What are global city regions and why have they become so prominent in the contemporary
world? What distinguishes global city regions from related
concepts such as world city or global city? How do global
city regions relate to such concepts as glocalization and
scalar restructuring? I will address these questions by
looking at each of the three components of the term: global
+ city + region. I begin with a discussion of globalization and its effects on cities and metropolitan areas, tracing how the concept of
global city regions has emerged in part from the globalization
discourse. This is followed by a more specific look at
the new urbanization processes that have been transforming the modern metropolis over the past thirty years,
linking the concept of global city region to what I have
described as the postmetropolitan transition.2 The third defining feature re-combines the global and the urban in the framework
and context of what has been called the New Regionalism. I will argue that the regional component of the concept of global city regions
is its most distinctive and analytically significant feature.
Globalization Effects
Cities have been globalizing for many centuries. London and Amsterdam, for example,
were global cities in the 16th century and still earlier cases of urban globalization can be found in commercial,
imperial, and religious cities around the world. The link
between globalization and urbanization processes is therefore
not new, but there has been a growing realization that
starting at least as early as the 1960s there has been
a pronounced acceleration in the globalization of capital,
labor, and culture and that this intensified globalization
has been having significant effects on cities and urban
life all over the world. Analyzing the impact of globalization
on cities is thus the first step in understanding the concept
of global city regions.
The effects of globalization on cities and urban development can be seen at two
levels. Within cities and metropolitan regions, globalization
has been playing a role in reconfiguring the social and
spatial organization of the modern metropolis and in changing
some of the basic conditions of contemporary urban life.
Increasing global flows of labor and capital and the concentration
of these flows in certain urban areas have contributed
to the expansion of metropolitan populations to hitherto
unheard of sizes, with several urbanized regions (or city
regions) in East Asia now containing more than fifty million
inhabitants. Beyond contributing to this expansion in population
size, globalization has also fostered the creation of the
most culturally and economically heterogeneous cities the
world has ever known.
There has also been a significant change in the external relations of cities,
in large part due to the geographically uneven effects
of globalization and the impact of new information and
communications technologies. Cities have experienced an
expansion in the geographical scope of their interactions
and become hierarchically structured based not simply on
population size but on the degree of city-centered control
over transnational flows of capital, labor, information,
and trade. As cities interact increasingly according to
their relative positions within this global hierarchy,
inter-urban linkages more frequently transcend national
boundaries and substitute long distance ties for those
with more close by cities.
One of the first scholars to notice this ongoing internal and external reconfiguration
of cities and its links to globalization processes was
the planning theorist John Friedmann.3 A longtime leader in the field of urban and regional development, Friedmann
in the late 1970s took stock of the major trends affecting
cities and regions around the world and, with Goetz Wolff,
published an article in 1982 entitled “World City Formation:
An Agenda for Research and Action.”4 This work would initiate a lively debate on the globalization of cities that
would eventually play an important role in the development
of the concept of global city region.
Friedmann’s “world city hypothesis,” as he called it, examined from a social
activist perspective the increasingly evident effects of
globalization on the conditions of urban life, especially
with regard to the growing polarization between the expansive
citadels of financial and political power and the compacted
ghettoes of the poor. He also focused attention on the
emerging global network and hierarchy of cities and metropolitan
regions that was affecting in significant ways the “world
system” of economic and political power relations, reinforcing
but perhaps also blurring somewhat the international divisions
between First and Third Worlds.
The concept of world cities would continue to influence the work of planners
and geographers, but the specific term world city was eclipsed in the academic and popular literature by the term global city, defined and promulgated most forcefully in the work of Saskia Sassen.5 Influenced by Friedmann, by world systems theory, and by more sociological notions
of postindustrialism, Sassen focused attention on the social
polarization and economic expansion associated with the
concentration of financial power in a smaller group of
global “command centers,” the controlling spatial nodes
of the expanding global economy. This had the effect of
narrowing the definition of global cities, concentrating
attention on the three largest “capitals of global capital”
(London, New York, and Tokyo), and focusing research on
the commanding role of financial capital in shaping both
the internal structure and external linkages of the world’s
major metropolitan regions.
The discourse on urban globalization was broadened again, and significantly refocused
around the relations between globalization, urbanization,
and industrialization at an international conference held
at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in
October, 1999, and the publication two years later of Global City-Regions, edited by the main conference organizer and a leading figure in the UCLA cluster
of urban and regional researchers, Allen J. Scott.6 The agenda-setting first chapter of Global City-Regions was collectively written by four UCLA geographers and planners, Allen Scott,
Edward Soja, Michael Storper, and John Agnew. Here is an
excerpt from this framing chapter.
[C]ity-regions increasingly function as essential spatial nodes of the global
economy and as distinctive political actors on the world
stage. In fact, rather than being dissolved away as social
and geographical objects by processes of globalization,
city-regions are becoming increasingly central to modern
life, and all the more so because globalization (in combination
with various technological shifts) has reactivated their
significance as bases for all forms of productive activity,
no matter whether in manufacturing or services, in high-technology
or low-technology sectors. As these changes have begun
to run their course, it has become increasingly apparent
that the city in the narrow sense is less an appropriate
or viable unit of local social organization than city-regions
or regional networks of cities. (2001: 11-12)
This approach to global city regions represents much more than a nominal change
in the analysis of urban globalization or the idea of global
cities. It signals a much broader and more ambitious re-conceptualization.
Above all, it reflects and forcefully asserts the resurgence
of interest in the importance of space and spatial perspectives,
especially in the study of globalization processes. Many
have written about how globalization and technological
innovations such as the Internet have been reducing the
significance of space and geography as global flows of
information, capital, labor, and culture erode territorial
borders and the identities and attachments to particular
places, cities, and regions. Just the opposite is argued
here, that globalization and new technologies may be making
space, place, location, networks of urban nodes, territorial
development, cities, regions, and regionalism more important in the contemporary world.
Through the global city region concept, globalization, urbanization, and industrialization
are analyzed together as fundamentally spatial and regional
processes. Whereas manufacturing industry was assumed to
be disappearing in most earlier analyses of global cities,
“all forms of productive activity, no matter whether in
manufacturing or services” becomes central to an understanding
of global city regions, a clear departure from the notions
of a postindustrial society dominated by the services sector.
The global city region is still emphatically the expression
of urban-based industrial capitalism, and the manufacturing
sector remains a primary generative force in urban, regional,
national, and global economies, especially when seen as
incorporating the production of information, industry-linked
business services, and the so-called culture or creative
industries.
Behind this emphasis on urban-industrial restructuring is a very distinctive
perspective on the globalization process itself. From this
point of view, the most distinguishing feature of the current
phase of globalization is not the spread of commercial
capital through trade or the global reach of financial
or investment capital, but more specifically the selective diffusion of advanced forms of urban-based industrial production. Globalization in this sense has been associated with the creation of “new industrial
spaces” at many different scales, spreading advanced forms
of industrialization and the characteristic conditions
of urban industrial societies to areas where little of
this existed before the urban and other crises that marked
the 1960s.
The best known examples of these new industrial spaces are the NICs (Newly Industrialized
Countries), including the most recent addition of the “Celtic
Tiger” of Ireland, now the third richest economy of Europe
after Norway and Luxembourg. But there are also many examples
of NIRs, or Newly Industrialized Regions, including at
the sub-national scale the US Sunbelt and the Third Italy
(located between the highly industrialized north and the
agricultural south), and, at the metropolitan regional
scale, Silicon Valley and many other high-technology production
and employment complexes that have developed in formerly
suburban or “greenfield” sites.
Sustained by massive transnational and inter-regional flows of labor, capital,
trade, and information, the growth of global city regions
has created distinctive new relationships between globalization,
industrialization, and urbanization processes. In so doing,
the city region has become the primary developmental fulcrum
between the global and the local, concentrating the geographical
effects of globalization and the New Economy of flexible
capitalism in 400 or so regional conurbations. Although
the global spread of industrial urbanism is far from complete,
the old divisions of labor at the international, national,
and metropolitan scales have been significantly reconfigured
and the once profound differences between First, Second,
and Third World urbanization processes are no longer as
great as they were thirty years ago.
Urban Restructuring and the Postmetropolitan Transition
As with the study of globalization, the analysis of urban restructuring processes
traces a distinctive path to the concept of global city
regions. There can be no doubt that cities and urban life
have been changing quite dramatically over the past forty
years, a multi-faceted transformation that I have described
in composite terms as the postmetropolitan transition.
The modern metropolis that existed in the 1960s, for example,
is no longer what it used to be. Among its many changes,
the old metropolis has become increasingly “unbound” in
several senses of this term.
More than ever before, the reach of the city stretches outward to a global scale.
The metropolitan hinterland is no longer defined exclusively
by proximate boundaries of daily commutes or media use
or residential identities, for the “city limits” have exploded
in scale and scope. Every urban activity or event, whether
linked to production, consumption, exchange, or entertainment,
is in some sense not only local but global as well, giving
additional meaning to such hybrid terms as glocalization to describe the increasing interpenetration of global and local worlds. At the
same time as “glocalized” city regions reach out to the
entire world, all the world is also reaching in, creating
extraordinary degrees of cultural and economic heterogeneity.
It is almost as if the modern metropolis has been turning
itself simultaneously inside-out and outside-in, making
what we associate with the city and urbanism as a way of
life appear everywhere while at the same time “everywhere”
increasingly appears in the city. In this sense, every
place on earth, from the Amazon to Antarctica, is being
both globalized and urbanized (glocalized?), although at
very different rates and intensities.
A similar paradoxical spin seems to be happening within many metropolitan regions
as they are affected by the forces of globalization, economic
restructuring, and new information technologies. In its
selective deconstruction and still ongoing reconstitution,
the modern metropolis has been simultaneously deindustrialized
and reindustrialized, decentralized and recentralized,
in highly varied mixes and intensities, as the postmetropolitan
transition takes many different forms in different urban
spaces. Many dense urban cores, for example, have become
“hollowed out,” losing population and jobs, while some
have become refilled again with the influx of global migrants
and reinvigorated global investment. While the inner city
is being reconfigured, there has also begun what can be
described as the urbanization of suburbia, another seemingly
paradoxical concept, as once homogeneous and sprawling
outer rings of the metropolis become punctuated by densely
populated edge cities, technopoles, and other outer city
employment centers.
In the transition between metropolis and postmetropolis, the typically monocentric
focus of the metropolitan region has become increasingly
polycentric or multi-nodal. Once steep density gradients
from the center have begun to level off as peripheral agglomerations
multiply and the dominance of the singular central city
weakens. What were formerly relatively clear boundaries
between city and suburb, the urban and the non-urban, urbanism
and suburbanism as ways of life are becoming increasingly
blurred as new networks of interaction emerge and the city
and the suburb flow into one another in what can best be
described as a regional urbanization process.
One of the most remarkable examples of regional urbanization can be found in
the city region of Los Angeles. In the 1960s, the urbanized
area of Los Angeles was among the least dense of all major
metropolitan areas in the US. By 1990, however, it had
passed the urbanized area of New York City as the densest
in the country. While more than a million white and black
residents left the inner city, as many as five million
new migrants poured in, creating Manhattan-like densities
in the old urban core. At the same time, at least three
outer cities, the largest located in Orange County, grew
in the suburban periphery, raising density levels there
as well. It is perhaps no surprise then that the concept
of global city region has evolved with strong roots in
Los Angeles.
Regional urbanization and the postmetropolitan transition have been strikingly
associated not just with the blurring of social, economic,
and cultural boundaries, but with increasing economic inequalities
and social polarization. Over the past thirty years, the
income gap between the rich and the poor in the US (with
it greatest extremes in Los Angeles and New York) has reached
historically unprecedented levels. Associated with this
widening gap, there has also been a significant reduction
in the size of the middle class, with the fortunate few
moving up the income ladder while much larger numbers fall
toward the swollen ranks of the urban working poor and
welfare-dependent “underclass”. Even where strong surviving
welfare systems have blunted this income polarization,
as in most of the European Union, cities have become increasingly
divided politically and culturally, especially by conflicts
between domestic and immigrant populations.
With its deepening inequalities and polarizations, growing cultural heterogeneity,
and rapidly changing geography, the still evolving postmetropolis
has become a highly volatile space, seemingly ready to
explode under its new conditions. This has encouraged the
spread – or globalization – of what Mike Davis once called
“security-obsessed urbanism” and an “ecology of fear” as
urban life in nearly every part of the world becomes increasingly
fortressed behind elaborate alarm systems, thick defensive
walls topped with razor-wire, gated and armed-guarded housing
compounds, and omnipresent surveillance cameras.7
These urban transformations have had the additional effect of blurring another
boundary, that between what are conventionally known as
the urban and the regional (or metropolitan scales). It
once was quite easy to distinguish the urban from the regional
as distinctive levels of analysis. In the postmetropolis,
however, the two seem to be blending together, as the simple
structure of the modern metropolis, with its clear and
monocentric division between urban and suburban, becomes
shattered and shifted around in new and still unsettled
forms of polynucleated, complexly networked, multi-cultural,
and polyglot regional urban systems. This urban-regional
convergence adds further to the distinctive meaning of
city-region or region-city, with or without the dash in
between.
The New Regionalism
The concept of global city region is more directly rooted in the resurgence of
interest in regions and regionalism than it is in the study
of globalization or urban and metropolitan restructuring.
Stated somewhat differently, the regional dimension of
globalization and urbanization processes is what matters
most significantly to the meaning of the term. It is the
regional that absorbs and defines the interplay of globalization,
urbanization, industrialization, and development, and grounds
the concept of global city region in a particular form
of analysis and interpretation.
Over the past thirty years, there has not only emerged a pronounced cross-disciplinary
turn toward critical spatial thinking and analysis but
also a closely related development of specifically regional
perspectives. This New Regionalism, as it has come to be
called, has been playing a particularly important role
in making theoretical and practical sense of globalization,
economic restructuring, technological change, and other
processes shaping contemporary life. Underpinning the New
Regionalism is a significant re-theorization of the key
concepts of region and regionalism.
Regionalism in the broadest sense of the term is a form of advocacy, an actively
practiced belief that regions are useful tools for achieving
a wide variety of objectives. These objectives may involve
achieving greater theoretical insight and understanding,
inducing more rapid and equitable economic development,
improving administrative efficiency, fostering and defending
cultural identity, enhancing political democracy and representation,
preserving the natural environment, and stimulating innovation
and creativity. As a form of advocacy and collective action,
regionalism is intrinsically political and contentious,
in that is promotes regional ideas, organizations, and
identities in ways that often do not fit easily within
existing political structures. This connects regionalism
to questions of governance, and especially to the territorial
or spatial dimensions of government, administration, social
control, and the shaping of the built and natural environments.8
Most often, the term region has been used to refer to sub-national and supra-urban
scales, that is, to regions and regional states such as
Quebec and Catalonia, as well as to metropolitan regions,
such as Greater Montreal or Barcelona. The global city
region can be seen as straddling these two forms, between
the state and the city. The term region can also be expanded
conceptually and analytically to describe all distinctive
and organized spatial domains, from the personal spaces
that surround the human body, defining the most intimate
and mobile nodal region, through many intermediate geographical
scales, to the planet earth, the largest occupied region
of relevance.
Regional thinking, advocacy, and identity are thus closely associated with concepts
and theories of geographical scale(s). This conjunction
of regions and scales can be expressed in an axiomatic
or ontological statement that describes the fundamental
spatiality of human life: all human beings exist in a nesting of nodal regions, starting with the mobile region of the body and moving upward through the built
environment of rooms, households, neighborhoods, and so
on to larger and larger regional scales. While the specific
meaning and number of these scales and their influence
on our lives varies from place to place, culture to culture,
and changes over historical time, there is always a nesting
of nodal regions shaping human behavior and existence.
It is crucially important to recognize that the nesting of nodal regions is socially
constructed and not naively or naturally given. This means
that regionality and regionalism at every scale can be
socially changed or reconstructed. Indeed, over the past
decade, there has developed a growing literature on the
notion of regional or territorial re-scaling, especially
in connection with increasing globalization and the effects
of the New Economy.9 One example of this was discussed earlier, with the blurring and possible convergence
of the urban and regional scales. Another has to do with
the restructuring of the nation-state and national sovereignty
in conjunction with subnational and supranational regionalisms,
exemplified by debates over the distribution of powers
in the European Union.
The term nodal emphasizes another fundamental aspect of regionality, the tendency
for regions to be organized around centers or nodes. Proximity
to a nodal center usually brings with it some advantages.
In this sense, centrality also defines peripherality as
potentially generating relative disadvantage, giving to
all regions at least a superficial core-periphery structure.
Regional scales and core-periphery structures are in turn
often associated with different levels of power or influence
over our individual and collective lives. For the past
two hundred years at least, the scale of the territorial
region we call the nation-state has been especially influential.
More recently, the global scale has significantly increased
in its influence both absolutely and relatively. This has
generated an interesting literature on the impact of globalization
on the power and sovereignty of the nation state and on
the development of new concepts of citizenship from the
local to the global (or cosmopolitan), as the exclusive nature of national citizenship is questioned.10
Regions and regionalism in this general sense can thus be seen as meso-analytical concepts and emphases, located in between and serving as a mediating link between the
macro- and the micro- or, more pertinently for present
purposes, the global and the local. The hybrid field of
regional political economy has itself developed from a
meso-analytical blending of insights from pre-existing
urban and international political economy perspectives,
tying together the exogenous or top-down (macro) forces
of globalization and the endogenous, bottom-up (micro)
processes of urban-industrial restructuring. In short,
the New Regionalism draws insight from the interplay of
the global and the local, seen not simply as a dualism
but as the ends of a concatenation of mediating regional
scales. The term glocalization can also be positioned here,
as a related meso-analytical concept.
One of the most vigorous expositions on the New Regionalism is Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy.11 As Storper notes, nearly all earlier approaches to regionalism and regional
development treated the region almost entirely as an outcome
of underlying social, economic, and political forces, conceptualizing
it as an external domain or container in which things happen
but rarely as a influential or causal factor in and of
itself. Today, the region is being conceptualized quite
differently, and it is this difference that most emphatically
distinguishes the global city region from related concepts.
Storper defines regions as fundamental units of social life, comparable in importance
to the family, the state, and the market as ways of organizing
societies and social relations. Moreover, he argues that
regions and regionalism are equally fundamental as driving
forces for societal development, similar in impact and
influence to such social forces as technological innovation,
the division of labor, interest-seeking behavior, and competition
for markets. In other words, regions and, in particular,
cohesive regional economies, are active forces and distinctive
social formations that can significantly affect our lives,
positively as well as negatively, in ways that go well
beyond physical-environmental influences, access to resources,
or simple locational advantage.
Under certain conditions, regions or, in Storper’s words, regional worlds of
production, can be seen as generating development and change,
and stimulating innovation and creativity. This reformulated
view of regions has had major repercussions. It provides
a compelling foundation and explanation for the resurgence
of interest in regions and the New Regionalism and, in
a related way, demonstrates why regionality is so central
to the concept of global city region. The global city region
is not just a new twist on the concept of global city,
it is an assertive argument for putting regions first in
the analysis and interpretation of globalization, the formation
of a New Economy, the impact of new technologies, and the
patterns of urban and metropolitan development.
Bolstering the New Regionalism has been a closely related revival of interest
in nodality and the role of urban agglomeration and clustering
in generating forces of creativity and innovation in regional
economies. Regions or, more specifically, global city regions
are internally comprised of networks of urban nodes of
different sizes connected together by flows of people,
goods, information, capital investment, ideas, etc.. At
the global scale, they form a mosaic or archipelago of
city-regions covering nearly all the earth’s surface and
organized in a fluid hierarchical structure of inter-regional
linkages. Increasingly, these networks of city-regions
compete with national economies and markets as the driving
developmental forces of the global economy.
Nodality in the form of urban agglomeration generates economic advantage and
developmental force in at least two different ways. The
first is fairly straightforward, arising from the time
and energy savings associated with the clustering of activities
in space, thus reducing the frictional costs of distance.
This has been the basis for what has long been recognized
as agglomeration economies or, more specifically, localization
economies. These savings and other advantages due to proximity
can take many forms: in the gathering of material inputs
to production processes (backward linkages), in access
to consumption markets and other producers (forward linkages),
in the search for specialized labor and technical skills
(labor pooling). Simply put, having needed resources, including
human capital, close at hand can reduce the costs of production
and lead to increased efficiency and productivity.
In addition to these fairly direct cost-reduction effects of nodal agglomeration,
there are other less tangible advantages that can be described
broadly as innovation and learning effects. These not only
help to reduce the costs of production, they contribute
to sustaining continued economic growth and development.
More difficult to measure and more complex in their workings,
these generative effects of agglomeration or urbanization economies, have become a major focus of contemporary research in the borderlands between
geography and economics. Analysis here extends well beyond
the hard statistics of input-output relations for the individual
firm or cluster of firms to the softer side of regional
worlds of production and the study of such developmental
and relational factors as social conventions, untraded
interdependencies, reflexive thinking, and other regionally
specific assets.
Among the earliest to recognize these less calculable advantages arising from
urban agglomeration was Alfred Marshall, a key figure in
the study of external or agglomeration economies and the
formation of industrial districts. Marshall saw these advantages
“in the air” or atmosphere of the city and the industrial
cluster. Just how this atmosphere works to stimulate productivity
and growth was unclear but that there was something special
emanating from agglomerations and linked to creativity
and learning was undeniable. In the 1960s, Jane Jacobs
picked up on these generative and creative effects of urban
agglomeration and spoke of the “spark” of urban economic
life. She went even further to say that all societal development,
going back for 12,000 years to the origins of cities and
agrarian society, was internally generated from the effects
of urban agglomeration.12 Today, some geographical economists refer to these human capital-augmenting
effects of cities as Jacobsian economies or externalities.
The New Regionalism has recaptured the ideas of Marshall and Jacobs and taken
them several steps further, moving toward such still unformulated
but potentially rich concepts as “spatial capital” and
“regionalization economies” to signify the generative effects
of urban-regional agglomeration. The industrial or Marshallian
district concept has influenced our understanding of regional
industrialization in many parts of the world, from the
Third Italy to Singapore, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and
Hollywood. In his recent work, Michael Storper (with the
British economist Anthony Venables) advances these ideas
by focusing on the importance of face-to-face contact in
the promotion of innovation, creativity, and learning,
at least for certain economic activities and sectors. They
call this particular stimulating effect “buzz” and, in
the original subtitle of the published article, described
it as a vital part of “the economic force of cities.”13 In Postmetropolis, I follow Jane Jacobs back 12,000 years to origins of this economic force of
cities, using the ancient Greek term synoikismos, translated as synekism, to define the stimulus of urban agglomeration and to
argue with her that without cities we would all be poor,” meaning that urbanization has been fundamental to all societal development
from the very beginnings of sedentary life.
The dynamic inter-relationship between regionality and nodality, most effectively
captured in recent research on the regional effects of
agglomeration, gives new meaning to what may look to many
as just a simple addition of city + region. Just as the
city and the state became one composite term in the formation
of the polis or city-state several thousand years ago, the city and the region have been
blending together over the past thirty years to create
a distinctive new socio-spatial formation, the global city
region. The concept is likely to expand significantly in
its use and influence as we make increasing practical and
theoretical sense of what is happening at every geographical
scale, from the global to the local, in the 21st century.
Edward W. Soja (USA)
Professor at the Department of Urban Planning, UCLA, USA.
