World Cities

Embedded in the “world city” argument is the idea that world cities “lie at the junction between the world economy and the territorial nation state.” If so, it is probable that this junction does not result in a tight and impenetrable boundary. Rather it is possible that the on-going conflict for dominance between the two forces — the nation state and powers associated with the world economy — results in the creation of interstitial spaces and vacuums which allow previously marginalized local actors to have much greater impact on cities than has been previously allowed. If this is the case, the importance of  the high level service sector associated with global management and financial services has been overemphasized. Instead, ” . . . the growth of the low-level, low paid service jobs, needing little skill or language proficiency and with few possibilities of advance, increasingly undertaken by non-unionized, often immigrant and female labor” have had the greater impact on the world’s urban areas.

While the world (global) city argument often defines the global city as “a nested entity of privilege within the privileged national community of a core industrial state,” an urban hierarchy has been identified which includes cities in the less developed world which link regions or nations to the world capitalist economy.

A good example in the less developed world is Mumbai (previously known as Bombay) which has the same kind of position within India as is possessed by other global cities in their own countries. It has been more than dominant, it is pre-eminent within India.

Mumbai (Formerly Named Bombay): World City or Global Village?

Mumbai has the same kinds of features that are associated with global cities everywhere. It holds India’s largest urban population (over 12 million).

Mumbai’s’s traditional industries are in decline, and the city’s core serves as a hub with new industries like high-tech clustered along the transport arteries. Newly established cottage style, high-tech, or service industries have spurred the rapid growth of an immigrant population,  contributing as well to the increasing presence of labor not linked to trade unions or officially registered.  This global city is predominantly a village, more accurately, a series of villages, and the labor of slum dwellers is vital to the economy of the city. The shanties supply laborers, taxi drivers, servants for high-rise buildings, and various and sundry other informal services. Still, despite their village characteristics, slum settlements reflect the sophistication expected in a large and cosmopolitan city. According to Jim Masselos in his work titled Postmodern Bombay: Fractured Discourses

Most Bombay slums have their own satellite dishes which receive world television, CNN and Star Television, and each slum has its own small locality cable network supplying a number of different channels, apart from whatever video theaters exist in a neighborhood. The direction of this universalization of culture . . . creates a mass audience based on very specific elements of exclusion as well as inclusion . . .

Urban Social Movements — Or Riots?

In January 1993, the social and ethnic polarization clearly visible in the built environment of Bombay gave rise to severe riots which destroyed all perceptions of urban ordering as rioters took charge of the global city. The city’s control function evaporated as police stood by and government officials showed an unwillingness to do what was necessary to suppress the disorder. The city as consumer or producer as well as the city’s role as a regional center for command and control were undermined by fragmentary pressures outside of the control of global forces. Some observers talked of the riots in terms of the “rising of the city’s underclass.” However, what was significant was that “the city had many underclasses and many groups and many of these came out as aggressors or victims . . .”  Masselos’ description of the character of the riots is quite telling:

The January riots . . . were diffused throughout the city and not limited to one or two areas. People in the slums burnt each other’s shanties and killed one another. Slum dwellers went out and attacked middle-class dwellings, middle class people defended themselves and others, slum dwellers attacked high-rise apartments and demanded that Muslims be produced for killing, middle class Hindus went out on a pogrom against Muslims, burning shops and houses, killing and injuring. Behind all of these events were a number of  elements that had created the emotional situation in which such things could happen . . . the politicization of religion, events elsewhere in India, the communalization of politics, slum gangs fighting for control of slums and control of hutments that represented real monetary value, criminal gangs fighting for dominance between themselves, and landlords trying to regain control of their land. In the process modern values of co-existence and cosmopolitanism went by the board, and communal harmony and economic prosperity were equally questioned. The lack of central control was demonstrated by the inability of the police or their unwillingness to control what was going on, and an equal inability or unwillingness on the part of the state government to quell the situation.

Is Mumbai an isolated example? Or do revolutions in Havana and Isfahan as well as social movements in Taipei reflect the same phenomenon? Each of the three cases suggests that, despite the strong presence of a Cold War patron, local forces continued to control and shape many aspects of the urban environment. And what role does globalization play in the emergence of urban social movements — or riots?

Alan Gilbert argues that

today the integrated world economy means that many of the critical decisions about technology, employment, and economic growth are made in the offices of the transnational corporations in Tokyo, New York and Frankfurt. From this perspective, the World Bank makes decisions about the pricing of infrastructure provision, not local government.

Because transnational forces are so powerful, some observers fail to detect the empowerment of the marginalized and, thus, in concert with world systems theorists, tend to minimize the importance of popularly empowered social movements. However, such movements continue to gain momentum. They are now are sweeping Brazil as that country prepares for FIFA’s 2014 World Cup.

The New York Times reports that the latest happenings in Brazil involve “thousands of teenagers, largely from the gritty urban periphery and organizing on social media, going on raucous excursions through shopping malls.” The Times goes on to say that

the rowdy gatherings may be going beyond mere flash mobs to touch on issues of public space and entitlement in a society in which living standards for the poor have improved and social classes are influx.

Rodrigo Constantino, a columnist for the newsmagazine Veja, expresses some of the alarm in elite circles, lashing out at what he calls the “caviar left” for defending the participants. He writes:

A multitude of barbarians invading a private property to do turmoil isn’t a protest or a rolezinho (little stroll) but an invasion, a sweep, delinquency . . . .

(For more on the idea of “invasion” read our first post on Cold War Cities: Contesting the global here.)

Clearly, as we can see in present day Brazil, previously marginalized local actors have much greater impact on cities than has been previously allowed.  I guess Mumbai isn’t such an isolated example after all.

Photograph by Midianinja.

The Nation Invades the City

At the same time that the United States and the Soviet Union were competing for power and influence, scholars worldwide began to debate a contest between the global and the local that was perceived to be surfacing in metropolitan arenas throughout the less developed world. This conflict, captured by some in the idea of urban social inversion, maintains that individuals once thought of as marginal are taking over public space and services in the world’s urban areas. According to Richard M. Morse in his work on “Cities as People”  there has been a

people’s invasion that appropriates the city center, creates its own space for commercial activity, causes deterioration of tourist hotels and promenades, and in seaboard locations appropriates the beaches. For the first time since the European conquest, the city is not an intrusive bastion against and control center for the rural domain. The nation has invaded the city . . . Cities are nodal points for the nation and not the citadels of control.

Contamination vs. People’s Invasion

This is in contrast to a perception of “contamination” that dominated the early Cold War years. “Contamination” reflected the predominant belief that those who are marginalized and disadvantaged are undesirable inhabitants of the urban environment. As an aside, one “good communist” I spoke with in Havana depicted the idea quite vividly when he called migrants in Havana cockroaches. The “people’s invasion” argument is interesting as far as it goes. However, a people’s invasion couldn’t occur in a vacuum. In capitalist cases, it was supposed to arrive as a response to the austerity programs and structural adjustment policies imposed by global forces like the International Monetary Fund in response to demands for new borrowing and restructuring of past debt.

The Roots of Protest

This linkage raises several questions. Would the people’s participation in protest activity such as food riots, general strikes, or political demonstrations infer rejection of both the economic and political aspects of the neoliberal project promoted by America’s liberal grand strategy during the Cold War conflict and supported by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank?  Or can the proliferation of social movements in the urban arena be explained in the context of the neoliberal paradigm? And what about socialist cities? Here, as we will see in the case of Havana, a people’s invasion has reportedly materialized as a reaction to the collapse of Soviet grand strategy. But, will social movements necessarily follow as in the capitalist case? What is the relationship between the global and the local in socialist cities? In sum, does the contest between the local and the global have universal significance? Or is the notion of globalization that is now being promoted a mask for the advancement of US interests worldwide?

Overlapping Boundaries: Grassroots and Global

Clearly, the concept of urban social inversion is primarily descriptive and does not provide answers to the above questions. It leads to a problematic discussion, at best, because as in the world city paradigm, socialist cities are excluded. Moreover, even for major capitalist cities, it doesn’t explain how life at the grassroots level impacts the global role. This, of course, is the more interesting question because it has long been argued that “the most inherent feature of the world city is its global control function and this gives it its principle geopolitical characteristic.”

If, as some argue, the people have invaded the city, undermining its primary role as a “citadel of control,” the impact of the global and the local on the urban environment must be reconsidered.

For instance, is the growth in industrial employment associated with informal types of manufacturing — the sweatshop, industrial homework — connected to the more global functioning of the world city? Or is such employment related to meeting the needs of the indigenous community?

Is the labor force associated with such enterprise — primarily immigrant and ethnic women — along with the growth of the informal economy as a whole, tied to the importance of the high level service sector associated with global management and finance? Or, is it possible that the tentacles of the multinational organization (as well as the internationalization of banking and finance) have put in motion population forces that, in the end, incite social movements which reinforce the local rather than the global?

Has the focus on “the activities involved in producing and reproducing the organization and management of the global production system and the global labor force” obscured the impact of more local variables on the urban environment? And what about major sports events like the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil? (For more background see our post on Cold War Cities in Crisis.)

Recently, there’ve been enormous street protests in Brazil against government spending for the World Cup, and anger is now building over the costly transportation projects intended to get soccer fans to matches. Christopher Gaffney reports

There’s a real lack of robust governance structures here to deal with an event this size, so things start breaking and people start dying.

An overexaggeration?

At least two workers were killed this past November when a construction crane collapsed at the stadium in Sao Paulo where Brazil plans to hold the opening game of next year’s World Cup, raising concerns over the country’s ability to finish an array of lavish arenas that have been plagued by delays and cost overruns.

The accident at the Arena Corinthians stadium, intended to seat 70,000 spectators when completed, highlights festering tensions in Brazil as the June 2014 beginning of the World Cup approaches. When Brazil was chosen to host both the World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, the news was seen as confirmation of the country’s status as a developing world power. But spending on the stadiums has drawn the ire of street protesters and prosecutors questioning priorities in a nation where public schools and hospitals remain in lamentable conditions. (The New York Times: November 27, 2013)

Clearly, the contest between the global and the local is still at play in parts of the former Third World.

Structural Adjustment and Stabilization Policies

The introduction of structural adjustment and stabilization policies (SAPs) led to new strategies for development which many argued disproportionately affected urban dwellers, particularly women.

Some have asserted that the changes in labor practices and the erosion of real wages which accompanied SAPs initiated a substitution of women for men workers. The relatively high concentration of women in export-oriented industries provided support for the argument that export-oriented production required the feminization of employment. This contention was bolstered by the move toward more “flexible” forms of production, meaning “the informalization and decentralization of employment, whereby firms relied more on part-time, casual or temporary workers, subcontracting production and/or using homeworkers.”

“Marginal” Workers

By the end of the 1960s, there was a general awareness that a large number of people were not included in statistics regarding the make-up of the urban labor force.  Obviously, the urban poor of the developing world were taking advantage of both legitimate and illegitimate income opportunities. This group of people provided a floating pool of labor since it tended

to be intermittently employed, unemployed or underemployed according to the contingencies affecting this economic level. As a result, it inevitably tends to be forced to take refuge in the roles characteristic of the ‘marginal pole,’  where it fluctuates among a numerous range of occupations and labor relations. In this sense, the principal tendency of this labour-force is to turn ‘marginal’ and to differentiate and establish itself as such within the economy.

The Informal Sector

The characteristics of the informal economy were first delineated in 1972. At that time, it was stated that the informal sector provided a wide-range of low-cost, labor-intensive, competitive goods and services through activities that were marked by

• ease of entry
• reliance on indigenous resources
• small-scale of operation
• labor intensiveness
• skills acquired outside the formal school system
• unregulated and competitive markets.

Such activities were (and are) largely ignored and often actively discouraged by the government. In some cases — in both the developed and the less developed worlds — they remain more or less invisible.

The Formal Sector

In contrast, formal-sector activities are characterized by

• difficult entry
• frequent reliance on overseas resources
• corporate ownership
• large scale of operation
• capital-intensive and often imported technology
• formally acquired skills
• protected markets.

Formal sector markets include

• public-sector companies
• multinational corporations
• locally owned firms.

They were (and remain) closely related to the state, and they protect the labor force through legislation, collective bargaining, and social security.

The Informal Sector and FIFA World Cup 2014

While the informal sector sometimes provides solutions to urban unemployment, most usually the estimated 2/5 to 2/3 of the urban labor-force working in this sector find themselves disadvantaged and marginalized since it serves the very young and the very old, women (whose earnings are almost always lower than those of men), and the less educated. Nevertheless, the sector sometimes provides an opening for the emergence of local entrepreneurs. Moreover, since activities of “informal” workers range from artisans making furniture to sellers of basic foodstuffs to prostitutes and drug peddlers, earnings vary a great deal.

Today, in some sectors, the informal and the formal economies are  merging. A good example is Brazil’s real estate rental sector  — especially relating to tourism and the FIFA 2014 World Cup.

Recent news reports note that in Rio de Janeiro

the residents of Rocinha and other favelas, or slums, are making the most of the city’s acute shortage of lodging for the event: They are renting our their homes to fans around the globe.

Maria Clara dos Santos, 49, is preparing to take as many as 10 World Cup visitors into her three-bedroom home in Rocinha (pronounced ho-SEEN-ha), which commands a stunning view of Ipanema’s sun-kissed beaches in the distance. True, Ms. dos Santos notes, untreated sewage reeks on her street and steel bars on her windows are needed to deter break-ins, so she is offering guests a comparative bargain — about $50 a night to stay with her during the tournament. [NOTE: Hotel rooms are in such short supply in Rio that even modest hotels are charging as much as $450 a night during the World Cup.]

“We can provide a level of human warmth and authenticity that places down below cannot,” she said, reflecting the growing popularity of favelas for their vibrant musical scenes, cheaper prices and absence of pretension compared with ritzier parts of town. (The New York Times — December 21, 2013)

The extent of the debt crisis was widespread. Over 80 countries worldwide were burdened with debts to international banks and agencies, forcing then to adopt austerity and stabilization programs.

The debt was, in part, tied to aid for costly development projects common in the less developed world in the 1960s and 1970s. It was also a product of excessive lending to strategic countries like Turkey, Egypt, and South Korea.

The total debt of developing countries to the First World was quite large, increasing from $64 billion in 1970 to $686 billion at the end of 1984. Private banks were heavily involved.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), debt to private banks stood at one-third of the total debt of Third World countries in 1973, climbing to more than half by 1982.

As a consequence of what was thought to be a disturbing trend, the US government and international agencies began to place stricter conditions on new loans and aid programs. The IMF, particularly, mandated a set of measures to be imposed on most borrowing countries, including the following:

• devaluation
• reduced public spending
• elimination of public subsidies for food and other essentials
• wage restraint despite inflationary spirals, increased interest rates, increased taxes
• elimination of state-owned or state-supported industries
• greater access for foreign investment
• lesser protection for local industry
• export promotion
• new debt ratios.

While these cuts were applied differentially, some observed that the urban working class was almost always affected by subsidy cuts, wage cuts, layoffs, and cuts in public services. Austerity protests were often the end result.

Typically a nation’s capital city was the primary focus, although demonstrations didn’t always begin or end there. For example:

“in Egypt, Turkey, Poland, Brazil, Tunisia, and Morocco, the protests began in regional cities experiencing stagnant industry, unemployment, and the inequities of regional development.”

Photograph by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe.

Changing Issues

With the emerging emphasis on the city’s role as part of the global economy came a realization that urban issues were now more complicated than before.

Many experts found that it was no longer enough to focus on population growth, rural-urban migration, jobs, and housing. Rather, it was considered necessary to examine the economic foundations of the urban environment in the context of the on-going internationalization of the metropolis.

Fragmentation

By the end of the first half of the Cold War period, many government officials and analysts were observing a breakdown of the older social and economic foundation of society. In the context of globalization, this breakdown is now referred to as fragmentation.

The argument was that increased population mobility was associated with an erosion of primary attachments, contributing to social disorganization, disorientation, insecurity, and anomie — all linked to the contradictions inherent in capitalist societies. Socialist cities were largely ignored since issues such as population growth and regional imbalance were displaced by a new emphasis on cities as sites for the reproduction of labor power.

Anxiety

There was continued anxiety regarding the inability to incorporate marginal individuals such as migrants into the fabric of the urban environment, particularly so far as jobs were concerned. The informal sector was no longer seen as a temporary alternative to regulated, wage-earning employment but as a permanent fixture of urban life encompassing over one-half of the economically active urban population.

Along with a continued concentration on the expanding informal sector, the discourse surrounding Third World urbanization began to focus on other matters of emerging concern:

• the globalization of manufacturing
• international debt and processes of restructuring
• the impact of privatization on the urban arena.

These worries became particularly acute by the mid-1970s when

a series of bread riots and political risings swept across continents with little regard for geopolitical divisions or domestic conventions of political expression. In one country after another workers, civil servants, students, shopkeepers, and the urban poor took to the streets, fundamentally because their governments were in trouble, in debt to international agencies and syndicates of western banks, looking for solutions that would mollify creditors and compelled to adopt a desperate orthodoxy of economic austerity.

Where Are the Jobs?

Most migrants came to cities confident that they would find decent prospects for employment. They were disappointed when faced with a gap between reality and their expectations.

In many cases, expansion in the industrialized sector of the economy was just not able to keep pace with population growth, especially when the multinational corporation was involved. Most often, in fact, the capital-intensive technology employed by the multinational corporation was at odds with pressures to absorb the labor surplus. The result was the emergence of a labor aristocracy, causing a cleavage between groups linked with the foreign-owned sector and the rest of the population.

During the Cold War

. . . the nightmare seemed to have become reality as city populations passed the one-million mark and as their industrial and commercial energy appeared to cause moral degradation along with severe deterioration of the quality of life. Cities came to be seen as arenas of corruption and pollution in contrast to the image of small towns where life seemed neighborly and free of original sin. If the Latin American master image was the city-as-parasite, the North American one was the city-as-cancer. The parasite fed on the body social of the whole nation, the cancer poisoned the conditions for amiable, petit-bourgeois urban life.

Where Are the Houses?

Marginal housing, likewise, was a visible manifestation of the problems associated with regional imbalance. Most of the newcomers couldn’t afford the new dwellings that were cropping up. This construction was built to the western specifications favored by planners and required by legal codes. A proliferation of squatter settlements and associated problems was quick to materialize. Squatter housing took on on many different forms and was dependent upon available materials. It was often the only option.

Other forms of makeshift housing were also common. Kazemi vividly describes a kind of alternative housing in Tehran which enabled entrepreneurial owners to “bilk the migrant poor.”

In one section of the city, several rooms were discovered with long cloths hanging from the ceiling to the floor for partitioning of the  space. Upon questioning, it became apparent that each partitioned area was rented by the hour to individual, itinerant migrant laborers who had nowhere to sleep. By paying a nominal hourly fee, the migrants were able to find a few hours of unencumbered rest before their next attempt to search for employment. When these migrants find temporary employment in construction, they normally camp out at the site, either in tents or inside the partly completed buildings.

Poor housing conditions contributed to the environmental and quality-of-life issues endemic to growing Third World urban centers during the Cold War timeframe. These challenges included concerns over air pollution, water quality, noise pollution, and rising crime. Many cities couldn’t supply even the most basic of public services.

Importantly, the problematic situation transcended urban boundaries for over 90% of  raw sewage from urban areas in the developing world ends up in streams and oceans.

In addition to these obvious environmental issues, various quality-of-life problems were in evidence.

As the New York Times reported, the prevalence of rural-urban migration meant that:

Cities are increasingly populated by young, unemployed men, creating a climate for rising crime, political violence, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, including the virus that causes AIDS.

By the 1970s, these issues were acquiring greater visibility. It was obvious that a large population did not provide an easy future but, instead, strained public services and infrastructure.

Other problems were also surfacing, connected not to the local — but to the international — economy. We’ll talk about changing issues in our next post about Cold War Cities.

Photograph by Carole O’Brien.

Pessimistic analysts of the urban scene throughout the post World War II Third World focused on growing rural-urban disparities and the stunted growth of smaller cities. They emphasized the negative consequences of primacy and overurbanization.

More positive observers viewed the city as an ‘engine of growth,’ arguing that the metropolis provided increasing returns to scale by lowering the cost of service delivery and infrastructure.

Some asserted that contact with the activities and values of a dominant — or primate — city provided “the impetus to industrialization in ‘backward areas.'”

Nevertheless, according to Janet Abu-Lughod, logic dictates

that there is some range of optimal spatial distribution which lies somewhere between a concentration so great that it becomes totally unmanageable and unliveable and a dispersal so scattered that the units cannot be integrated through communication into a coherent national order.

Such a balance is clearly difficult to achieve, however, and regional imbalance intensified as migrants from rural areas flowed into mid- and large-sized cities in search of a better future.

A good example of a receiving city is Tehran, the primate capital of Iran.

Tehran, like many cities in the developing world, was a strong magnet for migrants since it contained almost half of all the large industrial establishments in Iran and had a large tertiary sector devoted to the national government and defense establishment. By the 1970s, over 50% of Tehran’s total population was made up of individuals who had migrated.

Many urbanists argue that regional inequality (such as existed in Iran) is linked to the capitalist expansion which occurred during the Cold War period, often under the umbrella of the multinational corporation. It is commonly asserted that the growth of large-scale industry provided an opportunity for rural workers to find employment in urban areas as the production of mass produced goods in the city displaced small-scale domestic producers in the countryside.

This argument alone, though, doesn’t reflect the subtleties at play during the post World War II period. It doesn’t explain why a socialist city like Havana remained a primate city despite government actions to ensure the contrary or why a capitalist city like Taipei didn’t become a primate despite rapid industrialization and a substantial influx of migrants.

Analyses of the forces associated with the onset of rural-urban migration generally overlook stresses on urban areas that might be connected to the Cold War military build-up. While the rural-urban migration discussed above is often linked to rapid industrialization and the expansion of capitalism, the frequent focus on the association of the multinational corporation with these activities ignores urban tensions related to the Cold War conflict.

Photograph by Kamyar Adl.