Globalization, Modernity and the City

John Rennie Short

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136671500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences physiques
• Subtopic: Géographie

We live in a world of big cities. Urbanization, globalization and modernization have received considerable attention but rarely are the connections and relations between them the subjects of similar attention. Cities are an integral part of the network of globalization and important sites of modernization.

Globalization, Modernity and The City weaves together broad social themes with detailed urban analysis to explore the connections between the rise of big cities, the creation of a global network and the making of the modern world. It explains the growth of big cities, the urban bias of global flows and the creation of metropolitan modernities. The text develops broad theories of the subtle and complex interactions between urbanization, globalization and modernization in a sweep of the urban experience across the globe. Thematic chapters explore the making of the modern city in profiles of the growth of urban spectaculars, the role of flanerie, the traffic issues of the modernist city, recurring issues of urban utopias and the rise of the primate city.

Detailed case studies are drawn from cities in Australia, China and the USA. Urban snapshots of cities such as Atlanta, Barcelona, Istanbul, Mumbai and Seoul provide a truly global coverage. The book links together broad social themes with deep urban analysis. This well-written, accessible and illustrated text will appeal to the broad audience of all those interested in the urban present and the metropolitan future.

Part 1

Global generalities

1 The Third Urban Revolution

In this book I want to look at the connections between three dominant social trends: the growth of cities, the creation of a global society, and the construction of modernity. Urbanization, globalization, and modernization have received considerable attention but rarely are the connections and relations between them the subjects of similar attention. I want to focus on their inter-connectedness, the subtle as well as the surprising links between the three. I will develop ideas concerning what I have termed the Third Urban Revolution, the Late Modern Wave of Globalization and metropolitan modernities. Let us begin in this chapter with some definitions and provisional descriptions of the Third Urban Revolution.

May 23, 2007 marks a demographic milestone. On that date the world's population became more urban than rural. For the first time in human history more people lived in cities than in the countryside. The shift marks a culmination of two centuries of continued and increasing urban growth. As late as 1800 only three out of every 100 people lived in cities. A little over 200 years later the figure was more than fifty. Our world is increasingly a world of cities and the urban context is now the dominant human condition.

Urbanization is often described as the geographical redistribution of population from rural areas to urban areas. However, it is not just the spatial reorganization of society but also the social reorganization of space. Cities incubate social and political change. They are, as Fernand Braudel (1981, p. 479) notes, “like electric transformers. They increase tension, accelerate the rhythm of exchange and constantly recharge human life.”

Even when cities were small and demographically insignificant, they played a disproportionate part in social development. The first cities that appeared from the fifth millennium BCE witnessed the emergence of writing, political centralization, and organized knowledge. To take just one example: organized religions, with their gods and priests and rituals to make sense of the mysteries of life, grew out of the need to justify and legitimize the social hierarchy in the early cities. When urban empires expanded and came into contact with other urban empires, there was both creative and destructive cultural collision. Karen Armstrong (2006) updates the idea of a pivotal “axial age” from 900 to 200 BCE when the great religious traditions of the world came into being across the globe—Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Their universal messages of empathy and compassion grew out of the collective experience of living in cities as well as their awareness of people in other cities and regions. Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself is the only livable code for city dwellers living cheek by jowl.

The early merchant city—examples include Amsterdam, Bruges, Florence, and Venice—gave us the development of international trade and commerce but also the creation of a commercial society where private interest was regulated, collective rules were established, and civic communities were forged. The people of the merchant cities helped create the notion of the public realm and civic society. The largest and most prestigious building in Amsterdam during the city's golden age of mercantile activity, let us not forget, was the Town Hall (see Figure 1.1).

The industrial city was the crucible of early industrial capitalism, giving us factory life and class struggles. It was the setting for a working class as much for itself as in itself. Marx's great three volume book, Capital, is a work of theory based firmly on the experience of the industrial cities of nineteenth-century Britain.

Again and again, the city, in its various emblematic forms, creates the opportunities, contexts, and laboratories for new social developments, innovative political developments, and far-reaching economic changes. Cities are the accelerants of social, economic, and political change.

There are two dominant narratives that deal with the weight of this urban consequence. The first is the city as emancipatory vehicle. When Sir Peter Hall (1998, p. 7) writes that the most cosmopolitan cities, despite all their problems, “have throughout history been the places that ignited the sacred flame of the human intelligence and the human imagination,” he repeats an old idea that cities help to liberate us from the past. In this reading, the city is the setting for the full realization of human potential and the launching pad for freedom. This is the city as the leading edge of a progressive history. Another, alternative reading sees the city as a site of compulsion. The authoritarian city is the counterpoise to the liberation city. Cities have an authority embedded in them that ranges from the more obvious forms of control and surveillance to the internalized, the guards, visible and internalized, that limit our movement and shackle our imagination. The city is of course too complex to be easily summarized by either characterization. The liberation city and authoritarian city are best visualized as polar ends of a shifting dynamic continuum. Occasionally the liberation city spurts into life: riots in Paris, marches on Washington, people power in Manila. This is where and when the city is a theater for strikes and sit-downs and demonstrations. At the other end are the policeman's cosh, the fire hose, the prison, and the more subtle but effective dominant ideologies that marginalize and smash alternatives. And in between is the vast banal reality that cities are places of quiet normality, rarely the focus for insurrection, rebellion, or disobedience.

Figure 1.1 Amsterdam Town Hall: a monument to the urban polity.

Photo: John Rennie Short

Contemporary urbanization

Today we are in the midst of the Third Urban Revolution. The first began over 6,000 years ago and saw the first cities in Mesopotamia. These cities were less the result of an agricultural surplus and more the reflections of concentrated social power that organized sophisticated irrigation schemes and vast building projects. The First Urban Revolution, independently experienced in Africa, Asia, and the Americas ushered wrenching social changes, new ways of doing things, and new ways of experiencing, seeing, and representing the world. The Second Urban Revolution began in the eighteenth century with the linkage between urbanization and industrialization that inaugurated the creation of the industrial city and unleashed unparalleled rates of urban growth. Since 1800, urban growth is one of the most significant features of global demographic change.

The Third Urban Revolution is a complex phenomenon that began in the last half of the twentieth century. It is marked by five distinct characteristics. The first is the sheer scale and pace of change. A majority of the world's population is now urban and in many countries this new urban majority appeared in little more than a generation. The proportion of the urban population in developing countries has doubled between 1950 and the present day. In 1950 the urban population of Kenya was 340,000, by 2005 it had increased to 7,384,000. In Pakistan the urban population in 1950 was 6,473,000, and by 2005 it was 55,135,000. Some of the effects of this rapid change in culture will be explored later in our discussion of modernity and modernization. For the moment we can note that across the world, the dominant demographic trend is the growth of cities and the development of urban places.

The second characteristic is the increasing size of individual cities. Urban growth is concentrated in large cities. Take the case of Shanghai. In 1950 it had a population of around six million; by 2010 its official size approached close to twenty million. In the developing and developed world, the big cities have morphed into wider metropolitan regions. In 1900 no metro region in the world had a population greater than ten million; a hundred years later there were at least twenty and probably more. Population and economic activities have spread beyond the municipal boundaries. In the past fifty years, across the world, small towns have grown into cities and big cities have sprawled into giant metropolitan regions.

Third, this revolution exhibits a marked metropolitanization. Improvements in transport have allowed dispersal of people and activities away from the tight urban cores of the pre-industrial and industrial cities. Large metropolitan regions rather than individual cities are the new building block of both national and global economies. Three giant urban regions in Asia Pacific, Bangkok (11 million population), Seoul (20 million), and Jakarta (20 million), have between 35 and 25 percent of all foreign direct investment into their respective countries and constitute between 20 percent and 40 percent of respective national gross domestic product. In China, for example, the three city regions of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong constitute less than 8 percent of the national population, yet they attract 73 percent of the foreign investment and produce 73 percent of all exports. China is less a national economy than the aggregate of three large metropolitan economies. Recent work looking at city regions in the US has identified ten megapolitan regions, defined as clustered networks of metropolitan regions that have a population either of more than ten million or that will exceed that number, on current growth projections, by 2040 (Lang and Dhavale 2005). Collectively they constitute only 19.8 percent of the nations’ land surface yet comprise 67.4 percent of the population. I examine one of the regions in Chapter 11. Large city regions are the main centers of global economic activity.

Fourth, this urban change is a global phenomenon. The First Urban Revolution was concentrated in the fertile plains of only a few river basins. The second was restricted to cities in countries undergoing rapid industrialization. The Third Urban Revolution, in contrast, is truly global. Metropolitan growth is evident across the globe and patterns of individual city growth and decline are linked to global redistributions of economic activities. The global shift in manufacturing from the West to new centers of industrial production has urban consequences. Some of the slowest growing cities of the past decades are places such as Liverpool and Leeds in the UK and Buffalo and Pittsburgh in the US. Their relative decline is connected to their loss of manufacturing activity and the decline of the industrial base. Meanwhile cities such as Shanghai and Seoul, as first manufacturing and then service employment, grew substantially (see Figure 1.2). The tighter global linkages ensure that global shifts in economic activity are quickly reflected in patterns of urban growth and decline. Urban landscapes became devalorized and revalorized at an often bewildering pace: in much of the developed world central cities have characteristically become sites of new urban spectacle; inner cities are pockmarked by sites of gentrified renaissance as well as stubborn poverty; inner suburbs show the first inklings of decline while exurban development continues apace as gated communities and mixed use developments sprawl into the former countryside. In the developing world massive rural to urban migration feeds the creation of peripheral settlement on the edge of cities and fast growing informal economies. Urban growth seems inexorable around the world, just as urban decline seems unavoidable throughout the globe.

Fifth, large cities are now part of a new spatial assemblage of connections between the global, the nation-state, and the city. The territorial unity of nation-states is being undermined by changes in national policies as well as global trends. The encouragement of the private market and the decline of the Keynesian state is leading to marked regional inequality and difference. In many countries around the world the difference between urban and rural, big city, and small town, expanding and declining economies is reinforced by the lack of national equalization policies. The “national” economy is something of a statistical fiction, an averaging of different urban regions. Economic globalization is aiding the creation of informal city-states within different countries. Sydney in Australia, for example, is developing as Australia's “global city.” Its appearance and the life experiences of its citizens are becoming more like those in San Francisco, London and New York than those in the outback or small town Australia. The ability of Sydney to reposition itself in the global economy allows the city to become separated off from the rest of the country. Globalization is aiding in the creation of de facto city-states, the control points of a global economy. Globalization is not so much undermining the nation-state as restructuring it. The nation-state is being redifferentiated according to success and failure in dealing with and attracting global capital. Certain parts are becoming more successful, some less so; in effect, the nation-state is being broken up into degrees of connection with the global economy. In the wake of a widespread withdrawal of state intervention, the result is growing difference within the nation-states, increasing similarity between certain cities in different countries, and the rise of de facto city-states whose economic fortunes are tied to their global connections as much as to their national location.

Figure 1.2 Songdo International City, South Korea: part of the massive and rapid change in the Third Urban Revolution.

Photo: John Rennie Short

The Third Urban Revolution embodies and reflects global trends whether it is worldwide shifts in economic activities, leading to new industrial growth in some metropolitan regions and the deindustrialization of older regions, or increased international immigration, in terms of the emergence of cosmopolitan cities and urban immigrant gateways. There are connections between this latest round of urbanization, globalization, and modernization that I will now explore.

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CASE STUDY 1.1 Istanbul

To say that Istanbul is situated between East and West is not a trite cliché, but a simple statement of geographical reality. The city sprawls across the narrow sea passage between Europe and Asia.

Like all maritime cities—it fringes not only the Bosporus, but also the Golden Horn and the evocatively named Sea of Marmara—it has an expansive luminosity, a salt-tinged clarity and sea-breezed airiness. Even with seventeen million people and busy traffic, it still manages to shine and sparkle.

The city straddles both continents and embodies the varied and long contacts between East and West. Founded in 330 by the Emperor Constantine as Constantinople, it became the capital of a Byzantine Empire that stretched throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, covering parts of Europe as well as Asia. As an important repository of the legacy of Greek classical thought and a transmission point for the intellectual flowering of Arabic and Persian scholarship, Constantinople stayed lit when Western Europe sank into the dark ages. The Byzantines kept the sparks of culture alive that subsequently caught fire in the Renaissance of Western Europe. There were also more destructive exchanges. The city was pillaged in the Fourth Crusade, its treasures looted and taken back to Western Europe. The churches of Venice are filled with the theft.

When it became the capital of the Ottomans, it was the center of an empire that embraced the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. At its furthest extent, the city's power reached to the very gates of Venice. Under the longest reigning Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566), not only was the empire extended, but also the city was adorned with new mosques and an early form of multicultural tolerance was practiced. The city is still filled with the most beautiful of religious architecture including the intimate Church of St Savior in Chora, the serene Hagia Sophia, and the stunning Blue Mosque. The city skyline as it stretches across the hills is punctuated with minarets and towers, Ottoman mosques, and Byzantine churches.

As a center of two transnational empires the city was a global city. Charles Parker (2010) writes of the global integration of space as the defining feature of early modernity. From 1400 to 1800 empire building across the globe—including the Chinese, Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid as well as the Spanish and British—created international markets and global exchange networks, the movement of people, the spread of new technologies, the diffusion of cultures, and the transmission of religion and scientific practices. The result was a tighter integration of global space, a space pulled especially tight in cities such as Constantinople/Istanbul.

The names Byzantine and Ottoman cover processes rather than fixed objects. The Byzantine Christians grafted their religion onto pagan roots, and their later art reflected contact with the East as well as encounters with the West. The icons produced in the later Byzantine Empire have a more naturalistic representation, reflecting contact with the art of the Western Renaissance. Constantinople/Istanbul was a city where Arabic and Turkish, as well as Greek and Italian, could be heard in the streets. As the Ottoman Empire waned, there was a growing admiration for an ascending West. In 1856, the Sultan abandoned the Topkapi Palace for a new neoclassical palace at Dolmabahçe, which could look just as at home on the banks of the Seine or the Thames as it does on the Bosporus. The encounters continue. Today the Grand Bazaar, first founded when the Ottomans gained control of the city in 1453, is filled more by foreign tourists than native Turks (see Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3 Grand Bazaar in Istanbul: completed in 1461, it is one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world; a forerunner of the Paris Arcades and today's indoor malls.

Photo: John Rennie Short

Istanbul is less a fixture and more an ongoing process, a crucible where East and West ar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of case studies
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Part 1 Global generalities
• Part 2 Thematic specificities
• Part 3 City particularities
• Part 4 Urban utopias
• Bibliography
• Index