LITERATURE REVIEW ON CITY REGION

GENERAL

Today there are more than three hundred cities or city regions around the world with populations greater than one million people. In 1950, only one city – New York – had a population of at least 10 million people. According to the UN (2001), at least 16 cities or city regions had populations in excess of ten million by 2000. The projections for the next 50 years indicate that urban growth rates will rise steadily, particularly in the developing world. This development poses many deep challenges to researchers and policymakers alike, not only in the context of urban governance and management.

The outstanding importance of cities as nodal points of a world-wide network was recognized by Peter Hall back in 1966. Since then, most of the research conducted on cities or city regions has focussed primarily on the world’s leading financial and economic centres (i.e. New York, London, Tokyo, Frankfurt) and on their role in a network of globally connected cities (Sassen, Friedman). While the outcome of these pioneering projects has provided researchers with valuable insights, research on the changing role of larger cities in the developing world is less advanced – despite the fact that urban growth rates in these cities are much higher than in the cities of the north. According to the UN, twenty-four of the thirty largest cities or city regions will be located in less developed countries by 2015.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The challenge of conducting research on large and important cities is that the significance of any given city is defined very differently by the authors of various studies. This divergence of views reflects both the diverse nature of cities and also differences of approach taken in the study of cities. In this section, we provide a short overview of the different understandings of the significance of large cities by introducing the terms world city, global city, informational city, mega city, and global city-region. Of course this is only a narrow selection made from a wide range of terms used to describe cities. However, in the context of our own study on Global City Regions as Changing Sites of Governance, we consider the following definitions to be extremely valuable for developing a framework of analysis.

The concept of global city-regions can be traced back to the "world cities" idea of Hall (1966) and Friedmann and Wolff (1982), and to the "global cities" idea of Sassen (1991). We build here on these pioneering efforts, but in a way that tries to extend the meaning of the concept in economic, political and territorial terms, and above all by an effort to show how city-regions increasingly function as essential spatial nodes of the global economy and as distinctive political actors on the world stage. In fact, rather than being dissolved away as social and geographic objects by processes of globalization, city-regions are becoming increasingly central to modern life, and all the more so because globalization (in combination with various technological shifts) has reactivated their significance as bases of all forms of productive activity, no matter whether in manufacturing or services, in high-technology or low-technology sectors.

Sassen (1991) defines global cities as, "cities that are strategic sites in the global economy because of their concentration of command functions and high-level producer service firms oriented to world markets; more generally cities with high levels of internationalisation in their economy and in their broader social structure". Thus, they are both centres of production and innovation as well as a home to markets. Manuel Castells describes the new urban phenomena as the informational city, adapted to his global information society concept. The key issues within his definition are the new communication technologies and infrastructure. This includes information technology, telecommunications, air transportation, and the accordingly necessitated infrastructure. Furthermore, he takes financial and economic performance into consideration. The informational city is to be seen as embedded in a global system of networked information flows.

CONCLUSION

These city-regions are expanding vigorously, and they present many new and deep challenges to researchers and policy-makers in both the more developed and less developed parts of the world. The processes of global economic integration and accelerated urban growth make traditional planning and policy strategies in these regions increasingly inadequate, while more effective approaches remain largely in various stages of hypothesis and experimentation. Global City-Regions represents a multifaceted effort to deal with the many different issues raised by these developments. It seeks at once to define the question of global city-regions and to describe the internal and external dynamics that shape them; it proposes a theorization of global city-regions based on their economic and political responses to intensifying levels of globalization; and it offers a number of policy insights into the severe social problems that confront global city-regions as they come face to face with an economically and politically neoliberal world.

At a moment when globalization is increasingly subject to critical scrutiny in many different quarters, this book provides a timely overview of its effects on urban and regional development, one of its most important (but perhaps least understood) corollaries. Conventionally, if one lives in an apparently rural area, suburb or county town where a majority of wage-earners travel into a particular city for a full or part-time job then one is (in effect) residing in the city region. In studying human geography, urban and regional planning or the regional dynamics of business it is often worthwhile having closer regard to dominant travel patterns during the working day (to the extent that these can be estimated and recorded), than to the rather arbitrary boundaries assigned to administrative bodies such as councils, prefectures, or to localities defined merely to optimise postal services.