CityReads│Do Cities Become Obsolete Under Globalization & ICTs?

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Do Cities Become Obsolete Under Globalization & ICTs?

In the age of globalization, facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICTs), the roles of cities become greater, not lesser. 

Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy - 4th Edition, (Sage/PineForge

Press, 2011)

In the late twentieth century, massive developments in telecommunications and the ascendance of information industries led analysts and politicians to proclaim the end of cities. Cities, they told us, would become obsolete as economic entities. The emergent globalization of economic activity seems to suggest that place—particularly the type of place represented by cities—no longer matters.

As Saskia Sassen argues in her book, Cities in a World Economy, the spatial dispersion of the economy is only half of the story of today’s global and digital age. Alongside the well-documented spatial dispersal of economic activities and the increased digitizing of the sphere of consumption and entertainment are the growing spatial concentration of a wide range of highly specialized professional activities, top-level management, and control operations, as well as, perhaps most unexpectedly, a multiplication of low-wage jobs and low-profit economic sectors. More analytically, these trends point to the development of novel forms of territorial centralization amid rapidly expanding economic and social networks with global span. 

Cities in a World Economy features a cross-disciplinary approach to urban sociology using global examples, and discusses the impact of global processes on the social structure of cities. It was first published in 1994. And it has been updated to newer editions. The latest one, the fifth edition published in 2018, reflects the most current data available and explores recent debates such as the role of cities in mitigating environmental problems, the global refugee crisis, Brexit, and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. This post is based on the fourth edition published in 2012.

Given the generalized trends toward dispersal—whether at the metropolitan or global level—and given the widespread conviction that this is the future, what needs explaining is that at the same time, centralized territorial nodes are growing. In this book, I examine why and how firms and markets that operate in multi-sited national and global settings require central places where the top-level work of running global systems gets done. I also show why information technologies and industries designed to span the globe require a vast physical infrastructure containing strategic nodes with hyper-concentrations of material facilities. Finally, I show how even the most advanced information industries, such as global finance and the specialized corporate legal and accounting services, have a production process that is partly place-bound: Not all of the activities of these industries circulate in electronic networks.

Once these place-centered processes are brought into the analysis of the new global and electronic economy, surprising observations emerge. These centralized territorial nodes of the digitized global economy turn out to be not only the world of top-level transnational managers and professionals but also that of their secretaries and that of the janitors cleaning the buildings where the new professional class works. Further, it is also the world of a whole new workforce, increasingly made up of immigrant and minoritized citizens, who take on the functions once performed by the mother/wife in the older middle classes: the nannies, domestic cleaners, and dog walkers who service the households of the new professional class also hold jobs in the new globalized sectors of the economy. So do truck drivers and industrial service workers. Thus emerges an economic configuration very different from that suggested by the concept of information economy. We recover the material conditions, production sites, and place-boundedness that are also part of globalization and the information economy. To understand the new globalized economic sectors, we actually need detailed examinations of a broad range of activities, firms, markets, and physical infrastructures that go beyond the images of global electronic networks and the new globally circulating professional classes.

These types of detailed examinations allow us to see the actual role played by cities in a global economy. They help us understand why, when the new information technologies and telecommunications infrastructures were introduced on a large scale in all advanced industries beginning in the 1980s, we saw sharp growth in the central business districts of the leading cities and international business centers of the world—New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, São Paulo, Hong Kong, and Sydney, among others. For some cities, this era took off in the 1980s, and for others, in the 1990s and into the new century. But all experienced some of their highest growth in decades in the form of a vast expansion of the actual area covered by state-of-the-art office districts, high-end shopping, hotel, and entertainment districts, and high-income residential neighborhoods. The numbers of firms opening up in these downtown areas grew sharply.

But this still leaves us with the question, if information technologies have not made cities obsolete, have they at least altered the economic function of cities—have cities lost some of their old functions and gained new ones we could not quite understand when this new phase was taking off?

And if this is so, what does it tell us about the importance of place and its far greater mix of diverse economic sectors and social groups than is suggested by the prevalent imagery of high-level corporate economic globalization and information flows? Is there a new and strategic role for major cities, a role linked to the formation of a truly global economic system, a role not sufficiently recognized by analysts and policymakers? And could it be that the reason this new and strategic role has not been sufficiently recognized is that economic globalization—what it actually takes to implement global markets and processes—is not only about massive dispersal of operations around the world but also about thick places?

Cities have re-emerged not only as objects of study but also as a lens for research and theorization on a broad array of major social, cultural, economic, technological, and political processes central to the current era: (1) economic globalization and international migration, (2) the emergence of specialized services and finance as the leading growth sector in advanced economies, (3) new types of inequality, (4) the new politics of identity and culture, (5) new types of politically and ideologically radicalizing dynamics, (6) the urbanizing of a broad range of high-technology systems, and (7) the politics of space, notably the growing movement for claiming rights to the city.

Many of these processes are not urban per se, but they have an urban moment; in many cases, the urban moment has become increasingly important and/or capable of illuminating key features of the larger process involved

Cities in a World Economy is organized in 9 chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the place and production in the global economy. Chapter 2 examines the key characteristics of the global economy that matter for an understanding of globalization and cities. In many cities, these global presences are weak or nonexistent. But they are becoming increasingly strong in a growing number of cities. Understood as tendencies, they reveal new formations and indicate future trends. Chapter 3 analyzes the new interurban inequalities, focusing on three key issues: (1) the diversity of urbanization patterns across continents, (2) the impact of globalization, particularly the internationalization of production and the growth of tourism, on so-called primate urban systems in less developed countries, (3) the impact of economic globalization on so-called balanced urban systems, and (4) the possible formation of transnational urban systems, including the emergence of hundreds of cities across the world with significant immigrant populations. Chapter 4 focuses on the new urban economy, where finance and specialized services have emerged as driving engines for profit-making. One important aspect examined in this chapter is the sharp increase in the linkages binding cities that function as production sites and marketplaces for global capital. Chapter 5 explores these issues in greater detail through case studies of the turning point that led some cities into global city status from the 1980s to the 1990s. It further examines a more recent set of turning points in the 2000s, illustrated through very diverse cases: Hong Kong and Shanghai, the Gulf city-states, and the repositioning of a 3,000-year-old imperial capital, Istanbul, in the re-emerging global East–West axis. Chapter 6 focuses on new urban social forms resulting from growing inequalities and segmentations in labor markets and urban space. The effort here is to understand whether the changes documented in this book are merely a quantitative transformation or also a qualitative one. Chapter 7 takes one particular case as a lens to get at a more detailed and focused account of the issues introduced in Chapter 6: women immigrants who increasingly constitute global care-chains as they become the nannies, nurses, maids, and sex workers in global cities. Chapter 8 considers the larger transnational social, cultural, and political dynamics that are becoming mobilized through the variety of processes examined in this book. Chapter 9 summarizes the four propositions running through the book.

1. The territorial dispersal of economic activities, of which globalization is one form, contributes to the growth of centralized functions and operations. This entails a new logic for agglomeration and is a key condition for the renewed centrality of cities in advanced economies.

2. Centralized control and management over a geographically dispersed array of economic operations does not come about inevitably as part of a world system. The built environments of cities partly represent the spatial effects of the growing service intensity in the organization of all industries.

3. Economic globalization has contributed to a new geography of centrality and marginality. Global cities become the sites of immense concentrations of economic power, while cities that were once major manufacturing centers suffer inordinate declines. Parallel inequalities develop inside cities, professionals see their incomes rise to unusually high levels, while low- or medium-skilled workers see theirs sink.

4. Emerged transnational urban system also enable a proliferation of sociopolitical networks. sociopolitical networks illuminate the ways in which powerlessness can become a complex condition in the concrete space of cities where multiple groups and projects intersect.

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