Cities: Persistent Space or Dynamic Process?

Urban studies have traditionally defined cities based on the physical proximity of people and the scale of human settlements such as population size and built up area (Goodall, 1987). The formation of the world’s earliest cities has been attributed to the Neolithic revolution when increasing labour force was released from farming and began to take on specialized occupations such as trade and business (Bairoch, 1988). Although it remains subject to debate which city in the world is the oldest, there is evidence that the first generation of cities was located in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, India, China and Egypt, where farming was developed in around 3000 BC (Mumford, 1961). However, urban growth was relatively stagnant until the ‘industrial revolution’. In 1800, only three percent of world population lived in urban areas (UN Habitat, 2010). By 1900,

approximately 14 percent of total population was urbanized, however only 12 cities had a population surpassing one million (UN Habitat, 2010). In spite of huge human loss and malaise during the two twentieth century ‘world wars’, the urbanisation rate rose to 30 percent in 1950, and increased to 54 per cent by 2013. It is expected that 66 percent of

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world population will be urbanized by 2050 (UN Habitat, 2010). In addition, the number of cities that accommodate more than one million population exceeded 500 by 2010 and 28 mega-cities have more than 10 million population, accounting for 12 percent of the world population (UN Habitat, 2010). Dependent on definition, Tokyo remains the world’s largest city with 38 million inhabitants, followed by Delhi with 25 million, Shanghai with 23 million, and Mexico City, Mumbai and São Paulo, each with around 21 million

inhabitants (UN Habitat, 2010). It is therefore recognised that emerging countries have become the major world sources of increasing urbanisation and urban population.

The unprecedented speed and scale of urbanisation in emerging markets has generally been attributed to the major change of production modes (Harvey, 2008; Jackson and Senker, 2011; Lu, 2012). Industrialization⁷ initiated the process of modern urbanisation and

reversed economic stagnation associated with principally agricultural economies (Fishman, 2005). Urbanisation in medieval times was motivated mostly by political and military factors such as the status of capital cities, religious centres, transportation centres and military strongholds (Fishman, 2005). This situation changed a little after the development of maritime international trade, which stimulated the emergence of port and commercial cities, such as Amsterdam, Liverpool, Antwerp and New York, however the number of such cities was limited. This is attributed to the fact that agriculture and later maritime trade prior to industrialization did not have a high demand for labour agglomeration and cross-sectoral cooperation; on the contrary, industrialization called for huge labour forces and a high level of cooperation in order to boost scale economies (Fishman, 2005;

O'Flaherty, 2005). Theoretically, O'Flaherty (2005) attributed the formation of modern cities to their prominent advantages known as increasing returns to scale or economies of scale, which will be examined in a Chinese context in Chapter 4 of this thesis.

Nevertheless, urbanisation has not progressed consistently since the industrialization process started in western countries. Early in the 1920s and 1930s, the Chicago School articulated that urban vitality had been weakened by emerging urban issues such as crime, poverty and poor environmental conditions, which were attributed to the failure of social

7 Different countries went through industrialization at different times and a large number of developing countries are still in the early process of industrialization. In addition, the content of industrialization has changed with technological advances. Thus, as industrialisation has rolled out over time it has been linked to hegemony. However, since developed countries have witnessed the major process of industrialization and urbanisation to a large extent, this section draws on international literature on relationships between urbanisation and the change of production modes that reflect a developed economy perspective.

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institutions and social relationships (Sutherland, 1924; Thrasher, 1927; Frazier, 1932).

After the two world wars, more attention was given to urban regeneration and to ideological debate concerning the role of institutions in addressing market failures. In particular, the ‘cold war’ hindered the process of globalisation and economic development, leading to the slowdown of urbanisation. Especially in the late twentieth century,

intertwined with deteriorating urban environments, massive suburbanisation and

developments in ICT, the role of cities was questioned as illustrated by ‘end of geography’

(O’Brien, 1992) and ‘death of distance’ (Cairncross, 2001) predictions. In the context of telecommunications advances and the shrinkage of city ‘downtowns’, Gilder (1995, p. 56) went so far as to claim that “cities are only leftover baggage from the industrial era”, suggesting that virtual communications would make face-to-face contact redundant.

During this period, metropolitan areas were plunged into crisis characterized by the decline of industrial centres, the decentralization of urban functions, environmental decline and social protests and blackouts, such as the riot in New York in 1977 and the blackouts in New York, Cleveland and Detroit in 2003 (Glaeser, 2012). Furthermore, suburbs established in the late twentieth century were depicted as “decay in the great, dull, grey belts” by Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961, p.4).

However, these predictions have been proved too simplistic, since they assumed that telecommunication has simply substituted for physical human interactions. On the contrary, Couclelis (2000) found that the rise of telecommunications had been paralleled by a corresponding increase in travel demand at all geographic scales. With reference to Silicon Valley, Glaeser (2012, p. 8) also argued that accelerating electronic communication had vitalized “the urban ability to create collaborative brilliance” through face-to-face contact, as opposed to replacing it as Gilder (1995) had predicted; instead of wiping cities out, technological advances facilitated the intensification of face-to-face interactions concentrated in cities. Therefore, these predictions comply with Jevons paradox⁸. They assume that the technological advances of telecommunication will diminish the desirability of face-to-face communication, however, face-to-face communication becomes more

8 The typical Jevons paradox is mostly applied in environmental economics. It indicates the situation that technological advances promote the efficiency of using a resource, but in fact the consumption of this resource rises.

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necessary needed in human and business interactions under knowledge economy (Glaeser, 2012).

In the re-urbanisation of cities, urban migration started to flow back to city centres from suburbs and rural areas. Fishman (2005) characterized this phase as the ‘glory time’ of cities. To date, urban areas have thereby been salvaged from the threat of disappearance,

‘planned shrinkage’ and ‘the systematic withdrawal of city services’ (Mumford, 1961;

Starr, 1976). As shown in Graph 1, the urbanisation rates of the world’s ten biggest economies have all increased consistently since 2005. Among them, Japan maintained the most urbanized country at more than 90 per cent, while China, as the second biggest

economy and the most populated country, made the biggest upward leap from 42.5 per cent in 2005 to 54.4 per cent in 2014 (World Bank, 2015).

In terms of established global cities, New York, London and Tokyo illustrated the process of city resurgence as shown in Graph 2. In the 1970s, the three cities experienced

substantial population loss, particularly New York and London, until the 1990s when the process of resurgence took off; although Tokyo’s overall population did not fall but instead increased very slowly until the year 2000 and then leapt up in the first decade of the

twenty-first century (World Bank, 2015). New York for example, which had experienced blackout in 1977 and city bankruptcy, reached its peak population to 2015 while its violent crime rate dropped dramatically. Twin contemporary processes of globalisation and

immigration thereby resonated with re-urbanisation as globally interconnected advanced production networks and the demand for labour in knowledge intensive and supporting services enhanced the vitality of downtowns (Sassen, 1991; Loukaitou-Sideris, 2000).

In addition to the reversal of city out-migration, the revitalization of cities was boosted by the value-adding capabilities of globally concentrated headquarter activities in APS sectors, financial and linked business services, to be examined further in Chapter 3. As discussed by Sassen (1991), locations such as New York, Tokyo and London came to be focal points for globalisation as highly concentrated world locations for APS corporate headquarters dependent on specialized decision making, creativity and innovation (Graham and Marvin, 2002). These services that are mainly clustered in downtowns require

proximity to high-skilled international labour, other service suppliers, clients, and linked economic actors in order to be globally competitive in new modes of flexible production and the knowledge economy. The skylines of such ‘global cities’ have been reshaped by

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downtown redevelopment providing offices and residential districts both occupied by and invested in by these ‘new economy’ services (Lizieri, 2009).

Graph 1 The Urbanisation Rate of the Biggest Ten World Economies (source: World Bank).

Graph 2 Historical Population of New York, London and Tokyo (source: World Bank).

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Urbanisation Rate

Year

USA CHN JPN DEU FRA

GBR BRA ITA RUS IND

0.00 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00 10.00 12.00 14.00 16.00

1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2014

Population: million

Year

New York London Tokyo

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In conclusion, the once predicted disappearance of cities (Castells, 1996) has so far

generally proved to be elusive. As O'Flaherty (2005) argued, "cities could persist—as they have for thousands of years—only if their advantages offset the disadvantages" (p. 12).

Based upon Jacobs’ (1961) theorisation that city and city region vitality are products of how a city system operates, it would seem then that understanding and responding to city economic development and its spatial expansion as an inherently socially generated process will be essential for the persistence of advantageous urban agglomeration

economies. By 2025, 136 new cities in developing markets, of which 100 will be located in China, are predicted to enter the world’s top 600 ‘economic giants’ (Dobbs et al., 2011).

Given the diversity of urban development paths worldwide, theoretical constructions and empirical studies in new domains of globalisation, such as China, are necessary to

understand emerging urban processes and dynamics, and this is the motivation behind this research.