Frontiers/Shanghai

MPPA-DL 452Session 9

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Course Themes

• Dynamics: Globalization, Urbanization• Circuits: Transnationals, Diasporas• Centers: Agglomeration, Sprawl• Margins: New Inequalities• Ecologies: Sustainability• Architectures: A Sense of Place• Crises: Globalization in Reverse• Frontiers: Looking Ahead

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1. Shanghai: global city formation revisited

2. Another kind of New Urbanism

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…if (the poor) copy the pattern of wealth creation that made Europe and America rich, they will eat up as many resources as the Americans do, with grim consequences for the planet.

“Falling fertility,” The Economist, 10/29/09

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The basic proposition, that growth can continue indefinitely and that the means can remain an end without a catastrophe occurring, still seems paradoxical.

Henri Lefebvre, “The Urban Revolution” (1968)

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Political city Mercantile city Industrial city “critical zone”

“Implosion/explosion” - from Henri Lefebvre, “The Urban Revolution” (1968)

transition from agrarian to urban

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Globalization has accentuated the importance of spatial proximity and agglomerations in enhancing economic productivity and performance advantages.

Olds and Yeung, “Pathways to Global City Formation: Singapore” (2004) in The Global Cities Reader

(Alpha) global city states• Political capacity and legitimacy to

mobilize strategic resources to achieve national objectives

• Not constrained by tensions inherent in national-vs.-urban politics (or regional development politics)

• Colonial origins helped to shape urban destinies that are intertwined with the evolving global economy

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Source: Olds and Yeung, “Pathways to Global City Formation: Singapore” (2004) in The Global Cities Reader, p. 394

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London, New York, Tokyo

Beta, Gamma cities

Singapore, HK

HYPER

EMERGING

CITYSTATES

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The past two decades have seen lower-income metro areas in the global East and South “close the gap” with higher-income metros in Europe and the United States, and the worldwide economic upheaval has only accelerated the shift in growth toward metros in those rising regions of the world.Global Metro Monitor: The Path to Economic Recovery, Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, Dec 2010, p.5

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Source: Global Metro Monitor: The Path to Economic Recovery, Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, Dec 2010

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Lower-income metro areas in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, and portions of the Middle East led growth in the prerecession period, largely evaded the worst effects of the recession, and are now setting the pace in recovery.Global Metro Monitor: The Path to Economic Recovery, Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, Dec 2010, p.49

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The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city.Parag Khanna

We're going back to the city-state.John Perry Barlow

1. Shanghai: global city formation revisited

2. Another kind of New Urbanism

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Scale does not add up, space is messy, complex, juxtaposed, or perhaps there are many kinds of space.

Richard G. Smith, “World City Topologies” (2003) in The Global Cities Reader, p. 401

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By not stopping the flows (everything is made of flows) a new urbanism comes into view that bypasses vertical thinking by refusing to ossify or freeze the flow of the world into unities (…)

The dominant theoretical ideas in the field of global/world cities research have remained unchanged for decades. Those following world-systems analysis (writers such as Friedmann and Taylor) or political-economy (writers such as Castells and Sassen) are keen to talk about, or simply measure (if in fact they are doing that at all), global/world city networks without questioning the fundamental contradiction that the theories they follow were never designed to take the idea of networks seriously.

Richard G. Smith, “World City Topologies” (2003) in The Global Cities Reader, pp. 404-5

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Time is not simply simultaneous and multiple; it is with globalization increasingly non-linear and complex. With globalization any event can have unexpected, disproportionate, and emergent effects that are often distant in time and space from when and where they occurred. (…)

What would cities be like if we were to think of them as no more than the undefined middle of a continuum? For example, how might we think of London or New York if we think of them as a continuum? If we were to change our mind set to accept this idea would we be more likely to agree with journalists that New York and London are losing their specificity by becoming one bi-continental megalopolis (which perhaps could be called NY-LON)?

Richard G. Smith, “World City Topologies” (2003) in The Global Cities Reader, p. 403

As different as New York and London are, a growing number of people are living, working and playing in the two cities as if they were one…

The cities are drawn together by a shared language and culture that long ago linked Broadway and the West End and today explain the NY-LON nexus of film, television, pop music, publishing and the New Economy.

But mostly the two cities are drawn together by money—more of which churns through Wall Street and the City each day than through all the rest of the world's financial centers combined. "In terms of our business," says Richard Corrigan of Merrill Lynch in London, "the cities are beginning to meld into one massive whole."

McGuire and Chan, “The NY-Lon Life,” Newsweek International, 11/13/2000

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It is my opinion that urban studies needs to decolonize its imagination about city-ness, and about the possibilities for and limits to what cities can become, if it is to sustain its relevance to the key urban challenges of the 21st century (…)

Approaches which explore links between the diversity of economic activities in any (ordinary) city, and which emphasize the general creative potential of cities, are crucial, rather than those which encourage policy-makers to support one (global) sector to the detriment of others.

Jennifer Robinson, “A View from Off the Map” (2002) in The Global Cities Reader, p. 221