World City: Why Globalization Makes Cities More Important Than Ever

By James S. Russell with Michael Gallis
Architectural Record, March 2002

We’re all post-industrial now. Or at least that’s the fashionable line. Cities that united people and ideas are becoming anachronistic, the reasoning goes, so we should expect to work from anywhere and watch old cities shrivel. Let’s just move on to virtual communities: a self-revitalizing electronic universe of total connectedness. Anyone stuck in a “post-industrial” traffic jam, however, will attest to how naivé it is to expect that electronic communities will soon replace the real thing.

We’re here to argue that in a globalizing age real cities have become more important than ever, but they are taking on new form. The factors that have historically determined the fate of cities–the depth and diversity of their human infrastructure along with the quality and quantity of their connectedness to movement networks (not just electronic ones)–apply today more than ever. Globalization of the marketplace, technological advancement, and the organization of knowledge do form the basis of the 21st-century economy, just as the techno-gurus argue, but this economy is also moving more people, information, and goods over more physical infrastructure than ever before.

The “virtualness” that technology has made possible is not nearly as important as the connectivity–and it is the increasing ways in which we are linked that is causing a new kind of urbanity to emerge that we call “world city.” If you don’t have connectivity, you can’t design athletic shoes in Oregon and make them in Latin America from fabrics woven in Asia out of petrochemicals processed in Texas–and then sell them worldwide.

World city is not a single bloblike urban conurbation seeping over every acre of the globe. But the vast networks of all kinds that girdle the world are so intertwined that they unite existing cities in a single global urban entity. Cities are the hubs in these networks for making, for distributing, and for consuming. They will succeed in the coming century in much the same way they’ve always succeeded–by adapting to evolving networks of connectivity (bottom).

Census data shows that Americans are gathering in the largest metro areas (if not, precisely, in the big cities within those metro areas). That’s because economic growth is occurring in those places that have the depth and diversity of expertise to serve vast and diverse global markets (in terms of education, R&D, health care, culture, arts, sports, and recreation) and the best global connections (air, rail, road, water, telecom). The importance of cities in these networks corresponds to the quality, quantity and diversity of their connectivity. One reason BMW distributes parts in Senatobia, Miss., is its proximity to Memphis’ airports, which Federal Express has turned into one of the busiest freight hubs in the world.

The notion that cities need physical infrastructure more than ever is heartening to architects, because designing what cities are made of is what architects have traditionally done. But the complexities of world city also calls on people who can make abstract notions understandable through visual means and who can pick patterns out of the global information tidal wave.

The patterns our research picks out show that the fast-evolving global network is shaping cities in ways we have largely failed to anticipate, causing urban places to mutate into new forms that we don’t wholly understand and that we certainly have not yet attempted to plan, manage, or design. The collapse of Communism, the gradual integration of China, Russia, and its satellites, along with the growing scale of world enterprise, has begun to make obsolete the idea of trading nations, replacing it with continent-scaled trading blocs. The introduction of a single currency in Europe this year is only the latest evidence of that continent’s integration. Trucks line up for miles at the Texas/Mexico border thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)–which has created a three-country North American trading bloc.

Within these blocs we find a hierarchy of urban hubs. In America, these are not just big cities, nor even big cities and their suburbs. They have morphed into metropolitan regions: multicentered, multi-jurisdictional urban networks, encompassing older cities and suburbs and the suburbanizing hinterlands–the host of smaller towns functionally linked to the metro core. It takes a metropolitan region in today’s economy, since it can offer the scale, diversity, and complexity called for by the global economy: depth in key knowledge-based fields like technology, finance, media, and law; and a substantial infrastructure of educational, medical, research, culture and arts institutions. “Cincinnati” is not just the few dozen square miles within its city limits; it’s really a 60-mile-diameter “market space.” Larger metro areas stretch across hundreds of miles.

No one planned this scale of urban transformation. Indeed, few people yet understand the developing patterns. But these new urban forms create a variety of unintended consequences. In a study of New Jersey, for example, we learned that distribution activities that once took place within a few blocks or a few miles of the vast Elizabeth container-ship docks now occur as far away as Harrisburg, Pa.–160 miles west. These growth eccentricities (and accompanying land-use conflicts and enormous traffic growth) are encouraged by the failure of dozens of cities and three states to understand the consequences of changes in port activities and retail-distribution concepts and the way these affect the region. Thanks to congestion and high land costs in more developed locations, what was once a linear Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington has metastasized into a lattice of big and small centers. They now sprawl over ten states and thousands of highway miles, with profound consequences for affected communities.

It has been convenient to regard urban growth and change as unmanageable or best left to market forces alone. The patterns we are detecting show more dramatic, and potentially damaging effects globalization can have on the places we live, and how important it is to understand and plan for them. Economic entwinement with the world is inevitable for the U.S.–indeed, the nation has benefited enormously from it. World city is the largest form of architecture we make. Are we prepared to design it?

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	World City: Why Globalization Makes Cities More Important Than Ever By James S. Russell with Michael Gallis Architectural Record, March 2002 We’re all post-industrial now. Or at least that’s the fashionable line. Cities that united people and ideas are becoming anachronistic, the reasoning goes, so we should expect to work from anywhere and watch old cities shrivel. Let’s just move on to virtual communities: a self-revitalizing electronic universe of total connectedness. Anyone stuck in a “post-industrial” traffic jam, however, will attest to how naivé it is to expect that electronic communities will soon replace the real thing. We’re here to argue that in a globalizing age real cities have become more important than ever, but they are taking on new form. The factors that have historically determined the fate of cities–the depth and diversity of their human infrastructure along with the quality and quantity of their connectedness to movement networks (not just electronic ones)–apply today more than ever. Globalization of the marketplace, technological advancement, and the organization of knowledge do form the basis of the 21st-century economy, just as the techno-gurus argue, but this economy is also moving more people, information, and goods over more physical infrastructure than ever before. The “virtualness” that technology has made possible is not nearly as important as the connectivity–and it is the increasing ways in which we are linked that is causing a new kind of urbanity to emerge that we call “world city.” If you don’t have connectivity, you can’t design athletic shoes in Oregon and make them in Latin America from fabrics woven in Asia out of petrochemicals processed in Texas–and then sell them worldwide. World city is not a single bloblike urban conurbation seeping over every acre of the globe. But the vast networks of all kinds that girdle the world are so intertwined that they unite existing cities in a single global urban entity. Cities are the hubs in these networks for making, for distributing, and for consuming. They will succeed in the coming century in much the same way they’ve always succeeded–by adapting to evolving networks of connectivity (bottom). Census data shows that Americans are gathering in the largest metro areas (if not, precisely, in the big cities within those metro areas). That’s because economic growth is occurring in those places that have the depth and diversity of expertise to serve vast and diverse global markets (in terms of education, R&D, health care, culture, arts, sports, and recreation) and the best global connections (air, rail, road, water, telecom). The importance of cities in these networks corresponds to the quality, quantity and diversity of their connectivity. One reason BMW distributes parts in Senatobia, Miss., is its proximity to Memphis’ airports, which Federal Express has turned into one of the busiest freight hubs in the world. The notion that cities need physical infrastructure more than ever is heartening to architects, because designing what cities are made of is what architects have traditionally done. But the complexities of world city also calls on people who can make abstract notions understandable through visual means and who can pick patterns out of the global information tidal wave. The patterns our research picks out show that the fast-evolving global network is shaping cities in ways we have largely failed to anticipate, causing urban places to mutate into new forms that we don’t wholly understand and that we certainly have not yet attempted to plan, manage, or design. The collapse of Communism, the gradual integration of China, Russia, and its satellites, along with the growing scale of world enterprise, has begun to make obsolete the idea of trading nations, replacing it with continent-scaled trading blocs. The introduction of a single currency in Europe this year is only the latest evidence of that continent’s integration. Trucks line up for miles at the Texas/Mexico border thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)–which has created a three-country North American trading bloc. Within these blocs we find a hierarchy of urban hubs. In America, these are not just big cities, nor even big cities and their suburbs. They have morphed into metropolitan regions: multicentered, multi-jurisdictional urban networks, encompassing older cities and suburbs and the suburbanizing hinterlands–the host of smaller towns functionally linked to the metro core. It takes a metropolitan region in today’s economy, since it can offer the scale, diversity, and complexity called for by the global economy: depth in key knowledge-based fields like technology, finance, media, and law; and a substantial infrastructure of educational, medical, research, culture and arts institutions. “Cincinnati” is not just the few dozen square miles within its city limits; it’s really a 60-mile-diameter “market space.” Larger metro areas stretch across hundreds of miles. No one planned this scale of urban transformation. Indeed, few people yet understand the developing patterns. But these new urban forms create a variety of unintended consequences. In a study of New Jersey, for example, we learned that distribution activities that once took place within a few blocks or a few miles of the vast Elizabeth container-ship docks now occur as far away as Harrisburg, Pa.–160 miles west. These growth eccentricities (and accompanying land-use conflicts and enormous traffic growth) are encouraged by the failure of dozens of cities and three states to understand the consequences of changes in port activities and retail-distribution concepts and the way these affect the region. Thanks to congestion and high land costs in more developed locations, what was once a linear Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington has metastasized into a lattice of big and small centers. They now sprawl over ten states and thousands of highway miles, with profound consequences for affected communities. It has been convenient to regard urban growth and change as unmanageable or best left to market forces alone. The patterns we are detecting show more dramatic, and potentially damaging effects globalization can have on the places we live, and how important it is to understand and plan for them. Economic entwinement with the world is inevitable for the U.S.–indeed, the nation has benefited enormously from it. World city is the largest form of architecture we make. Are we prepared to design it?
Š copyright 2006 James S. Russell \| terms