The Making of a World City

London 1991 to 2021

Greg Clark

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118609729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

After two decades of evolution and transformation, London had become one of the most open and cosmopolitan cities in the world. The success of the 2012 Olympics set a high water-mark in the visible success of thecity, while its influence and soft power increased inthe global systems of trade, capital, culture, knowledge, and communications.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 - 2021 sets out in clear detail both the catalysts that have enabled London to succeed and also the qualities and underlying values that are at play: London's openness and self-confidence, its inventiveness, influence, and its entrepreneurial zeal. London's organic, unplanned, incremental character, without a ruling design code or guiding master plan, proves to be more flexible than any planned city can be.

Cities are high on national and regional agendas as we all try to understand the impact of global urbanisation and the re-urbanisation of the developed world. If we can explain London's successes and her remaining challenges, we can unlock a better understanding of how cities succeed.

Section III London today and in the future

10
World cities today

London operates within a dynamic competitive framework with many other urban agglomerations, now widely known as world cities. World cities have been recognised as an analytical concept for over 30 years, since John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff set out a series of groundbreaking hypotheses in World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and Action. Their study took a step forward in the 1990s with the publication of Saskia Sassen's Global City in 1991. Sassen claimed, in tandem with the findings in London: World City, that only a handful of cities were functioning as command centres – organising nodes – of contemporary globalisation. This elite group, including London, had unparalleled concentrations of advanced producer services firms which offered bespoke financial, professional and creative support to corporate clients. As large firms became global, supporting services in commercial law, wealth management, corporate tax advice and advertising sprung up around them in these cities. By 2001 when Sassen updated her work, London, New York and Tokyo were still the exemplary global cities, but 20 or so other cities in the world economy were providing similar services to global capital at a less concentrated level.

A great deal of study has followed from Sassen's analysis, led not least by the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research group. Their ongoing research over the past 15 years has revealed a more complex picture of world cities. Advanced producer firms, the group has shown, operate through geographic and communication networks across a much larger number of cities. What were once a few nodal points in the global economy have proliferated to become a set of interlocking relations between hundreds of cities (Figure 10.1). These cities function not only as physical nodes of the global economy but as complex bundles of information, infrastructure, leisure and culture (Sassen, 2001; Taylor et al., 2011).

Figure 10.1 The world city corporate network

Source: Wall (2009).

In 2015, a much wider group of cities have accumulated economic powers and political responsibilities. In 1991, London: World City recognised only four bona fide world cities, complemented by a handful of other contenders, mostly in Europe and the United States. The report did not, and perhaps could not, foresee the emergence of large developing cities as global challengers with distinctive competitive strengths. Back then, even Hong Kong, now the world's third financial centre, was not clearly on the competitive horizon, while Brussels and Berlin were considered among the major rivals to London's international roles. Today, the Belgian and German capitals are placed well outside the top 20 cities for corporate links (GaWC, 2010).

Instead Shanghai, São Paulo, Beijing, Toronto, Seoul, Mumbai, Istanbul and even Moscow are among the major movers in a much more diffuse, though still hierarchical, urban system. The arrival of these large metropolitan areas on the global scene is far more pertinent to London's future. As Director of Strategy and Policy at London First John Dickie observed, “the issue is no longer the challenge from EU based cities as it was in 1991; it is all about competition from the other great global cities” (personal communication, 16 November 2011).

A new cycle brings new challenges

The context for London in 2015 is a world entering a new cycle of investment and development. This period is distinctive for at least three reasons: unprecedented urbanisation and re-urbanisation; the gradual re-balancing of power and wealth from West to East and North to South; and a critical mass consciousness of humanity's impact on planetary processes. City leadership for London and other world cities functions in unavoidable relation to these three trends, which demand new ways of shaping, leading and managing cities.

It is therefore not only the number and identity of competitors that has altered. The nature of the competitive terrain has also evolved significantly. In London: World City, rivals such as Tokyo, New York and Berlin were analysed for their initiatives in the soft economy and their active pursuit of the benefits of agglomeration (LPAC, 1991: 26–27). The report was, it turned out, prescient in identifying inter-urban competition around human capital and quality of life. Subsequently, however, more subtle understandings of the push-and-pull factors for mobile knowledge workers and international firms have prompted more refined and targeted attraction and retention strategies. Innovative solutions have been applied to the intricacy of negotiated and collaborative governance, both between tiers of government and between public and private sectors. London now has a much wider set of practices to learn from other cities, from Singapore to Seattle, from Seoul to São Paulo.

The quest for quality of life remains the key overarching goal for many world city leaders because it is the profound common ingredient uniting the needs of citizens, businesses, investors, and visitors in a city. The creation of a liveable city remains key to attracting those who possess locational mobility, and to meeting the needs of those who do not. Local amenities, transport links, and public services are therefore essential to the urban project. In order to achieve these liveability advantages, new megacities and de-industrialising cities both need to address substantial infrastructure deficits. Existing commuter links, energy storage, waste management, and housing have to be renewed, managed and, in many cases, refinanced. Investment and reinvestment is critical to create new infrastructure that can cope with the challenges of growth and adaptation. New and updated infrastructures act as tools for city managers to meet economic and social goals, but their realisation presently entails an unaffordable public finance burden. Financial restrictions are exacerbated by enduring local government constraints and outdated nation-state paradigms which allocate resources in ways that fail to address new and future imperatives.

The new cycle also requires cities to address sustainability and `smartness' properly. City leaders have better access to technological management arrangements that can reduce urban carbon outputs and also achieve cost efficiency. The improved precision and flexibility of these technologies is driving a second wave of sustainability through city government. The drive for sustainability is thereby usefully merging with liveability ambitions, enabling both fields to be handled within one regime of urban design upgrades. At the same time, city leaders continue to seek to lead changes in citizen behaviour in relation to waste and recycling, energy use and supply, transport modes and use, and other areas of civic life. The ambition to help residents make lifestyle choices that contribute most to collective wellbeing has moved up the leadership agenda, at least partly because of the marriage of sustainability and liveability goals.

Imperatives for city leaders

Substantial new imperatives have emerged for city leaders since 2008 and the global financial crisis. Citizen trust and public confidence in political leadership have been eroded by the protracted economic slowdown, breeding a widespread cynicism. City governments, especially but not only in the West, have a new task to repair relationships with the public based on the principles of patience, realism, ambition and communication. The need to articulate and communicate collective aspirations ‘downwards’ has become critical, just as has ‘upwardly’ rearticulating cities' relationships with national and supra-national systems. Those cities which lack ‘self-governing’ powers and largely depend on public transfer payments are in constant tension with central governments and supra-national bodies such as the European Union, whose emphasis on fiscal balance and rigorous redistribution often clash with urban economic competitiveness. Leaders and policymakers have to make a new political and financial case for cities as the competitive edge of nations, the key sites for CO₂ reductions, and the incubators for progressive social development.

New kinds of economic strategy underpin world cities' quest for success in the next cycle. Most analysts now recognise cities as indispensable hosts of knowledge creation, scientific breakthrough, entrepreneurship, and face-to-face transactions. To leverage these sources of competitive advantage optimally, cities have the task of serving the needs of growing markets around the world with distinctive and viable services. Many have invested considerable time and money to identify which sectors to prioritise and to build new identities around these sectors that can be effectively communicated to new customers and investors in the emerging world. Strategic positioning is accompanied by the pressure to increase rates of investment, so as to ensure vital existing assets do not become liabilities. In a climate of severely cons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Section I: London in 1991 – Setting the scene
• Section II: The evolution of London, 1991 to 2015
• Section III: London today and in the future
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• Advert
• End User License Agreement