GLOBALISATION AND CITY-REGIONS

The concept of global city region is more directly rooted in the resurgence of interest in regions and regionalism than it is in the study of globalization or urban and metropolitan restructuring. Stated somewhat differently, the regional dimension of globalization and urbanization processes is what matters most significantly to the meaning of the term. It is the regional that absorbs and defines the interplay of globalization, urbanization, industrialization, and development, and grounds the concept of global city region in a particular form of analysis and interpretation. Over the past thirty years, there has not only emerged a pronounced cross-disciplinary turn toward critical spatial thinking and analysis but also a closely related development of specifically regional perspectives. This New Regionalism, as it has come to be called, has been playing a particularly important role in making theoretical and practical sense of globalization, economic restructuring, technological change, and other processes shaping contemporary life. Underpinning the New Regionalism is a significant re-theorization of the key concepts of region and regionalism.

Cities have been globalizing for many centuries. London and Amsterdam, for example, were global cities in the 16th century and still earlier cases of urban globalization can be found in commercial, imperial, and religious cities around the world. The link between globalization and urbanization processes is therefore not new, but there has been a growing realization that starting at least as early as the 1960s there has been a pronounced acceleration in the globalization of capital, labor, and culture and that this intensified globalization has been having significant effects on cities and urban life all over the world. Analyzing the impact of globalization on cities is thus the first step in understanding the concept of global city regions.

The effects of globalization on cities and urban development can be seen at two levels. Within cities and metropolitan regions, globalization has been playing a role in reconfiguring the social and spatial organization of the modern metropolis and in changing some of the basic conditions of contemporary urban life. Increasing global flows of labor and capital and the concentration of these flows in certain urban areas have contributed to the expansion of metropolitan populations to hitherto unheard of sizes, with several urbanized regions (or city regions) in East Asia now containing more than fifty million inhabitants. Beyond contributing to this expansion in population size, globalization has also fostered the creation of the most culturally and economically heterogeneous cities the world has ever known.

The concept of global city region is more directly rooted in the resurgence of interest in regions and regionalism than it is in the study of globalization or urban and metropolitan restructuring. Stated somewhat differently, the regional dimension of globalization and urbanization processes is what matters most significantly to the meaning of the term. It is the regional that absorbs and defines the interplay of globalization, urbanization, industrialization, and development, and grounds the concept of global city region in a particular form of analysis and interpretation. Over the past thirty years, there has not only emerged a pronounced cross-disciplinary turn toward critical spatial thinking and analysis but also a closely related development of specifically regional perspectives. This New Regionalism, as it has come to be called, has been playing a particularly important role in making theoretical and practical sense of globalization, economic restructuring, technological change, and other processes shaping contemporary life. Underpinning the New Regionalism is a significant re-theorization of the key concepts of region and regionalism.

22 JANUARY 2009 - 3rd YEAR ANNIVERSARY WE CONQUERED MOUNT KINABALU

CARREL...MY COSY PLACE... NEW STUDY SPACE IN PTSL

After 1 year study in UKM, finally I managed get my cosy and private place to do my research in UKM's library, Perpustakaan Tun Sri Lanang (PTSL). However, I can only use this room only 4 months and I have to apply again and wait another 4 months. I will fully utilise this room to do my research.

KUALA LUMPUR...IN GLOBAL CITY-REGION OR LOCAL CITY-REGION?

INTRODUCTION

There are now more than 300 city-regions around the world with populations greater than one million. At least twenty city-regions have populations in excess of ten million. They range from familiar metropolitan agglomerations dominated by a strongly-developed core such as the London region or Mexico City, to more polycentric geographic units as in the cases of the urban networks of the Randstad or Emilia-Romagna. Everywhere, these city-regions are expanding vigorously, and they present many deep challenges to researchers and policy makers as we enter the 21st century. The processes of world-wide economic integration and accelerated urban growth make traditional planning and policy strategies in these regions increasingly problematical while more fitting approaches remain in a largely experimental stage. New ways of thinking about these processes and new ways of acting to harness their benefits and to control their negative effects are urgently needed.

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. As these changes have begun to run their course, it has become increasingly apparent that that city in the narrow sense is less an appropriate or viable unit of local social organization than city-regions or regional networks of cities. One tangible expression of this idea can be observed in the forms of consolidation that are beginning to occur as adjacent units of local political organization (provinces, Länder, counties, metropolitan areas, municipalities, départements, and so on) search for region-wide coalitions as a means of dealing with the threats and the opportunities of globalization. In this process, we argue, global city-regions have emerged of late years as a new and critically important kind of geographic and institutional phenomenon on the world stage.

KUALA LUMPUR CITY-REGION…GLOBAL OR LOCAL?

The dominance of a nation in a global economy has been directly linked to the emergence of global city; which become the global command and control centre, such as New York, London and Tokyo. Drawing on Kuala Lumpur’s experience and its city region, this thesis aims to analyse the city’s transformation, positionality, competitiveness as well as its niches in the global city network system particularly in the context of Asia Pacific region. The objectives of this thesis are explored and revealed through three main parts of this research. The first part concentrates on the description of the spatial and functional transformation of Kuala Lumpur and its city region, through its national and supranational economic engagement over the past four decades. Based on secondary data, the study reveals that Kuala Lumpur city region had experienced substantial spatial and functional transformation, beginning particularly in the early 1990’s.

This suggests that Kuala Lumpur has responded positively to the exogenous and endogenous forces, and is integrated in the mainstream of global economy. Nevertheless, do these changes elevate Kuala Lumpur to a global status, often measured with reference to existing indicators of global cities? This question has been dealt in the second part of the research. Using a set of questionaire, a field study has been carried out on 61 respondents, comprised chief executive officers from two groups of samples. These groups are, firstly FORTUNE Global 500 firms operating in the Klang Valley; and secondly the MSC’s (Multimedia Super Corridor) status companies. Perception of respondents pertaining to the city’s indicators, positionality, competitiveness and its niches are then measured in likert scale and statistically tested using Mann-Whitney U test.

Hamzah Jusoh in his PhD research on Kuala Lumpur in Asian Pacific City Regions Network showed that Kuala Lumpur’s achievement has to be complied to the same set of indicators, applicable to cities in developed countries. This is inevitably to ensure Kuala Lumpur to be as competitive as cities in the developed countries. By using validated indicators and measured through the Index of Global Cities Indicators, the study reveals that the global-city region of Kuala Lumpur has positioned herself at the intermediate level in the global city network system, with the index value of 61.61%. What does its mean in term of competitiveness, comparative advantages and niches of Kuala Lumpur in the Asia Pacific region? This has been dealt in the third part of the thesis, which focuses on a comparative study with selected global cities in the Asia Pacific region. Based on the primary data sources obtained from questionaires as well as supporting secondary informations, this study reveals that Kuala Lumpur is relatively positioned in a less dominant role compared to the other cities in the region, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney and Seoul. However, its position has been somewhat better than Shanghai and Bangkok.

WORLD SYSTEM THEORY...ADVANCED SPATIAL THEORY OF CITY-REGIONS

Globalization is the process, completed in the twentieth century, by which the capitalist world-system spreads across the actual globe. Since that world-system has maintained some of its main features over several centuries, globalization does not constitute a new phenomenon. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the capitalist world economy is in crisis; therefore, according to the theory's leading proponent, the current "ideological celebration of so-called globalization is in reality the swan song of our historical system" (I. Wallerstein, Utopistics, 1998: 32).

The modern world-system originated around 1500. In parts of western Europe, a long-term crisis of feudalism gave way to technological innovation and the rise of market institutions. Advances in production and incentives for long-distance trade stimulated Europeans to reach other parts of the globe. Superior military strength and means of transportation enabled them to establish economic ties with other regions that favored the accumulation of wealth in the European core. During the "long sixteenth century," Europeans thus established an occupational and geographic division of labor in which capital-intensive production was reserved for core countries while peripheral areas provided low-skill labor and raw materials. The unequal relationship between European core and non-European periphery inevitably generated unequal development. Some regions in the "semiperiphery" moderated this inequality by serving as a buffer. States also played a crucial role in maintaining the hierarchical structure, since they helped to direct profits to monopoly producers in the core and protected the overall capitalist economy (e.g., by enforcing property rights and guarding trade routes). At any one time, a particular state could have hegemonic influence as the technological and military leader, but no single state could dominate the system: it is a world economy in which states are bound to compete. While the Europeans started with only small advantages, they exploited these to reshape the world in their capitalist image. The world as a whole is now devoted to endless accumulation and profit-seeking on the basis of exchange in a market that treats goods and labor alike as commodities.

In the twentieth century, the world-system reached its geographic limit with the extension of capitalist markets and the state system to all regions. It also witnessed the rise of the United States as a hegemonic power-one that has seen its relative economic and political strength diminished since the last years of the Cold War. Newly independent states and communist regimes challenged core control throughout the century, and some formerly peripheral countries improved their economic status, but none of this shook the premises of a system that in fact was becoming more economically polarized. The nineteenth-century ideology of reform-oriented liberalism, which held out the hope of equal individual rights and economic advancement for all within states, became dominant in the twentieth but lost influence after 1968. Such twentieth-century developments set the stage for what Wallerstein calls a period of transition. New crises of contraction can no longer be solved by exploiting new markets; economic decline will stimulate struggle in the core; challenges to core dominance will gather strength in the absence of a strong hegemonic power and a globally accepted ideology; polarization will push the system to the breaking point. While this chaotic transition may not produce a more equal and democratic world, it does spell the end of capitalist globalization.

5TH JANUARY 2009 NURIS ZULAZLIN FIRST DAY IN SCHOOL - SEKOLAH KEBANGSAAN JALAN 3, BANDAR BARU BANGI

THE CLASSIC SPATIAL THEORY 0F CITY-REGIONS

GROWTH POLE THEORY

No regional development concept or theory has received greater attention among economists, regional planners, governments and development agencies than growth pole theory. The growth pole concept originated from British Economist, Sir William Petty (1623-1687), who was fascinated by the high growth in London during the 17th century and conjectured that strong urban economies are the backbone and motor of the wealth of nations.

However, it was the French Economist, Francois Perroux (1903-1987), who is credited with formalizing and elaborating on the concept. Since then, the growth pole concept has been subject to various definitions and interpretations, and its application has spread across the globe considerably. Monsted (1974) and Parr (1999) agree that the widespread use of the growth pole concept is reflected in the number of conferences and publications on the subject, as well as the apparent positive outcome of its application in developed countries in Western Europe, particularly in Great Britain, France and Italy.

Regional development based on growth pole strategy became popular in developing countries in the 1960s, mostly in Latin American Countries, with national governments filled with optimism about its benefits for economic growth and social progress (Angotti, 1998). Ironically by the 1970s, the interest in the growth pole concept in developing countries had dwindled, after its application failed to yield the anticipated outcome (Gilbert, 1974; Conroy, 1973; Moseley, 1973). This fact notwithstanding, there is still some belief in the growth pole concept today, as could be revealed in the literature and various programs aimed at expanding development via viable cities.

CENTRAL PLACE THEORY

Central place theory is a spatial theory in urban geography that attempts to explain the reasons behind the distribution patterns, size, and number of cities and towns around the world. It also attempts to provide a framework by which those areas can be studied both for historic reasons and for the locational patterns of areas today. The theory was first developed by the German geographer Walter Christaller in 1933 after he began to recognize the economic relationships between cities and their hinterlands (areas farther away). He mainly tested the theory in Southern Germany and came to the conclusion that people gather together in cities to share goods and ideas and that they exist for purely economic reasons.

Before testing his theory however, Christaller had to first define the central place. In keeping with his economic focus, he came to the conclusion that the central place exists primarily to provide goods and services to its surrounding population. The city is in essence, a distribution center. To focus on the economic aspects of his theory, Christaller had to create a set of assumptions. He decided for example that the countryside in the areas he was studying would be flat, so no barriers would exist to impede people's movement across it. In addition, two assumptions were made about human behavior: 1) Christaller stated that humans will always purchase goods from the closest place that offers the good, and 2) whenever demand for a certain good is high, it will be offered in close proximity to the population. When demand drops, so too does the availability of the good.

In addition, the threshold is an important concept in Christaller's study. This is the minimum number of people needed for a central place business or activity to remain active and prosperous. This then brings in the idea of low-order and high-order goods. Low-order goods are things that are replenished frequently such as food and other routine household items. Because these items are purchased regularly, small businesses in small towns can survive because people will buy frequently at the closer locations instead of going into the city.

High-order goods though are specialized items such as automobiles, furniture, fine jewelry, and household appliances that are bought less often. Because they require a large threshold and people do not purchase them regularly, many businesses selling these items cannot survive in areas where the population is small. Therefore, they often locate in large cities that can serve a large population in the surrounding hinterland.

CITY-REGIONS...TOWARDS COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES

A city can be understood on more than one spatial level. Department of Communities and Local Government, United Kingdom, 2006 defined a 'city-region' is the economic footprint of a city and is defined by the ways that people live their lives and the economic relationship between a city and its surrounding area (including smaller cities and towns and rural hinterlands located there). Increasing the extent to which economic development decision-making is managed at the city-regional level is therefore an important means of improving economic outcomes including those in the most deprived areas. A city's success depends heavily on its connections with neighbouring towns and cities in its region and its rural hinterland - economically, culturally and socially. The city-region takes into account functional economic markets such as travel to work areas and labour markets. As such, city-regions have flexible boundaries traversing administrative ones.

City-Regions are the enlarged territories from which core urban areas draw people for work and services such as shopping, education, health, leisure and entertainment. The City-Region is a functional entity within which business and services operate. City-regional economies play a strong role in driving forward the economies of their regions. The city-regional scale reflects the 'geography of everyday life' rather than administrative boundaries and presents us with opportunities to develop policy that reflect and support the functioning of that City-Region. Below is a theoretical diagram of a city-region, depicting the travel to work area, contiguous built up area as well as administrative areas.

The term city region has been in use since about 1950 by urbanists, economists and urban planners to mean not just the administrative area of a recognisable city or conurbation but also its hinterland that will often be far bigger. 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. . (Allen J. Scott (ed.) (2001))

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. Inevitably City Regions change their shapes over time and quite reasonably politicians seek to redraw administrative boundary maps from time-to-time to keep in-tune with perceived geographic reality. The extent of a city region is usually proportional to the intensity of activity in and around its central business district, but the spacing of competing centres of population can also be highly influential. It will be apprciated that a city region need not have a symmetrical shape, and that is especially true in coastal or lakeside situations (consider for instance Oslo, Southampton or Chicago).

edited from Allen J. Scott (ed.) (2001) "Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory Policy," Oxford: Oxford University Press.