Saskia Sassen is the leading urban theorist of the global world. (Here are several prior posts that intersect amongst her work.) Her The G...
Saskia Sassen is the leading urban theorist of the global world. (Here are several prior posts that intersect amongst her work.) Her The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (1991) has shaped the concepts in addition to methods that other theorists bring used to analyze the role of cities in addition to their networks inwards the contemporary world. The heart in addition to person ideas inwards her theory of the global urban center are presented inwards a 2005 article, "The Global City: Introducing a Concept" (link). This article is a convenient house to gain an agreement of her basic approach to the subject.
Key to Sassen's concept of the global urban center is an emphasis on the period of time of data in addition to capital. Cities are major nodes inwards the interconnected systems of data in addition to money, in addition to the wealth that they capture is intimately related to the specialized businesses that facilitate those flows -- fiscal institutions, consulting firms, accounting firms, police describe firms, in addition to media organizations. Sassen points out that these flows are no longer tightly leap to national boundaries in addition to systems of regulation; hence the dynamics of the global urban center are dramatically unlike than those of the groovy cities of the nineteenth century.
Sassen emphasizes the importance of creating novel conceptual resources for making feel of urban systems in addition to their global networks -- a novel conceptual architecture, equally she calls it (28). She argues for 7 fundamental hypotheses almost the modern global city:
- The geographic dispersal of economical activities that marks globalization, along amongst the simultaneous integration of such geographically dispersed activities, is a key element feeding the increase in addition to importance of primal corporate functions.
- These primal functions larn hence complex that increasingly the headquarters of large global firms outsource them: they purchase a portion of their primal functions from highly specialized service firms.
- Those specialized service firms engaged inwards the most complex in addition to globalized markets are dependent champaign to agglomeration economies.
- The to a greater extent than headquarters outsource their most complex, unstandardized functions, peculiarly those dependent champaign to uncertain in addition to changing markets, the freer they are to opt for whatever location.
- These specialized service firms demand to render a global service which has meant a global network of affiliates ... in addition to a strengthening of cross edge city-to-city transactions in addition to networks.
- The economical fortunes of these cities larn increasingly disconnected from their broader hinterlands or fifty-fifty their national economies.
- One resultant of the dynamics described inwards hypothesis six, is the growing informalization of a attain of economical activities which discovery their effective demand inwards these cities, withal bring turn a profit rates that make non allow them to compete for diverse resources amongst the high-profit making firms at the transcend of the system. (28-30)
Three key tendencies appear to follow from these structural facts almost global cities. One is a concentration of wealth inwards the hands of owners, partners, in addition to professionals associated amongst the high-end firms inwards this system. Second is a growing disconnection betwixt the urban center in addition to its region. And tertiary is the increase of a large marginalized population that has a rattling difficult fourth dimension earning a living inwards the marketplace defined yesteryear these high-end activities. Rather than constituting an economical engine that gradually elevates the income in addition to welfare of the whole population, the modern global urban center funnels global surpluses into the hands of a global elite dispersed over a few dozen global cities.
These tendencies appear to line upward good amongst several observable features of modern urban life throughout much of the world: a widening separation inwards character of life betwixt a relatively modest elite in addition to a much larger marginalized population; a increase of high-security gated communities in addition to shopping areas; in addition to dramatically unlike graphs of median income for unlike socioeconomic groups. New York, London, in addition to Hong Kong/Shanghai stand upward for a huge concentration of fiscal in addition to concern networks, in addition to the concentration of wealth that these make is manifest:
Inside countries, the leading fiscal centers today concentrate a greater portion of national fiscal activity than fifty-fifty 10 years ago, in addition to internationally, cities inwards the global North concentrate good over one-half of the global upper-case missive of the alphabet market. (33)
This agency of global concern creates a tight network of supporting specialist firms that are likewise positioned to capture a pregnant grade of wealth in addition to income:
By primal functions I make non alone hateful transcend grade headquarters; I am referring to all the transcend grade financial, legal, accounting, managerial, executive, planning functions necessary to run a corporate organisation operating inwards to a greater extent than than i country. (34)
These features of the global urban center economical scheme imply a widening laid upward of inequalities betwixt elite professionals in addition to specialists in addition to the larger urban population of service in addition to industrial workers. They besides imply a widening laid upward of inequalities betwixt North in addition to South. Sassen believes that communications in addition to Internet technologies bring the resultant of accelerating these widening inequalities:
Besides their touching on the spatial correlates of centrality, the novel communication technologies tin besides last expected to bring an touching on inequality betwixt cities in addition to within cities. (37)
Sassen's conceptual architecture maintains a house for location in addition to space: global cities are non disembodied, in addition to the surgical operation of their global firms depends on a network of activities in addition to lesser firms within the spatial reach of the urban center in addition to its environs. So Sassen believes in that location is infinite for political competitor betwixt parties over the partitioning of the global surplus.
If nosotros consider that global cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global upper-case missive of the alphabet in addition to a growing portion of disadvantaged populations (immigrants, many of the disadvantaged women, people of coloring generally, and, inwards the megacities of developing countries, masses of shanty dwellers) hence nosotros tin come across that cities bring larn a strategic terrain for a whole serial of conflicts in addition to contradictions. (39)
But this strategic competitor seems badly tilted against the disadvantaged populations she mentions. So the outcomes of these contests over ability in addition to wealth are probable to lead, it would seem, to fifty-fifty deeper marginalization, along the lines of what Loic Wacquant describes inwards Urban Outcasts: Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (link).
This is a hugely of import dependent champaign for everyone who wants to sympathise the dynamics in addition to hereafter directions of the globe's mega-cities in addition to their interconnections. What seems pressingly of import for urbanists in addition to economists alike, is to envision economical mechanisms that tin last established that make a improve undertaking of sharing the fruits of economical progress amongst the whole of society, non simply the elite in addition to professional person halt of the socioeconomic spectrum.
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