Introducing Marxism and the City in Globalization IV

Cities as Objects of Globalization in Marxian Theory (Continued)

6.  The City as a Discrete Scale in a Multi-scalar Economic Geography

This approach attempts to situate the city as an entity functionally defined in reference to its role in economic processes at multiple geographic scales.  In this sense, it is directly related to the view of cities as loci for labor power reproduction, which can be posited as an introductory reflection in articulating functional, economic linkages between distinct spatial scales.  Thus, Castells’ (1977: 445) initial designation of the city as the appropriate scale for consideration of collective consumption practices and a regional scale, articulating spatially extensive transportation networks and the flow of commodities over long distances, as appropriate to consideration of industrial capitalist production constitutes an important introductory statement on the analysis of cities embodied by multi-scalar functional hierarchies in space.  More recent theoretic accounts on regional economies, like those represented in the literature on global city-regions (e.g. Scott, et al., 2008), have repeated this basic distinction between the city and the region, maintaining, at least implicitly, that the city, as a spatial entity, is too small to meaningfully contribute to an analysis of capitalist production.  

The importance of this approach and its ubiquitous appearance in recent Marxist and Marxian-inspired accounts on economic geography lies in its capacity to situate the city in reference to enhanced economic connections across space evident in economic globalization.  Efforts to theoretically situate cities have become enmeshed in larger questions about evolving regional and global economic networks, articulating spatial relations between production, exchange, and consumption processes at discrete locations/places.  The approaches that I mean to emphasize in developing this categorization, like global-city region theory, World Systems-inspired global commodity chain (GCC) theory (e.g. Gereffi et al., 1994), global production network (GPN) theory (e.g. Coe et al., 2004), and more Neoclassical-inspired theories like the theory of industrial knowledge-clusters (e.g. Malmberg and Maskell, 2002), reflect a particular focus on industrial capitalist production.  I mean to contrast this focus with the forthcoming approach to cities as control points and centers for the production and concentration of information.  Both such approaches share a common conclusion, however, that an understanding of capitalist economic processes must incorporate an analysis of the spatial organization of capitalist firms and industrial sectors. 

On the other hand, a significant amount of variability exists among different theorists and theoretic schools within these approaches on whether to prioritize local (regional) processes or to prioritize interregional network connectivity and, therefore, concentrate on globally extensive spatial relationships.  For theorists oriented more strongly toward endogenous development regimes at the regional level, including the global-city region theorists and industrial knowledge cluster theorists, the emphasis remains on why and how individual regions specialize in certain ranges of industrial capitalist production processes.  For the global-commodity chain theorists, by contrast, the emphasis is on specification of interregional flows of commodities and capital.  Contrasted with both these foci, Lipietz (1993), writing from the perspective of Régulation theory, has attempted to situate the local and the global within a larger, multi-scalar hierarchy, concentrating to a great degree on the “return of the political” as a critical dimension in the geographic restructuring of industrial capitalism in which the national, territorial state still maintains an important structuring role in securing the viability of regional economies.  Likewise, Massey (1994: 50-114) attempts to bridge the local/global divide by developing a conception of spatial divisions of labor emphasizing, on the one hand, the variability of spatial location strategies across different industrial sectors and, on the other hand, the effects these strategies have over time on the economic development of given local contexts, thus situating particular regions, like the English Southeast, as areas in which the location strategies of firms contribute to the locational advantages enjoyed in some degree by all firms in the region.               

Among theorists concentrating on industrial capitalist production at the regional level, questions linger about the ultimate economic role and significance of the city as a spatial entity, relative to entities at other scales (i.e. regions).  Scott et al., for example, quite definitively argue that the “city in the narrow sense is less an appropriate or viable unit of local social organization than the city or networks of cities in a regional context” (Scott et al., 2008: 11).  Following from this conclusion, the authors consign any consideration of individual cities to the background of a thoroughly regional analysis in which internal spatial variations reflect consumption-based inequalities.  In fact, what appears most clearly in the account of Scott et al. is the attribution of a strict political-juridical definition of the city, implying that sub-regional spatial entities lack any real economic significance in an era of capitalist globalization.  

By contrast, in rejecting Castells’ initial definition of cities relative to collective consumption and limitation of production analysis to a regional level, Smith (2008: 181-185) advances a conception of the “urban scale,” based on the relationship between transportation costs and rental gradients determining access to space, more accurately defining the regional scale for other theorists.  Smith’s understanding of the urban scale ultimately demonstrates an intellectual indebtedness to Lefebvre’s conception of the explosion of urban space, but it does little to identify the uniqueness of the city relative to the regional or to the interregional/global scale.  In other accounts, Smith (2002) goes somewhat further in identifying the significance of local state supported gentrification as a strategy of cities to maintain tax revenues and enhance living conditions for particular, higher income social groups, but, as suggested above, this amounts to a mere inversion of the consumption based definitions of the city first applied by Castells and the other collective consumption theorists (high-income/bourgeois consumption v. low-income/working class consumption).

The problem introduced by these reductions of the city to specific political and/or economically functional roles can be addressed, in part, through introduction of relational perspectives, like those utilized by Harvey (1996: 248-267) and Massey (1994: 157-173; 2004).  Such perspectives argue that individual processes define their own geographic scales and that the individual or collective agents engaged in such processes interact over multiple indeterminate distances.  In this sense, scales become wholly relativized in reference to specific processes, the geographic dimensions of which may be constantly in flux.  To take this logic a step further, in the manner advanced by Graham and Healey (1999) and Amin (2002), in the limit, as economic, political, and cultural processes lose any spatial fixity under the influence of technological change and enhanced interregional mobility, the mere notion of scale, per se, becomes an impediment to characterizing the fluidity of social interactions over multiple, simultaneous and indeterminate distances.

Neither of these takes on a relational geography really defines, in any strict sense, the functional role of cities relative to other spatial forms.  Rather, both representations of relational logic advance a critique against the reification of functional roles assigned to particular geographic entities, like the city or the region or territorial/nation-state.  For example, collective agents of production contained by a firm engage in commodity production within a given city, through which they interact with suppliers of raw materials, directly and indirectly over multiple distances internal and external to the city, and they interact with consumers internal and/or external to the city.  Other firms within the same city may undertake certain stages of a production process completed at other facilities of the same firm outside of the city, but, perhaps, within the larger region containing the city.  Individual consumers in the city, in the process, among other things, of reproducing their labor power, consume certain commodities produced within the city, other commodities produced outside of the city and subsequently imported (intra- or interregionally), and some non-commodified goods and services (e.g. enjoyment of tax-financed public parks). 

The processes represented here define numerous chains or networks of processes stretched out to indeterminate and, possibly, changing distances in space, in such a way that each process defines its own scale and individual or collective agents engage in networked processes at multiple scales, often simultaneously.  The point is that the city, as a spatial form, internalizes connections with a wide range of networked processes and internalizes a wide variety of processes (consumption as well as production, exchange, and multifarious non-economic processes) occurring entirely within the city.  None of these processes can uniquely specify the functional role of the city. 

To summarize, I regard this approach to the city as highly important because of its prevalence in contemporary accounts in economic geography and, additionally, because the account that I will advance on cities relative to globalization will take seriously questions of scale, in relation to the processes contained by cities.  In this regard, my account will reflect the sort of relational understanding of scale through which geographical entities like the city embody processes with diverse, relativized scales.  I, thus, mean to extract from this approach the importance of situating cities geographically while, in the process, not producing a theory that reifies the functional role of cities or any other geographic entity. 

7.  The City as a Control Point for Transnational Capitalist Firms

This approach proceeds a step beyond the assertion that cities play important functional roles in a hierarchy of geographical scales to concentrate on one particular set of functional roles: the exercise of control over interregionally dispersed units of capitalist production and the accumulation and processing of information necessary to facilitate such control.  I associate the theorization of cities as control points with the world city hypothesis (Friedmann and Wolff, 1982; Friedmann, 1986), the theory of global cities (Sassen, 2001), and the theory of world city network (Taylor, 2004).  The approach will be the focus of the critique that I develop in chapter 4, but I intend to briefly introduce some of the contours of the theory here. 

            In general, theorizations of cities as control points build from a given image of capitalist world economies introduced by dependency and world systems theories in the 1960s and 1970s.  In particular, at least until most recently, theorists in this approach have accepted a conception of the world economy differentiated through the intentional construction by capitalist firms of core, peripheral, and semi-peripheral/intermediate regions through differentiated patterns of capital accumulation (e.g. Taylor, 1995).  Taking this image of the world economy as their point of departure, theories inquire into the actual geographical dispersion of transnational capitalist firms and, in particular, their control and coordination apparatuses.  The approach, thus, attempts to clearly delineate commodity producing activities from non-productive activities like finance, marketing, legal services, and information network management, identifying the latter range of activities as key to the capacity of transnational firms both to compete against other transnational firms and to exercise control over their own geographically dispersed productive activities. 

The point of argument here is that, even to the extent that technological change facilitates the physical/geographic reorganization of commodity production, depositing certain production processes that had been located in core economies into the semi-periphery, the capacity to exercise control and coordination of broadly dispersed production processes continuously resides in the global core economies.  Non-productive activities, accordingly, tend to agglomerate in a range of cities in core economic regions because certain characteristics of these cities correspond to the requirements of these processes (e.g. high-income, culturally diverse consumption opportunities and gentrified living environments for labor; access to technologically advanced telecommunications infrastructures for information transfer; access to reserves of highly qualified labor, with state and/or privately financed educational resources capable of reproducing labor supplies over extended periods; cooperative interaction between firms and the state in provision of needed infrastructures; etc.).  In this regard, the larger project of this approach concerns the identification of cities functioning as control points and, further, articulation of connections between individual firms and/or units in transnational commodity producing firms specializing in non-productive control and coordination activities in these cities.

A key contrast here, again, concerns differences with the approach of the regional economy theorists, who privilege analyses of the geographies of commodity production rather than those of control and coordination, per se.  To the extent that such a distinction can be identified between theorists who privilege one focus relative to the other, a question arises as to how the control and coordination theorists treat the geographic dispersal of commodity production and why this problem can be relegated to a level of secondary importance.  In this respect, the control and coordination theorists tend to embrace a vision of production in which post-Fordist production methods (e.g. “just-in-time” inventory control; development of subcontracting networks; quality force team management) enable transnational firms to maintain highly fluid management of production processes and avoid accumulation of industrial fixed capital anchored in particular geographic locations for long periods of time.  In place of a Fordist economic geography of industrial agglomeration by mass producing firms in places like Detroit, the control and coordination theorists (and, to some extent, many regional economy theorists) elevate the importance of flexible, networked, geographically-dispersed production processes (Dicken, 2003; Castells, 2000A: 255-267).  In general, the onus is placed on production of information as a key component in reducing the costs of physical commodity production and eliminating trial and error from the management of widely dispersed production sites, a focus that emerges strongly from Castells’ (2000A; 2000B) vision of network society.

            A very important set of contrasts within the approach of the control and coordination theorists involves the role of geographically fixed infrastructures in facilitating global command and control over production processes.  Part of the originality of Sassen’s global cities thesis, for example, lay in her emphasis on spatially fixed communications and information technology infrastructures required to facilitate global communications between control and commodity producing units in transnational firms or, more to the point of her argument, between geographically concentrated, specialized advanced producer service firms and geographically dispersed client firms (Sassen, 2001: 90-126).  Spatial fixity of infrastructures implies that, notwithstanding the possibilities for widely dispersing production units and incorporation of much greater degrees of flexibility in locational decisions, command functions, which are dependent on technological infrastructures like point-to-point local fiber optic broadband hardware, must be relatively frozen in space.  In this regard, Sassen has identified the pronounced concentrations of advanced producer service/control processes in New York, London, and Tokyo as characteristic to the identification of global cities, an echelon of economic dominance limited to these particular spaces. 

By contrast, other theorists, especially Taylor and the world city network theorists, have gone farther in advancing Castells’ space of flows concept (2000A: 440-448), emphasizing not fixity but the enhanced velocity of communications flows from control points to dispersed production units.  To delineate the terms of the debate between fixity and networked flow evident in these contrasting positions, Castells’ own response to Sassen’s definition of the global city concept was to reappropriate this terminology, arguing:

The global city, in any strict analytical sense, is not any particular city.  And empirically it extends to spaces located in many cities around the world, some extra-large, others large, and still others not so large.  The global city is made of territories that in different cities ensure the management of the global economy and global information networks (2000B: 697).

Thus, for Castells, the global city concept does not describe a place but a connected network of places, all of which can be reduced to subsets of larger cities and metropolitan regions, through which information flow and control over the global capitalist economy is facilitated. 

Taylor et al (2008) argue similarly, in regard to Massey’s theorization of the London City economy as constitutive of a World City (Massey, 2007).  Massey, like Sassen, insists, in part, on the relevance of fixity/place, asserting, in particular, that places like London City internalize their connections to other places through the “constitutive interrelatedness” (2007: 177-187; 2005: 188-195) of economic, political, and cultural processes stretching out across space.  Taylor et al, however, suggest that the substance of Massey’s argument overemphasizes place because her account and her further project of developing a “geography of responsibility” for the inequalities constructed by economic processes in London City do not recognize the networked interrelatedness of London, New York, and many other cities through which control is exercised.  Rather than facilitating a meaningful basis for radical challenges to global inequalities, they imply that Massey’s account reifies the power exercised from a single place while failing to situate that power in relation to the totality of control network nodes.  They argue, thus, “the power of world city-ness is in the networks not the places” (Taylor et al, 2008: 414).         

           
              In some respect, debates over the emphasis on place rather than flow/network in relational geographies, like that of Massey, extend beyond the limited purposes that I have in introducing this approach.  It suffices to say that, for Massey and Sassen, on the one hand, and for Castells and Taylor, on the other, cities concentrate the capacity to control the global capitalist economy.  This power can either be seen in ways that prioritize the specific capacities of individual sites in space to exercise control or it can be seen as a quality of a broader network of sites.  In either sense, accounts in this approach reflect back upon Lefebvre’s initial characterizations of the global city (2003: 169-170) and, beyond Lefebvre, to Marx and Engels’ (1975B: 488) characterization of the dominance of towns/industry over the pre-industrial countryside.  In contemporary capitalism, the dominance of spatially concentrated industrial society over nature is, however, superseded by the domination over industry capitalism by advanced producer services (finance, marketing, corporate law, research, and, above all, information technology management), through which the global capitalist economy has been restructured since the 1970s.  If only because such a reading is implied by this approach to the city, theorists of control and coordination need seriously to be read in connection to the Marxian tradition, even to the extent that some make no explicit appeals to the larger body of Marxian theory.