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Cities Without Borders
An anonymous reader writes "There is a very interesting article about Cities Without Borders in the latest issue of Mindjack. The author, Paul Hartzog, argues that we are seeing the emergency of 'global cities' concentrating command-and-control functions for the global economy. For instance, the increasing importance of certain cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Sydney or Miami shows they not only support complex webs of businesses but also participate in a global network for the production and distribution of finance and capital. This is just one example. You should read the original article to see if you agree with the author -- or not."
If location doesn't matter. Then why is everyone getting ripped off from real estate cost.
Im reminded of school history lessons as a kid, full of stories of once great cities, now deserted because the rivers or trade routes that suported them changed. This is the same sort of thing, those cities are important because of the information that flows through them. How easy these days is it for information to change where its located? In the past a river would take hundreds of years to change its course. Nowdays, that cultural river can change a great deal in mere decades. How long ago was it that Miami was just a holiday spot?
As our economy depends more and more on services, people will tend to clump together to reduce travel costs and maximize convenience. The digital outsourcing trends that we see now don't fight this: they just link the clumps (ex: Bangalore to NYC). It's easier now to get services away from the city network, but still easier to get them within the network.
I first thought of Civilization (Sid Meier's) where you have to acquire city walls to protect your fellow citizens from invaders...
Once you get a proper air defense system, these become obsolete.
But no, it just looks to be more about the demise of ruralship and the slow disappearing of intermediate management : info no gets directly from the ground up and vice versa.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Actually the trend is going in reverse. Telecommuting / telepresence means you don't need to be in the city.
Being in the city used to be useful for acquiring the extremely valuable commodity of trust. Personal relationships. Now, I can trust Larry Lessig (at least on Copyright law critique) because I know where he stands on those issues. We are on opposite sides of the planet. I also trust Warren Buffet as a source of information on investment issues. He's in Nebraska.
Warren B. might not take my calls but Larry probably would. And they're are plenty of 'mini' Warrens around.
I have no reason to visit Frankfurt or any of those other places.
I find that as I interact with people from all over the world, on forums, and newsgroups, and in online games (my EQ guild had Canadians, and Australians, and French, and a few others, for example), the notion of countries, like "The United States", just doesn't seem that relevant any more.
I'm starting to feel that basically the world consists of here (basically, where the people I interact with outside the net are) and everywhere else. When I deal with someone who is not here, it doesn't matter to me if they are in Texas or New York or France. That the first two of those are in the same country as I and the third is not seems a silly distinction to make.
As economies move more and more toward services and not manufacturing, the countryside-- with scattered factory towns, resource locations (coal, iron), and certainly agrarian regions atrophe their youth to the capital metropolis.
I have seen this firsthand in London, where real estate prices continue to climb, while the Northern England and certainly Scotland prices are stable or slightly falling.
I saw this happen in Seoul, where there is currently a property bubble on the south side of the Han river, while villages south toward Pusan are growing more empty every year.
I am currently watching this happen in Tokyo, where every new building is full of "one room" apts catering to newcomers draining out of the countryside, and the towns on the far side of the island are nothing but grandmas and grandpas growing rice.
My point: Tokyo, London, Seoul, Paris, New York, and perhaps Sydney will continue to see strong local economies, while their surrounding areas stagnate. Meanwhile, manufacturing-based economies like China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Germany, Brasil, and perhaps Vietnam will see distributed development as factories seek cheap land and cheap raw materials.
davejenkins.com |
Saskia Sassen, professor of Sociology & author of "The Global City" is used as an authority in TFA. This post is not a slam but more of a critique of her as a lecturer.
.RAM file - Real Player required) Yes I attended this as it was mandatory but I was there with an open mind. We were required to attend and then discuss it at the next class meeting with our fellow students and our Senior Sem. professor.
As a graduate of RIT, it was mandatory to take Senior Seminar which is RIT's attempt to enrich the student with timely lectures from authorities in a field. The topic of Senior Seminar is on globalization, human rights, and citizenship.
You can find all the lectures online at http://www.rit.edu/~gannett/Archived.html (might I add that there are some really great lectures available) and you can specifically you can find Professor Saskia Sassen's lecture from December 13, 2001 Globalization or Denationalization? Economy of Policy in a Digital Global Age. (
The class, including the professor, agreeded that she is too far out into the fringes of her studies of sociology and thus is unable to effectivly communicate her thoughts to those in attendance. Our professor, he too a professor in the field of sociology, was both disgusted and outraged in regards to her lecture. Disgusted that she can not reach students and perhaps make them question why & how globalization changes our lives. Outraged that we had to listen to over an hour of uninterpretable socio-politic-economic mishmash of ideas. I came away from that lecture with nothing. I will wholly admit that I am not a peer of hers nor am I well versed in any social science. Perhaps I am way out of my element and all of us students in attendance are not the pinnacle of sociology & research like she is, but I was dumbfounded that I could walk away from a lecture and gain nothing.
Maybe she is a great authority on the topic of globalization, but her delivery on that topic left us feeling ill. Since we suffered through her lecture, I wonder if she really is an authority on globalization since many educated students and some of her peers were unable to discover it for themselves. If Sassen's lecture is measured against Marshall McLuhan's quote "The Medium is the Message", then Sassen's message becomes bunk.
For a critique of her book, see Amazon.com customer reviews.
Location matters depending on one thing - the quality of local government.
Take North Korea for instance - it isn't that different from South Korea, and yet the people in North Korea are dying of hunger.
The only difference between the North and South Korea(s) isn't location, but rather, the governments that run the two places.
Even within a country, you can find that people of different classes congregate into different areas, and that is largely the effect of governments.
People paying hefty premiums for the real estate in High Class Area for many reasons - of course, the "High Class" does sound nice. But other than that, better schools, better security, better connections, et cetera do add up.
In slums area, like in shanty towns, people often don't even have to pay for the real estate they occupy, but they DO pay for the effects of CRIME, little or no chance of schooling, rampant joblessness, and so on.
All those can be and would be addressed effectively if you have a good government.
The Philippines as well as Myanmar were RICH COUNTRIES in Asia. Today, the people of both countries are suffering because of the failure of their respective governments.
On the other hand - we can see the rise of China - whether you agree or not, the present government of China is "better" in some ways, as compare to the past - and that allows the people of China to have a chance to move foward, and many do.
By the same token, the government of United States of America is failing, and we can see the effects - dropping standards of living, growing deficits, the exodus of jobs, the rising crime rates, and so on.
City Without Borders is just an idea. Cities such as New York City won't be in the list of City Without Borders for long, if New York City continues to be ruled by bad governments.
Other newcomers from South America or Asia or Europe may take its place, simply because talents will flock to places with good governence. And with the concentration of all those talents, miracles happen.
That's all.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
- Digital culture is potentially global culture. We find theatre productions from London, like "Les Miserables", becoming mega-hits on Broadway in New York City.
- The city scenes in the first Matrix film were shot in Sydney, the second in San Francisco, and yet on-screen they constituted an architecturally homogenous unidentifiable "global city."
- The increasing globalization of production creates a "global culture" that is cosmopolitan and robust in its diversity.
- Balancing this trend, however, we find a resurgence in international arts. Films like "Amelie" succeed because they inflect the emerging global culture with a local or regional cultural flavor.
- In addition, Chow Yun-Fat is not only a successful Chinese actor, but more importantly a successful global actor.
Each generation thinks that their time is the most important moment in history. It is the hubris of our species, and it leads us unfailingly to make bad decisions about the future, thinking we know more than our predecessors and as much as our successors. This is why each generation laughs at its ancestors and is laughed at by its descendants.Italian operas have been performed all over the world for centuries. What is different? Nothing.
Modern skyscrapers are designed more for efficiency than uniqueness, and with few exceptions are not terribly distinctive. Just because my city can be photoshopped to look like another one does not make me more a "citizen of the world."
What an asinine statement. My grandfather could walk into a store 50 years ago and buy a Japanese radio as easily as an American-made one. Did it make him more culturally aware?
Films like "Amelie" succeed because they are well-made and entertaining despite the subtitles, not because of them.
Mark Twain was an international star as well. So was Benjamin Franklin. Chow Yun-Fat is not a different species, just a different breed.
Come on, people; we have thousands of years of history to draw upon here. Can't we muster some perspective? Read Ecclesiastes--there is nothing new under the sun.
I think they felt a swell of pride when they got mentioned from TFA "News: In what began as a primarily geek phenomenon at Slashdot.org,"
There are a dozen cities in Asia (yes I know Australia is not Asia) globablly more important than Sydney ("the gateway to Woomera"). Sydney is a great place to (begin a) holiday, but except for the fact that it has a somewhat unique location, it is unexceptional from a business standpoint. You might raise the same objection about Miami, but given how much south / central american money passes through there, I can see a reasonable case being made for Miami. Sydney is not defensible as a top global business city unless you use the criterion "best of each continent", in which case they forgot McMurdo station off that list.
And you accuse somebody else of spouting bunk? References or statistics, please, for your assertion that, umm, "most people would find highly dubious."
During the "days of the British empire", most people lived isoliated agrarian lives. This includes the people in the British Empire itself. The percentage of commerce that involved trade beyond a regional scale was probably far less than 5 or even 1% when viewed over the population of the earth as a whole.
This morning I had cheese made in Holland and France, an orange grown in Spain, some orange juice from Florida, and some crackers from Norway for breakfast on bowl made in China. I'd have to have been an aristocrat to achieve this at the height of the British Empire.
This article reminds me of the kinds of articles that were written in the early '90s about the fall of nation states and the emergence of a cosmopolitan information economy due to that newfangled internet thingy. Well I'm glad the days of millenarian doom and gloom are over and that we will go back to '90s optimism. (yes the world is a mess, but it was bad back then too. Remember it gets worse before it gets better) Now all I want is my VR helmet.
Sounds a lot like the theory of The Global Village from 1962
Underholdning.info
As is so often the case when reading academic articles, it's hard to determine whether I agree or disagree with the author. I do, however, disagree with the notion that the concentration of economic power in cities is some sort of new or increasing phenomenon. Cities have always been, essentially, points of concentration of economic power. Concentrated economic power might even be the defining characteristic of cities.
Many years ago, access to and control of natural resources such as salt or fish or arable land or water was the reason a city might develop. Today, access to man-made resources such as communications infrastructure, various markets, or even tax policies may be more important than natural ones. But the fact remains that different localities provide different operating environments, some of which are more advantageous to a given business than others. Place, therefore, still matters.
Why indeed?
English speaking? Proximity to water? Same timezone as the burgeoning Asian markets, yet Anglo-friendly for multinationals wanting to build their presence in Asia.
If you consult some studies from people who have actually the phenomenon of the 'Global City', you'll find that Sydney meets the criteria, whereas, for example Singapore (trotted out as the 'real' Global City in the region) is better described as a 'city state'.
Sydney has established itself as the leading Australian city in world city terms (Baum,1997; Stimson, 1995). It is the major international air hub, is the most important financial centre and, during the growth in Asian economies, extended its role tobecome a location for many transnational corporations wanting to service south eastAsia.
With your final comment - you come off sounding like you have "Tall Poppy Syndrome". Your city not on the list hey?
Jobs, from factory jobs to computer jobs are automated out of existence. Jobs also disappear when profit rates fall and capital investment falls (that's cyclical though). Supposedly jobs automated out of existence magically reappear as new jobs paying the same or higher wage. Keynes didn't think so, and despite the rhetoric, the US government and "business community" doesn't think so either.
If these jobs don't reappear, then why has unemployment stayed basically the same throughout the entire industrial revolution? I would guess that 90% of the jobs that were done in 1800 have been automated out of existence, so why isn't 90% of the workforce unemployed?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Unfortunately for them, their own plans are about to lead them to cultural ruin. Bush's plan to provide High Speed internet to the nation should be read as what to him would seem akin to the Rural Electrification Project. Where the idea was, lets get power to the people out in the farms so they will be more competive and produce more. That sort of backfired. They got used to the power and started wanting more. More TVs, DVD, Fancy cars and the lowly Banana.
The upshot was that the young started to abandon the farms in droves. As they did the cheap labor of the farm children was replaced by cheap labor from immigrants. The old cycle was that the Farm would be inherited by the children of the farmer and next generation would take over. As the found new jobs as computer programmers and got MBAs they let their parents sell of the old family farm to large agro businesses. Large Farms got larger and Cities got bigger.
Wiring the rest of the county will give reason for companies to relocate to cheaper parts of the US and bring good jobs to town who's main income was the local speed trap. If your a Conservative Rural Republican in a Red State, visions of selling farmland to city slickers for housing and commercial parks must seem like heaven. Voting for Bush was voting your pocketbook.
Now here comes the other side of the coin. Unlike mining towns of the 19th and early 20th Century you really can't lock people in. Your neigbors will undercut your housing deals because they all got buckets of land and nobody to grow whatever.
City Slicker Programmers and the upper skilled workforce are not Conservative Rural Republicans, There those damn Blue State Liberals. They eat fish RAW!!!!, A lot of them aren't even from the USA, most dress like they were extras in that confusing movie The Matrix. As Techs and Tech businesses move to the boondocks they will turn the red states blue.
Right now the current FUD is that Liberals don't respect people with Faith. The fact is that the rural people can't afford to break the back of the liberal technology complex. Ever wondered why Strict harsh and very communist China hasn't stompped all over Hong Kong? China needs Hong Kong more then Hong Kong needs China.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Like many other things in life, if it's worth trying and even if it's not, we've tried it in California. We already have a city without borders, we call it Los Angeles. Joking aside, even as an idea or culture, one could argue that Los Angeles is world wide.
You probably have no idea how much you're right on that one. If you live in a country as different from California as possible - Eastern Europe, for example - you are still somehow aware of various LA-specific cultural phenomena. For example, if you are a frustrated teenager with no clear weather forecast for the labor market, you express your frustration in terms of "South Central ghetto", even if you are actually white in a 100% white nation. It was perfectly parodied in the hilarious Ali G show. But it goes further, even if you are NOT a hip-hop music fan. Popular Dreamworks 3D cartoons like "Shark Tale" or even "Shrek 2", expect from the viewer to understand at least the basics of LA reality. Actually, many Hollywood filmmakers are just too lazy to ever move out of the city, so some popular LA (or rather "within 2 hours driving from Beverly Hills") vistas and locations are ubiquitous in Hollywood movies. Which, in turn, are ubiquitous in cinemas in such remote places as Kosice, Slovakia or Tigru Mures, Transilvania. Kids and teenagers learn how to live in a multi-racial sprawl-infested megalopolis even before they start to learn how to live in their own community. I find it scary, sometimes.
Now the cash market has become all electronic, yes the market place may exist in a building on the outskirts of Frankfurt, but the financial centre is no longer there. Much of the trading is actually taking place in London and Frankfurt becomes relegated to backoffice clearing and settlement operations.
What I'm trying to say is that whilst the market place is important, it could be quickly established elsewhere. Where the customers are becomes more important.
Essentiaally it means there is a movement towards a single financial centre serving a group of timezones.
See my journal, I write things there
I was working from home in the US and recently moved to the middle east. I still have the same job thanks to broadband internet and VoIP telephony. Cost of living here is much less, and it's nice to have the same US salary.
Excellent.
"...because they think Jesus...."
You express exactly the polarized thinking that a big city produces. Couldn't be that all us fly-overs are thinking individuals that have opinions and values (both valid) that differ from you, could it? No. It's got to be that we are unthinking, stupid, or duped.
Sorry, little man, you need to look for the mass of the iceberg yourself.
I read an interesting book several years ago, Revolt of the Elites, that is very much on topic. The author argues that a global economy represents the breakdown of the nation state as the central political-economic unit, as the global economy encourages a cosmopolitan mindset among those at the top who benefit from it.
While I don't agree that this represents "a threat to democracy" (just the opposite in my opinion), I think the book is very perceptive.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Lay off already. You don't need to spin for a while. Kerry's gone and won't be back. Go back to blaiming Bill Clinton, it's more entertaining. To claim NY is anti-semitic or anti-Israel is surreal. You have bought some strange extremest spin.
... (hopefully you can fill in the rest)
The phrase 'fly over country' is indicative of insecurity that over TV'ed 'right wingers' get while watching Leo DeCaprio cavort with models.
And what's with the hatred of the French? That's like me hating Southerners except I don't: Seems like most of them (like most of everyone) are cool. Most New Yorkers have little to do with your hatred except we don't vote like you. And we get screwed on Homeland Security Funding, but that's another post.
New York City, speaking as a native, has an advantage, to me, over much of the country, including Hollywood, in that you don't need to drive everyday. Other than that, we're a huge amount of people trying to make the same kind of living that every one in the 'Red States' are trying to make, and some of us try to take advantage of being surrounded by a huge amount of people.
The article, (did you RTFA?) had as one of it's few interesting points a nice shout out to slashdot. The centralization and future of the super-city is an interesting topic not really addressed.
>>thinking of themselves as New Yorkers first and Americans second...
Always have. You will find that in Italy, too, which is a country sort of next to France with, IMHO, really good food.
I'm a New Yorker
I pledge allegance to the flag
I am a citizen of the world, my religion is doing good.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
"We might find individuals thinking of themselves as New Yorkers first and Americans second, or Parisiennes first and French second."
That is what is happening now. It is also the reason that New Yorkers and Parisiennes are looked upon so poorly by others in their own countries.
all that this means is that talking no longer requires us to be geographically next to each other. Great, the phone did that 100 years ago.
The UPS and FedEx example is interesting. It is almost as if a new class is being developed. The Business people of the world cannot be bothered to travel anymore, so they pay somebody to do it for them. You are still governed by geography though, you have simply outsourced the requirement.
Cities are cheaper to maintain. They also allow for agglomerations and pools of skilled labor. There is a reason that airplanes are made where they are made. There is a reason that certain cities were at the center of the dot-com boom. Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco. MIT, University of Washington, and Stanford/Berkeley. What do they have in common? That's right, top of the line CS schools. Cities are the life blood of our economy. They are much cheaper to maintain than a huge network of rural homes and the physically bring people together, something that is very important to the creation of culture. Yes, great masses of people in single locations is a security risk, but then again, I seem to recall $2,000,000,000 being lost from tiny little programs running around our great decentralized network.
Sorry, had to jump in here, even though I'm not the original poster. I'm struggling to not comment on the fact that this was modded "insightful" when it is completely wrong. In actual fact, the global economy was indeed more globalized during the latter days of the British empire than it is now; capital outflow from the UK has never recovered to the same level (as a percentage of GDP) as it was in 1914. In addition, no country (yes, including the US) has ever had as high a rate of capital outflow as was achieved by the UK before the First world war. Also, you really need to check your history books - during the "days of the British empire" I think you'll find that most people in the UK were living in cities. (certainly far more, as a percentage of population, than in the US). Whilst you're there, read a history of the East India company, or any book about corporatism, to see what globalisation really was about back then.
Well done on your breakfast, but it's nothing new; certainly a member of the Eurpoean middle classes at the beginning of the 20th century could have done the same.
Dan.
From the OED:
Emergency:
1. The rising of a submerged body above the surface of water; = EMERGENCE 1.
2. a. The process of issuing from concealment, confinement, etc.; = EMERGENCE
What I think this article missed is that a lot of the "big money" does things like travel much of the year to avoid taxes. These folks are more likely to be found in places like Aspen or some of the nicer carribean resorts than cities. What really drives the cities are jobs that are located in cities for traditional or political reasons(i.e the New York Stock Market-the various political jobs in Washington DC). People with serious money have _choice_ and they usually don't for the most part choose to hang out in cities. Maybe some cites are doing better in the global economy-but with increased communication eventually the functions in those cities will move to someplace cheaper.
"World Cities" have been around for a long time, all the way back to the Roman Empire. Overcentralization was once a key part of the control system of kingdoms and empires.
Actually, finance is far less centralized than it used to be. There was a time within living memory when most major US companies were headquartered in New York. That's no longer the case. The international financial system, for most of the twentieth century, revolved around London and New York. Today, there are major financial centers all over the world. For a serious paper on the subject, see Rank Size Distribution of International Financial Centers.
Going against this trend is the centralization of power in the Washington DC area. For most of American history, there were few major businesses headquartered in the Washington area. That started to change some time during the Reagan administration, and now the Washington area is a major business hub, focusing on businesses which are defined by their relationship to federal regulation or spending.
I honestly dont know why people are still writing on topics that Alvin Toffler wrote about in 1969 with his wife. I mean, there was a movie made about his works...so its not as if it didn't gain attention...and as a movie, it would be able to hold attentions of americans better it seems. Its just future shock revisited.
As the author of the mindjack article on Sassen's "Global Cities" concept, I must say I'm fascinated and delighted to see all the discussion.
Regardless of whether or not you agree with Sassen's basic premise, it does provide an interesting opportunity to muse on the effects of digital cultural production and reproduction.
My own theory of Panarchy is considerably different than Sassen's "Global Cities." Where we agree is that networks are on the rise, and old-fashioned power hierarchies are waning. All else is details.
I do think this transformation is something unique in human history.