Globalizing Cities

A Brief Introduction

Mark Abrahamson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351722018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Globalization has been built upon, and maintained by, major urban centers. As the interconnections among these cities grow, more cities become involved as important global nodes, and globalization has an extremely strong influence upon the forms and functions of cities everywhere. This new textbook examines modern cities worldwide through two lenses: as the major nodes in the global economy, and as primary propagators of cultural ideas across the world.

Exploring the ramifications of the continuing penetration of global forces into smaller urban areas, this book clearly distinguishes economic, cultural, and political processes to demonstrate how global attachments are shaping many of the basic features of modern cities. Specifically, the book examines the way cities accommodate huge global flows of people, including migrants, tourists, and the managers of multi-national firms, and the effects this has upon the cultural, economic, and political forces associated with globalization in cities. The main features of the book include:

• a balanced emphasis upon how economic, technological, and cultural forces shape both urban and global developments;
• a highly interdisciplinary focus, incorporating major works and ideas from urban scholars writing in sociology, geography, anthropology, and politics;
• detailed case studies of events and activities within specific cities and regions that illuminate major trends;
• end of chapter reading lists of corresponding chapters in The Globalizing Cities Reader, second edition, edited by Xuefei Ren and Roger Keil and published by Routlegde in 2018.

Written in a clear and accessible style, Globalizing Cities: A Brief Introduction will appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in both urban and globalization courses within sociology, geography, and urban studies.

CHAPTER 1

The history of globalization

This first chapter focuses upon the historical development of globalization from a number of perspectives, with particular attention to its economic, social-cultural, and governmental-political dimensions. The next chapter turns to a historical examination of cities, focusing upon how they have grown in size and complexity. Special consideration will be given to how their growth has been accompanied by increased outreach eventually leading to linkages with counterpart cities in other nations. To some degree, we will note, the current forms and functions of almost all cities that are being influenced by their connections to the global system.

Globalization entails the degree to which nations are inter-dependent; in other words, the extent to which there are explicit connections, such as political or military activities jointly undertaken by nations; or the degree to which events that occur in one nation have substantial repercussions in others. This variable amount of inter-connectedness conventionally involves nations rather than regions, cities, or any other entity. However, as we shall describe in later chapters of this book, it is the major cities within nations that are the primary places in managing the flows of people, capital, goods, firms, and ideas that are at the heart of globalization.

DIMENSIONS OF GLOBALIZATION

Globalization obviously involves not only the production and distribution of diverse commodities, but also the dissemination of values and ideas as well as forms of organization. To be more specific, in recent years, analyses of globalization have tended to distinguish among three primary dimensions: economic, political, and cultural. Each can be briefly described as follows:

1. Economic, entailing the international flow of capital, goods and services as well as forms of business and commercial organization (e.g. transnational organizations). It is typically measured by a variety of statistics relating to imports, exports, and investments.
2. Social-cultural, which involves a diffusion of values, ideas, and images that shape people’s identities and the types of relationships and recreational forms they favor. Relevant indicators often include tourism and international media flows, broadly defined to include movies, newspapers, recorded music, etc.
3. Governmental-political, entailing the degree to which agreements, treaties, and shared rules control the flow of people and goods across national boundaries, and define the locus of citizenship. Measurement frequently includes the number of signed treaties and embassies and immigration rules.

While theorists have often found it useful to distinguish among these three dimensions and to analyze each separately, it can sometimes be difficult to place a component into one and only one dimension. Their constituent parts are often shared. To cite just one example, the music industry is ordinarily considered an element of the social-cultural realm, but it obviously involves the import and export of goods (e.g. recorded music) and services (e.g. concert management) as well, and these components can also be viewed as part of the economic dimension.

Whether the three dimensions should be separated or combined is, at least in large part, an empirical question to be answered by the degree of correlation among them. If they overlap almost perfectly—the correlations among the dimensions would then be very high—that would make a strong case for combining them into a single measure of globalization. By contrast, the more nations’ scores on each dimension are independent of their scores on other dimensions—the correlations among them would then be very low—the more it would make sense to view the three as separate dimensions. We will examine the data with these questions in mind.

THE KOF INDEXES

There are a number of centers and institutes that rank the nations of the world on globalization indexes. Because they employ different criteria, the rankings differ a little from each other, but only a little. One of the most useful set of indexes for our purposes is prepared annually by the Swiss Economic Institute and is titled the KOF Index of Globalization.¹ (KOF is the abbreviation of the institute’s name.) It rates a large sample of 207 nations on the three dimensions of globalization that we have been discussing. Each dimension is expressed as a composite of a number of specific indicators, as described below. The three indexes are also combined into a fourth, which can be regarded as a general measure of globalization.

In sum, the KOF Indexes provide both an overall measure of globalization and separate rankings of each nation’s economic, governmental, and social-cultural scores. The main components of each of the four indexes are as follows:

1. Globalization: An overall measure that combines the economic, governmental, and social-cultural indexes, as described below.
2. Economic, which combines two sub-dimensions:
   2a. Economic flows: a nation’s imports, exports, and foreign investments.
   2b. Restrictions on trade, involving tariff rates and hidden import barriers.
3. Governmental-political: Embassies located in a nation, the nations’ number of memberships in international organizations and number of treaties signed with other nations.
4. Social-cultural, which has three sub-dimensions:
   4a. Transnational personal contacts involving telecommunications and mailed letters.
   4b. Potential flow of ideas and images, indicated by the number of internet users, households with television sets and Internet and international newspapers.
   4c. Penetration of transnational beliefs and values, indicated by such variables as the number of imported and exported books and the number of McDonald’s restaurants.²

KOF calculated index scores for all the 207 nations, then based upon those scores the nations were ranked, relative to each other, from 1 to 207 on each of the four indexes. Presented in Table 1.1 is a 10% systematic sample (that is, every 10th nation) from the KOF listing. The figures shown for each of the 21 nations in this sample are its ranking among the 207 nations rated by KOF. To illustrate, based upon economic globalization, the Netherlands was the fourth highest scoring nation among the 207. (The only ranks shown in Table 1.1 are for the 21 nations included in our sub-sample.)

Table 1.1 Nations’ globalization rankings

Inspection of the sample of nations included in Table 1.1 shows a general tendency for the three primary dimensions to co-vary with each other, that is, for nations to rank similarly on all of the dimensions. The Netherlands is a particularly good example, ranking in the top 10 on all four dimensions. However, the relationships among the three dimensions are far from perfect. For example, there are nations—such as Qatar—that are globally well connected economically and culturally, but lag well behind on the government dimension. On the other hand, there are nations—such as Ethiopia—that rank much higher on the government dimension than they do on either the economic or cultural dimensions.

As the above examples would lead us to anticipate, a statistical analysis indicates that the three dimensions and the composite are all positively inter-related, and the relationships among them (varying between about 0.50 and 0.80) are statistically significant. At the same time, these inter-relationships are clearly imperfect. The conclusion that follows is that it is prudent to dissect globalization into its three primary dimensions, but the dimensions are sufficiently related to each other to make it also reasonable to refer to globalization as a composite phenomenon. In the following chapters, we will emphasize the composite or specific dimensions according to which better fits the issue at hand.

The remainder of this chapter traces the history of globalization with weight given to recent time periods. Within each time period, the three primary dimensions of globalization will be discussed separately, but their inter-connections will also be noted.

EARLY ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION

In some form, there has been a degree of economic globalization for thousands of years. As early as the 8th century BCE, gold and bronze figures were being traded between China and parts of Central Europe. This trade eventually bourgeoned and the route was later termed “the silk road” because of the initial importance of transactions involving silk material; but by the end of the 14th century, it included everything from gunpowder to carpets.³ During the Renaissance (14th to 17th centuries), there was extensive trade across many parts of the world. The busiest trade routes linked Western Europe (Spain and Portugal, in particular) and Asia (China and India, in particular).

As early as the 16th century, the principal cities in the nations most involved in global trade had become major nodes in the global economy of the day. Lisbon and Portugal, in the mid-16th century, were an especially notable example. It is described in Box 1.1.

BOX 1.1 LISBON: A 16TH CENTURY GLOBAL CITY

During the 15th and 16th centuries, Lisbon became one of the world’s most important port cities. It was home to extensive ship building and manufacturing of naval instruments, permitting Portuguese trading ships to acquire merchandise from China, West Africa, Sri Lanka, etc. Some of the cargoes most sought by these traders could be described as “curiosities” and luxury goods. Included here were carvings, ivory caskets, elephants, jewelry, and precious stones. At various times, some of these items were provided almost exclusively to royalty, but Lisbon also contained a bustling international market in which both luxury and everyday goods were sold to a very diverse set of buyers.

The principal commercial and financial street in Lisbon was Rua Nova dos Mercedores. It was, during this era, one of the wealthiest streets in the world; the 16th century equivalent of Bond Street or Fifth Avenue. The specialized shops along this avenue offered Asian textiles, Ming porcelain, jewelry, animal byproducts, and so on. The shoppers were ethnically and economically diverse, described at the time as rich and poor, slaves and knights, and they included both domestic shoppers and international traders.⁴

Adding to Lisbon’s importance as a port city, many of the items that arrived at its waterfront were sold to international merchants who, in turn, shipped them across Europe. Thus, the Rua Nova and surrounding area were simultaneously both a major market serving a Portuguese clientele and a hub from which merchandise from around the world was shipped across Europe. Unfortunately, Rua Nova was completely destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 1755, so the best descriptions of this important marketplace are gleaned from several paintings that managed to survive.

Global trade increased over the following two centuries, slowly encompassing more nations and more commodities, though increases were not uninterrupted. A variety of disruptions, from natural disasters to wars, depressions, and revolutions almost...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Preface
• 1 The history of globalization
• 2 Global city-regions
• 3 Inequality
• 4 Global emigres
• 5 Ghettos, enclaves, and ethnoburbs
• 6 Paradigms of growth and shrinkage
• 7 Gentrification
• Index