March 4, 2007
The social and spatial configurations of Sydney and other global cities (such as London) have been significantly re–shaped in recent years by three forces: – post–industrialisation, globalization and migration. The first is the uneven transition from an industrial to a post–industrial economy--- a shift towards the service and information economy. Globalization refers the new forms of the ‘global’ economy, based on the multi–national capitalist corporation and augmented financial flows, which began to emerge in the mid–1970s. The third force is migration, which is a consequence of the other two. The ethnic, social, and cultural diversity that results necessarily from migration is changing the face of the modern urban landscape and reconfiguring the social divisions and conflicts characteristic of so–called ‘global’ cities.
In Divided city: the crisis of London at New Democracy Stuart Hall asks:
The question is how the cartography of the contemporary city is being re–configured under the impact of globalization and migration. In significant ways, the old, hierarchical ordering of urban space seems to have disappeared for good.
Global cities are not whole cities: what we have are bits of cities that are highly globalized – and bits juxtaposed that are completely cut out[from the globalizing process.
Hall says that on the one hand we have global economic networks whose characteristic new skyline is now increasingly dominated by the corporate headquarters of globally–dispersed transnational companies, surrounded by their ancillary and supportive out–sourced dependencies in financial services, marketing, banking, investment, advertising, design, and information technologies. On the other hand, the decline of manufacturing areas has given rise urban areas of extensive social deprivation and economic dislocation, endemic unemployment, and environmental degradation as well as sites of a widespread social despair leading to the defensive mobilization of difference – and thus of ethnic tension, intra–class hostility, racial conflict, social alienation, and civil unrest.
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