REFLECTION PAPER NEW YORK CONFERENCE...

REFLECTION PAPER NEW YORK CONFERENCE FEBRUARY 2005 KNOWLEDGE AREA: LABOUR MARKET AND WORKPLACES THE RESURGENCE OF URBAN CENTRALITY: A LOOK AT CONTEMPORARY NEW YORK DIETER LÄPPLE AND MIGUEL KANAI CITIES PROGRAMME LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

THE RESURGENCE OF ECONOMIC CENTRALITY: A LOOK AT CONTEMPORARY NEW YORK

Contents

Introduction 3

An Urban Age at the Global Scale 3

New York, a Paradigmatic Comeback City in the United States 4

The City as a Production Site 6

Urban Labour Markets as the City’s Magnets 9

Advanced Consumption, Differentiated Life Styles 10

Increased Urban Inequalities in the Resurgent City 11

The role of Architecture and City Design: 13

Conclusions and Policy Implications 15

Bibliography 17

Reflection Papers The Urban Age reflection papers summarize the city specific investigation within each core knowledge area by merging the preliminary research with the debates at each regional conference. They are written for a general audience from a variety of backgrounds and need to inform both urban scholars and practitioners. It is part of the project’s mission to provide a high level of interdisciplinary accessibility and practical relevance to all thematic areas while also complying with the rigour of each professional or academic discipline. Each locality is highlighted not to evaluate existing urban practice but to rather learn from both its successes and failures; to put forward a consensus on city development and to identify areas of disagreement. Reflection papers guarantee the continuity of outputs that will ultimately lead to a more general publication as the project’s final product.

Abstract This paper looks at the enduring economic centrality of cities in advanced capitalist countries under current conditions of globalisation, the shift to a knowledge-based economy and the worldwide transition towards urban settlements. The paper introduces the overall trends that indicate the advent of an urban age at the global level and also a renaissance for (at least a number of) cities in the advanced capitalist core of North America and Europe; focussing on the significance of contemporary New York in visualising these trends. We develop our initial statement into the following five propositions: (1) the city remains a key site of production and innovation, particularly in fields of knowledge and cultural production; (2) developed urban labour markets act as magnets that continuously draw investment; (3) the attractiveness of the city is related to its privileged position as a site of consumption and its adaptability; (4) cities have become re-embedding contexts; (5) the resurgence of urban economies has not stemmed the growth of inequalities in the city. Finally, we look at the potentials of urban design and architecture to intervene on these issues. We conclude with a summary and number of policy recommendations.

Authors Dieter Laepple is Professor of Urban and Regional Economics and Head of the Research Unit on 'Urban and Regional Economics and Sociology' at the University of Technology Hamburg-Harburg. He is currently a Research Fellow of the 'Ladenburg Kolleg "Zwischenstadt' of the Daimler-Benz Foundation, Ladenburg and is a member of the German Academy of Urban and Spatial Planning. Miguel Kanai is an Argentine-Japanese urbanist interested in the relationship between economic restructuring and the social and spatial transformations of cities. He has studied, lived and worked and consulted in cities in four different continents on issues of urban development.

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THE RESURGENCE OF ECONOMIC CENTRALITY: A LOOK AT CONTEMPORARY NEW YORK

Introduction This paper looks at the enduring economic centrality of cities in advanced capitalist countries under current conditions of globalisation, the shift to a knowledge-based economy and the worldwide transition towards urban settlements. It argues that even under the contemporary high levels of technologically-enabled economic mobility and decentralisation, cities still remain important sites for production and innovation, particularly in knowledge-intensive sectors and creative industries. In our view, traditional cities – characterised by their compactness, density, diversity and attractiveness of their built environment – are still in a condition to continue growing in both economic and demographic terms: they remain competitive as employment hubs, as sites for advanced consumption and differentiated life-styles, and as integrators of increasingly complex and interpenetrated activities of working and living. However, even economically successful cities retain important concentrations of a wide range of precarious employment situations. The enduring economic centrality or resurgence of high-density cities has not stemmed the increase in urban inequalities – this paper’s argument is that this growth in inequality is the most problematic inherent condition of the contemporary urban age. We see city form and urban economic development inextricably linked and therefore both our analysis of the contemporary sources of urban competitiveness and our proposals for possible remediation to their negative social consequences take into account the built environment of cities. A distinctive characteristic of this paper is that our definition of the urban built environment includes the distribution of densities and land uses across an urbanised area but also the fine grain quality of the built forms found in strategic sites of that area – whether it is “a built environment which has certain distinctive and attractive, interaction-facilitating characteristics” (Storper, 2004, p. 23). We use the case of contemporary New York to explore these assertions on the continuing economic viability of the traditional high-density city, on its increasing

inequalities and on the importance of city design in promoting urban economic development and facilitating social integration. New York has been recognised as a successful case of continuous urban adaptation in the globalised and knowledge-based economy but it is also an increasingly poignant symbol of global inequalities and, at the same time, a stubborn challenger to common wisdoms in the fields of architecture and city design.

An Urban Age at the Global Scale, Time Again for the Cities in the Capitalist Core Decades of technological progress and structural changes in the world economy have left an indelible mark on cities in advanced industrialised nations that once were seen as the pre-eminent centres of industrial production. Clear examples of this restructuring can be found in the older large cities in the United States whose fate seemed to be sealed in the second half of the twentieth century. In these cities de-industrialisation was compounded with large population losses and out-migration to suburbs, exurbs and inter-regionally to the country’s Sun Belt. In each decade between 1950 and 1980, almost every north-eastern or Midwestern city with more than 500,000 residents decreased in population size. The share of Americans living in big cities fell from a high of 17.54% in 1950 to 12.09% in 1990 (Glaeser and Shapiro, 2003; p. 139). Academic studies at the time were concerned with processes of counterurbanisation (Berry, 1977) and a reversal of urbanisation (Richardson, 1981). Further doomsayer arguments of an “urban crisis” and “the death of the city” melded a pervasive discourse interpreting the decline of traditional cities throughout this period (Beauregard, 2003). More recent developments in North America, Europe and other regions of the world challenge earlier conclusions that the city had become an unviable form of human settlement. Indeed, when the level of the analysis is set at the global scale, it is clear that urbanisation is still an important development force and for the first time in human history more than half of the world’s population is estimated to live

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URBAN AGE / NEW YORK / FEBRUARY 2005 / LAPPLE AND KANAI - THE RESURGENCE OF ECONOMIC CENTRALITY: A LOOK AT CONTEMPORARY NEW YORK

in cities at the dawn of the twenty first century (UNCHS, 2001, Clark, 1996). This overall growth of cities at the global level cannot be connected directly with the resurgence of certain older cities in advanced capitalist nations assuming that both processes are led by the same dynamics. A number of clarifications need to be made before linking these simultaneous phenomena. Firstly, the impetus behind contemporary global urbanism is attributed mainly to the rural to urban transitions in the less developed parts of the world (Montgomery et al., 2003) and to the high urbanisation rates in the Asia Pacific that are correlated to the rapid economic ascendancy of this region (Lo and Yeung, 1996). Sceptics argue that “city” is not the most accurate term to describe the massive urbanisations currently taking shape in these regions. For these critics, a number of tacit implications are attached to the notion of city-ness. These include a dense and compact built form, an amalgamation of certain architectural typologies and places (e.g. the central square and civic monuments), and a number of economic benefits and socialisation patterns associated to these physical elements. In the view of critics, these conditions are not easily found in the rapidly expanding metropolitan regions of today. John Friedmann (2002; p. 7) has argued that at the same time that the world is becoming inevitably urban, “the city has effectively vanished and all that remains is palimpsests and memories, a metaphor of what it was”. Furthermore, some sceptics call for a deep re-thinking of Western notions of city-building by the light of urban development in other, more dynamic, regions of the world. While decrying the “waning power” of New York as an urban paradigm, Rem Koolhaas (2004; p. 236 -9) praises Lagos, Nigeria as a city that works and, despite “its near-complete absence of those infrastructures, systems, organizations, and amenities that define the word ‘city’ in terms of western planning methodology”, allows for the survival of up to fifteen million people. For Koolhaas, “[t]his is not say that Lagos is catching up with us [but r]ather, we may be catching up with Lagos” (ibid.; p. 262). Secondly, the empirical realities of urban patterns at the global scale show a broad spectrum of partly contradictory trends. Contemporary urbanisation is characterised both by growth and shrinkage, by dynamic innovation and innovation blockages and by integration and exclusion (Läpple, 2001). Some forms of urban production such as the vertically integrated large-scale factory and its associated company town have decayed and virtually disappeared (Crawford, 1994). Others have emerged or re-emerged, as it is the case with the clusters of craft-based producers,

cultural industries and knowledge-intensive sectors that can be found in traditional high-density urban centres (Scott, 2000; Zook, 2000; Moriset, 2003). Diverging urban patterns of growth and decay within the advanced capitalist core posit a context that is problematic in terms of theory-building: at the same time that it requires caution for those that focus on resurgent cities, it also questions the generalised notion of the “shrinking city” in post-industrial (or de-industrialised) societies. Large amounts of variation can be found even among cities that are growing with relative levels of success – some of them have developed around a well defined traditional core (e.g. New York, Paris and to a lesser extent London) and others have resulted from the integration of polycentric or multi-clustered agglomerations (Scott, Agnew, Soja and Storper, 2001; p.18) such as the case of Southern California and the Randstad in the Netherlands where oftentimes, at least in the perception of their own residents, the metropolitan whole is less than the sum of its parts (Sudjic, 1991; Fulton, 2001). Nevertheless, if this simultaneity of historically and regionally specific processes of de-urbanisation and re-urbanisation is seen from the perspective of a general expansion of city-based economies, societies and cultures into every region on the planet (Soja, 2000; p. 152) the current period of urbanisation can be characterised more aptly as a dynamic, albeit problematic, urban age at the global level rather than a time to unquestionably decree that the traditional high-density city is dead. Without going too deep into debates on the usefulness of positing a hypothesis of a worldwide “urban convergence” (Cohen, 1996) or on the theoretical and practical needs to move beyond dichotomous models of the global city in the North and the mega-city in the South (Flusty, 2003; Roy and AlSayyad, 2004), we limit ourselves to point out that if not the main driving force behind this period of global urbanism, the resurgence of (at least some) traditional cities in the advanced capitalist core can also be seen as a constitutive part of the urban age that the world has entered. This fact is increasingly recognized even in the United States, a country with a profoundly suburban (or anti-urban) ethos (Katz and Altman, 2005).

New York, a Paradigmatic Comeback City in the United States and a Telescopic Insight into the Global Urban Condition Recent evidence supports the assertion of an urban renaissance for American cities. If the decades ensuing World War II were characterised by trends of industrial dispersal and population deconcentration, the strong de-urbanisation tendencies of that period appear to have receded in the 1990s. Patrick Simmons

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and Robert Lang (2003; p. 51) call it an “urban turnaround”. They point out that during the last decade of the twentieth century growth began to take place again in large metropolitan areas of the Northeast and the Midwest and, for the first time since World War II, the combined population of these “declining cities” grew. Simmons and Land also mention that the share of total population living in big cities increased during this decade. Chicago, for example, went from losing 360,000 residents in the 1970s to gaining over 100,000 residents in the 1990s. But no other case is as impressive as New York: having lost 800,000 residents in its crisis decade of the 1970s, New York City gained almost 700,000 during the 1990s to reach a population of over 8 million for the first time in its history (ibid; p. 56). Recent population estimates indicate that even after the post-millennium recession and 9/11, the city has continued to grow and it currently reaches over 8.1 million residents. We look at this “urban turnaround” with caution when relating it to overall metropolitan growth patterns in the United States. The resurgence of central cities cannot be confounded with an end to suburban decentralisation as in recent years fast-growing peripheral municipalities have continued to outgrow traditional big cities (Lang, 2004). Evidence is not conclusive even for the case of metropolitan New York, the least sprawling of the largest American metropolitan areas (Galster et al., 2000) and where strong growth at the core has led some analysts to argue that the previous 50-year long pattern of suburbanisation may be coming to a structural shift that preludes an end to sprawl (Hughes and Seneca, 2004). Growth at the metropolitan margins has continued apace and New York City has barely surpassed the population growth rate of its metropolitan region. From 1990 to 2000, the city’s population grew by 8.1%, only 1 percentage point higher than the consolidated metropolitan statistical area as a whole. In fact, almost 60% of the region’s total gain in population – close to 1 million residents – was registered outside the city limits during this decade. Employment growth follows a similar trend: New York City only captured less than half of the employment increase in the region (over half a million jobs) between 1990 and 2000 (Sources: New York State Department of Labor and the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics). While inter-census data on land consumption is less readily comparable due to definitional changes between periods, the evidence seems to point to a decreasing density in the New York urbanised area as a whole since the area’s surface appears to be growing faster than its population. Continuing metropolitan decentralization trends notwithstanding, New York City has evidenced a

demographic rebound; a strong yet unstable economic dynamism; and tidal changes in some of its worst urban problems such as the revamping of its mass transit system, large-scale housing and commercial rehabilitation of many inner-city neighbourhoods, and a stark decrease in crime. The sum of these qualitative improvements in the city’s functioning and in the quality of life of its residents have attracted large amounts of international attention on New York as a successful model for resurgent cities. This interest is muddled at times with images constructed by the intense city-marketing campaigns that have been “selling” New York for at least three decades (Greenberg, 2003) and with the late twentieth century “New York triumphalism” embodied in the Guiliani administration (Sites, 2003). On their explanation of this rebounding of New York and other American “comeback cities”, some rely on a number of political changes and policy innovations. They mention the strong grassroots and neighbourhood-based revitalisation movement, the streamlining of bureaucratic procedures that used to complicate and delayed public policies and the regulatory incentives that led private investment to return to the inner-city and seize its competitive advantages (Grogan and Proscio, 2000). Others focus on structural forces to explain the success of the city in recent times. The first argument is that the movement towards a global economy and the increasingly complex economic system of transnational transactions have generated a growing demand for advanced finance and producer services in which cities such as New York maintain competitive advantages (Sassen, 1991, 2001a). Secondly, the resumed international migration to the United States and other advanced industrialised nations is thought to have infused a handful of “gateway cities” such as New York with the demographic dynamism needed to replenish the local workforce and reinvigorate local entrepreneurialism (see e.g. Foner, 2000). Finally, to some analysts the shift to a knowledge-based economy and the increasing demand for workers with specialised skills and high levels of human capital means that New York and other cities with large concentrations of this segment of the workforce and that are able to continue attracting elite workers are more likely to succeed (Glaeser and Shapiro, 2003). The convergence of these factors has arguably made contemporary New York the most visible comeback or resurgent city in the United States. New York is also an exemplary case to illustrate this paper’s assertions that: (a) the high-density city remains a viable site of production and a central place for economic innovation (b) that bases much of its attractiveness on its thick urban labour markets (c) while also

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continually attracting new residents by providing them with a diverse set of amenities and opportunities to lead differentiated life-styles and the ability to reintegrate the increasingly complex worlds of work and private life. But the relevance of New York in the contemporary urban age stretches to a wider realm. In its dual role as a motor of globalisation and a beneficiary of the process, New York is often seen as one of the most symptomatic sites of how planetary-wide processes are telescoped into local contexts (Warf, 2000; p. 488). Therefore, New York is a prime analytic window from which to reflect on contemporary urban conditions associated to globalisation processes and the wider economic restructuring of cities. In our view, the most problematic of these conditions is the growth of inequalities in cities. As discussed later in the paper, a substantial body of research shows that even during the period of relatively strong economic growth, wages and incomes continued evidencing strong polarisation trends in both New York City and its metropolitan area (see e.g. Beveridge and Weber, 2003; Renwick, 2000; Parrot, Meaker and Nowakowski, 1999).

The City as a Production Site in the Globalised and Knowledge-based Economy The global geography of economic development today is marked by concurrent trends of dispersal and (re-) agglomeration. On the one hand, there is a relentless dispersal of economic activities – both manufacturing and services – to peripheral low-cost locations that may be found in growing exurbia as in the most remote international export processing zones. But on the other hand, the seeming death of distance (Cairncross, 1997) brought about by dramatically reduced transportation costs and the IT revolution has not fully eliminated the need for co-location and face-to-face contacts (Hall, 2003). Despite the dictum that high-density cities would become obsolete, many urban agglomerations today represent privileged locations for firms in sectors at the very forefront of globalisation and digitisation (Sassen 1991, 2001a; Wheeler, Aoyama and Warf, 2000). Clusters of new media, Internet services, international finance, design and other fields of knowledge production are conspicuously evident in the dense urban cores of city-regions across the world. Economic and social activities such as advanced finance, cultural production, new technologies, politics, arts and academia are organised around a number of non-routine tasks and a high intensity of transactions carried out by actors endowed with specialised skills and tacit knowledge (Storper and Venables, 2004). These activities depend on the embedding context of the city and hence the firms and workers involved in them remain clustered in congested and high-cost urban settings, even when their weightless outputs

(Quah, 1996) can be distributed worldwide with virtually no time lag and at a negligible transaction cost. In many cases the scale of useful economic agglomeration is set at a level even more proximate than the metropolitan region. The sectoral composition and location patterns of New York City’s urban economy illustrate this fact. Information and financial services jobs make it the quintessential knowledge economy. As New York grew more economically and fiscally dependent on this sector in the late twentieth century (Office of the State Deputy Comptroller, 1998), these firms have also contributed to the continuous vibrancy of the city’s strong core in Manhattan. Financial industries have remained in their original locations regardless of the current high costs (high land values, high levels of local taxation, congestion, etc.) and, after 9/11, arguably high risks of doing business in these locations. Moreover, financial and producer services do not exhaust the economic profile of New York’s urban core. A number of cultural and creative industries share this tightly occupied urban space with the leading sectors. Creative firms are densely incrusted between Midtown Manhattan’s corporate headquarters and banking district and the downtown node of financial and security firms. These creative clusters include designers, producers and service-providers engaged in projects related to apparel design, advertising, information and cultural products (Christopherson, 2005). According to several researchers and local practitioners, New York City is not the best case to tell the story of high-density cities as enduring sites of production, innovation and successful economic growth. Since the 1970s employment levels have shown a relatively flat long-term evolution with periodical fluctuations related to the city’s economic cycles of high growth and recession. Unemployment rates in the city are also usually higher and labour force participation rates lower than in its metropolitan region and in the United States as a whole. Furthermore, these critics have formulated a number of arguments of why New York’s economic future faces deep structural challenges. Firstly, many of the competitive advantages that New York still has in the sector of finance and advanced producer services at the national and global scales derive from the city’s historical role as the leading financial information centre of the United States. Much to the like of London, jobs considered central to the New York’s economy today are the inheritors of its traditional role as a pre-eminent merchant city (King, 1989). Several studies have argued that New York’s advantage in the fields of advanced finance and producer services over

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other cities is thinning out (see e.g. Logan, 2000, Gwiasda and Markusen, 1994). Secondly, the sectoral composition of New York’s economy is also significantly less diverse than other large American cities. By comparison with Los Angeles (Gladstone and Fainstein, 2003) or Chicago for example, New Yorkers are employed in a smaller number of industries, which makes the city less resilient to global fluctuations in demand and to sectoral restructurings in these industries, as the lack of diversity could also, according to Jane Jacobs’ well known ideas (1965), affect the city’s capacity to innovate. Thirdly, the city has been steadily losing its manufacturing base for decades and it has even lost employment in its signature manufacturing industries: apparel, printing and publishing (Christopherson, 2005). Finally, Kotkin and Bowles (2003; p.5) argue that the current approach to economic development in New York is too narrow and it only focuses in a few sectors and modalities: the financial and producer services, large-scale commercial development projects and a near-exclusive focus on Manhattan’s central business districts. Yet others see New York as a successful case of urban economic growth through permanent restructuring and innovation. A recent survey on the city published by The Economist magazine (Gottlieb, 2005; p. 6) argues that: “New York has captured an increasing share of high-paying jobs by continually restructuring its economy to become ever more productive.” This assertion is based on the fact that the city (and particularly Manhattan where two thirds of New York’s jobs are concentrated) has shown an evolution in its number of jobs and the level of real wages and salaries that is contrastive to that of the country. Between 1978 and 2000, the United States as a whole showed a marked and consistent growth in employment, but on average wages remained relatively flat. In contrast, Manhattan’s wages increased substantially with overall employment growth remaining essentially level (Dolfman and Wasser, 2004; p.4). In 2002, the average wage in Manhattan was $72,572 (ibid.), a figure far exceeding the national average. Beyond these controversies, one clear lesson to be drawn from the case of New York City is that increasing levels of productivity, innovation and sectoral domination of certain world markets can indeed occur in an environment of unusually high urban densities. Yet, the increasing number of planners and economic development practitioners that favour master planned high-rise business districts and urban mega-projects ought to bear in mind that the very conditions that make New York a global leader may be preventing the replicability of its model

in other locales (Beauregard and Pierre, 2000). Moreover, as developments such as Pudong New District in Shanghai and the Lomas de Santa Fé in Mexico City continue sprouting around the world and most, if not all, aspiring global cities are seemingly attempting to build mini Manhattans (Newman and Thornley, 2005; p. 255), these cities also need to recognise that New York’s model of a single strong core with multiple peripheries in a largely unplanned region also carries with it several negative implications in terms of its economic, social and urban dynamics (ibid., p. 90; Christopherson, 2005).

The Importance and Issues of the Creative Industries A number of clusters of creative industries are located in New York’s densest urban core. Several empirical studies report the successes and failures of this sector in detail and analyse the specific factors behind the development path of each industry (see e.g. Rantisi, 2002, 2004; Indergaard, 2004, Leslie, 1997). Nevertheless, the structure of costs and benefits associated to their location is an important commonality of these industries. They benefit from their spatial closeness to New York’s economic and financial core in terms of access to information, capital, social networks and a strong demand for their products and services. They are also burdened by the high costs associated to the location (esp. those related to real estate) and face displacement pressures when an expansion occurs at core sectors of the economy that increases demand for land and office space and drives real estate and leasing prices up. Extant research also shows that cultural producers in other cities such as London and Manchester for example co-locate in the “cultural districts” of these cities (Newman and Smith, 2000; p. 10). From Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, cities all over the world now recognise that it is in their interest to attract, develop and retain the rapidly growing cultural-products industries: they are environmentally friendly; they frequently employ high-skill and high-wage creative workers; and they generate positive externalities by contributing to the quality of life in the places where they congregate and by enhancing the image and prestige of the local area (Scott, 2004; p. 477). In many cases, this recognition is yet to translate into comprehensive policies that guarantee the permanence of cultural industries in highly competitive urban environments and particularly into policies that would secure conditions for the less profitable segments of the sector. These segments perform important functions in the overall urban cultural production complex and are required to remain in close geographical proximity to the productive core of their industries. Major artistic

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productions draw from the innovations that proved themselves successful amidst a much larger number of trial-and-error sequences that only smaller economic actors can risk undertaking. A need of proximity hence arises between independent artists that conceive an oeuvre and the large firms that commercialise these acts of creativity and diffuse them at a massive scale. These dynamics evidence themselves in, for example, the interrelationships between the recording complexes and music scenes of New York and Los Angeles (Scott, 1999). In the case of New York City, we have mentioned the intense displacement pressures that threaten creative industries due to their location in high-cost environments. Ironically, it is sometimes the very consumption or distribution of culture (opening of galleries, conversion of lofts to high-end housing units, etc.) that displaces its producers. Arts-initiated gentrification has occurred and then turned against the artists themselves in core areas of Manhattan, the same process is increasingly happening in selective areas of the outer boroughs (Zukin, 1982, 2005). Furthermore, it is not only individual artists that face intense displacement pressures. For example the continuing battle over the Fashion District in central Manhattan shows how land speculation threatens the critical nexus between the creative work of designers and the manufacturers who supply them just-in-time in order to meet accelerated fashion cycles and customized orders (Christopherson, 2005).

A Word on Urban Manufacturing, the Silent Partner in the City’s Economy Many arguments have been made on the importance of retaining manufacturing at the national level (e.g. Cohen and Zysman, 1988). But there are also several reasons why manufacturing still matters for cities, even after decades of a de-industrialisation process that has left them almost bereft of a manufacturing base and in cities such as New York, less than 10% of the city’s workforce in employed in the manufacturing sector (Moss, O’Neill and Kedeshian, 1996; Meaker, 1998; Shiffman et al., 2001). These reasons can be summarised into two dimensions: economically, manufacturing supports vital sectors of the urban economy; and socially, it can provide low-barrier entry job opportunities with career-ladders for the less skilled. However, actual and potential contributions of manufacturing to the urban economy are unrecognised by policy makers. In the particular case of New York City, land use and zoning policies have not kept apace with the needs and threats affecting the sector. In the context of rising real estate values and the demographic pressures on the city’s housing stock, manufacturing firms of the city face increasing difficulties in securing locations and to afford their

lease since most of them do not own their space. Additionally, the expansion of other industrial uses such as warehousing and distribution mean more competition for space in areas of the city zoned for manufacturing, as does the emergence of new uses such as big-box retailers (Shiffman et al., 2001). Urban manufacturing firms produce key outputs for leading economic sectors of the city. This sector of small-scale “niche” firms is integrally related to the economic core of New York: the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector, creative/cultural industries and health care. Sassen (2005) posits an inversion in the traditional relationship between services and manufacturing in the city. Whereas services used to be ancillary to the manufacturing core of the urban economy, it is now manufacturing firms that “service” the leading service firms in developed and complex cities. They provide them with a number different of material inputs than range from specialised office equipment to customised catered foods on the kind of high-speed cycles and short-notice bases that require physical proximity, as we explained in our previous section referring to the case of New York’s fashion industry. Manufacturing can also play an important role as a gateway to social and cultural integration in cities, especially cities such as New York with high levels of unskilled immigration. It has been argued that ethnic manufacturing firms in general provide employment opportunities to newly arrived immigrants that are rare elsewhere (see e.g. Lin, 1998), even when these can be listed among the most vulnerable employment conditions and often take place in precarious work environments with the sweatshop becoming one of the prevalent typologies for the workplace in this sector (Hum, 2003). Furthermore, ethnic foods manufacturing firms, for example, cater to their communities and other immigrant groups in the city, satisfying the needs of these niche markets which otherwise would be underserved (NYIRN, 1999). A number of further benefits are associated to manufacturing: it is an important factor in job creation – its employment multiplier of 1.77 is greater than the employment multiplier of other sectors; it contributes to the diversity of the economy and its resilience in times that its leading sectors turn downmarket; and it leverages more jobs and offers its workers more security than other low-wage sectors such as retail and services through higher wages, higher rates of unionisation, and greater benefits (Shiffman et al., 2001).

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Urban Labour Markets as the City’s Magnets in a Knowledge-based Economy The simultaneous trends of dispersal and (re-) agglomeration that characterise the global economy today are clearly reflected in urban labour markets. On the one hand, an increasing number of specialised workers no longer seem to permanently need the city’s infrastructure to carry on with their work. With the aid of their laptop computers and cell phones these workers can keep up with their tasks from a pool side or on a tropical beach far away from any urban centres, as popular images in advertising and the media show. There is also increasing evidence that telecommuting extends commuting sheds for those workers that only need to be physically present at the office a couple of days a week, and hence it entices exurban developments (Lang, 2003). But on the other hand, we can think of dense urban labour markets as strong magnets that attract both workers and firms and that have helped the city retain its centrality in today’s world. In the words of Pierre Veltz (2004; p. 5): “the size of labour markets is probably the main competitive advantage of cities”. In this sense, the city has the capacity to create jobs as it functions as a hub labour market providing a sufficiently concentrated, specialised and diverse labour pool that firms can tap into while also offering a vast variety of job opportunities for individuals to pursue more than one career from a single residential location – this latter advantage is magnified when one looks at the issue from the perspective of households with multiple earners and working couples’ desire to share a house or live in close proximity from each other (Jarvis, Pratt and Wu, 2001). One of the consequences of the eroding long-term commitments from firms to their workers and vice versa (Sennett, 1998) is that firms increasingly look at the wide availability of qualified labour force when considering their location choices and qualified professionals look for places with a high variety of employment possibilities and urban living conditions. For Veltz (2004; p.5), “cities are especially efficient in accelerating the search processes” in this Schumpeterian innovation context (already described for the case of New York) where some jobs are being destroyed and rapidly replaced by new jobs. The functioning of the large and diverse city as a hub or switchboard labour market activates cumulative dynamics between labour demand and labour supply where dense urban labour markets become a framework for common learning, untraded interdependencies (Storper, 1997) and the creation of specialised pools of knowledge and skills. This argument bears a particular relevance to sectors and industries linked to the emerging knowledge-based

economy where intellectual labour and human creativity are key production factors. For example, Susan Christopherson (2002) has shown that, in the absence of intermediate regulatory institutions such as workers’ unions or professional guilds, place-based networks of personal contacts are critical to a large segment of the workforce in the field of new media and in project-orientated industries in general. The logics and imperatives of contemporary high value-added flexible economic activity are reflected in the workforce of New York City. The city’s core workforce is project-orientated and comprised of people with diverse skills and experience who come together around a work project and then disperse only to meet up again to work on another project in media, information, the making of financial deals and closing of legal contracts (Christopherson, 2005). New York’s workforce is also moving in the direction of self-employment, and especially since the mid-1990s growth in the city’s self-employed sector has been faster than in the United States as a whole. The City of New York’s Department of City Planning (NYDCP, 2005) reports that around 650,000 city residents were self-employed in the year 2002 and that the figure had registered an increase of above 52% in the preceding ten-year period. Reports from a New York-based non-profit advocacy organisation estimate the number of independent workers at well above 1 million; they characterise this workforce as young, highly educated, highly mobile and relatively well paid, yet facing severe constraints in their access to affordable health care and other benefits tied to traditional employment (Horowitz and Buchanan, 2004). New York’s economic vitality and its continuing capacity to innovate increasingly depends on the skills, energy and inventiveness of its flexible workers and on the employers’ ability to use this “on demand” workforce effectively (Christopherson, 2005). At the same time, New York and other cities need to adapt their public policy mechanisms to be able to attract and insure the welfare of the new workforce required in a knowledge-based economy. For decades, urban and regional economic development planners have dedicated their efforts to attract industries and firms deemed strategic to their local economies. They have used instruments such as provision of land and infrastructure together with tax abatements and other financial incentives. Also for decades, “targeting” has been critiqued as an inefficient and inequitable use of public resources leading to zero-sum bidding wars among localities (Goodman, 1979; Eisinger, 1988). In recent years, these industry-based and brick-and-mortar schemes have started to give way to broader approaches based on occupational profiles that engage directly with the

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attraction and development of human resources. Ann Markusen (2004; p. 266) has recently suggested that practitioners should target occupations that appear to (1) be highly skilled, (2) show growth potential, (3) cluster spatially, (4) cross-fertilize with other sectors, (5) encourage entrepreneurship, and (6) match the potentials and needs of the local workforce. Another occupational-based approach is Richard Florida’s (2002) analysis of the relationship between thriving cities and the presence in them of what he calls the “creative class”: a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly. It is evident that many cities are now pursuing the creativity strategy and strive to imbue their core public spaces with design, put “the city on the map” through festivals and events, and market it through an overall city image of openness and originality. They are not only attempting to capture growing shares of the fluctuating tourism market but are also vying for residents and, in their hopes of upgrading their local workforces, high-skilled and creative professionals.

Advanced Consumption, Differentiated Life Styles, Urban Attractiveness and the City as a Re-Embedding Context The attractiveness of a city contributes to its economic development in multiple ways. We have already mentioned that New York’s workforce has been renewed by the large-scale international in-migration that has offset, at least to certain extent, the strong metropolitan decentralisation trends and regional demographic shifts affecting it as much as they have affected other comparable large American cities. Yet, the New York of the late twentieth century has succeeded in attracting all kinds of people from all over the world and this allure has undoubtedly been the source of a strong economic dynamism. Top firms and businesses are run by high-powered American executives and international expatriates alike. The value of the city’s real estate is maintained by continuous flows of national and international as well as institutional and individual investment. New York’s universities and other elite cultural, educational and research institutions thrive with cosmopolitan scholars and students – New York University e.g. remains the most popular destination for college-bound high school students across the United States and is also consistently among the top in terms of international student enrolment. Servicing tourists and out of town shoppers are also important components of the local employment base. This economic importance of the city’s attractiveness is recognised by its leadership, Mayor Bloomberg (quoted Newman and Thornley, 2005; p. 85) declares:

Companies are here because this is where the labour force of choice wants to live…Although traditional economic development incentives such as tax incentives, zoning bonuses and retention deals are necessary to induce businesses to stay in/return to lower Manhattan, they are not sufficient to assure our future economic vitality…New York City’s quality of life, in spite of the recent horrendous catastrophe, is still the city’s most powerful asset for economic development

In their critique of what they see as partial and productionist narratives of the continuing centrality of cities in an age of globalisation and a knowledge-based economy, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (2000; p.67) argue that whereas certain assumptions of agglomeration, density and local transfers of knowledge are not easily confirmed by empirical research, cities do possess the economic power of consumption and circulation, in their words: “[i]f cities are not engines of competitiveness, they are certainly generators of demand.” The two British geographers are not alone in this stance, Glaeser, Kolko and Saiz (2001) also emphasize the continuing centrality of cities as places of consumption that in certain cases takes pre-eminence over their role as production sites. They argue that cities with a high level of amenities tend to attract high-skilled workers and hence grow faster, that urban rents have increased more than urban wages (indicating a specific growing demand for city living), and that the rise of reverse commuting by city residents to suburban employment locations also points out to the same trend in consumer preferences favouring traditional urban settings. With a similar focus on the importance of attracting the “creative class”, Florida’s (2001) approach to the city as a site of advanced consumption, or in more general terms an attractive place for these elite workers to live, rather emphasises urban openness and diversity. As Glaeser, Kolko and Saiz (2001; p.29) argue that: “[t]raditional cities will only succeed when they provide amenities that are attractive to high human capital residents”, Florida (2002) calls for urban social milieus favouring ease of entry and enough tolerance so that individuals have the ability to carry in them a variety of life styles and personalised choices. At the same time he calls for built environments that develop around a true quality of place grounded in history and authenticity, leveraging local built forms as assets that attract people and spur economic revitalisation rather than building “the generic “mall” approach of chain stores, chain restaurants and chain bars” (p. 302). In summary, in Florida’s (p. 269) view: “[p]eople want

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diversity, low entry barriers and the ability to be themselves”. These arguments may have weaknesses in terms of their applicability to only an advantaged segment of the urban labour force (an issue we consider below in the section on urban inequalities) and in that they may be privileging the potential interests of a highly mobile group of outsiders over the existing needs of current city residents (Martinotti, 1999) but they nevertheless extend the discussion on urban economic development beyond the sphere of work. In our view, not only it is important to include elements of individual consumer preferences and differentiated lifestyles, we also need to look at the interrelation between production and consumption or the increasing interpenetration of working and living, and how the enduring economic importance of high-density cities depends on their ability to become re-embedding contexts allowing for a relatively seamless integration of these two activities that current economic dynamics are bringing closer and closer together. Recent analysis of firms, their boundaries and location space tend to emphasise the concept of "blurring”. It has been argued that firms (and transnational corporations in particular) have metamorphosed from bounded units of production with a clear location, staff and ownership to networked organisations with fuzzier and virtual boundaries that depend on highly mobile investment flows, adaptive workplaces and a flexible workforce – according to this view firms have mutated “into a temporary, constantly changing, more or less loose cooperation of teams, teleworkers, subcontractors and suppliers” (Altvater and Mahnkopf, 1996; p. 356). Other authors look at the erosion of standardised work relations (Kratzer and Sauer, 2003), which has implications in terms of employment lengths and also on the daily organisation of tasks and the duration of the working day. Regarding this issue, Gottschall and Voss (2003) argue that the boundaries between the workplaces and living spaces, working hours and leisure time, and the firm and its outside are all blurrier now. On the other hand, a rich empirical literature also shows that this blurring of boundaries at the level of work and private life depends on the possibility of re-embedding flexible forms of working and living in an urban context that can provide both firms and workers with a rich variety of contacts, information and opportunities. For example, the actual work of producing knowledge and other information-intensive contents is posited on project-orientated organisational structures that allow for working arrangements with high levels of flexibility in terms of

time and space. These arrangements also require a complementarity of work- and non work-related activities in the worker’s life. In his study of new media firms in New York, Andy Pratt (2000; p. 434) shows that the need for face to face interaction (and hence spatial proximity) was manifested in the workers’, entrepreneurs’ and investors’ practices of learning, innovating, contracting, employing, and also in the less formal activities of socialising, eating, relaxing, or just ‘feeling the pulse of the city.’ Studies of Soho in Central London and other European media and advertising clusters in high density urban environments found similar conclusions (Nachum and Keeble, 2003; Noller, 1999)

Increased Urban Inequalities in the Resurgent City If high-density cities have been able to retain or regain their economic centrality as sites of integrated production and consumption in an age of globalisation and a knowledge-based economy, much of their physical character and social composition has been transformed in synchrony with these processes. To us, the increased inequalities registered in cities over the past three decades are one of the most problematic developments of this restructuring of the city, therefore our discussion cannot be limited to the high-end sectors we have mentioned such as finance and advanced producer services, the knowledge economy and creative industries, or the remaining manufacturing in cities. Even by the most inclusive account, highly qualified professionals do not make up over 30% of a city’s workforce and that includes all those employed in finance, advanced producer services, cultural industries, and other high-wage occupations. The case of New York is highly indicative of the trend towards increased inequalities, as documented by a substantial body of academic, governmental and advocacy research. For example, a report from the Fiscal Policy Institute (Renwick, 2000) shows that in the late 1990s the average family income of the top fifth of families in New York (New York City plus three suburban satellite counties) was 20 times greater than the average family income of the bottom fifth and more than half (54.4%) of family income went to the richest fifth of families while the poorest fifth received only 2.7% and 13.4% went to the middle fifth (p.9). The report also points out that while the United States as whole has registered increased inequalities, these inequalities have increased much more in New York State than in the rest of the country, and more so in New York City than the rest of the state. Another report from the Fiscal Policy Institute (Parrot, Meaker and Nowakowski, 1999) indicates that the brunt of employment growth in New York City through the

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1990s was in the services sector, high wage export-oriented industries [security and commodity brokers (average wage in 1998: $194,590); computer and data processing ($73,477); management consulting and public relations ($85,817); motion picture production and distribution ($58,695)] and on the other end in consumption-related and personal service sectors [eating and drinking places ($17,965); home health care services ($19,782); individual and family services ($19,756)]. Yet this phenomenon is certainly not limited to New York, eleven of the twenty fastest growing job categories in the United States are in the service sectors, each of which pays less than two times minimum wage (Retsinas, 2005). Higher levels of inequality are perceivable in cities across Europe too, albeit in lower intensities that the United States and with ample differences between countries and specific cities. Research has documented increasing inequality in the largest and most globally integrated metropolitan areas of Europe such as London, Paris and to a lesser degree the Randstad in the Netherlands (Fainstein, 2001a; pp. 286 – 91). The case of Frankfurt am Main has been characterised as a top class European financial centre where “poverty, marginalisation of social groups, an indebted local state, socio-spatial segregation and the explosion of the traditional relationship of centre and periphery show that the formation of a world city had a price” (Keil and Ronneberger, 2000; p. 228). Beyond the case of metropolitan and globalised cities, it has also been argued that their social and economic robustness notwithstanding (such as a large presence of the public sector and other specific social formation stabilising urban economies), inequalities are changing and often strengthening in European cities in general (Le Galès, 2002; pp. 112 – 46). Moreover, as a recent case study of the Helsinki metropolitan region in Finland shows that the positive contexts of a strong welfare state regime and a growing economy do not fully deter inequalities from increasing and manifesting themselves in restructured social and spatial patterns of the city (Vaattovaara and Kortteinen, 2003). A substantial body of research has pondered the causal mechanisms behind the increased levels of inequality now recognised in cities across the board. The immense amount of findings, heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory sources of data and the highly contested nature of the debate impede us to properly address this issue here. We thus limit ourselves to point out that the recent data from New York City that we have presented here seem to confirm the polarisation thesis describing how services-led growth in employment leads to a bimodal occupational and earnings structure with a larger

segment of the workforce constituted by high-skilled and highly paid professionals but also a much larger segment of low-skilled and poorly paid workers. This thesis has been widely deployed in analyses of urban economies in the United States (e.g. Harrison and Bluestone, 1988) and incorporated into Saskia Sassen’s (1991, 2001a) “global city” model. This model posits that the growth in advanced producer services in cities induces the creation of a vast number of low-income jobs to serve this sector both directly through their production process (e.g. clerical workers) and indirectly through the consumption patterns of its elite workers that generate a strong demand for labour-intensive personal services (e.g. maids, dog-walkers, etc.) – and then by the consumption needs of this lowly paid workers themselves. Nevertheless, a number of scholars have argued that this bifurcated employment and earnings pattern cannot be found in the urban economies of Europe. A widely quoted study of the structural transformation of London’s labour market (Hamnett, 1994) points out that growth in high-skilled and high-wage employment in this city has not been correlated with growth in the lower echelons of the labour market. Yet this transformation – that should be characterised as a case of professionalisation instead of polarisation – also evidences increased levels of inequality. The explanation that the study provides for inequalities in household incomes focuses on the persistence of relatively high levels of unemployment. Whichever explanation one should follow, the common assertion of these studies is that, together with advanced economic sectors and elite professionals, New York, London and other economically successful cities across North America and Europe still contain a vast number of either low-wage workers, the long-term unemployed, or those employed in precarious and substandard conditions in, for example, the informal economy. All of these work-related social situations can be seen as emerging from the deterioration of insured full-time employment as a social institution. The rise of self-employment in New York City has also been attributed, at least in part, to this transition (Weisbrod, 2005). The temporary health care industry, one of the fastest growing industries in terms of employment in New York, is a case in point (Christopherson, 2005). This industry is largely composed of low-wage home care attendants who are often female immigrant workers. The industry is also paradigmatic of the difficulties that organised labour faces in gaining a stronghold in the new economy: it is comprised of an unprotected and politically weak workforce; its work is organised in irregular and individualised schedules; and in highly decentralised and changing workplaces that depend on the patients’

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place of residence. A traditional bastion of organised labour, New York still has higher unionisation rates and arguably stronger unions than the rest of the United States (Freeman, 2000). However, this strength does not seem to have translated into innovative practise such as those seen in less traditional “union cities”. Examples such as the labour-community coalitions of Los Angeles, the union-sponsored training and placement programmes of Las Vegas, or the increasing number of municipalities enacting living wage ordinances throughout the United States, show a number of achievements and potential directions for the new labour movement in cities (Waddoups, 2000; Merrifield, 2002).

The role of Architecture and City Design: As high-density cities have maintained their economic vibrancy, there is an increasing interest for the role that design and the fine grain quality of the built environment play in supporting the city’s attractiveness. For example Glaeser, Kolko and Saiz (2001) point out that whereas evidence is limited on the role of architectural beauty, more attractive cities have had a better performance over the past decades. The examples that they provide include cities such as San Francisco in the United States and Paris, London, Barcelona, Vienna and Edinburgh in Europe. Architectural legacies and physical beauty of the built environment is, however, only one item in the list of urban amenities that they consider. According to their analysis, the presence of a rich variety of services and consumer goods; good public services such as reliable schools and low crime rates; shorter commuting times; and even the desirability of the local weather also play important parts in determining the attractiveness of a city. More systematic research is undoubtedly needed to specify the role of city design in the urban economy. In the following paragraphs we venture into a number of directions that may inform such future research agenda. A basic first step is to look at the implications of design in terms of both symbolism and functionality, and then the interaction between the two. Nevertheless, as countless architectural debates on the relationship between form and function prove, this is not a straightforward task.

Architectural Symbolism and Urban Identity An important deployment of architectural symbolism noticed in cities around the world is the adoption of totemic architecture as a sign of a city’s economic vigour. When looking at this phenomenon, Deyan Sudjic argues (2005) “this ancient throwback [of architecture] has never been more in demand than it is now”. Sudjic presents, among many other examples, the case of the Petronas Towers: “The world which

could not put Malaysia on the map can now recognise Kuala Lumpur thanks to Cesar Pelli’s twin towers”. Indeed the world over, no urban mega-project seems complete these days without the signature design of an internationally acclaimed “star architect” and/or a flagship high-rise. Many of these schemes have impressive architectural qualities and each of them has, individually, an idiosyncratic and highly distinctive form. Yet their increasing physical, economic and social disconnection from local environments have led critics (Beauregard and Haila, 2000; p. 30-5; Moulaert, Rodríguez and Swyngedouw, 2003; Olds, 1995; Talesnik and Gutierrez, 2002) to raise concerns regarding the type of urban places that result from these interventions, arguably isomorphic and mutually interchangeable in essence. To further quote from Sudjic (2005): “Ken Livingstone’s vision of London competes with Frankfurt’s bid to shore up its crumbling plans to be Europe’s next financial centre – both cities have giant models and both strategies are characterised by interchangeable plans for daring office towers in the form of cocktail shakers”. The increasing ubiquity of what we can call global city architecture symbolises both what cities and their local government have or perceive within their reach, namely upgrading their built environments through, for example, massive infusions of cutting-edge design, and what their limits are in controlling the very economic flows they attempt to attract. Within the existing nested structure of intergovernmental levels and without the intervention of national governments, a number of authors have argued that “local governments are largely helpless” in shielding their citizens from the most pernicious effects of the global economy (Fainstein, 2001a: p. 295). Moreover, the rise of global city architecture cannot be attributed only to exogenously oriented local policies and globalist city governments, it also responds to the strengthening of an internationally integrated property market (Sassen, 2001a; p. 190-5) around prime business locations in cities such as New York and London and increasing importance of transnational actors (e.g. developers and financiers) in the city building process (Fainstein, 2001b; Haila, 1997). Finally, as the contested process of rebuilding New York’s World Trade Centre site shows, the final form of symbolic projects does not always originate from pure architectural vision – their economic importance also renders them subject to commercial demands and the wishes of developers, and increasingly to the specifications dictated by security specialists concerned with terrorist attacks (Goldberger, 2004; Ouroussoff, 2005). The architectural discontent in contemporary New York extends to a wider realm than the critique to the lack of aura in the Freedom Tower’s final design

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(Giovannini, 2003). A number of influential architects and critics have cast a negative judgement on New York’s contemporary architecture, alternatively chastised as a “collective failure of creative vision” (Muschamp, 1996), “architecturally stagnated in a way that London is not” (Sudjic, 2005) or altogether non-existent (Eisenman, 2005). Even a more moderate, and overall positive, assessment such as Joseph Giovannini’s (2004) describes the MoMA’s expansion as underwhelming (p. 7) and parts of the Times Square redevelopment as wildly uneven and sometimes cartoonish (p. 11). In our view, this debate is symptomatic of the blurred relationship between an excelling design of a city’s built environment and its urban attractiveness, a point also expressed in New York-based Peter Eisenman’s (2005) derisive critique of the quality of architecture in the hometown he would not change for any other city in the world. Is the case of New York exceptional in the sense that its proved attractiveness is based on its unparalleled wealth of cultural amenities (which after all also include a vast architectural heritage), social milieus and economic opportunities, regardless of (what at least some would see as) mediocre contemporary architectural production? Or does this case rather evidence the increasing peripheral nature of architecture and urban design in producing urban meaning and contributing to the city’s attractiveness? Is New York peculiar or rather the norm pointing to the exceptional character of cases such as Bilbao and the limited potential of destination-architecture? Without fully answering these questions, we limit ourselves to point out that in today’s world architecture and urban design co-exist with a number of other creative industries whose products, many of them consumer products of massive reach, both embody and contribute to define the identity of a city, as shown for example in the study of creative industries in Los Angeles by Harvey Molotch (1996). In some cases there is a direct competition, as with media in the quest for generating spectacular events; and in these cases, as Eisenman (2005) sees it, architecture is at a clear disadvantage. An indication of this complex visual rapport between architecture and the media can be found in Los Angeles Plays Itself, a recent cinematic essay by Thom Andersen where he shows the manifold ways in which the film industry has framed perceptions of Los Angeles and re-presented this most photographed city on the planet. One of Andersen’s arguments is that Hollywood films systematically present a biased portrait of the city’s heritage of modernist architecture. Works by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra are narrativised as the dens of cinematic villains with the original utopian intent of their modernist typologies recast as built forms embodying a morally bankrupt,

unaccountable, and ultimately unsustainable social project.

Improving Functionality Through Design Paralleling the growth in interest for how the symbolic functions of architecture and city design can enhance urban attractiveness, there is also a growing recognition of how added design functionality to the various workplaces of the city contributes to more efficient work routines. Contemporary formulations of the concept of efficiency place competitiveness in the quality of cooperation processes between differentiated actors and parts of the production process rather than in the traditional division of labour segmenting and differentiating these parts as much as possible. These are open-ended coordination processes that cannot be standardised and mechanised in their entirety and depend on a dense web of formal and informal communication mechanisms between the actors involved (Veltz; 2004; p. 6). Hence, much of the demand placed on design focuses on its ability to facilitate and enhance interaction. An important architectural typology that is increasingly assessed according to this parameter is the office building, no longer valued purely as a real estate asset or a symbol of a certain corporate identity but with the idea that, as Francis Duffy (1997; p. 9) puts it, “the most vital function of an office building is to facilitate and accommodate change”. According to this view, telecommuting, long-distance work collaborations across national borders and a wide gamut of activities of what is now called “distributed work” (see e.g. Hinds and Kiesler, 2002) pose a new set of requirements to the way in which office buildings are designed, delivered and managed. Duffy’s (2005) suggestion is that the contemporary workplace in general needs to be prepared for mobility, volatility, permeability and the complementarity of the big and small, of what is internal to the firm and what is not. This surge of the “nomadic” or “networked” office as an important architectural typology for the contemporary workplace has important consequences for high-density cities. The first implication falls on the research side. Existing literature shows (a) how the hyper-mobility that characterises the global economy in the view of many observers actually depends on vast amounts of social networking (Sassen, 2001b; p. 89) and physical infrastructure (Graham and Marvin, 1996, 2001) of a highly (spatially) fixed nature, and (b) that a large of proportion of such soft and hard infrastructures is agglomerated in central cities. The next steps in research are to look systematically at the spatial distribution of networked offices to confirm if they present a similar pattern of concentration in urban cores, which the locations of cases presented in

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reviews of best architectural practices would seem to confirm (Duffy, 1997; Myerson and Ross, 2003); and to develop a thorough specification of how this architectural typology interfaces between the telecommunications and transport nodalities found in the high-density city and the clusters of specialised professionals that inhabit the city and deploy these nodalities in their everyday work. The implication for policy-makers and the real estate industry is that, Duffy (1997; p. 102) argues, calculations will need to be done very differently when relating the supply of office spaces to estimates of future demand for them. As the gross amount of square feet needed per additional job or increased activity is likely to decrease, more attention needs to be put in the qualitative characteristics of the city’s office stock, not only the amounts of telecommunications-rich “plug-and-go” offices but also its morphological capacity to accommodate the types of work required in the contemporary global and knowledge-based economy. It has been pointed out that many of today’s work-related activities require extensive face-to-face contact (Storper and Venables, 2004) and that the diverse spaces of the high-density city become an extended workplace for these activities of intense knowledge-transmission, negotiation and deal-making. The hotel lobbies, cafés, atriums, but also public spaces and even the streets of Manhattan provide examples of what Susan Christopherson (2005) calls liminal public/private spaces. Everyday a number of projects are hatched in these meeting spaces that, at least in terms of how they are used, are neither public nor private. For Christopherson (ibid.), this implies that the quality of public space, its safety, visual interest and accessibility are interwoven with the practice of creative work and with the economy of the city. A concrete example of this implication is that the design quality of the privately-owned public spaces matters both to city’s liveability and to its economic vibrancy. Since the 1961 Zoning Resolution, more than 3.5 million square feet of public space have been built in New York City (mostly in Manhattan) in exchange for additional building area or other considerations such as relief from certain height and setback restrictions (Kayden, 2000). Public scrutiny is mounting on these spaces for the unevenness of their design and for creating, in many cases, barren unusable surfaces, arguments stating the economic importance of well designed liminal public/private spaces can be added to these claims. Our discussion on contemporary offices and on urban space as a site for negotiation and deal-making has only covered a small portion of workplace typologies

found in the high-density city. Throughout the paper we have mentioned other less advantaged typologies such as the sweatshop, the artist loft threatened by displacement pressures, or the private residences that for many providers of personal services such as maids, nannies or care-givers become a workplace. One more important category to consider is the workplaces of the sector now called the “meds and eds”. Education, health and social services have become major employment sectors of contemporary urban economies such as New York City, and the quality of the workplaces where these service-providers perform their daily tasks arguably has an important bearing on their livelihoods and, equally or even more importantly, on the lives of those on the receiving end of those services – not only students at prestigious universities and patients at technically advanced research hospital, but also a wide variety of groups ranging from children in the public school system to public library patrons, and from welfare recipients waiting to meet with their case-worker at a local welfare centre to those living in city-funded nursing homes. For the less advantaged in this urban age of global economic inequality, the majority of these services are provided outside the unaffordable private market, either directly from the state or through the non-profit sector. For these people, the sites where services are provided represent key embodiments of what is, or what remains, public. Richard Sennett (2005) argues that the design of these work/service places is an increasingly important factor in making the lives of those who have less worth living in the contemporary city. Hashim Sarkis (2005) also looks at a number of architectural elements that could be mobilised to counteract some of what he sees as the most malign aspects of the contemporary urban age: namely a sense of personal drift and anxiety (Sennett, 1998) and a lack of clarity of how social logics and economic dynamics have made individual careers and livelihoods more insecure (Beck, 2000). In architecture, Sarkis argues, we may be witnessing a shift of gear from the pursuit of a physical flexibility that represents change to a search for formal qualities that inspire change without imposing it, and that hence democratise society by making its logics more legible (Beck, 1992). Sarkis finds the potential for this architecture in the resilience of armatures such as grids, in intensities of surfaces and in suggested voids.

Conclusions and Policy Implications In this paper we have argued that, if geographically extended transnational value-chains and knowledge-intensive production dominate the contemporary global economy, urbanisation also continues to be a constitutive force of economic development across the

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world. With this urban age as a global context, the situation of older high-density cities in advanced capitalist countries continues to be problematic, some have continued declining and even shrinking while others have been able to retain or even regain their economic and demographic centrality. The case of New York City shows that high-density cities remain a viable site for production and innovation. The structure of the industrial city used to be based on the strong differentiation of its components and a marked temporal and spatial separation of workplaces and living spaces. But with the transformation of industrialised societies into knowledge-based economies, the organisation of work is no longer constrained by these rigid spatial and social structures. Contemporary knowledge-intensive production seems to thrive in city centres with mixed land uses or easily accessible from residential areas, and in the type of workplaces often found in them (e.g. networked offices, refurbished workshops, small factories, etc.). The high-density city functions at the same as a concentrated and “thick” labour market, as a privileged site for advanced consumption and the pursuit of differentiated life-styles and as the spatial integrator of both dimensions, the re-embedding context for the increasingly interdependent activities of working and living. At the metropolitan level, there is also mounting evidence of the economic advantages associated to compactness. Recent research findings point out that the compact metropolis that also enjoys a good balance between workplaces and living spaces linked by an efficient transport infrastructure is the most productive of all urban settlements (Cervero, 2001; p. 1652 emphasis added). Therefore, it makes economic sense for both central cities and metropolitan regions to grow by densification and the intensification of existing land uses rather than by sprawling horizontally and with largely underutilised interstitial spaces. If an adequate city form contributes to urban economic development then good planning is essential to sustain urban productivity and the capacity of cities to remain important economic sites. Many challenges lay ahead for the less advantaged workers in the new urban economy. Public policy, labour advocacy and community mobilisation are likely to play important roles in securing better wages, workplace conditions, job security and comprehensive benefit packages with health care provisions. Nevertheless, the aims of these interventions need to be thought in increasingly comprehensive terms that are not limited to quantitative goals but that are also framed in a multidimensional view of the needs of individual workers and their families (Rose, 2003),

especially since the increasing inequalities emerging from the labour market are compounded with imbalances in other urban systems (e.g. housing markets, transport system, provision of public services, spatial distribution of amenities, etc.). We have argued that design-based approaches and interventions on the city’s built environment can play an important role in joined-up initiatives to both strengthen the economic performance of high-density cities and to improve their social conditions. If properly embedded in a city’s cultural strategy, architectural investments can enhance its international visibility and symbolic status. They can also improve its productivity by providing workplaces and urban spaces more amenable to the logics of an economy that has become more transactions-intensive and dependent on the collaboration of specialised workers with different pools of knowledge. Finally, if in a more tentative way, a number of urbanists has begun to think of possible interventions on the built environment to make the city “worth living in” even for those less advantaged in the new urban economy and to render its form more conducive to, rather than obstructive of, progressive social change. It is debatable how feasible or consequential these proposals are, nevertheless, such discussions are increasingly meaningful in the contemporary context of an urban age of growing inequalities.

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