The Planning and Governance of Cities in Globalization
When Peter Hall first brought The World Cities to international attention in 1966, his analytical focus was to predate that of Scott’s (2001) ‘global city-region’ by three decades.
Urban Metabolism Redux (Neo)liberalizing Urban Environments Urban Socio-Ecological Movements and the Struggles for Justice Urban Socio-Ecological Imaginaries: Discourses of Urban Natures Policiticizing Urban Environments: New Beginnings References
Macleod, G., Jones, M. (2011). Renewing Urban Politics. Urban Studies, 48 (12), 2443-2472.
In recent years, urban research has become increasingly concerned with the social, political and economic implications of the techno‐political and socio‐scientific consensus that the present unsustainable and unjust environmental conditions require a transformation of the way urban life is organized. In the article, I shall argue that the present consensual vision of the urban environment presenting a clear and present danger annuls the properly political moment and contributes to what a number of authors have defined as the emergence and consolidation of a postpolitical and postdemocratic condition. This will be the key theme developed in this contribution. First, I shall attempt to theorize and re‐centre the political as a pivotal moment in urban political‐ecological processes. Second, I shall argue that the particular staging of the environmental problem and its modes of management signals and helps to consolidate a postpolitical condition, one that evacuates the properly political from the plane of immanence that underpins any political intervention. The consolidation of an urban postpolitical condition runs, so I argue, parallel to the formation of a postdemocratic arrangement that has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic environmental management. In the third part, I maintain that this postpolitical consensual police order revolves decidedly around embracing a populist gesture. However, the disappearance of the political in a postpolitical arrangement leaves all manner of traces that allow for the resurfacing of the properly political. This will be the theme of the final section. I shall conclude that re‐centring the political is a necessary condition for tackling questions of urban environmental justice and for creating egalibertarian socio‐ecological urban assemblages.
Résumé
Récemment, la recherche urbaine a montré un intérêt croissant pour les implications sociales, politiques et économiques du consensus techno‐politique et socio‐scientifique selon lequel les conditions environnementales actuelles, non viables et injustes, exigent que soit transformé le mode d'organisation de la vie urbaine. Or, cette perspective consensuelle de l'environnement urbain soumis à un danger manifeste et réel annihile le moment véritablement politique et contribue à ce que de nombreux auteurs ont défini comme l'apparition et la consolidation d'une situation post‐politique et post‐démocratique. Traitant ce thème essentiel, l'article tente d'abord de conceptualiser et de recentrer le politique en tant que moment critique dans les processus politico‐écologiques urbains. Ensuite, il montrera que la mise en scène particulière du problème environnemental et de ses modes de gestion indique, et aide à consolider, un état post‐politique, dans lequel le véritablement politique est évacué du plan de l'immanence sous‐jacent à toute intervention politique. La consolidation d'une situation post‐politique urbaine se fait en parallèle à la formation d'un dispositif post‐démocratique qui a remplacé débat, désaccord et dissension par une panoplie de technologies gouvernementales gravitant autour de mesures de consensus, d'accord et de responsabilité, associées à une gestion technocratique de l'environnement. Une troisième partie soutient que cet ordre policé consensuel post‐politique se rapproche nettement du geste populiste. Toutefois, la disparition du politique d'un dispositif post‐politique laisse toutes sortes de traces permettant la réémergence du véritablement politique. Cet aspect est au cœur de la dernière partie. Pour conclure, le recentrage du politique est un préalable au traitement des questions de justice en matière d'environnement urbain et à la création d'assemblages urbains socio‐écologiques d'égaliberté.
Are global city office markets inherently unstable? This examination of office markets in major world cities analyses the flows of capital that create urban form, the nature of ownership, investment and occupation and the impact of office markets on economic stability. Towers of Capital - office markets & international financial services explores the relationship between the evolution of major international financial centres as part of the global capital market system, the development of office markets in those cities, real estate investment in those office markets and the patterns of risk and return that result from the interactions between financial flows and office markets. Rather than focusing on just one single aspect of the relationship, Colin Lizieri sets out the interconnections between the location of financial activity, the processes operating in office markets and the volatility of real estate returns. The resulting schematic model of IFC office markets provides insights into risk and will act as a springboard for subsequent empirical work. Towers of Capital develops a framework for understanding real estate and the transformation of the built environment in financial centres, based both on the development of global capital markets and on micro-level research into the functioning of office markets. By drawing together the insights, models and ideas that address global capital flows, the evolution of city systems, office market processes and real estate finance, the book will help students and researchers in property and urban planning, investors and policy advisors to understand the linkages between the evolution of financial markets, innovation in commercial real estate markets and the dynamics of the office markets in global cities.
Within the developed countries, business and governmental leaders of large cities typically aspire to reach global-city status. Yet no convincing evidence shows that the inhabitants of global cities and their surrounding regions fare better than the residents of lesser places. Indeed “the globalcity hypothesis” argues that these metropolises are especially prone to extremes of inequality (Friedmann 1986). Despite being, in aggregate, the wealthiest areas of their respective nations, global-city regions tend to have large, dense groups of very poor people, often living in close juxtaposition with concentrations of the extraordinarily wealthy. According to Sassen (1991), the particular industrial and occupational structure of global cities produces a bifurcated earnings structure that in turn creates the outcome of the “disappearing middle”. This paper shows that global-city regions in wealthy countries do display high levels of income inequality (although not necessarily of class polarization), but that the explanation given by global-city theorists in terms of earnings is not wholly satisfactory. It further indicates that the five wealthy global-city regions of New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, and the Randstad (Netherlands) vary in terms of the extent of inequality. It concludes by examining the reasons for inequality in such regions and the effects of public policy on it.
The growth machine perspective is reviewed in light of various critiques of urban political economy as being overdeterministic, ignoring cultural issues, place diversity, and environmental crises. The author shows how growth machines are anchored in local systems of elite sociability, ideological conceptions, and local problem solving. He stresses the role of professional consultants in generating consistencies across places that can mistakenly be taken as evidence of economic necessity. The traditional US urban situation is contrasted with certain other industrial socities and with emerging trends in various southern California locations to show how local and national politics matter in determining the strength and mode of growth machine dynamics. He examines the links between growth machine politics and impacts on the physical environment and the creation of environmental movements. The interaction of agency and structure is specified, drawing upon structuration theory.
For much of the 1990s and 2000s, the emphasis of urban policy in many global cities was on managing and mitigating the social and environmental effects of rapid economic growth. The credit crunch of 2008 and the subsequent recession have undermined some of the core assumptions on which such policies were based. It is in this context that the concept of resilience planning has taken on a new significance. Drawing on contemporary research in London and Hong Kong, the paper shows how resilience and recovery planning has become a key area of political debate. It examines what is meant by conservative and radical interpretations of resilience and how conservative views have come to dominate ‘recovery’ thinking, with élite groups unwilling to accept the limits to the neo-liberal orthodoxies that helped to precipitate the economic crisis. The paper explores the implications of such thinking for the politics of urban development.
Under the titles of ‘global city-regions’ and the new ‘city regionalism’ there has been a growing support for a resurgence
of city-regions within economic geography. While sympathetic to the general tenor of the new city-regionalism, this article
argues for a more synthetic approach to understanding the significance of the city-region. It is argued that the same inherent
weaknesses that undermined the previous new regionalist orthodoxy within economic geography, have been collapsed into the
present focus upon the scale of the city-region. The article concludes by looking at the broader implications of this for
the future of economic geography.
In this introduction to a special Debates and Developments forum on city-regions, we argue that the recent revival of interest in city-regions has been constructed around a rather narrow set of empirical and theoretical issues relating to exchange, interspatial competition and globalization. The 'new' city-regionalism results in a reification of the city-region as an autonomous political agent of the global space economy. We outline an alternative approach to investigating and understanding geographies of city-regionalism, highlighting: a politics of governance and state re-territorialization around the city-region; the role of democracy and citizenship in city-region politics; and tensions around social reproduction and sustainability across the city-region. Copyright (c) 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd..
Rethinking the Region (Routledge: London)
- J Allen
- D Massey
- A Cochrane
Allen J, Massey D and Cochrane A (1998) Rethinking the Region (Routledge: London).
The Polycentric Metropolis: Learning from Mega-City Regions in
Hall P and Pain K (eds.) (2006) The Polycentric Metropolis: Learning from Mega-City Regions
in Europe (Earthscan: London).
The Economy of Cities (Random House
- J Jacobs
Jacobs J (1969) The Economy of Cities (Random House: New York).
- D Massey
Massey D (2007) World City (Polity Press: Cambridge).
Preparing for China's Urban Billion -Summary of Findings (McKinsey & Company)
- Mckinsey Global Institute
McKinsey Global Institute (2008) Preparing for China's Urban Billion -Summary of Findings
(McKinsey & Company).
State of the World's Cities Report
- Un-Habitat
UN-HABITAT [United Nations Human Settlements Programme] (2011) State of the World's
Cities Report 2010/11 (UN-HABITAT: New York).