The big picture: Sassen’s vision of globalization

In Sassen’s Cities in a World economy, she makes two major claims: 1) cities are the strategic places in the world economy because they function as command and control centers, as global marketplaces, and production sites for the information economy, and 2) many of the localized/marginalized areas of the urban economy fulfill essential functions for the centralized places that have taken an increased amount of economic importance (Sassen, 329). She effectively weaves many of the key globalization concepts from other authors and introduces new ideas that reinforce her comprehensive view of globalization. She also identifies several implications of the globalization trend: 1) increasing wage inequality and the increasing bifurcation of the workforce, and 2) the various scales at which centrality and marginality occur both at a global scale and at the urban scale. Her book suffers from one deficiency, however: for several examples of the localized impact of the global economy, she failed to fully illustrate the complexity of the problem she was describing: the relationship between cities and the environment is one such example.

One of Sassen’s most interesting claims is how globalization has restructured urban consumption in a way that results in increased earnings disparity. The once-strong middle class earned wages that were spent in ways that strengthened the middle class–a positive feedback loop, so to speak. The mass production and distribution of goods for the middle class, as seen through the existence of factories, department stores and supermarkets also sustained livable wages, and in some cases, a unionized workforce for the middle class (p. 256). Now, the concentration of high-wage workers and their lifestyles in global cities has created a great demand for low-cost service operations. Growth in the highly skilled service sectors leads to an increasing income bifurcation.

When attempting to explain the relationship between cities and the environment, Sassen accurately captures the theoretical problem, which is defining the proper conceptualization of what sustainability means for cities (p 299-308). However, because she mostly stays in the theoretical realm, she doesn’t accurately capture the true complexity of making cities more sustainable. For example, she believes that the concentration of power by multinational corporations provides an opportunity to engage and compel MNC headquarters to operate in a more environmentally-friendly way. Sassen glosses over the legal constraints – that cities may be bound by national environmental and natural resource laws and regulations and unable to exert influence over MNC operations. Furthermore, the political boundaries and associated governance structures present a major impediment to the kind of multi-scalar solutions required to sufficiently address regional sustainability.

So what can we do as aspiring planners and as global citizens? The challenges of globalization are immense in scale, and the balance of power strongly favors the elite. In a global economy that favors deregulated MNCs and the removal of the social safety net, lower and middle classes are supposedly incentivized to work ever-harder to achieve financial success and stability. Unfortunately, the poor quality of education and health care along with the degraded environment makes the goal of financial stability a mirage.  To counter the deleterious impacts of globalization, a fundamental ethical shift is required, and it must call for greater investment in human capital and environmental value. In other words, it must recognize the comprehensive forces that threaten the lower and middle classes and propose comprehensive solutions. Part of the problem is that it is so difficult to comprehend the interconnectivity of globalization’s impacts. Therefore, we must make an argument for the values left behind by globalization: that investing in people and environmental health (see Aldo Leopold’s The Land Ethic) will ultimately strengthen the global economy.

Week 10: Regionalism – Rethinking How We Govern Global Cities

City of Toronto

Reflecting on Sassen’s book, the framework she creates around notions of global cities, and the assertions that she states about the processes operating both within and between these spaces have truly made me rethink my understandings of modern urbanization. Generally, the overarching argument that she makes throughout the book is that as technology has made communication over long distances more feasible, this has allowed for capitalism to truly become the global phenomenon that it is today. With constantly improving technology at our disposal, many of the traditional sectors of production such as manufacturing and labor are easily dispersed across the globe. Subsequently, as part of this dispersion there has been a greater need for spaces from which production processes can be managed and those “control” spaces have increasingly located in cities across the globe. What have resulted are places where cultural spaces and labor markets are greatly bifurcated and inequality has become more extreme.

With these new realities in mind, Sassen briefly explore the ways in which the inequalities between central and peripheral spaces can be bridged and moderate globalization. A serious option she talks about briefly is the idea of shifting how we think about cities and the areas surrounding them. Typically, cities are thought about in terms of core and peripheral spaces. As cities continue to globalize, this city-suburb categorization will be increasingly less able to deal with conflicts between the different types of spaces and the cultures/workers that inhabit them. With that in mind, the idea of regionalism is mentioned as a method for presenting a more adequate means of traversing these diverse urban spaces through policy and bridging the needs of the marginalized communities of the periphery with those of corporate communities and workers at the center. Although regionalism concepts are still largely being developed, there do exist spaces cities where this approach has been used.

One example of a Global City that has used the mega region regional approach to evaluation of its development and inclusion has been the City of Toronto.  Officially established in 1998, the City of Toronto as it exists today is the result of an amalgamation the original city with its surrounding jurisdictions (James 2008). Ultimately this was done in order to generate regional benefits in terms of savings, equity, and clout and over the past ten year the city has been able to reap these benefits (James 2008). “On equity, the megacity has been a big success, spreading the social safety net across the city. York, the poorest of the old municipalities, has benefited most” (James 2008). Additionally, the has gained clout through a revised tax code and a “progressive climate change plan” (James, 2008).

This is not to say that the amalgamation process in Toronto has been without growing pains or political tensions. However, it does begin the conversation around how the many social and environmental issues associated with globalized cities and economies can understood and dealt with.

Source: James, Royson. “Amalgamation: 10 Years Later.” The Toronto Star, 01 01, 2008. http://www.thestar.com/news/2008/01/01/amalgamation_10_years_later.html (accessed March 26, 2014).

Week 10: Cities still matter

In this book, Sassen has sought to prove that place is still important in the world economy, and cities still have significance. The world is not as flat as Friedman claims it is. “Disembodied marketplaces,” as Sassen describes cyberspace and internet transactions, is definitely altering the economy but not in a way that makes cities irrelevant (Sassen, p. 214). In chapters 5-9, Sassen continues discussing how cities are the “command centers” for primarily financial institutions that control activities around the world. She also continues to emphasize how there is a bifurcation of the labor market, where an increasing number of higher-skilled laborers exist within cities who need low-wage service sector laborers to support them.

Globalization continues to expand the reach of financial systems into new marketplaces around the globe, but even with its dispersal of production or consumption, the control of the process remains within cities. And a consolidation of these command activities is occurring, both within and across nations. Sassen explains this as resulting from three main reasons: social connectivity, need for enormous resources, and denationalization of the corporate elite. Basic economic concepts also apply to this situation, especially the “economies of scale” concept.

Sassen points out how the distribution of earnings within cities is very unequal, especially within the United States. Sassen says, “I do not necessarily mean that the middle class is disappearing. I am, rather, referring to the dynamic whereby growth continues to inequality rather than to expansion of the middle class…” (Sassen, p. 271). Well, what’s the difference? And should we question the term “middle”? As we have discussed before, and as Sassen points out, the 1% or even 0.1% has a disproportionate amount of the wealth in the United States. So where is the median income? And there is a discussion about migrants, especially women, into cities in order to serve in support roles for the higher-income laborers. I’d like to unpack the idea of “survival circuits” more. Is this a novel term Sassen has created?

High-income gentrification generates demand for goods and services that are not mass produced. Customized production for specialty items are needed, usually produced locally, and Sassen describes this as “labor-intensive.” I wonder what types of goods she is describing, as she gives no examples. I am thinking of an item, such as an almond croissant that needs to come from a local bakery—is this on target? Some of the work to provide the goods is done in urban manufacturing settings. But since type of work is so small-scale, there is little opportunity to unionize. The diversified services-sector, in general, makes it harder for low-wage employees to unionize. On top of the spatial barriers, many immigrants lack the opportunities to do so for fear of losing their jobs or risk deportation if not a legal immigrant.

She also discusses global governance challenges. And provides some suggestions on how to counteract the environmental mess we’ve caused in cities. Sassen’s phrasing, “delegating back to nature” makes a lot of sense to me. And she recognizes that we need to come up with solutions to retrofit existing conditions in cities rather than build sustainable ones from scratch if we want to solve the issue. I’ve never heard of self-healing concrete and thought that was fascinating. Additionally, Sassen would most likely agree that we need to decrease our impervious area within cities to allow “biological processes exhibit economies of scale” and self-regulate environments (Sassen, p. 303). As Sassen points out, there are underlying governance and economic structures that need to be altered in order to really tackle this issue.

So, now that Sassen has described the importance of cities, what can we do with this information to enact change and help level out the playing field, protect human and civil rights, and the environment?

Week 7: Space and Exclusion

Looking back to the readings from class last Wednesday and thinking about the discussion we had during class, I think the central conversation being had between these authors is that of the social processes being observed in the greater society. Specifically, these authors discuss how our built environments and cities are themselves touched by these processes and what that means for them. David Harvey begins this conversation in his article by asserting this exact argument. The general point he makes is that are cities are not simply just sites where social processes and interactions take place as is often thought.

Instead, cities should be thought about not only as the places where these interactions take place at the micro scale but also are themselves shaped by these same forces at the macro level. A quote that immediately comes to my mind when thinking about this (which I somewhat mentioned in class) is from the film Urbanized when one of the narrators says “Cities are always the physical manifestation of the big forces at play…. Economic forces. Social forces. Environmental forces.”  An (albeit extreme) example of this idea at play includes Northern Ireland during The Troubles in which violence between Loyalist and Republican neighborhoods necessitated government officials to separate and restrict movement between communities across northern cities. Additionally, many of the communities in these cities reflected the neighborhood’s identification with either the crown or with Irish nationalists. I believe that the conflict in Northern Ireland also presents an argument for Nationalism that is built upon shared religious affiliation and history.

Belfast Peace Line

Irish Loyalist Mural

Irish Republican Mural

Ali Madanipour continues this point with his discussion of social spaces and how exclusion flows though the forces previously described. Specifically, he states that social exclusion operates in economic, political, and cultural spaces and can be thought of as existing along a spectrum of access with complete access on one end and complete exclusion on the other. In general, very few people exist at either end of the spectrum extremes and fall somewhere in the middle, living with varying levels of access to many different types of resources and information. Most importantly to us and our understanding of cities, this idea of access also applies to the spaces that people are able, or welcomed, to access. Madanipour examines this through the way in which planners view cities as large agglomerations of segregated neighborhoods and, though this concept, plan and design communities which commodify space in ways that only allows for specific groups of people to feel welcome.

Suburban “Priced From” Sign

A great example of this process in action is the manner in which our suburbs, and increasingly our cities, are being developed and marketed to consumers over citizens. A symbol of suburban life since their rise in access and popularity has been the “drive until you qualify” mentality evidenced by the new community signs which display how much an average home will cost in that community. This has increasingly become a facet of urban communities in which historic urban neighborhoods are marketed in ways that extoll segregation by class and only provide access to those who can afford that space, ultimately creating homogeneous spaces in which the local resources and establishments only appeal to that group and exclude those who do not identify with them either in terms or class, race, sexuality, and others.

Understanding global cities: space, flows and social exclusion

Many academics, critics and others interested in urban affairs recognize the increasing importance of cities, as more people now live in urban areas than rural areas. As planners, how should we conceptualize and understand cities? My education and experience in landscape architecture and urban design carried an implicit promise: that the perfect design–of parks, neighborhoods, districts, cities or regions–can foster a greater sense of community, improve ecological health and be profitable.

In dismissing the idea that design can yield the perfect city or product, Harvey accuses (directly and implicitly) Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, the Congress for New Urbanism, and any other movement or philosophy that empowers the idea of a thing, a final product (in this case a city) over the idea of a process. The reality of cities is that they contain intertwining economic, social, political, and ecological processes that are not “things”.

Knox ties the conceptualization of cities to the broader processes of globalization. He identifies the “fast world” and “slow world” which reflect the new international division of labor. Global cities are part of the fast world, and the flow of goods, capital and information between global cities (and the TNCs that inhabit them) now exceed the global trading of raw materials and produced items. Building on Harvey’s concept of processes, Knox identifies six categories of socio-cultural flows that occur in global cities and says that the fast world benefits from these flows and sometimes even incorporates characteristics or products of the slow world.

Though the pressure exerted by globalization is outward – suggesting that life and culture will become more homogenized, Knox argues that global forces or flows are interpreted and acted upon by local forces, which alters the way place is formed. Knox seems to express the idea that society now turns inward to find its center or home away from the broad global forces that focus our attention and loyalties beyond our immediate communities. This withdrawal from community means that the affluent may live in gated communities, but low-income workers can benefit from having the space to build true community networks and adapt the city to their needs, thus giving them the opportunity to play a larger role in global cities.

Davis and Madanipour focus on social exclusion and the privatization of public space, but examine the issue from different conceptual levels. Davis focuses on the militarization of the built environment in Los Angeles. Urban design, architecture, and police tactics combine to reinforce the social boundaries of the city and snuff out any real chance of urban reform and social integration. Davis believes that LA’s public spaces–streets, parks, etc–are now repositories for undesirable elements like traffic and the homeless. He reinforces Knox’s “inward shift” by pointing out how new architectural developments are oriented inward, ignore the street and restrict access. While he focuses on the physical consequences of this architecturally-driven exclusion, he also identifies the root cause–corporate defined redevelopment priorities.

Madanipour takes a step back from Davis’ case-study approach and considers how social exclusion prevents access to resources/jobs, decision-making, and common narratives through language, religion and nationality. These ideas are aligned with previous concepts introduced this semester, but Madanipour goes a step further by linking these barriers to the phenomenon of space. He links sociospatial segregation to the spatial subdivision (zoning) practiced by city planners and also implicates the real estate development industry in the increasing privatization of space. His assertions raise troubling questions for aspiring planners who are poised to enter the global market. Are we to participate in the social exclusion of already marginalized people?