Global City-Regions

Global City Regions

Agnew, Scott, Sojato , and Storper try to illustrate the current issues global city-regions are facing. Due to globalization, “the processes of worldwide economic integration and accelerated urban growth make traditional planning and policy strategies in these regions increasingly problematical…”(1).
The problems they hope to address were:
1. Why are the global city-regions growing rapidly precisely at a moment in history when some analysts are claiming that the end of geography is in sight?
2. How have the forms of economic and social organization in city-regions responded to globalization, and what new problems have been created as a consequence?
3. What main governance tasks do global city-regions face as they seek to preserve and enhance their wealth and well-being?
4. Is it possible for the less economically advanced parts of the world to harness the potential benefits of global city-region development to their own advantage and what are the main drawback of such development for them?
5. How can we define the public interest in culturally heterogeneous global city regions? How are the traditional notions of democracy and citizenship being challenged by the emergence of global city-regions and in what ways can they be made more effective?

The writers begin by describing how during the post-world war period the strongest capitalist economies had strong centralized governments that ensured manageable political, economic, and urban frameworks. Although international trade was a part of a state’s affairs during the post-war era, there sector of political affairs rarely was involved or affected the domestic economic policies.
However, with globalization today governments are presented with new issues of organization. States have created hierarchies of political and social agents to help deal with these problems. These include institutional networks like the IMF, multination blocs such as the EU, etc. Region-based political and economic organizations are a strategic response to the heightened competition between nations as a result of globalization, and clustering of these needs improves efficiency: greater routinization of production, and in the manufacturing of such goods. Thus, urban concentration is affected by productivity in two ways: first, “concentration secures overall efficiency of the economic system and secondly”, it “intensifies creativity, learning, and innovation both by increased flexibility of producers and knowledge that occur with these transactional links”(17).
Social stratification is an example of the changes in social geography with these global city-regions in that these regions are not only experiencing migration but also demographical changes. Another affect of globalization is the economic restructuralization of social geography: the gap between the rich and poor is widening.
The cities are extending outward, becoming more diverse, but the urban societies are not necessarily giving equal opportunities.
Developing Global City-Regions are also experiencing increased economic activity due to globalization of these city-regions. A trend the authors take note of is the situation where a “small number of cities in these countries comes to account for a high proportion of the national population”(24). Yet, the difference with these developing countries is that it becomes difficult to manage the enormous influx of population. The huge economic disparities create a situation where “it becomes impossible to finance needed improvements in infrastructure and services.”(24)
The governments of these third-world nations have made attempts to deal with this problem with privatization yet the infrastructures are not yet suited to sustain privatization of all networks. Consequently, the authors end noting that ideological and political challenges must be altered for all nation states to evolve to the growing issues of worldwide globalization in political and the international market.