Cities and Civilization (Week 12 extra)

• The intellectual debate on cities at the turn of the millennium concerns the state and prospects of human civilization.
• Throughout history, cities have been sources of cultural creativity, technological innovation, progress, and democratization.
• Cities bring people together from diverse origins, enhancing synergy and stability through communication and cooperation.
• The Information Age challenges cities as globalization and informationalization diminish the need for spatial proximity.
• Global communication systems subdue the local, blurring social meaning and hampering political control.
• Cities, rooted in concentrated human settlements, could become obsolete in the new technological environment.
• Despite this, urbanization, understood as spatial concentration, is accelerating, leading to a predominantly urban world.
• By 2005, over 50% of the planet's population may reside in urban areas.
• Core activities and a growing proportion of people are concentrated in multi-million metropolitan regions.
• Socio-spatial evolution could lead to urbanization without cities, where urban/suburban sprawl diffuses people and activities widely.
• Local societies in this scenario may become socially atomized and culturally meaningless.
• Questions arise whether cities are disappearing as a cultural form due to metropolitan settlements.
• We must ask if virtual communities and electronic-based communication networks are substituting for the urban community.
• It is important to consider the patterns of spatial concentration and dispersion, and the interaction of locality and virtuality.

Metropolitan Spatial Concentration in the Network Society

• While networks of interaction decentralize our economy and society, the spatial pattern of human settlements presents territorial concentration.
• The largest wave of urbanization in human history is occurring.
• The World Bank reports that the urban population accounted for 37% of the total population in 1970, rising to 46% in 1996.
• Projections suggest a majority of people will live in cities around 2005.
• Sub-Saharan Africa has the fastest rate of urban growth, with 63% of its population likely living in cities by 2020.
• In 1998-9, South America had 78% urbanization, Western Europe 82%, Russia 75%, and the US 77%.
• In 1996, Japan and the Korean peninsula had 78% urbanization; Southeast Asia 37%, Pakistan 35%.
• China (30% in 1996) and India (28% in 1998) account for over one-third of humankind, remaining largely rural.
• Projections estimate India's urban population will almost double between 1996 and 2020 (256 million to 499 million).
• China's urban population is expected to increase from 377 million in 1996 to 712 million in 2020, more than half of China's population.
• A growing share of the urban population is concentrated in large metropolitan regions rather than cities.
• Metropolitan regions' cultural meaning is open to question.
• The proportion of the population in agglomerations of more than one million people reaches about one-third in Latin America.
• South Asia doubles its proportion between 1980 and 1996, reaching 14%, similar to Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Rich countries in 1996 had approximately 30% of their population in metropolitan areas, with the US at 26.5% in 1990.
• Projections indicate increasing population concentration in large metropolitan areas.
• Secular trend: urbanization and metropolitanization of human settlements accelerates over time.
• The most extensive metropolitan settlements are in the developing world, increasing in occurrence.
• Spatial concentration ensures jobs, income, economic activities, services, and development opportunities in cities, especially larger ones.
• Increased productivity drives new rural-urban migrations, while agricultural job crisis grows.
• Wealth sources in metropolitan areas are those where higher values are generated, which creates jobs directly and indirectly.
• Higher income levels in these areas offer opportunities for education and health services.
• Urban migrants find better chances for survival than those in marginalized rural areas.
• Metropolitan areas present greater chances for cultural enhancement and personal enjoyment for consumption.
• The Information Age favors metropolitan concentration through new production and management, examined next.

The Informational City: Metropolitan Areas as Milieux of Innovation

• Sources of value and power in the Information Age are knowledge generation and information processing.
• Both depend on innovation and the diffusion of innovation in networks that synergize by sharing information and knowledge.
• Territorial complexes of innovation facilitate this synergy.
• What are sometimes called "milieux of innovation" seem central to larger cities' ability to source wealth in the Information Age.
• This is the case for Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area.
• Major centers of innovation have appeared in large metropolitan areas across the world
• Examples: Tokyo-Yokohama, London, Paris, Munich, Milan, Moscow, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul-Inchon.
• Also: Taipei-Hsinchu, Bangalore, Bombay, São Paulo-Campinas, as well as San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles, Greater Boston, Seattle.
• There are also secondary innovation milieux in such areas as Austin, Dallas, North Carolina's research triangle, Minneapolis-St Paul.
• New York, a major exception, is compensated by its financial, business services, media and culture prominence.
• Hall linked cities and innovation to the entire Western history of cultural creativity and entrepreneurial innovation.
• As cultural creativity becomes a productive force, the competitive advantage of cities is reinforced.
• Cities' innovation potential extends to advanced business services like finance, insurance, consulting, legal services, accounting, marketing.
• These are concentrated in large metropolitan areas, such as New York/New Jersey, forming twenty-first century economic hubs.
• Advanced services are unevenly distributed between central business districts and suburban centers, varying per area.
• Decision-making processes are concentrated territorially with a territorial web of suppliers/customers.
• A third set of value-generating activities in metropolitan areas is cultural industries, e.g. media, entertainment, art, fashion, publishing, museums.
• These industries include the fastest-growing and highest value-generating activities.
• They rely on territories of shared innovation, with face-to-face exchanges complemented by online interaction.
• The Internet has led to an increasing concentration of Internet domains in the largest metropolitan areas (mostly New York and San Francisco in the US).
• Because the internet processes information, hubs reside in main information systems of metropolitan regions.
• This does not imply its status as a metropolitan phenomenon and is instead a network of metropolitan nodes.
• Through advanced telecommunications, innovation hubs can exist in a few key nodes globally.
• These hubs can reach globally from locations like Manhattan, Wilshire Boulevard, in Santa Clara County, or in London, Paris, Tokyo, or São Paulo.
• These territorial complexes connect, ushering in a new global geography made of nodes and networks.

The New Global Geography: Networks of Metropolitan Nodes

• Globalization links economic, media, science/technology, and strategic activities worldwide in real time.
• While many activities are not global and are local, those activities are dependent on a globalized core.
• This core organizes its performance using networks of global interaction through telecommunications, information systems and transportation.
• As these core activities are based in metropolitan areas there is a global interaction process between these metropolitan nodes.
• Often misunderstood as 'global cities.'
• Characterized by networks and nodes, not hierarchies of centrality/periphery.
• Therefore no city is entirely global, e.g., Queens in New York and Kunitachi in Tokyo.
• Wall Street, The City of London, and Palo Alto do work in a global network.
• Hundreds and thousands of localities connect to global information and decision-making networks.
• All large metropolitan areas in the developed world are global to some extent with their nodal weight in the network depending on time and issues.
• Most people live locally in these same cities.
• No few global cities exist but one "global city" exits - a transterritorial city.
• This global space is built by linking spaces into one network of interaction that brings processes and people together.
• Networks of metropolitan regions process flows of capital, production, and information according to the value generated.
• Cities and metropolitan areas are conditioned by global and inter-regional competitiveness from their value.
• While high-technology centers reinforce positions as innovation centers certain old industrial cities are being bypassed.
• There is considerable versatility in these global networks; this implies the transterritorial global city is a changing, variable geometry.
• Whenever a major node is formed, it generates a new spatial form: the metropolitan region.

A New Spatial Form: The Metropolitan Region

• Large-scale territorial units concentrate population and activities through a metropolitan spatial form.
• The existing of cities are distinguished from a larger cultural and political framework.
• A "region" describes a functional connection within activities within a vast territory around a labor and consumer market.
• The metropolitan region is not just a large urban area but is also a distinctive spatial form.
• Metropolitan regions also have no political unity or institutional agency.
• The "Bay area" (San Francisco) includes surrounding counties in a large constellation.
• The settlement pattern is already expanding beyond the area, linking with Sacramento and the Central Valley.
• Southern California blends areas into a merged space encompassing 17 million people.
• Freeways connect Orange County to San Diego merging the area into a binational mega-urban constellation.
• Outside California similar spatial conglomerations formed in the New Jersey-New York area.
• In Asia, some of the largest metropolitan regions are being formed such as the region between Hong Kong and Macau.
• Other regions include: Tokyo-Yokohama-Nagoya and Seoul-Inchon.
• These settlements blend cities and the countryside and suburbs/cities.
• Transportation/mass transmit influence spatial discontinuity and density.
• There is no formal zoning as work spaces, homes, transit, and commercial areas tend to be dispersed.
• As these regions typically stem from a major central city, smaller urban centers are absorbed within the intra-metropolitan networks.
• This process is dependent up transportation and communications and is increasing work productivity from a spatial distance.
• However, rather than workplaces disappearing, multi-location activities and mobility patterns create a stepped-up arrangement.
• Characterized simultaneously by concentration, mobility, dependence and fragmentation.

The Unsustainable City: The Ecological Crisis of Twenty-first Century Metropolitan Regions

• Ecological consciousness became a major cultural and political shift.
• From an ecological perspective this poses a challenge for urbanization as the natural environment is destroyed to accommodate the population.
• High-speed and mobile transportation adds more cars and planes that damage the environment.
• Expansion results in the conversion of agricultural land to built territory and decreasing open space protections.
• In developing countries, increased settlements in informal housing damage the environmental conditions and contribute to epidemics.
• Wild urbanization causes environmental irresponsibility and the deterioration of urban liveability.
• The environmental twenty-first century problem is the metropolitan issue.
• Short-term profit seeking and ecological ignorance have contributed to unsustainable development.
• Humans are enclosed in a metropolitan world which accentuates the distance from out social ecosystem.
• To make change future generations must be included in developmental equations.
• A global warming can occur as a result of greenhouse effects from metropolitan concentration and transportation.

The Fragmented Metropolis: Spatial Segregation and the Breakdown of the Urban Contract

• Douglas Massey showed wealth and poverty have had unprecedented concentrations in the past decades.
• Segregation proceeds alongside ethnicity and income between regions, within regions, and metropolitan areas.
• Areas are increasingly specified via their social characteristics in cities, suburbs, and exurban areas.
• Upper/middle class groups have created distinct communities, resulting in wealth having a higher spatial concentration than with poverty and minorities.
• As gated communities gain more housing increases, some fear an increase of "Fortress America".
• The rising fear of crime has been a large motivation for separatism, in which multiculturalism is resisted.
• Through new systems people can stay selectively connected.
• Breaking of the urban contact has fragmented the metropolis between homes and gated communities.
• There is no longer a shared culture in segregated communities.

Reconstructing the City (I): The City and the Grassroots

• People can react and build communities that re-create the urban society from the grassroots.
• Communities and networks can use personal communication to enhance networks.
• Problems still arise whether selective aggregation will break the meaningful units.
• The issue of social meaning of elective aggregation is not equivalent to communication meaning in a shared culture.
• Growing urban diversities need better bridges to connect citizens together.

Reconstructing the City (II): The City of Women

• The city is organized around patriarchal subordination within families.
• Processes of social transformation are altering the relationship between cities and women to create new urban challenges.
• Increased bargaining power creates a higher demand for urban services such as child care as women join the paid labor force.
• Women manage the daily urban system to impact and change their mobilizations.
• Feministic consciousness impacts how the cities are organized.
• By emphasizing on public spaces women were able to push new ideals regarding urban design.
• These ideas include enhancing sociability and making the city and the environment more friendly and safe.

Reconstructing the City (III): Metropolitan Governance and the Evolution of Planning

• Unstable relations between metropolitan governance and its size makes management mechanisms require governance and new tools.
• Local diversity and regional governance are difficult to implement as there are instabilities in national governments, creating issues of global management.
• Local governments can't manage metropolitan regions, creating a need for metropolitan governance.
• The issue lies in making metropolitan governments implausible as local citizens are accustomed to local control.
• Collaboration between local governments can provide common solutions when scaled to work together within a metropolitan area.

Rethinking Cities in the Information Age: Space of Flows, Space of Places, and the Production of Urban Meaning

• Characterization on cities during the transformative Information Age.
• In this context, a new form of space can be theorized called "the space of flows".
• Its operation is via distances of communication, electronic networks, and telecommunication.
• Locales are included but only as networks, not operating separately.
• Most dominate activities operate in the space of flows, such as: financial markets, high-level management, good production, media, science and technology.
• Operates increasingly in the space of flows, as in education, miscellaneous information and public/political debates.
• Material support of simultaneity in a time of chosen events created theoretical space.
• Simultaneous with spatial and time.
• Simultaneously was associated with communications from electronic devices.

The New Culture of Cities

• Cities are hubs for communication, a medium between home and global networks.

• Communication systems are based around shared social representations, organized through forms/ collective experience.

• The challenges are greater in the age of information for their power to separate function from meaning.

• Anchored spaces can become specialized and reduce themselves from quality.

• This in turn strengthens existing diversities/ indues interfaces for a quality.

• Electronic and place occur as communication within spatial forms.

• The old ideas of versus do not induce a sense of that basic argument.

• Positivity and culture provide ways associated for extending traditional city functions in the technology paradigm, such as: --Reconstruction of urban structure from multinuclear forces. --Public space provides the most important physical bridge between various sources, enabling experiences together. --Open areas are needed for new urban designs. --Support schools, create networks, and attenuate modes of atomized multimedia worlds.

• Explicit interfaces are created to restore interactions between city power.

• Redefined museums provide an emphasis on urban design and communicative bridges, such as, Bilbao’s Guggenheim. Ultimately, a city with a culture must utilize hyper communication, built from bridges and the ability to restore interactions between identity and technology.

Urban Studies at the Turn of the Millennium: Back to the Future?

• With the twentieth century approaching an end, two major debates had marked the intellectual field of urban studies.
• In face of market-driven and unbalanced industrialization, sought to affirm spaces as sustainable and cultural, from sources such as Urbanist Ebenezer Howard.
• Cities and social society had an articulatation.
• Both transitions were put through stern criticism where urban problems by economic and social. – These problems can be solve through technology and social engineering. Urban studies may became able as research to greatly improve public and private decisions.
• New urban research had evolved from societal problems such as society. With this an environmental sustainability was created.
• Concerns regarding environmental was added to new urbanity.
• Environmental consciousness became the future in order to better serve new society.