Towns and cities are thus
undergoing some striking transformations as the result of the massive employment in services.
One might think of towns
and cities as increasingly centres for the switching of
information, knowledge, images and symbols (see Mulgan 1989 for a related
argument).
This can be seen, both in
the importance of `smart' communication infrastructures in towns and cities (it
is calculated that 30 per cent of the cost of new office building in Tokyo
is accounted for by electronic installations), and in the softer
infrastructures, of the knowledge, leisure and cultural activities found within
the urban context, of the culture-society.
Education has come to play the role once attributed to the
`manufacturing base' and of
importance is the degree of `liveability' of different towns and cities.
Many cities pretend not to
be cities at all, but present themselves as `semi-rural' (1989: 270).
An enormous range of contemporary
political issues is essentially concerned with questions of the `liveability'
of different places and in particular therefore with the size and nature of
service provision, by both the private and public sector.
Much contemporary social
and political conflict is thus concerned with the forms of service
provision; their financing; the buildings they are `housed' in; their
relationship to images of place; and their consequences for other aspects of
the built and physical environment and more generally for local social
experiences in multiple post-industrial spaces.
Further ideas along these
lines have recently been developed by Castells. He argues, we have noted, that
contemporary capitalism has been recast into an `informational mode of
development', in which information processing has become the pivotal
productive activity (1989).
Knowledge has always
figured centrally, in technical change, but only now `is the raw material
itself information and so is its outcome' (1989: 38).
For Castells the key consideration
is technological change or `objectified' human capital. In this the development
of the integrated circuit in 1957 speeded up the processing of
information, the accuracy of outcome and the ability to deal with complexity.
Subsequent benchmark steps
were the development of the micro-processor in 1971; the exponential
increase in the processing power of computers accompanied by increasing
cheapness of storing information in cost per unit of memory; and the connection
of units into systems made possible by advances in telecommunications.
Hence he emphasizes the
importance of fibre-optic networks, `smart buildings' as well as computer-aided
design, and manufacturing in flexible integrated manufacturing.
Castells' restructured
economy is very much an economy of signs, whose central axis is
information-processing, the organization of sets of instructions for the
handling of information.
Even in biotechnology this
development is governed by our enhanced ability to store, retrieve and analyse
information. On this view, where machines take second place to information, the
output itself is information embodied in goods, services and decisions.
Castells' reincorporation of
information-processing into the framework of capitalist development has the virtue
of shifting attention away from flexibility and towards the reflexivity
involved in the process.
Castells' information is in
most cases embodied or objectified reflexivity. Such reflexivity is
objectified in the increased ability of machines to retrieve, store and analyse
information. Further, the information which is the output of this process
is embodied in goods, services and decisions.
However, in the light of our
discussion goods and services should be viewed not as either informational or
material, but as to varying degrees `information soaked'.
The shorter-product-run
goods and services will be more information soaked while large-batch runs will
be less so. That is, the very short batch services and goods consumed by
progressively more individuated consumers will themselves increasingly consist
of objectified reflexivity.
Yet ever greater numbers of
the labour force are involved in human information-processing, in the
retrieval, storage and analysis of information about people.
Clearly machine-objectified
reflexivity has often played a very positive role as a complement to the
information-processing powers of human capital.
There is a hierarchy in the
growth of services, whose initial development, linked to industry, especially
to transport and distribution, is superseded by services set in the context
of improved quality of life (Sassen 1991: 247).
The services that the
middle-class professional may consume,
physiotherapy, psychotherapy, windsurfing lessons, jazz, symphony and rock concerts,
`exotic restaurants', exotic tourism and art museums, are all linked to a
higher `quality' of life.
What
is important here is not so much the quality-of-life notion, but the increased
symbolic content of the services
towards the top of the hierarchy. An example would be the replacement of
material or `sand, sun and sex' tourism by the more symbol-laden or
`place-myth' or cultural tourisms of recent years (Urry 1990c).
It is indeed symbols and not only information that is crucial here.
The professional middle
class is centrally involved in the processing and circulation of symbols.
All information is so to
speak carried in symbols, yet the
notion of information captures only a tiny part of the multi-dimensionality of
symbol. The symbol also contains moral, affective, aesthetic, narrative and
meaning dimensions.
We thus live in
increasingly individuated and symbol-saturated societies, in which the advanced-services middle class plays
an increasing role in the accumulation process.
This class assumes a
critical mass in the present restructuration: as symbol-processing producers
and as consumers of processed symbols working and living in certain towns
and cities.
To talk of services is to
talk of information and symbol and
of the increasing importance of both within many diverse kinds of
post-industrial space.