Space and time are
the fundamental, material dimensions of human life.
Both space and time
are being transformed under the combined effect of the information technology
paradigm.
And of social forms
and processes induced by the current process of historical change.
For instance, it
appears to be obvious that advanced telecommunications would make location of
offices ubiquitous.
Thus enabling
corporate headquarters to quit expensive, congested, and unpleasant central
business districts.
Opting instead for
custom-made sites in beautiful spots around the world.
Global City
The
informational/global economy is organized around command and control centers.
Able to coordinate,
innovate and manage the intertwined activities of networks of firms.
Advanced services,
including:
Finance, insurance, real estate, consulting, legal services, advertising, design, marketing, public relations, security, information gathering, and management of information systems, but also R&D and scientific innovation
Are at the core of
all economic processes.
Be it in
manufacturing, agriculture, energy, or services of different kinds.
They all can be
reduced to knowledge generation and information flows.
As the global economy expands and incorporates new markets it also organizes the production of advanced services required to manage the new units joining the system.
And the conditions of
their ever-changing linkages.
A case in point that
illustrates such process is Madrid, relatively a backwater of the global
economy until 1986.
In that year Spain
joined the European Community.
Opening up fully to
foreign capital investment in the stock exchange markets, banking operations,
and in acquisition of companies equity.
As well as in real
estate.
In the 1986-90 period
foreign direct investment in Madrid and in Madrid’s stock exchange fueled a
period of rapid regional economic growth.
Together with a boom
in real estate and a fast expansion of employment in business services.
The global city
phenomenon cannot be reduced to a few urban cores at the top of the hierarchy.
It is a process that
connects advanced services, producer centers, and markets in a global network.
With different
intensity and at a different scale depending upon the relative importance of
the activities located in each area vis-à-vis
the global network.
Inside each country,
the networking architecture reproduces itself into regional and local centers.
So that the whole
system becomes interconnected at the global level.
Furthermore,
globalization stimulates regionalization.
In the 1990s, Philip
Cooke has shown, on the basis of available evidence.
That the growing
internationalization of economic activities throughout Europe has made regions
more dependent on the activities.
Accordingly, regions,
under the impulse of their governments and business elites, have restructured
themselves to compete in the global economy.
And they have
established networks of cooperation between regional institutions and between
region-based companies.
Thus, regions and
localities do not disappear, but become integrated in international networks
that link up their most dynamic sectors.
Thus, in the early
1990s, while business-led explosive urban growth was experienced in cities such
as Bangkok, Taipei, Shanghai, Mexico D.F., or Bogota.
On the other hand,
Madrid, along with New York, London, and Paris, went into a slump.
That triggered a
sharp downturn in real estate prices and halted new construction.
But why must these
advanced service systems still be dependent on agglomeration in a few large
metropolitan nodes?
The combination of
spatial dispersal and global integration has created a new strategic role for
major cities.
Beyond their long history
as centers for international trade and banking, these cities now function in
four new ways:
First,
as highly concentrated command points in the organization of the world economy.
Second,
as key locations for finance and for specialized service firms.
Third,
as sites of production, including the production of innovations in these
leading industries.
And
fourth, as markets for the products and innovations produced.
These cities, or
rather, their business districts, are information-based, value production
complexes.
Where corporate
headquarters and advanced financial firms can find both suppliers and the
highly skilled, specialized labor they require.
The advent of high-technology manufacturing, namely microelectronics-based, computer-aided manufacturing, ushered in a new logic of industrial location.
Roughly speaking,
both for microelectronics and computers.
Four different types
of location were sought for each one of the four distinctive operations in the
production process:
a)
R&D, innovation,
and prototype fabrication were concentrated in highly innovative industrial
centers in core areas. Generally with good quality of life before their
development process degraded the environment to some extent.
b)
Skilled fabrication
in branch plants, generally in newly industrializing areas in the home country.
Which in the case of the US generally meant in medium-sized towns in the
Western states.
c)
Semi-skilled,
large-scale assembly and testing work that from the very beginning was located
offshore in a substantial proportion.
Particularly
in South East Asia, with Singapore and Malaysia pioneering the movement of
attracting factories of American electronics corporations.
d) Customization
of devices and aftersales maintenance and technical support,
which was organized in regional centers throughout the
globe. Generally in the area of major
electronics markets, originally in America and Western Europe, although in the
1990s the Asian markets rose to
equal status.
High-technology-led
industrial milieux of innovation, which we called “technopoles,” come in a
variety of urban formats.
Most notably, it is
clear that in most countries, with the important exceptions of the United
States and, to some extent Germany.
The leading technopoles
are in fact contained in the leading metropolitan areas.
Tokyo, Paris-Sud,
London-M4 Corridor, Milan, Seoul-Inchon, Moscow-Zelenograd
And at a considerable
distance Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Taipei-Hsinchu, Singapore, Shanghai, Sao Paulo,
and Barcelona.
Some of the most
important innovation centers of information-technology manufacturing are indeed
new.
Particularly in the
World’s technological leader, the United States.
Silicon Valley,
Boston’s Route 128, the Southern California Technopole, North Carolina's
Research Triangle, Seattle and Austin, among others.
Were by and large
linked to the latest wave of information-technology-based industrialization.
Their development
resulted from the clustering of specific varieties of the usual factors of production.
Capital, labor, and
raw material.
Brought together by
some kind of institutional entrepreneur, and constituted by a particular form
of social organization.
Their raw material
was made up of new knowledge, related to strategically important fields of
application produced by major centers of innovation.
Such as Stanford
University, CalTech, or MIT schools of engineering research teams, and the
networks built around them.
Their labor, distinct
from the knowledge factor, required the concentration of a large number of
highly skilled scientists and engineers.
From a variety of
locally based schools.
Of Cities?
The development of electronic communication and the information systems allows for an increasing disassociation between spatial proximity.
And the performance
of everyday life’s functions.
Work, shopping,
entertainment, healthcare, education, public services, governance, and the
like.
A dramatic increase
of teleworking is the most usual assumption about the impact of information
technology on cities.
And the last hope for
metropolitan transportation planners before surrendering to the inevitability
of the mega-gridlock.
In the United States
the highest estimates evaluated in 1991 aoubt 5.5 million home-based
telecommuters.
But of this total
only 16% telecommuted 35 hours or more per week, 25% telecommuted less than one
day a week.
With two days a week
being the most common pattern.
Informational City
The information age is ushering in a new urban form, the informational city.
Because of the nature
of the new society.
Based upon knowledge.
Organized around
networks.
And partly made up of
flows.
The informational
city is not a form but a process.
A process
characterized by the structural domination of the space of flows.
The new global economy and the emerging informational society have indeed a new spatial form, which develops in a variety of social and geographical contexts.
Megacities.
Megacities are,
certainly, very large agglomerations of human beings.
All of them (13 in
the United Nations classification) with over 10 million people in 1992.
And four of them
projected to be well over 20 million in 2010.
But, size is not
their defining quality.
They are the nodes of
the global economy.
Concentrating the
directional, productive, and managerial upper functions all over the planet.
They control of the
media, The real politics of power.
And the symbolic
capacity to create and diffuse messages.
They have names, most
of them alien to the still dominant European/North American cultural matrix.
Tokyo, Sao Paulo, New
York, Ciudad de Mexico, Shanghai, Bombay, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Seoul,
Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta, and Osaka.
In addition, Moscow,
Jakarta, Cairo, New Delhi, London, Paris, Lagos, Dacca, Karachi, Tianjin, and
possibly others, are in fact members of the club.
Megacities cannot be
seen only in terms of their size, but as a function of their gravitational
power toward major regions of the world.
Thus, Hong Kong is
not just its six million people, and Guangzhou is not just its six and a half
million people.
What is emerging is a
megacity of 40 to 50 million people.
Connecting Hong King,
Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Macau, and small towns in the Pearl River Delta.
Megacities articulate
the global economy, link up the informational networks, and concentrate the
world’s power.
Megacities
concentrate the best and the worst.
From the innovators
and the powers that be to their structurally irrelevant people.
Ready to sell their
irrelevance or to make “the others” pay for it.
Yet what is most
significant about megacities is that they are connected externally to global
networks and to segments to their own countries.
While internally
disconnecting local populations that are either functionally unnecessary or
socially disruptive.
At the heart of such
staggering metropolitan development are three interlinked phenomena:
1.
The economic
transformation of China, and its link-up to the global economy with Hong Kong
being one of the nodal points in such connection. Thus, in 1981-91, Guandong province’s GDP grew at 12.8% per year
in real terms. Hong Kong-based
investors accounted at the end of 1993 for US$40 billion invested in China,
representing two-thirds of total foreign investment.
At
the same time, China was also the largest foreign investor in Hong Kong, with
about US$25 billion a year (compared with Japan’s US$12.7 billion). The management of these capital flows was
dependent upon the business transactions operated in, and inbetween, the
various units of this metropolitan system.
Thus,
Guanghzou was the actual connecting point between Hong Kong business and the
governments and enterprises not only of Guandong province but of inland China.
2.
The restructuring of
Hong Kong’s economic basis in the 1990s led to a dramatic shrinkage of Hong
Kong’s traditional manufacturing basis, to be replaced by employment in
advanced services. Thus, manufacturing
workers in Hong Kong decreased from 837,000 in 1988 to 484,000 in 1993, while
employees in trading and business sectors increased, in the same period, from
947,000 to 1.3 million. Hong King
developed its functions as a global business.
3.
However, Hong Kong’s
manufacturing exports capacity did not fade away.
It
simply modified its industrial organization and its spatial location. In about ten years, between the mid-1980s
and the mid-1990s, Hong Kong’s industrialists induced one of the largest-scale
processes of industrialization in human history in the small towns of the Pearl
River Delta.
By
the end of 1992, Hong Kong investors, often using family and village
connections, had established in the Pearl River Delta 10,000 joint ventures and
20,000 processing factories, in which were working about 6 million workers,
depending upon various estimates. Much of this population, housed in company
dormitories in semi-rural locations, came from surrounding provinces beyond the
borders of Guandong.
This
gigantic industrial system was being managed on a daily basis from a
multilayered managerial structure, based in Hong Kong, regularly traveling to
Guangzhou, with production runs being supervised by local managers throughout
the rural area.
Materials,
technology, and mangers were being sent from Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and
manufactured goods were generally exported from Hong Kong (actually surpassing
the value of Hong Kong-made exports), although the building of new container
ports in Yiantian and Gaolan aimed at diversifying export sites.
This accelerated
process of export-oriented industrialization and business linkages between
China and the global economy led to an unprecedented urban explosion.
Shenzhen Special
Economic Zone, on the Hong Kong border, grew from zero to 1.5 million
inhabitants between 1982 and 1995.
Castells, Manuel. The Information Age; Economy, Society and
Culture, Vol. 1:
The
Rise of the Network Society.
Blackwell Publishers: New York, 1996:
376-408.