The Unequal City

Urban Resurgence, Displacement and the Making of Inequality in Global Cities

John Rennie Short

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351987257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Cities around the world have seen: an increase in population and capital investments in land and building; a shift in central city populations as the poor are forced out; and a radical restructuring of urban space.

The Unequal City tells the story of urban change and acts as a comprehensive guide to the Urban Now. A number of trends are examined, including: the role of liquid capital; the resurgence of population; the construction of megaprojects and hosting of global megaevents; the role of the new rich; and the emergence of a new middle class. This book explores the reasons behind the displacement of the poor to the suburbs and beyond. Drawing upon case studies from around the world, readers are exposed to an examination of the urban projects that involve the reuse of older industrial spaces, the greening of the cities, and the securitization of the public spaces.

This book draws on political economy, cultural and political analysis, and urban geography approaches in order to consider the multifaceted nature of the process and its global unfolding. It will be essential reading to those interested in urban studies, economic geography, urban economics, urban sociology, urban planning and globalization.

1 Cities of the urban now

I want to focus on the ‘Urban Now’. It is a liminal location. Cities are in transitions: for some, between colonial pasts and neoliberal futures; for others, suspended between preindustrial and postindustrial, provincial and global; and for a few, precariously turning from growth to decay. It is a complex mosaic. Here growth, there resurgence, and in some places inexorable decline. In this book, I want to focus attention on the larger, globalizing cities of growth and resurgence.

The topic of this book is the remaking of these major cities across the world. It examines the reasons behind and consequences of the movement of people and investment into a select range of big, dynamic cities. In cities as diverse as Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, London, Mumbai, New York, Paris, Rio, Shanghai and Singapore there is an uptick in central city populations and an increase in capital investments in land and buildings. The results are an increase in population, a resifting of central city populations as the poor are forced out, a growing inequality and a radical restructuring of urban space. Cities are not only being remade but also are being reimagined.

This book has hugely ambitious goals: to provide an understanding of recent changes in growing cities across the world; to transcend the discursive divide of cities into categories of Developed/First World/Global North and Developing/Third World/Global South; and to pull together diverse themes that are currently ‘silo-ed’ in disciplinary and thematic bunkers. It aims to synthesize these diverse strands into a coherent account of what are the causes and consequences underlying the rapid and dramatic changes in global and globalizing cities. I draw upon a large body of work by others and some of my own writings.

In this introductory chapter, let me outline the broad contours of this work: consider it an intellectual map that coordinates the main debates informing the rest of the book. I will highlight the emergence of a global perspective on the urban condition that first emerged in the 1980s.¹ I will develop the notion of the global urban imaginary, a construct that combines ideas and practices, and, finally, I will provide a provisional theory of the Urban Now.

The global perspective

The idea of a global urban system is not new. In 1572, at the high point of global mercantile capitalism, Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg published a visual record of the global urban network in their compilations of city maps and prospects, the first city atlas, entitled Civitates Orbis Terrarum. A rough translation of this Latin title is World Cities. It proved so popular that by 1617 the work was enlarged to consist of six volumes with over 363 urban views. Collectively, the images indicate the increasingly global reach of mercantile capitalism and early European colonization, forging a world economy in such urban centers as Aden, Peking, Cuzco, Goa, Mombasa and Tangiers. While the cities in the Civitates are depicted separately, the effect of the compilation is to reveal a global economy of urban nodes and a trading world of connected cities.²

During the height of British global supremacy, in 1826, the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) provided maps for an expanding British reading public. As well as maps of countries, they produced detailed maps of cities, including Athens, Boston, Calcutta, London and Moscow. The SDUK realized early on that the rapidly globalizing world was composed of cities as well as countries.

In 1915 the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes noted that much of the world’s business is conducted in what he termed ‘world cities’. Rather than countries or regions, it was cities, he implied, that were the main connecting points of a globalizing economy. His remarks did not inaugurate a body of work, and the idea languished, to be resuscitated only in the 1960s by Peter Hall, who used the term ‘world cities’ to describe London, Paris, Randstadt, Rhine-Ruhr, Moscow, New York and Tokyo.³

The idea of Geddes and Hall did not immediately become the basis for scholarly geographical research because economic geography was concerned with regional complexes and national economies while the main emphasis of urban geography was on urban hierarchies at the regional and national level or on studies of individual cities. Urban studies were folded into largely national concerns about urban growth and land-use planning. There were some differences. Urban studies in places such as Australia and the UK was guided more by governmental practice than in the USA, where concerns over citizenship, race and disorder tended to dominate. Whatever the exact focus, the emphasis was always on national rather than international concerns.

The intellectual connection between the global economy and the city was not made until the 1980s, when the idea of globalization came to the fore. The terms ‘world cities’ and ‘global cities’ began to be used, at first interchangeably, though recently the latter designation has been more commonly employed. These were identified as important hubs in a global urban network, command centers for the organization and management of a capitalism just about to go global. Globalization stimulated a new perspective on cities and urban networks.

John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff connected patterns of urbanization to the internationalization of capital. They identified a global urban hierarchy with world cities at the apex, characterizing them as the control centers of the global economy with a concentration of producer services, housing a highly mobile, transnational elite and the sites of massive economic, social and physical reorganization. They identified the following world cities: Tokyo, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Randstadt, Frankfurt, Zurich, Cairo, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico City and São Paolo. Their world status was asserted rather than demonstrated. In a later paper, Friedmann identified Tokyo, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Zurich, Rotterdam and São Paolo as the first-order centers of a global urban hierarchy, a similar but not exact list to their previous one. The authors drew attention to the global city as command center and to the global network of cities, but their loose definition of these cities, based on simple assertion rather than careful documentation, became a hallmark of many subsequent studies in what we termed the ‘dirty little secret’ of early global cities research.⁴

The city and globalization

The most recent cycle of economic globalization stimulated interest in the connection between globalization and the city. Initially emphasis was placed on identifying global cities as the key urban hubs of a globalizing economy. Study after study sought to show why or how city X or city Y could be considered a global city. Emphasis gradually shifted from proving global city status to showing how the process of globalization impacts all cities. Nearly all cities are globalizing if only a few are global in the sense of being major hubs in a global economy. All cities, to varying intensities, are restructured by global flows of capital, people and ideas. Their socio-spatial structure is tweaked and pulled by global forces, and they are increasingly wired into global networks. Cities are principal sites of globalization. There are very few, if not actually any, non-global cities.

Figure 1.1 New York City: one of the centers of the global urban network

(Photo: John Rennie Short)

Research eventually widened from identifying global cities to uncovering globalization in cities and showing the multiple pathways to global-city formation.⁵

Global urban networks

One fruitful avenue of research was the identification of global urban networks. A substantial body of material emerged from the work of Peter Taylor, Jonathan Beaverstock and colleagues at the Globalization and World Cities (GAWC) research network.⁶ In 2000 they collected data across 315 cities on the distribution of 100 firms that specialized in advanced producer services that include accountancy, advertising, banking/finance, insurance, law and management consultancy. They analyzed the resultant data matrix to identify a global urban hierarchy. In 2012 they extended the analysis to 176 firms in 525 cities. The result was a fivefold hierarchy that identified cities as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, High Sufficiency and Sufficiency. New York (NY) and London (LON) dominate with a classification of Alpha++ (Table 1.1). NYLON is an important pivot in the global networks, and its dominance reflects the historical legacy of London as the center of the British Empire and the continuing importance of New York as the financial center of the United States’ more informal empire. Their data also hint at the rapid rise of new cities into the top tier as national economies make their way from the periphery to the core of the global economy. In 2000 Shanghai was in the Alpha category while Beijing was only a Beta city. In 2012 both Shanghai and Beijing were classified as Alpha +, only one step below NYLON. Both cities are moving into the top tier as China’s economic growth, both absolute and relative to the rest of the world, continues apace.

Table 1.1 At the top of the GAWC global hierarchy

Alpha ++	London, New York
Alpha +	Hong Kong, Paris, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo, Beijing, Sydney, Dubai
Alpha	Chicago, Mumbai, Milan, Moscow, São Paulo, Frankfurt, Toronto, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mexico City, Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur, Brussels

While these aggregate analyses are immensely useful, they also have their biases. The cities of the West tend to be privileged sites for investigation. Intensive fieldwork in less privileged cities reveals a different story, as in the detailed case study of Accra by Richard Grant.⁷ As the capital of the West African nation of Ghana, Accra does not figure highly in the standard measures of globalization. On the GAWC classification, it is listed as Gamma – well down the list. At first blush, then, just another city in remote Africa, largely cut off from global flows. Grant presents a very different picture, however. Foreign companies now play an important role in the urban economy, constituting one-third of all firms. The urban form itself was transformed. A new foreign-oriented central business district was established close to the airport. The city’s economy is fueled by remittances from Ghanaians abroad. Returning home, these repatriates often play key roles in transnational operations and flows. But even those stuck in the city also have global connections. Grant shows that shantytown-dwellers are also connected to transnational NGOs, working with them to frame their demands and need. This detailed case study reveals the pervasive and multiple connections with the global space of flows of people, money, discourses, practices and ideas. Accra is revealed as a networked city with globalization being imposed as well as embraced, transforming from above as well as changing from below. No African cities make the top tier of GAWC cities and yet, as the Grant study shows, Accra is a globalizing city firmly connected into global flows.

Lisa Benton-Short and colleagues also sought to identify a global network, but their work was based on flows of people.⁸ They looked at immigration into cities around the world and established an index based on the percentage of foreign-born; the total number of foreign-born; the percentage of foreign-born not from a neighboring country; and the diversity of immigrants. The result was a threefold division into Alpha, Beta and Gamma cities. The Alpha immigrant cites are New York, Toronto, Dubai, Los Angeles, London, Sydney, Miami, Melbourne, Amsterdam and Vancouver. The Beta-ranked cities include Riyadh, Geneva, Paris, Tel Aviv, Montreal, Washington DC, The Hague, Kiev, San Francisco and Perth in Australia. They identify established gateway cities, unrecognized gateway cities, accidental gateway cities and bypassed gateway cities. Examples of their different types are noted in Table 1.2. Unrecognized gateways are found in the Middle East, the accidental gateways are particularly strong in the former eastern bloc, and bypassed gateways, globalized cities with relatively low levels of foreign immigration, are common in Asian cities.

Table 1.2 Types of immigrant cities

Type	Examples
Established gateways	Miami, Amsterdam, Vancouver, Auckland, Geneva, Los Angeles, New York
Unrecognized gateways	Dubai, Muscat, Mecca, The Hague, Tel Aviv, Medina, Jerusalem, Brussels, Munich
Accidental gateways	Kiev, Tbilisi, Bratislava, St. Petersburg
Bypassed Cities	Tokyo, Seoul. Taipei, Osaka-Kobe, Pusan.

Networks vary according to the flow. Some flows ‘pool’ in some cities rather than others. The flow of people, while matching the connections in command functions, also has slight differences. National regulations concerning immigration, the demand for labor and the relative openness of societies to foreign migrants all play a part. The sheer need for labor, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1. Cities of the urban now
• 2. Displacements
• 3. Capital and the unequal city
• 4. The urban arena: contesting the unequal city
• 5. New people, new cities
• 6. Revalorizing space and time
• 7. Big urbanism
• 8. Marketing the city
• 9. New urban ecologies
• 10. Imaginaries of the urban future
• Index