Cities as Connectors
This section constitutes the beginning of my theorization of the city as a spatial form, emanating from the preceding theorization of networks. Two introductory points need to be advanced in making the transition in this section from the ontological abstraction of networks to develop a relatively concrete account on the city. First, reiterating the consequences of approaching the city from a framework of ontological overdetermination and, further, from an epistemological position conceived as performative, in the sense described in chapter 1, this project rejects the notion that any objective definition of the city can be articulated by theory or analysis. I advance a definition of the city in this and the succeeding sections of this chapter with the explicit intention of articulating persuasive arguments on the city that can inform an analysis of heterogeneous class structures in cities. In this respect, I mean to be quite explicit in conceding the irresolvable complexity of the city as a spatial form against which my theoretic intervention is strictly partial and partisan in its aims. There can be no objective general theory of the city.
Second, the material in this and the next section seek to define characteristics of the city related to its connections to processes external to its boundaries. Disaggregating this conception of a relationship between cities and the outside requires that I inquire into the notion of the city as a bounded form with a well-defined interior and exterior. Further, in holding to the conception of the networked spatio-temporality of processes introduced in the previous section, it requires that I inquire into the form of transmission vehicles/nodes and pathways connecting relatively stationary network nodes contained by the city to those external to its boundaries. These two tasks will be dealt with in this section.
Defining Boundaries
The theoretic conception of the city that I will advance in this project presumes a well-defined interior and exterior and, further, a defined regional geography constituting space that might be labeled a metropolitan hinterland. Such an image, in turn, presumes the existence of boundaries, capable to establishing a coherent separation of that which is inside the city from that which is outside. The city, in this sense, exists as a bounded spatial form, but the introduction of boundaries raises two sources of ambiguity that I must resolve. First, what kind of boundaries am I introducing to delimit the city? Second, insofar as the city is a theoretic articulation and theory is conceived in performative terms, why am I articulating a bounded city as opposed to a city conceived as an open, unbounded spatial form?
In responding to the first of these ambiguities, the boundaries of the city that I have in mind are not the boundaries drawn by political processes defining the spatio-juridical limits of authority for particular political organizations (e.g. municipal or regional/metropolitan governments). Acknowledging the validity of such a definition of boundaries and their importance to theoretic/analytic accounts attempting to come to terms with questions involving the exercise of political authority in addressing problems like regional economic development or ecological waste control, such a reduction of boundaries to those drawn by political processes will not address the particular needs of this theoretic account. Specifically, this account seeks to answer questions concerning the spatio-temporality of class structures (i.e. the spatio-temporal dispersion of class networks). In particular, when can I assert that a particular spatial agglomeration of class processes and inter-connected class structures is contained by some spatial form called a city? If I assert that the conception of the city as a container, with defined boundaries, must, in some way, be determined by all of the processes it contains, then I should be able to articulate a theoretic account linking the boundedness of the city to its containment of class processes. In what sense can the city, therefore, be said to be bounded with respect to class processes? This is the question I must answer.
The conception of boundedness with respect to class processes that I will advance here borrows, in part, from basic conceptions of spatial economy, concerning, in particular, agglomeration economies. The understanding of the economic theory of agglomerations from which I am proceeding subsumes a wide range of divergent theories from Von Thünen’s (1966) abstract theorization’s on the spatial distribution of economic processes in isolated agrarian economies, to Alfred Weber’s (1929) theories of industrial location, Isard’s (1972) attempt to synthesize diverse, mostly German, strains of location theory into a general theory of location, and, most recently, Krugman’s (1991; Fujita et al., 2000) efforts to develop a Neoclassical theory of geographical economics based on monopolistically competitive pricing models. My primary interest, however, is with central place theory, developed separately in works by Christaller (1966) and Lösch (1967), which posits, with varying degrees of specification, an account of the relationship between cities and their peripheral hinterlands. My use of central place theory as a “a classification scheme, a way of organizing our perceptions” (Fujita et al., 2000:27) of spatial economic organization runs counter to the purposes embodied in most recent Neoclassical strands of geographical economics, but, generally, will not hinder the manner that I will incorporate it, as an implicit background, into an explanation of the city.
My intention, in borrowing the basic idea of agglomeration economies, is not to dabble in the sorts of abstract Neoclassical assumptions, mathematical general equilibrium-oriented models of perfect or monopolistic competition, and stochastic perturbations necessary to distribute homogeneous firms unevenly across a flat plain with homogeneous characteristics. I, likewise, do not intend to engage in micro-founded analyses to determine how individual agents, displaying characteristic features of rational choice, produce agglomerative patterns. Rather, I intend, simply, to argue that, however such distributions arise, a dense grouping of economic processes, with local connections to a range of other non-economic processes, in a particular, arbitrarily compact space constitutes a spatial form that I will label a city.
In its simplest terms, a city, within this framework, constitutes a basin of attraction for economic processes. Such basins of attraction may arise, in part, from the effects of economies of scale or scope in the regional agglomeration of agents in economic production (e.g. firms), reducing average production costs per unit of output. One source of scale/scope economies may arise from minimization of transportation expenditures between sites of production in integrated relations of supply/consumption between producers. Agglomeration of production agents on this basis, further, generates a centripetal pull of consuming agents (e.g. households) toward the basin of attraction, reinforcing the advantages of central location in the basin by making it a center for (market or non-market) distribution and consumption. This centripetal pull generates relatively central and peripheral spaces of economic processes.
On the other hand, borrowing from a well developed Marxist literature on the spatial effects from imposition of differential rent (Marx, 1991: 779-811[1]; Harvey, 1973: 176-194), the centripetal pull of a basin of attraction must be unevenly balanced, relative to individual producing and consuming economic agents, by a centrifugal push. Rent arises, in this circumstance, because external economies/reduced average production and distribution costs generate super profits, relative to socially average/normal profit rates, for agents of production located in or near the basin of attraction and the capacity for private landholding and leasing enables landholders to extract these super profits as a condition of providing advantageous locations. Perfect extraction of super profits as differential rent constitutes an unnecessary assumption in this circumstance. It suffices to argue that any imposition of rents on producing or consuming (e.g. on favorably located residential space) will generate some degree of centrifugal pressure.
In this regard, a kind of spatial dialectic must operate, in which the possibility for economic advantages from location close to the basin of attraction (i.e. external economies of agglomeration in minimization of distance to distribution/market exchange sites in the basin of attraction) are unevenly counterbalanced by the imposition of rents and the consequent extraction of super profits from producing and consuming economic agents. This interplay of centripetal and centrifugal pressures around basins of attraction for economic processes precedes from a general assumption, evident in both Neoclassical and Marxian approaches to urban development, that competitive, cost-minimizing factors (e.g. relative to transportation costs) should drive the location decisions of firms and households.[2] The image of space generated by this kind of theorizing appears as a field of unevenly distributed economic agents, in which some corners of space exhibit dense concentrations of firms (and activities, like market exchange, associated with the presence of firms) and consuming agents, and other areas appear relatively empty.[3]
If I begin from this initial, abstract image of agglomeration economies, in which, to apply terminology consistent with the Marxian class analytical lexicon, some relatively dense collection of class processes, producing, appropriating, distributing, and receiving quantities of surplus labor, occupies the relatively compact space of a basin of attraction, then I can, further, generate an abstract image of an outside, of spaces that are not contained within such an agglomeration. Strictly speaking, such an image must consist of two general types of spaces: spaces in which the density of economic processes across the same spatial area is relatively lower and spaces in which the density of economic processes across the same spatial area is equal or relatively higher. At this level of abstraction, the former types of spaces might be labeled non-urban and the latter types might constitute other cities.
Proceeding from the assertion that what separates a city from other cities are intervening fields of non-urban space, cities, in this perspective, must be bounded by some form of gradient across which the density of economic processes distributed for a given area declines. Simultaneously, such a gradient must constitute a register of average differences in the imposition of differential rent, such that rental rates, on average, should be expected to decline directly with distance from the basin of attraction. Such gradients exhibit arbitrarily steep declines in the density of economic processes and rental rates in which the steepness may be continuous or discontinuous. If the separation between a city and its outside is constituted by a relatively steady and continuous or a relatively abrupt and disjunctive decline in the density of economic processes separating the center from its periphery, then the notion of a boundary must become as amorphous or as well defined as the gradient against which densities decline. The visual analogy to be drawn in conveying the mapped image of the city as a relatively dense economic center with an amorphous downward sloping gradient in all directions is that of a topographic surface with contour lines designating changes in altitude (e.g. from the summit of a mountain to its base). Such surface mappings may represent long continuous slopes or the presence of an abrupt precipice.
This image of boundedness may, further, be complicated if economic processes are concentrated in multiple, closely grouped localities separated by intervening spaces with relatively lower densities of economic processes, representing a multi-polar/multi-centered city whose character as an integrated spatial form would be constituted by the interconnection of its multiple basins of attraction for economic processes. Such cities would contain cleavages characterized by lower densities of economic processes, bordering basins of attraction and opening out into spaces of successively lower densities in geographic transition to the metropolitan periphery. Thus, the larger geography of a multi-polar city constitutes a discontinuous surface of mixed, alternating densities of economic processes bounded by a single, all encompassing gradient of indeterminate slope/steepness. In this sense, the boundedness of cities, as economic agglomerations, by gradients in relation to spaces with lower densities of economic processes applies both to simple agglomerations with a single basin of attraction and to integrated forms with multiple, interspersed basins of attraction.
This introductory conception of the city as an agglomeration of economic processes, and, in particular, class processes, does not present an obvious connection to the theory of networks advanced in the previous section. More pointedly, it suggests that the city exists as an economic interior separated from its outside, if not by walls or jurisdictional boundaries than by a declining density of economic processes. This is not the condition in which I intend to leave the problem of defining boundaries. On the contrary, I want to reframe the city, as an agglomeration of economic processes, in order to propose its relatedness to the outside, suggestive of permeable boundaries. At this point in my argument, I need to reintroduce the ontology and spatio-temporality of structures and inquire into how networked processes transcend individual cities.
It may be the case that a particular economic organization defined by a class structure (i.e. a firm) has all of the sites of its class processes (i.e. its surplus production, appropriation/distribution, and receiving nodes) located in the same agglomeration, alongside the sites of numerous other class processes belonging to other class structures. It is also, however, possible that the class processes in a given class structured organization will have spatially dispersed sites, with certain surplus production processes occurring in one agglomeration, other production processes occurring at sites in the non-urban periphery/hinterland of the agglomeration, the organization’s headquarters facility (a site for receiving and distributing surplus) in an entirely different agglomeration separated from the production sites by hundreds of miles, and recipients of surplus labor, producing a range of conditions of existence for the surplus production process, dispersed across dozens of different sites in many different agglomerations and non-urban locations.
If the organization of surplus labor is networked, in this manner, across multiple agglomerations, then there can be no question that the economic processes constituting the city as an agglomeration exist in continuous interaction with the city’s outside. The geography of the city is a relational geography. Every economic process contained by an agglomeration exists in a structural and spatio-temporal relationship to other processes within the agglomeration and to processes outside of it, in peripheral non-urban space/hinterlands and in other cities. The gradient that constitutes a city’s boundary, relative to economic processes, must, therefore, be a permeable boundary traversed by network pathways open to the flow of people, physical use values, and information by a variety of relatively mobile transmission vehicles. The permeable nature of the city’s boundary gradient and the capacity of networks to transcend the gradient implies, further, that the city may exist as both an agglomeration of economic processes and as the spatial milieu through which those processes become connected to other processes.
The definition of boundaries that I am, thus, advancing in this section is represented by a gradient, along which the density of economic processes occurring across a particular geography declines with distance from agglomerative centers/basins of attraction of economic processes, identified with cities. Such a gradient may exhibit a smooth or a disjunctive decline. Further, cities may contain a single basin of attraction or multiple basins of attraction interspersed by internal gradients, constituting multi-polar cities. The economic processes, including class processes in the organization of surplus labor, contained by cities, lastly, do not exist in isolation, but manifest network connections that will generally extend outside of the city. Thus, the city, itself, must be understood, in part, as an agglomeration of economic processes organized into structures of processes and, spatio-temporally, networks. In view of the relational character of the networked economic processes, the city is constituted not only by the agglomeration of economic processes internal to its boundary gradient, but also by the external processes to which these internal economic processes are connected across the permeable space of the boundary gradient.
The remaining question that I must answer before moving forward concerns why I want to theorize the city as a bounded form, however permeable to penetration of its boundaries and determination from its outside. The simple answer to this question is that I want to apply some conception of place through which I can differentiate cities from their non-urban hinterlands and from other cities. Elaborating, I am trying to steer a middle course between two possible alternative conceptions of place in which, on the one hand, the internal development of place overwhelms its connectedness to its outside, and, on the other hand, the entire existence of place is constituted by its outside. In the former approach, the boundaries of the city entirely inhibit its capacity to be continuously transformed by processes in other places. In the latter approach, the boundaries of the city become non-existent and the city, itself, becomes a pure, placeless conduit for external flows of people, of commodities, and of information. In relation to both extremes, the approach to boundedness that I seek to advance might be described as a relational conception of place, along the same lines as Massey’s understanding of a “global sense of place” (1994: 146-156). In articulating this idea, Massey argues at length that:
(t)he globalization of social relations is yet another source of (the reproduction of) geographical uneven development, and thus of the uniqueness of place. There is the specificity of place that derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations. There is the fact that this very mixture together in one place may produce effects which would not have happened otherwise. And finally, all these relations interact with and take a further element of specificity from the accumulated history of a place, with that history itself imagined as the product of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world (1994: 156).
In the terms that I mean to describe the city and its boundaries, it would make little sense to argue that the identity of a place is constituted as a “mixture of wider and more local social relations” in the absence of some means to differentiate a geographic locality from its outside, however amorphous the boundary is between the local and the non-local. More generally, a relational conception of place must, in some way, comprehend the construction of a place through its myriad economic and non-economic processual relationships to its outside without simultaneously dissolving it into a geography of flows between places. That is to say, there must be an inside of processes with which the outside relates. My emphasis on networked processes seeks to address this need to define the city as a place constructed in relation to other places but with a definite internal existence of its own.
Transitional Nodes and Short and Long Range Connections
If the processes contained by the economic agglomeration that I will label the city are themselves contained by structures that constitute spatio-temporal networks, then the question further arises concerning how relatively stationary network nodes in the city connect with other relatively stationary nodes outside of its boundary gradient. At an abstract level, network theory, in the tradition of ANT, requires that there must be some transmission vehicle that is, itself, a node in the network. In particular, Latour (1987: 227) interjects the conception of immutable mobiles, describing objects in transmission in Euclidean space (or, across historical temporality[4]) that retain their configurations as actors within a network. The underlying principle for this conception is that the space of an actor network is not Euclidean/Cartesian[5] space – actor network space is a relational space constituted by the hybrid connections of actors.
Using a popular metaphor introduced by Law (1986), a Fifteenth century Portuguese ship constitutes a network of human and non-human actors that, to the extent that none of its pieces are removed or their particular mobilizations fail to achieve a desired end, retains its shape while navigating the Cartesian space from Lisbon to Calicut (Law and Mol, 2001: 611-612). The ship is, therefore, mobile in Cartesian space but immutable/immobile with respect to the configuration of actors constituted both by the ship’s internal parts and all other actors facilitating the processes by which its transmission through Cartesian space occurs (e.g. the financiers, merchants on both terminal ends, navigational knowledge embodied in practical experience and learning, favorable climate conditions, absence of intervening hostile attack, etc…). The actor network maintains an existence that can be regarded, in terms of Cartesian mappings of space, as placeless. Rather, the spatiality of actor networks is topological, implying that the technologies configuring transmission vehicles fold and otherwise displace any universal set of measurement between points in Cartesian space, enabling objects in transmission to hold their integrity as objects, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, transform the temporal distance connecting points in Cartesian space (i.e. “to annihilate (Cartesian) space by time,” to compress space-time) (Marx, 1993: 524-525; Harvey, 1989A).
At the outset, I want to acknowledge that there is something to this understanding of the relational properties of network space and the necessity of reconsidering the intercourse between the spatio-temporality of networks and the spatiality of geographical mappings. If I am going to continue to take seriously the basic ontological notion that space and time are the dimensions of processes, then no geographical mapping, asserting objective and universal validity, can trump a relational analysis on the connection between processes separated by distance and time and connected, as mutually constitutive processes, by a transmission process. In this sense, the characteristics of the transmission process and, in particular, its capacity to achieve topological transformations of space-time to produce a different network spatio-temporality is critical.
Interpreting these insights with respect to my developing definition of the city, network nodes contained by the city and connected to points outside of the city via transmission processes must exist in heterogeneous, complex relationships with Cartesian mapped space. Every kind of different transmission process bends space-time in a particular, unique way to facilitate the transmission of objects and effects from every networked process contained by the city. Consequently, the city exists as a complex intersection of all these transmission processes with their particular, broadly heterogeneous relational network mappings.
This image of the city as an area in Cartesian space where space-time becomes bent in myriad different ways by connection to the outside represents an alternative relationship to Cartesian space from that implied by my consideration of the boundary gradient. The gradient represents a diminution of the concentration of economic processes along an interval from a given basin of attraction, reflected in a certain expanse of Cartesian space. Its mapping is relational but it maps the capacity of the city to be distinct from other places on its outside. The relational mappings of networks with transmission processes emanating from the city penetrate the boundary gradient as if it was not there precisely because they manifest a different kind of intercourse with Cartesian space from that of the gradient. I am, thus, dealing presently with three distinct kinds of relational space in describing the city and speculating on the relationships between each: the space of geographical surface mappings (Cartesian space)[6]; the topological space-time of networks; and the variable quantitatively imprinted surface mapping of basins of attraction and gradients relative to the density of economic processes. Cities exist simultaneously in all three forms of relational space, and the intercourse between these forms of relational space constitutes the particular position of the city in relation to its outside.
At present, focusing in particular on the topological space-time of networks, I want to argue that there are some characteristics of the transmission processes emanating from the city that makes cities different from non-urban space, particularly those of their hinterlands. Specifically, certain transmission processes emanating from the city must transform distances in Cartesian space in a relatively more radical fashion than most transmission processes emanating from non-urban spaces. That is to say, network connections emanating from cities must be able to extend over longer distances and/or accelerate the movement of objects or effects over longer distances relative to transmission processes emanating from non-urban space. The argument is simply that space-time compression, as the capacity to reduce the distance between two areas in Cartesian space by accelerating the rate of movement along the pathway, is a process primarily associated with cities. I mean to take it a step further, however, and to argue that space-time compression is a definitive characteristic of the city – that a city is not a city if transmission processes emanating from it do not compress space-time in radical ways. This argument relies, in particular, on the idea that the transmission processes connecting stationary nodes in cities to stationary nodes in their hinterlands take a particular form that is, in relative terms, different from the transmission processes connecting two different cities.
In considering here the transmissions of networked processes, I am speaking, in particular, of the transportation of material objects/physical use values and people and about the communication of information over relatively long distances. Such transmissions are certainly not exhaustive of the effects generated by material processes, but they are a highly evident starting point for discussing space-time compression. Reasons exist why particular processes involved in long distance transportation and communications might be regionally concentrated in cities.
First, evaluated both within from Marxian and Neoclassical spatial economic perspectives and from the perspective of network theory, the spatial displacement of use values, people, and information is costly. Resources must be expended to move material objects from one point in Cartesian space to another. From a spatial economic perspective, Isard (1972: 79) expresses this costliness in reference to transport inputs, denoting the quantity of resources necessary to move a unit weight over a unit distance. No such concept is explicitly developed in Marx’s (1992: 225-229) consideration of the costs of transportation, but his analysis demonstrates the same concerns with “cubic content and weight” in addition to the distance of movements. A governing component in both these considerations involves the technologies employed in the transportation process and their role in determining the productivity of the transportation industry, expressed in its capacity to displace unit distances in Cartesian space at progressively accelerated rates.
Proceeding with a disaggregation of transportation costs from Marxian value framework, the transportation process combines elements of fixed (e.g. transportation vehicles) and circulating (e.g. fuel) constant capital and variable capital (i.e. labor power) in order to directly facilitate the transmission of materials in Cartesian space. On the other hand, another component exists to be accounted for, in reference to the particular technologies of transportation. Specifically, transportation and communication processes make use of specific, dedicated pathways, the signature of which is left by investment in infrastructure (e.g. rail systems, telephonic and electrical grids, water and waste movement systems, etc.). Such infrastructures, as fixed constant capital components, must be produced and, periodically, reproduced in order to successfully execute transportation and communication processes. Sometimes firms engaged in transportation and communications processes undertake these investments in infrastructure, while others are collectivized through states. Infrastructures, moreover, tend to be embedded in Cartesian space. Once constructed, a road system or an electrical grid holds to a fixed geography, against which outlying spurs can be laid but larger territorial displacements of the underlying backbone are impossible. In this sense, the fixed Cartesian geography of transportation/communications infrastructures is critically important.[7]
Disaggregating transportation and communications processes, again, in reference to network theory, the same above distinction between movement and fixed infrastructure remains relevant. First, transmissions, as mobile processes, involve continuous movements, displacing certain distances between places in Cartesian space at a particular, relatively constant temporal rate. That is to say, a railcar may move at an average speed of 55 miles per hour on a continuous rail line from Chicago to Detroit. Such a rate is facilitated by a particular transportation technology, the dedicated infrastructural pathways on which technologies are employed, and a range of other physical and social processes that overdetermine the vehicle’s rate of movement along the pathways.
On the other hand, transmission processes may involve moments of transition between particular transportation/communications vehicles, facilitating movement along distinct, dedicated transmission pathways. An example of this transition process might involve removal of freight from a railcar to an on-road vehicle, reflecting different potential average rates of movement between places along different infrastructure pathways. Such transitions take place at critical points in infrastructure systems that I will alternately label transitional nodes or access points (e.g. rail yards, container ports, air hubs, satellite communications relays, entry/exit points for freeway systems) that may be more costly to produce than components in infrastructure systems that facilitate continuous movement (e.g. stretches of road, rail, or fiber optic cables). Transmission processes, particularly those involving transport and communications, may, thus, integrate distinct relatively stationary (transitional) and relatively mobile (continuous movement) nodes. The integration of both sets of processes is required for the successful execution of a transmission across Cartesian space because the inability to utilize a transitional node/access point in a privileged/exclusive infrastructure pathway implies exclusion from mobile transmission processes along the pathway. In this sense, the location of access points, as fixed/embedded infrastructural components, together with the relative costliness of developing such access points, regulates, to an important extent, the capacity of network transmission processes to bend space-time.
Again, this understanding of network concepts necessarily implies that large expanses of Cartesian space, even in close proximity to the basin of attraction, may be excluded from access to transmission infrastructures by their inability to utilize access points. For example, freeways may facilitate more rapid road based transportation. They may, likewise, saturate the geographic landscape of cities and rudely slice through the bucolic scenery of rural pastures, imprinting on quiet countrysides the image of industrial society. But, notwithstanding the incidental inconveniences attendant to streams of automobile traffic, areas bisected by freeways that lack entry and exit points cannot make use of such infrastructures. At all scales of transmission (intra-regional and interregional), the configuration of diverse infrastructure pathways into “hubs,” “spokes,” and “arteries” with limited access points generates tunnel effects (Graham and Marvin, 2008: 201), through which the experience of space-time compression in everyday life varies widely based on the access or exclusion of individuals and communities from proximate transmission pathways. Existence and proximity to a pathway capable of bending space-time neither implies the existence of the technological means to traverse it or, even the capacity to enter circulation.
Following the arguments on a spatial dialectic of centripetal and centrifugal pressures from the previous sub-section, the location of dedicated infrastructural pathways and access points in a given city region must both constitute, in part, the balance of agglomerative economies and differential rents, relative to the basin of attraction, and be constituted, in part, by this balance of attractive and repulsive forces. Space in close proximity to intra-regional transportation/communications corridors and, in particular, access points must command higher quantities of differential rent because the capacity to access transmission media that will undermine the friction of distance across Cartesian space confers the potential for super profit in intra-regional exchange. On the other hand, private or state investors in transmission infrastructures must negotiate pre-existing landscapes of agglomeration and rental rates in the production of new infrastructure and the replacement of existing infrastructure. These issues combine with larger questions concerning the capacity of specific transmission technologies to bend space-time and the compatibility of multiple technological vehicles on a given, dedicated infrastructure pathway (e.g. the capacity of a rail system to accept new, higher speed vehicles without making substantial changes to existing tracks).
The discussion of transmission processes, to this point, has largely concerned intra-regional connections in the relationship of a city to its regional hinterlands, alluding to the capacity of transport and communications infrastructures to allow economic processes to escape from central basins of attraction because intra-regional transport and communications technologies allow, particularly, commodity producing firms in the hinterlands to bend space-time in transporting commodities to city-based sites of market exchange. In this manner, cities, as economic basins of attraction, must constitute the terminal points for diverse, radial transmission pathways emanating from points in their hinterlands. Further, transmission pathways in close proximity to a city may be configured for lateral transmissions, connecting separate radial pathways to form “beltway” infrastructures of varying densities. In some cases, these infrastructures may carve small, uneven, but clearly evident, radial corridors through the regional landscape, with highly concentrated access points in close proximity to the city and profuse lateral connections (e.g. freeway road systems, rail systems). In other cases, the profusion of radial and lateral interconnections, especially in proximity to the city, is so dense, that infrastructures appear to completely saturate the landscape (e.g. landline telephone, fiber optic cable, and water transportation systems), with profuse, but by no means universally or evenly dispersed, access points. In either case, the city constitutes a space in which transmission pathways and access points, using all available technologies for intra-regional transmissions, get pulled together.
If a city is the place where all of the network pathways within a particular region get pulled together, then it may also be the place where intra-regional pathways link to transitional nodes/access points for interregional transmission pathways over longer distances. Whether or not the city undertakes this role depends, in part, on the costliness of transmission infrastructures and, in particular, of access points. If infrastructure access points for long distance transmissions, like container ports for long distance freight transportation or satellite communications relay infrastructures, are especially costly to construct, then it may be impractical to construct multiple such access points within a region. Given this condition, it is conceivable that such access points could be constructed anywhere within the region. However, if interregional access points were located in close proximity to the city, in a location where they intersected radial and lateral intra-regional transmission pathways, then the centrality of interregional access points would minimize the costs to complete transmissions to economic process nodes throughout the region. If the cost and locational conditions alluded to here obtain, then, limiting the terms of this argument to consideration of transmission infrastructure access points/transitional nodes, interregional transmission capacity would be largely concentrated within or in close proximity to cities.
On the other hand, the placement of access points/transitional nodes constitutes an important process in reshaping a regional geography and, in particular, in shaping a region’s interaction with other regions. Any space where access points to interregional transmission pathways are placed may develop into a basin of attraction for economic processes oriented toward interregional distribution/exchange. Such possibilities stimulate local demands for infrastructure investments in the construction or renovation of roadways, air facilities, and other transportation/communications infrastructures. Whether the placements of infrastructure succeed in stimulating aggregation economies, opportunities for super profit, and extraction of differential rent depends, however, on a long list of other economic, political, cultural, and physical processes. Jacobs’ (1984: 105-123) criticisms of the large-scale infrastructure investments in regions lacking economically dynamic cities (e.g. the Tennessee Valley Authority), in particular, demonstrate why the placement of transmission infrastructures outside of cities may not produce viable basins of attraction. Consequently, the argument advanced in this section, oriented strongly toward the interregional connectivity of cities as one of their defining characteristics, cannot be abstracted from the arguments to follow on the internal economic dynamics of cities as if the externally connective characteristics of cities solely determined their existence.
Connecting the relatively abstract considerations of topological network space-time above to relatively concrete considerations of transportation/communications infrastructures in regions with cities, the existence of a city must imply the capacity for connections to local points and to other regions by means of technologies that will reshape the way space-time is manifest in transmission processes. This image of space-time compression through the city accepts, in part, Virilio’s (Virilio and Lotringer, 1997: 66) contention that the city is a “box full of speeds, a kind of gearshift” such that a property of city space and its particular infrastructural architectures (e.g. satellite relays for instantaneous global wireless communication) is the annihilation of space through transmission technologies, appropriate to radically accelerated movements. As a matter of definition, cities are areas in space where networks from disparate Cartesian geographies get pulled together through local/intra-regional and long distance/interregional transmission technologies. The nature of these technologies changes continuously, but, provided appropriate conditions exist making it prohibitively costly for access points to pathways for radical space-time compressing technologies to be dispersed across non-urban hinterlands, cities must always be the spaces in which these access points will be concentrated.
Summarizing the points that I have sought to argue in this section, the city, as an agglomerative basin of attraction for economic processes, is delimited from its surrounding non-urban hinterland by a gradient along which the density of economic processes declines. Such a gradient may, to some extent, be further represented in reference to differences in rental rates for the use of land, implying that rental rates must decline with distance from city centers. Into this image of a city with static agglomerations of economic processes, I have sought to interject the network theory developed in the previous section to argue that processes contained within the city’s boundary/rental gradient connect to processes in non-urban hinterland areas and to processes in other cities. The former such linkages configure a city’s larger region, inclusive of its hinterlands, as a mesh of network pathways, along which mobile transmission processes enable flows of use values, people, and information.
The latter linkages from the city, configured over longer distances, emanate from access points to longer distance transmission media that radically bend Cartesian space, relative to local/intra-regional network pathway media, consistent, in this sense, with theoretic conceptions of space-time compression. Cities, thus, exist, in a static sense, as amorphously bounded areas in Cartesian space, but they also exist, dynamically, as areas in network topological space-time, within which they contain access points to transmission pathways that actively bend Cartesian space in myriad different ways, reflecting the diversity of network connections continuously forming, breaking down, and dissolving between and through cities. The degree of access in cities to longer distance transmission media constitutes a defining characteristic of cities relative to non-urban space. For the topological space-time of networks, non-urban spaces, including those of hinterlands, exist as Cartesian spaces to be folded over in developing connections between cities. Wherever a network begins, if it is to extend relatively long distances (i.e. outside of a given city-regional space), it must pass through a city. Utilizing this understanding of the role of cities as connectors in networks that extend relatively long distances via transmission processes that bend Cartesian space, I will attempt to articulate a working conception of what will be meant by globalization.[11] In particular, type 1 differential rent, emanating, among other possible sources of extractable super profit, from the location of land in relation to distribution/market exchange sites and access points (discussed below) to privileged pathways for means of transport/communication.
[12]The point, in this regard, is that the location decisions of firms and households exist in a mutually constitutive relationship – the centripetal pressure on firms, relative to basins of attraction, only exists because there is a centripetal pressure on households seeking opportunities to consume use values and, if necessary, to alienate their labor power through market exchange. The relationship between producing and consuming economic agents constitutes a basin of attraction as a site of distribution/exchange, capable of exerting centripetal pull and, therefore, potentiating the extraction of differential rents in inverse proportion to the distance from the basin as a counteracting centrifugal push.
[13] This imagery roughly conforms to the central place theory advanced by Lösch (1967) and modified in Isard’s (1972: 269-281) depiction of a Löschean system under less restrictive abstract assumptions. It is unnecessary and somewhat counterproductive to my project to impose the geometric construction of optimally scaled hexagonal market areas, characteristic of a Löschean system – my intention is not to theorize an economic geography structured by rigidly bounded spaces, however liberally defined in scale, but to theorize the interconnection of networked economic processes across largely permeable boundaries.
[14] The particular context of Latour’s (1987: 226-227) interjection of the immutable mobile concept concerns the assemblage of astronomical data, contemporaneous to the Sixteenth century Danish astronomer Brahe, and Copernican and Ptolemaic theoretic materials in written forms. These sources constitute the assemblage of a network extending across both time (from at least Ptolemy’s time) and space (the contemporaneous space of continental Europe), in forms capable of being mobilized by Brahe to produce accurate planetary mappings.
[15] In using this terminology, I am alluding to mapped geographic space that can be subjected to a fixed system of Cartesian coordinate (XYZ-dimensional) mapping in which points or fields can be measured or connected in accordance with the rules of Euclidean geometry (spaces that can be treated as if they were flat, non-spherical surfaces). Henceforth, I will simply regard this as Cartesian space, in part, because the term appears to generalize more, allowing for the use of spherical/non-Euclidean geometric descriptions.
[16] In this regard, Cartesian space must be regarded as a kind of relational space relative to some representation of space through a coordinate system. Notwithstanding any claims to the contrary, such representations are not objective, but theoretically constructed, partial, and partisan. Thus, I will label Cartesian space as a kind of relational space.
[17] Graham and Marvin (2008: 190-202) provide a good summary of political economy perspectives on the relevance of fixed, territorially embedded transmission infrastructures.
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