Editor’s note: This is an article from the Fall 1999 issue of UCLA Magazine.
Much has been written in recent years about the prospective obsolescence of cities. New communications technologies, it is often said, will make large-scale urbanization a thing of the past. Yet cities are growing, not shrinking. At least 20 of the world’s metropolitan areas have populations of more than 10 million, making them larger than many countries. Almost half of the world’s population now lives in urbanized areas. By 2015, the populations of Tokyo, Shanghai, São Paulo, Bombay, Lagos, Jakarta and Karachi are each expected to exceed 20 million.
Rather than fading away as technology improves, big cities — or more precisely, city-regions — have become the motors driving an increasingly integrated global economy. Indeed, as competition in global markets intensifies, national production systems are rapidly mutating into city-centered networks of businesses and associated regional labor-market activity. This fundamental change is in part due to the emergence and growing importance of new, flexible manufacturing and service sectors all over the world. These sectors display a special affinity for the performance-enhancing environment that is found above all in large city-regions. The software industries of San Jose and Bangalore; the financial services of New York, London and Tokyo; or the film-producing activities of Hollywood and Hong Kong all take the form of tightly linked, densely concentrated networks characterized by high levels of uncertainty, adaptability, specialization and innovation. As such, these industries stand in stark contrast to large-scale, rigid, assembly-line manufacturing, whose economic difficulties were at the center of the urban crisis of the 1970s.
This shift is also undermining many of the political and social structures that were developed in the past to deal with the interactions between strong central governments, discrete national economies and relatively self-contained national urban systems. The intertwined dynamics of globalization and massive urbanization have created a daunting range of challenges for policy makers on every level — challenges raising fundamental questions that as yet have few satisfactory answers. The consequences could be catastrophic, unless we begin to develop some workable solutions to the novel and complex problems now posed by these dynamics.
Consider the issue of how city-regions can successfully compete in the emerging global economy. In the past, policy makers set about managing regional economic development under the protective wings of the nation-state. Today, the focus is on efforts to sustain competitiveness in global (rather than purely national) markets by encouraging new local business formation, attracting investment and creating the kind of institutional environments needed to promote high levels of economic performance. But how do local policy makers balance market forces with the forms of inter-firm collaboration and cooperation that appear to be essential for high levels of innovation and economic success? What new conflicts are generated by the increasing activism of policy makers in city-regions all over the world, and how can these be dealt with at the national and supra-national levels? How do we ensure broad accountability in the policy-making process while taking into account industry’s need for efficiency and responsiveness to rapid change?
Such questions have vital implications, not only for economic development but also for how we define citizenship and political participation generally in an era in which cities like Los Angeles, Tokyo and Seoul are all faced with the stresses and strains of globalization. How do we plan for the public interest in, say, Los Angeles, when our fate is closely tied to what happens thousands of miles away in Beijing or Bangkok? With our economic and social prospects increasingly tied to the political initiatives and capabilities of the cities in which we live, citizenship may once again become associated, as it was classically, with city-regions. But what forms of citizenship can meet the needs of the increasingly diverse populations — including large groups of low-wage labor migrants — that live in the world’s major city-regions? This question is made all the more urgent in view of the withdrawal of many of the well-to-do from civic life into insular, gated enclaves.
The recently released 10th Annual United Nations Human Development Report underlines another major challenge that city-regions face: the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Globalization stimulates the growth of high-wage occupations in city-regions, while promoting the proliferation of marginal, low-skill jobs. There are high social costs associated with this outcome. In California’s Silicon Valley, where Asian and Hispanic immigrants assemble electronic parts in their homes for as little as one cent per component, the bottom 20 percent of wage earners have seen their real wages decline over the past 20 years. Such inequalities in the distribution of wealth pose a “dangerous polarization” between rich and poor, the United Nations warns. Yet immigrant populations play a vital role in large city-regions; not only do they supply much of the labor to industry, but they also represent an important reservoir of energetic small entrepreneurs.
The social problems created by rapid urbanization are especially severe in developing countries, where shortages of housing, sanitation, water and other basic infrastructure have, in many cases, reached crisis proportions. “We are moving toward the precipice, not away from it,” Mohammed Amin, an unemployed resident of the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, recently complained to a reporter from The Washington Post. “The politicians promised us drinking water so we would vote for them, but we still have to walk two hours to fetch water.” In many, if not most, developing countries — where 99 percent of the natural increase in the world’s population is now taking place — there seems to be no immediate prospects for halting or reversing these trends.
Given the limited economic assets of these countries, they are usually endowed with only one or two cities that have the infrastructure, workforce skills and entrepreneurial density needed to compete successfully on a global level. Often favored by national policies that seek to promote rapid modernization, these cities attract leading national and international companies, as well as thousands of job-hungry migrants from the countryside. The net result is that most developing nations seem to be trapped in a continuing cycle of megalocephalic urban growth, a problem that is all the more severe given the pervasive poverty in these cities.
In larger city-regions in both the developed and developing world, urban sprawl has created a situation where jobs are often located far from affordable housing and where new edge cities are springing up at great distances from downtown cores. Inadequate transportation systems, especially in low-income countries, then cause traffic to slow to a crawl, eroding the quality of life, polluting the air and hampering economic growth. In Manila, where the current average speed of street traffic is less than 8 miles per hour, direct and indirect economic losses due to congestion have been estimated at $3.78 billion annually. In São Paulo, congestion has impeded bus operations to the point where walking is preferable for large numbers of people, inducing bus lines to increase their fares to make up for the lost passenger traffic. For the 2 million residents of the Chinese city of Lanzhou, considered the world’s most polluted urban center, simply breathing the air is equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes each day. In Delhi, more than 8,000 people are reported to die each year from pollution-related illnesses.
As the local and global dimensions of modern life become more tightly intertwined, structures of social and economic interdependence are being radically transformed. Large city-regions interacting with one another at the world scale are one of the more dramatic expressions of this phenomenon. As we have seen, they are focal points of extraordinary new opportunities but also of many forbidding and unforeseen problems.
The questions are many, the stakes are high and the answers — as yet — are few. This is why hundreds of policy makers, scholars, businesspeople and community leaders from around the world will gather at UCLA in October for the Global City-Regions Conference. Hosted by the School of Public Policy and Social Research, the conference is a pioneering international and interdisciplinary effort to address the phenomenon of the city-region in all its astonishing complexity. Mayors and governors of major city-regions such as Berlin, Santiago, Sydney, Johannesburg and Curitiba; business theorists and consultants such as Japan’s Kenichi Ohmae and Michael Porter of Harvard; urban scholars such as Sir Peter Hall of University College London and Akin Mabogunje of the Development Policy Centre in Ibadan, Nigeria; and James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, will all come together in a series of intensive lectures, workshops and seminars in search of a better understanding of the forces driving city-region growth and how to cope with the problems it has created.
For the vast majority of the world’s 3 billion urban denizens, the questions they will debate and the solutions they will propose will not be mere abstractions. They will bear directly on such immediate and practical concerns as finding a job, enduring a four-hour daily commute or facing a two-hour walk to get a drink of water.
