A.J. SCOTT, Resurgent Metropolis, Economy, Society and Urbanization in an Interconnected World,...

Resurgent Metropolis: Economy,Society and Urbanization in anInterconnected World

ALLEN J. SCOTT

AbstractAn urban problematic is identified by reference to the essential characteristics of citiesas spatially polarized ensembles of human activity marked by high levels of internalsymbiosis. The roots of the crisis of the classical industrial metropolis of the twentiethcentury are pinpointed, and the emergence of a new kind of urban economic dynamicover the 1980s and 1990s is discussed. I argue that this new dynamic is based in highdegree upon the growth and spread of cognitive-cultural production systems. Along withthese developments have come radical transformations of urban space and social life, aswell as major efforts on the part of many cities to assert a role for themselves as nationaland international cultural centers. This argument is the basis of what we might call theresurgent metropolis hypothesis. The effects of globalization are shown to play a criticalrole in the genesis and geography of urban resurgence. Three major policy dilemmas ofresurgent cities are highlighted, namely, their internal institutional fragmentation, theirincreasing character as economic agents on the world stage and the concomitantimportance of collective approaches to the construction of localized competitiveadvantage, and their deepening social disintegration and segmentation.

Urban continuities and disjunctionsOne of the salient characteristics of modern society is its apparently endemic associationwith high levels of urbanization. This association is no mere contingency. Moderneconomic systems are made up of myriad units of capital and labor whose collectiveefficiency and competitiveness depend crucially on their coalescence into distinctivespatial clusters (Scott, 1988a; Storper, 1997). Economically advanced societies, in brief,persistently give birth to agglomerations of productive activity that crystallize out on theground in the form of distinctive urban settlements. In turn, and even as cities emerge outof this logic, they function as a basic, active engine of the continued successfulreproduction of economic and social life.

Urbanization in modern society, however, is never a smoothly operating process,partly because of the wayward course of wider national and international affairs, partlybecause cities are always susceptible to the build up of internal disruptions anddiseconomies. Over the period of the long post-war boom in the US and Western Europe,large industrial cities flourished on the basis of a thriving Fordist mass-productionsystem with its voracious demands for direct and indirect inputs and its dependence onenormous local reservoirs of labor. By the mid-1970s, many of the cities that hadbenefited most from this system were brought to the verge of bankruptcy, as foreigncompetition, labor–management discord, stagflation, and rapidly shifting productiontechnologies steadily eroded the economic sustainability of the old order. As a

Volume 32.3 September 2008 548–64 International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchDOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00795.x

© 2008 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2008 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by BlackwellPublishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

consequence, the 1970s and 1980s were a period in which many analysts publishedstrongly pessimistic accounts of the future of cities and regions, and in which notions oflong-run secular decline were very much in the air. Yet this was also a period in whichthe seeds of an unprecedented urban renaissance were being planted, as expressed in bothaccelerating shifts towards a more knowledge-based economy in primate cities like NewYork, London and Paris, and in the emergence of new industrial spaces and communitiesin many former peripheral areas of the world (Scott, 1988b). Even as this renaissancewas occurring, doubts about the future of cities remained at a high pitch in manyquarters, though the diagnosis was now taking a very different turn from that of theeconomic declinism of the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, in the 1990s, as consciousness aboutthe potentialities of new communications technologies gathered momentum, it wasproclaimed that distance was effectively dead and that a new era of globallydeconcentrated interaction was about to be ushered in. Accordingly, it was thought in anumber of quarters that cities would henceforth steadily lose much of their reason forbeing (cf. Cairncross, 1997; O’Brien, 1992).

It is certainly the case that the new communications technologies have vastly extendedour powers of interaction across geographic space, but the predicted concomitant ofurban decline has thus far failed signally to show up in statistical data. Mountingempirical evidence points to the conclusion that intensifying globalization and itsexpression in both virtual and material spaces of flow is for the most part helping toencourage the growth and spread of cities throughout the world (cf. Hall, 2001; Taylor,2005). As Cheshire (2006) has averred, cities in the early twenty-first century exhibitstrong symptoms of resurgence, especially in comparison with the dark days of the dyingFordist regime in mid to late 1970s. Other scholars, such as Dear (2000) and Soja (2000)have gone on to argue that current trends entail a qualitative transformation of the verynature of urbanization itself, and that alongside recent surges of urban economic growtha series of deeply rooted social and cultural transformations have also been occurring incontemporary cities. To be sure, numerous exceptions to these remarks can be adduced(Beauregard, 2004; Markusen and Schrock, 2006; Turok and Mykhenko, 2006). Myargument is not that every individual city everywhere in the world is flourishing, butrather that there is a distinctive group of metropolitan areas that are now forging aheadon the basis of their command of the new economy, their ability to exploit globalizationto their own advantage, and the selective revitalization of their internal fabric of land useand built form.

In the discussion that follows I seek to re-explore these themes in the light of an effortto affirm a basic framework for urban theoretical analysis. A focal point of this exerciseconsists of a reassertion of the basic character of the city as a complex of spatialrelationships in the more general context of capitalist society. By the same token, one ofmy goals in the present article is to cut part way through the welter of claims andcounter-claims that currently proliferate in the scholarly literature around the notion ofthe city, and to suggest an approach that might help to ground at least some of them ina workable general concept of urbanization.

The socio-geographic constitution of the cityPresumably, few analysts would disagree with the notion that the city is a distinctivesocial phenomenon whose internal organization is, in one way or another, an expressionof wider social and economic forces. Any attempt to define the city in more concreteterms, however, is almost certainly liable to generate considerable controversy. A cursoryexamination of the literature on urbanization reveals a cacophony of perspectives andpoints of empirical emphasis that are all said to be ‘urban’ in one way or another.Empirical phenomena are frequently qualified as being urban for no more obvious reasonthan that they are to be found inside the limits of the city, and much of the time, too, cities

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are simply equated with ‘modern society’ as a whole. However, in any search for anurban problematic there can be no maneuver to the effect that if, say, 80% of thepopulation of the US today lives in metropolitan areas, cities therefore represent 80% ofeverything that constitutes American society. In the same way, education, the semioticsof the automobile, the effects of income on voting behaviour, or even ethnic identity, arenot in the first instance urban questions, even though there might be senses in the secondinstance in which we can say that they intersect with an urban process. If we are to makesense of this confusion (and in order to understand just exactly what it is that is resurgent,and why), we need some sort of problematic; that is, a circle of concepts by which wemight pinpoint a social logic and dynamics that clearly demarcate the urban within thewider context of social life at large, a point made long ago by Castells (1968).

A basic point of departure here is the observation that one of the things all moderncities share in common is their status as dense polarized or multipolarized systems ofinterrelated locations and land uses. No matter what other social or economicpeculiarities may be found in any given instance, cities are always sites or places wheremany different activities and events exist in close proximity to one another. I reaffirm thistruism at the outset because I want to argue that this is the foundation stone for any theorythat seeks to capture the intrinsic, as opposed to the contingent, features of urbanization.Proximity and its reflection in accessibility is an essential condition for effectiveunfolding of the detailed forms of exchange and interdependence that constitute thelifeblood of the city. The quest for proximity, in turn, promotes the piling up of diverseeconomic and social activities at selected points of high gravitational intensity, with thegreatest density invariably occurring at and around the very center of the city. The spatialcompetition and land market effects that are unleashed in this manner result in thelocational sorting of functions so that different parts of the city come to be marked bydifferent specialized forms of land use and locational activity. The complex, evolvingwhole constitutes what I have referred to in earlier work as the urban land nexus (Scott,1980), though, as it stands here, the concept remains something of a formal skeletondevoid of substantive content. Accordingly, we now probe further into the meaning of theconcept in the context of three main questions. First, what is it in general that drives thesearch for proximity? Second, and as a corollary, what is it specifically that constitutesthe central function or functions of the city as such? Third, what administrative andpolitical tasks are conjured up as the logic of intra-urban space unfolds? The answers tothese questions provide us with important clues about the mainsprings of the resurgentmetropolis.

We can think of many reasons why large numbers of people would want to participatein spatially agglomerated activity systems. One commonly cited factor, for example, isthe search for some sort of human and cultural community. Another is the efficienciesthat can be obtained by building many different types of social and physicalinfrastructures in compact local settings (Glaeser and Gottlieb, 2006). Yet as an initialargumentum ad hominem, it seems hard to imagine that the massive urban growth thathas occurred in the more economically advanced societies over the last century or somight be ascribed simply to some kind of communal impulse or to the lumpiness ofinfrastructural artifacts. These factors no doubt make some contribution to the overallprocess of urbanization, but their powers of centripetal attraction must surely becomeexhausted long before we arrive at the kind of large metropolitan areas that are found inmodern society. Much less does it seem probable that the emergence of major globalcity-regions like New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City, Shanghaiand so on can be accounted for in this way. To begin with, any process of urban growthcan only be sustained by equivalent expansion of employment opportunities for the massof the citizenry. These opportunities are caught up in the extensive networks ofproductive capital (industrial, service, retail, etc.) that express the interdependenciesknitting individual units of economic activity in the city into a functioning system.Moreover, these networks are not just inert sources of jobs for the populace; moreimportantly, they are dynamic social mechanisms, much given to expansionary thrusts,

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and, on occasions, to painful contraction. In any case, large cities are huge axes ofproduction and work that function primarily on the basis of their interrelated firms andtheir dense local labor markets. As we shall see, the inherent economic dynamismof these systems is underpinned by the propensities for learning and innovation that sooften characterize dense grids of human interaction. These phenomena constitutethe fundamental engine of urban growth and development. The workings of the enginegenerate powerful agglomeration economies that set up a strong gravitational field, andtherefore, as production and work are mobilized, the city expands by continually drawingin new additions to its stock of capital and labor. Cities are also increasingly enmeshedin processes of globalization, but this does not necessarily mean, as Amin and Thrift(2002) suggest, that they cease to function as sites of local interdependency andeconomic power. On the contrary, the more the urban economy is able to reach out todistant markets, the more it is able to grow and differentiate internally, leading in turn toreinforcement of its agglomerative magnetism. To be sure, countervailing trends ofdecentralization are also almost always at work, but processes of urban expansion havethus far — with only occasional and temporary interruptions — tended to outrun anylong-term tendency to decline.

Precisely because the city is not just an inert aggregate of economic activities, butis also a field of emergent effects in the guise of agglomeration economies andcompetitive advantages (as well as many different sorts of negative externalities), it isby the same token a collectivity in the sense that the whole is very much greater thanthe sum of the parts. More to the point, its destiny is in important respects shaped bythe joint outcomes that are one of the essential features of urbanization as such. Theseoutcomes constitute a sort of commons that is owned by none but whose benefitsand costs are differentially absorbed by sundry parties, oftentimes unconsciously so.As such, the commons is resistant to market logic, and in the absence of somerationalizing agency of collective order is liable to serious problems in regard to theways in which its benefits and costs are produced and spread out over urban space.This means in turn that there is an intrinsically positive social role for agencies ofpolicy mediation and planning in the city with a mandate to seek out solutions to theproblems posed by the commons in all its complexity. In other words, any viabletheory of the urban must not only be open to the play of individual decision-makingand behavior but also to specific forms of collective action directed to the solution ofurban problems. Such action may originate at extra-urban levels of institutionalorganization, though the principle of subsidiarity suggests that it will usually beconstituted as an element of local society itself. Its role involves, in practice, a many-sided effort both in the production space and the social space of the city to enhance thesupply of positive externalities, to bring negative externalities and other urbanbreakdowns under control, and (in a path-dependent trajectory of urban evolution) toensure that rewarding opportunities which would otherwise fail to materialize arepursued as far as feasible.

It is in this broad context that we need to situate any claims about the resurgence ofthe modern metropolis. The remarks outlined above suggest that it is important toapproach this issue with a focus on questions of production and work combined with aclear sense of the social logic of intra-urban space and the intrinsically collective natureof its overall dynamics. Some of the most important changes that are currently beingwrought in patterns of urbanization around the world have their roots, precisely, in majorshifts in structures of economic activity, as well as in the special circumstance thatmodern cities are increasingly implicated in processes of globalization. In order to set thescene and to fix ideas, we take up the story with a brief account of an earlier and nowlargely abandoned version of urbanization. This story and its relationship to urbanizationmay at first appear as something of a diversion, but its relevance will become moresharply apparent as we see how it throws light on the problematic of urbanizationsketched out above, as well as on the widespread urban crisis that preceded the currentperiod of urban resurgence.



From growth to crisis in Fordist mass-production society

Over much of the twentieth century, the dominant (though by no means exclusive) modelof economic growth and development in North America and Western Europe revolvedaround the mechanisms of mass production (Coriat, 1979; Piore and Sabel, 1984). Thissystem of economic activity was based on large capital-intensive lead plants linked tolower tiers of direct and indirect input suppliers, thereby forming growth poles inindustries like cars, machinery, domestic appliances, electrical equipment and so on(Perroux, 1961). Producers caught up in these growth poles were apt to concentratetogether in geographic space, and many of the resulting industrial clusters constituted thebackbones of large and flourishing metropolitan areas. The production system itself wasdistinguished by a twofold division of labor comprising blue-collar workers on the oneside and white-collar workers on the other. This division of labor was then cast out, as itwere, into urban space where it became re-expressed, imperfectly but unmistakably, as adivision of residential neighborhoods, upon which a further pattern of socialsegmentation was overlaid based on differences of race and national origins.

The core regions of the mass-production economy in the US and Europe expandedrapidly over the middle decades of the twentieth century as new investments wereploughed into productive use and as streams of migrants converged upon the main urbancenters. Notwithstanding persistent decentralization of routinized branch plants to low-wage locations in the periphery, the core regions continued to function as the main fociof national economic growth, for, as Myrdal (1959) and Hirschman (1958) hadsuggested, the synergies generated within the major cities of the mass-productionsystem kept them consistently in positions of economic leadership. Moreover, from theNew Deal onward, mass-production society was subject to increasingly elaborate policymeasures intended to maintain overall prosperity and social well-being. After the secondworld war, these measures evolved into the full-blown Keynesian welfare-statist policysystem designed to curb the cyclical excesses of the mass-production economy and toestablish a safety net that would help to maintain the physical and social capacitiesof the labor force, especially in periods of prolonged unemployment. The scene wasnow set for the long post-war boom over the 1950s and 1960s, and for the climacticperiod of growth of the large metropolitan areas that functioned as the hubs of themass-production economy. This policy system was controlled by central governments,but as Brenner (2004) has argued, it was in many important ways directed specificallyto urban problems (and implemented through municipal agencies), and it had majortransformative impacts on urban space. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, urbanrenewal, housing programs, intra-urban expressway construction, suburban expansionand diverse welfare schemes performed the functions of maintaining economic growthand keeping the urban foci of the boom operating in a reasonably efficient and sociallymanageable way.

By the early 1970s, the mass-production system in North America and WesternEurope was beginning to shows signs of stress, and as the decade wore on it entered intoa period of exhaustion and restructuring. The details of these changes need not detain ushere, except to note that the endemic pattern of decentralization of production units awayfrom core areas was by the early 1970s turning into a rout, and the formerly thrivingindustrial cities of the system were now faced with massive job loss and decay.Deindustrialization of the old manufacturing regions advanced at a swift pace over the1970s, and with the deepening of the crisis the US Manufacturing Belt itself becamemore commonly known as the Rustbelt. In the metropolitan areas that had formerlyfunctioned as the quintessential centers of the long post-war boom the watchwords nowbecame stagnation and decline, most especially in inner-city areas where residualworking-class neighborhoods were marked by a pervasive syndrome of unemployment,poverty and dereliction. In the US, even those metropolitan regions that had weatheredthe economic crisis relatively well were left with deeply scarred central cities as a resultof industrial decentralization and restructuring. By this time, too, much of the job flight

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that was occurring was no longer simply confined to national peripheries but wasincreasingly directed to low-wage locations in the wider global periphery.

Analysts such as Carney et al. (1980), Bluestone and Harrison (1982), and Masseyand Meegan (1982) now began to write notably gloomy accounts about the prospects ofthe cities and regions that had most benefited from economic growth over the period ofthe long post-war boom. For many of these analysts, the prospect of a vigorous urbanrecovery seemed to be extremely dim indeed. The neoliberal political agenda initiated byReagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK confirmed this pessimism in many quarters asthe main underpinnings of the Keynesian welfare-statist system (though not ofgovernment spending, as such) were steadily dismantled, and as more and more stablehigh-paying, blue-collar jobs disappeared permanently from the urban scene.

Into the twenty-first centuryCities and the new division of labor

In the early 1980s, at the very moment when this gloom seemed to be reaching its peak,intimations of an alternative model of economic organization and development started toappear in various places. Several early attempts to conceptualize this model were offeredunder the rubric of ‘sunrise industries’ or ‘flexible specialization’ or ‘post-Fordism’or simply the ‘new economy’ (cf. Bagnasco, 1977; Piore and Sabel, 1984; Markusenet al., 1986; Esser and Hirsch, 1989). Equally, and right from the start of this effortof conceptualization, many analysts noted that a fresh spurt of agglomeration andurbanization seemed to be following on the heels of the new model in various regionsthat had been bypassed by the main waves of industrialization in the immediate post-wardecades, such as the US Sunbelt or the Third Italy.

There was, and is, much debate about the character and meaning of the new economythat began to emerge some two or three decades ago1 (e.g. Gertler, 1988; Sayer, 1989;Hyman, 1991; Pollert, 1991). Whatever specific controversies may be at stake in thisregard, there does not seem to be much disagreement nowadays about the fact that arather distinctive group of sectors much typified by deroutinized production processesand relatively open-ended working practices began to move steadily to the fore ofeconomic development at this time, and have continued to expand at an accelerating rateup to the present. This group of sectors includes technology-intensive manufacturing,services (business, financial and personal), cultural-products industries (such as media,film, music and tourism) and neo-artisanal design and fashion-oriented forms ofproduction such as clothing, furniture or jewelry. These and allied sectors have nowlargely supplanted mass-production industries as the main foci of growth and innovationin the leading centers of world capitalism, where they constitute the foundations of whatwe might possibly refer to as a new cognitive-cultural economy (see also Rullani, 2000;Moulier Boutang, 2007; Vercellone, 2007). The core of this phenomenon is comprised ofa stratum of professional, managerial, technical and creative workers concerned withtasks that can be seized in generic terms as scientific and technological research,administration and deal-making, representation and transacting, project management andguidance, conception and design, image creation and entertainment, and so on. This coreis at the same time complemented by and organically interrelated with a second stratumcomposed of poorly paid and generally subordinate workers engaged in either manuallabor (as for example in apparel manufacturing or in the assembly of high-technologycomponents) or low-grade service functions (such as office maintenance, the hospitality

1 Strictly speaking, the roots of the new economy can be traced back to the 1960s and even the 1950sif we consider such early precursors as Hollywood after the 1948 Paramount Decree or Silicon Valleyafter the mid-1950s.



industry, janitorial work, child minding and so on). While the tasks faced by workers inthe lower tier are often quite humdrum, there is even here a certain tendency —especially in large US cities — for many of them to require some substantial degree ofcognitive flexibility and judgment and/or cultural sensitivity on the part of employees(McDowell et al., 2007).

Autor et al. (2003), and Levy and Murnane (2004) have proposed rather plausibly thatthe absolute and relative growth of deroutinized labor processes in the Americaneconomy over the last few decades can best be understood as a consequence of the steadyincursion of computer technologies into the workplace. Their argument suggests that, ascomputerization has moved forward, many different kinds of standardized jobs havebeen eliminated in both the white-collar and the blue-collar segments of the economy.Jobs such as book-keeping, filing, low-level clerical operations and repetitive manualwork generally are rapidly being displaced by digital technologies, thereby releasinglabor power for deployment into less routinized forms of work. Of course, two otherimportant factors also need to be taken into account here. One is expressed by Engel’sLaw, which states that as income levels rise, so households will tend to spendproportionately more money on non-essential indulgences (many of which are producedby cognitive-cultural sectors). The other relates to the continuing movement of muchfactory work offshore, and this trend no doubt accounts for at least part of the decline ofroutinized manual jobs in large American cities. Whatever the precise dynamics of thisoverall economic restructuring, the growth of the cognitive-cultural economy seems nowto be proceeding at an accelerating pace. The same trend has been accompanied by anever-widening gap in average personal income levels between the two main occupationalstrata of the new economy (Autor et al., 2006).

The cognitive-cultural economy, then, is typified by a new division of labor revolvingaround the increasingly flexible and malleable systems of production (with their ever-varying palette of goods and services) that are now so much at the leading edges of thecontemporary economy. As it happens, the cognitive-cultural economy is also highlyconcentrated in urban areas, and many of its most dynamic segments have a particularaffinity for major global city-regions like New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris orTokyo (Sassen, 1994; Daniels, 1995; Pratt, 1997; Krätke and Taylor, 2004; Taylor, 2005).Often enough, distinctive clusters of firms in this new economy congregate together inspecialized industrial districts within the fabric of urban space where they typically alsoexist cheek by jowl in association with a range of allied service suppliers and dependentsubcontractors. In point of fact, a characteristic intra-urban geography of the neweconomy is frequently observable in which the more service and design-oriented sectors(e.g. business and financial services, the media, fashion-oriented industries and so on) arefound in specialized quarters lying toward the city center, whereas more technology-intensive sectors (e.g. electronics, biotechnology, aerospace and so on) tend to occur inagglomerations or technopoles located in more suburban areas (Scott, 2002). This intra-urban geography represents at best a broad tendency, obviously, and is never realizedconcretely in anything but approximate form.

The reasons for the attraction of cognitive-cultural industries to locations in the cityreside primarily in the organizational logic of the new economy generally, incombination with the ways in which the uncertainties and risks that characterize theseindustries are moderated by the size and density of the urban milieu. Unlike Fordist massproduction, the cognitive-cultural economy is focused on relatively small productionruns, niche marketing and monopolistic competition (in the Chamberlinian sense), andits core sectors tend to be radically deroutinized and destandardized. Individualproducers are almost always caught up in detailed transactions-intensive networksof exchange with many other producers, often in situations where considerableinterpersonal contact is necessary for successful mediation of their common affairs.These networks, in addition, are susceptible to much instability as firms adjust theirprocess and product configurations and hence swing constantly from one set of inputspecifications to another. Equally, local labor markets are subject to a great deal of

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unpredictability as a consequence of the volatility of markets and the growth oftemporary, part-time and freelance forms of employment, even among well-paid andhighly skilled workers (Angel, 1991; Blair, 2001). This situation is exacerbated by therecent expansion of project-oriented work in which teams of workers are assembledaround multidimensional projects calling for a diversity of skills and talents over somegiven time horizon (Grabher, 2004). Once any project is completed, the team is thendisbanded, with the result that at least some of its members must then search for newemployment.

These features of the cognitive-cultural economy alone are calculated to encourage asignificant degree of locational convergence among individual producers and workers inselected urban areas, not only as a way of reducing the spatial costs of mutual interactionbut also as an instrument allowing them to exploit the increasing returns effects that flowfrom the risk-reducing character of large aggregations of latent opportunities (Scott,2005). However, there is a further factor that contributes greatly to this process ofconvergence. As interacting firms and workers gather together in one place, and asauxiliary processes of urban development are set in motion, a distinctive field ofinnovative energies is often brought into being in the sense that the links and nodes of theentire organism begin to function as a complex ever-shifting communications systemcharacterized by massive interpersonal contacts and informal information exchanges(Storper and Venables, 2004). Much of the information that circulates in this manner isno doubt little more than random noise. Some of it, however, is occasionally of direct use,and discrete bits of it — both tacit and explicit — sometimes combine together in waysthat provoke new insights and sensibilities about production processes, product design,markets and so on. In this manner, strong creative-field effects are continually mobilizedacross sections of intra-urban space, leading to individually small-scale but cumulativelysignificant processes of learning and innovation.

These remarks help to clarify why it is that the new cognitive-cultural economy hassuch a manifest affinity for locations in urban areas. In turn, the great expansion of thecognitive-cultural economy and allied sectors underlies much of the urban resurgencethat has occurred so dramatically over the last couple of decades. Even many oldand formerly declining manufacturing centers (e.g. various large cities in the USManufacturing Belt, some parts of the north of England, and the Ruhr region ofGermany) are experiencing a rebirth as they too begin to participate in the new economicorder (O’Connor, 1998; STADTart, 2000). Once all of this has been said, it needs to berecalled that the resurgence is also associated with a definite and increasing bifurcationof incomes and life chances in the cities where it has been most evident, a circumstancethat has been exacerbated by the voracious demands of the new economy for low-wageimmigrant workers.

Urbs et Orbis

The contemporary resurgence of cities is inscribed in and greatly magnified by adeepening trend to globalization. This trend is expressed in the vast geographic extensionof the range of markets that any given city can reach, and has also made it possible forever-deepening international streams of labor (both skilled and unskilled) to flow into theworld’s most dynamic metropolitan regions.

Cities that have been most caught up in these processes have not only experiencedprofound changes in their economic and demographic profiles, but have frequentlyundergone dramatic shifts in their physical appearance as well. In the first place, theseshifts reflect the pervasive gentrification that has been occurring over the last few decadesin many old working-class neighborhoods, especially where they lie adjacent to inner-city areas. These neighborhoods are notably susceptible to colonization by the newcognitive-cultural elite, reflecting their demands for residential locations accessible todowntown areas where so many of their jobs are located. In the second place, they canalso be ascribed to the investment projects of large corporate organizations as well as to



the redevelopment plans of municipal authorities seeking to enhance the status of theirparticular cities as global economic and cultural centers (Smith, 2002). These activitiesoften assume the guise of new cultural, recreational and shopping facilities in the city;sometimes they are expressed in the recycling of old industrial and commercial buildingsby turning them into concert halls, art galleries, theaters, malls and so on. Perhaps themost egregious instance of this impulse is to be found in the contemporary fashionfor erecting dramatic architectural set pieces of monumental proportions in largemetropolitan regions with global ambitions. Some of the more remarkable examples ofthis fashion can be observed in a number of large Asian city-regions such as Hong Kong(Hong Kong Central Policy Unit, 2003), Kuala Lumpur (Bunnell et al., 2002), Shanghai(Huang, 2006) and Singapore (Yeoh, 2005), where sustained efforts are being made notonly to move decisively into the era of cognitive-cultural production, but also to proclaimby means of visible markers the status of these cities as flagships of the new global orderand hence also as points of attraction for large-scale investors and a high-qualitycosmopolitan labor force. These different aspects of the resurgent metropolis dovetailtogether in mutually sustaining synergies in which the urban economy, the cognitive-cultural labor force, and the physical environment all contribute to a developmentaldynamic that entails constant upgrading of the attractiveness and symbolic significanceof the city together with rising actual or potential mastery by local producers of selectedworld market niches.

As these trends unfold, the geographic pattern and logic of globalization itself isshaped and reshaped in various ways. In the old core-periphery model of worlddevelopment, major metropolitan areas of the advanced capitalist countries were oftenseen as being essentially parasitic on the cheap labor of the periphery by reason ofunequal development and exchange (Emmanuel, 1969; Amin, 1973). An effort to updatethe model was made by Fröbel et al. (1980) in their theory of the New InternationalDivision of Labor, where they claimed that the core tends to develop as a specializedcenter of white-collar work (command, control, R&D and so on), while the peripheryevolves as a vast repository of routinized blue-collar work. Whatever the merits ordemerits of these claims may have been at the time they were formulated, none of themstand up very well in confrontation with the specifics of urbanization and globalizationtoday. In particular, the rise of the cognitive-cultural economy with its associatedunderbelly of sweatshops and low-grade service activities employing huge numbers ofunskilled immigrant workers has meant that major cities of the core are now directlyinterpenetrated by growing ‘third world’ enclaves, while many parts of the erstwhileperiphery have become leading foci of high-skill technology-intensive production,business and financial services, and cultural industries. To be sure, we can still detectimportant elements of the core–periphery model in the great expansion of internationallabor outsourcing from high-wage to low-wage countries that has been occurring overthe last couple of decades (Gereffi, 1995; Schmitz, 2007). In spite of these continuingechoes, much of the old core–periphery pattern of international economic developmentseems to be subject to gradual supercession by an alternative geographic structurecomprising a global mosaic of resurgent cities that function increasingly as economicmotors and political actors on the world stage. Not all of these cities participate equallyin the cognitive-cultural economy, though all are tied together in world-encirclingrelations of competition and collaboration. Those that have emerged or are emerging asleaders in the cognitive-cultural economy find themselves functioning more and more ascynosures of the contemporary global system.

In the context of these developments, the resurgent cities and city-regions of today areevidently beginning to acquire a degree of economic and political autonomy that wouldhave been for the most part unimaginable in the earlier Fordist era when the nationaleconomy and the nation state represented the twin facets of a sovereign framework ofsocial order and political authority. In line with the general spatial rescaling of economyand society that has been occurring as globalization runs its course, something like a newregionalism is also becoming increasingly discernible. I mean by this a state of affairs in

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which as individual identities, social being and institutional structures are subject toreconstitution at diverse scales of spatial resolution, cities and city-regions are nowstarting to come insistently to the fore as functional components of the world system. Inview of this remark the early speculations of Jacobs (1969) about cities being rather morefitted than states to serve as organic units of economic organization and social life mustbe seen as having been remarkably prescient. If anything, the waning of Keynesianwelfare-statism and the turn to devolution in the context of an insistent focus on marketsand competitiveness has helped to bring the substance of these speculations closer toconcrete reality. Major city-regions are everywhere struggling with a multitude of socialexperiments as they attempt to consolidate their competitive advantages in the face ofthe deepening predicaments posed by globalization, and as they and the citizenry atlarge search out local institutional arrangements capable of responding effectivelyto idiosyncratic local economic needs and objectives. In an era of intensifyingneoliberalism and globalization, when national governments are less and less able orwilling to cater to every regional or sectional interest within their jurisdictions, citiesmust now either take the initiative in building the bases of their own competitiveness orface the negative consequences of inaction. One noteworthy expression of this trend —especially in large global city-regions — is the growing realization that some sort ofadministrative and institutional coordination across the spatial organization of the city asa whole is a necessary condition for achieving efficiency, workability and localcompetitive advantage. The force of this realization is such as to have encouraged diverseexperiments in local government in many different places, including the construction, orproposals for constructing, cross-border metropolitan governance structures, as in theØresund region in Scandinavia, the Pearl River Delta in southern China or, morefancifully perhaps, San Diego and Tijuana along the American–Mexican border.

Life and politics in the resurgent metropolisThe resurgent metropolis of the contemporary era, then, differs markedly from theFordist industrial city of the mid-twentieth century. So much is obvious in regard to theeconomic bases of these two classes of city. Their overall social structure also offersnumerous points of contrast. Thus, while much of social life in the Fordist city wasarranged around a classical blue-collar/white-collar pattern of stratification, today’sresurgent metropolis is more likely to be characterized by a deepening split between anew elite of cognitive-cultural workers and a mass of low-wage, low-skill workersforming a sort of urban lumpenproletariat, much of it composed of migrants from othercountries. The Fordist metropolis, of course, was also a focus of in-migration from bothdomestic and foreign (especially European) sources, and it certainly was marked bysignificant diversity from the point of view of race and national origins. However, today’sresurgent city is even more multifarious in terms of its overall cultural and ethniccomposition and, more crucially, it is a magnet for both skilled and unskilled immigrantsfrom less developed areas all over the world, notably from Asia and Latin America. Thenet result is a new sort of cosmopolitanism in the populations of these cities (Binnieet al., 2006), not so much the rarified cosmopolitanism of an earlier era whose definingfeature was its reference to a free-floating group of individuals of dubious origins butelite pretensions, but an everyday cosmopolitanism that accepts an eclectic mix of urbanidentities and cultures as a perfectly normal aspect of modern life.

Just over a century ago, Simmel ([1903] 1959) characterized the denizens ofthe modern city as a mass of mechanistically interconnected but psychologicallydisconnected individuals. Much of this characterization is no doubt still valid in thecontext of the resurgent metropolis, with its synchronized in-step rhythms of work andits atomized forms of social life. The individualism of urban society has, if anything,made considerable headway by comparison with the cities of middle and high modernity.



There is much evidence to suggest that traditional urban or neighborhood webs ofcommunity and solidarity continue to disintegrate, while norms of market order andutilitarian criteria of human evaluation penetrate ever more deeply into the fabric ofsocial existence. Sennett (1998), for example, has pointed to an apparent corrosion oftraditional forms of affectivity and trust in both the workplace and social life, whilePutnam (2000) has written more generally about the weakening of communal ties inAmerica. Even the apparently countervailing expansion of civil society — NGOs,non-profit organizations, philanthropic foundations and the like — seems to be more asign of underlying processes of social fragmentation and the retreat of formalgovernment than it does of political solidarity and mobilization around communal norms(Mayer, 2003). Still, the new kinds of consumerism and hedonistic social rituals ofcontemporary urban life offer consolations of sorts in the face of what Simmel calls the‘unrelenting hardness’ of cities, at least for privileged segments of society. Lloyd andClark (2001) have alluded to something of what I am reaching for here with theirdescription of the modern metropolis as an ‘entertainment machine’; that is, as a place inwhich selected spaces are given over to ingestion of the urban spectacle, upscaleshopping experiences, entertainment and night-time scenes, supplemented by occasionaldoses of cultural stiffening supplied by museums, art galleries, concert halls and so on.These spaces dovetail smoothly in both formal and functional terms with the gentrifiedresidential neighborhoods and high-design workplaces that are the privileged preserve ofthe upper tier of the urban labor force in the modern cognitive-cultural economy.

I have already pointed out that life and work in the resurgent city are subject to highlevels of risk, both for lower-tier and upper-tier workers. As social welfare provisions aresteadily pared away and as traditional union organization declines in contemporarysociety, lower-tier workers in particular are exposed to the full stresses and strains of thissituation, notably those who make up the large and increasing corpus of marginalized(often undocumented) immigrant workers. Upper-tier workers, for their part, usuallyhave capital resources, both human and financial, that provide a degree of shelter fromthe most deleterious effects of risk, and in certain cases they are additionally protected byprofessional organizations and guilds that help to secure a modicum of labor marketstability. All the same, even for this tier of the labor force, the deepening unpredictabilityof employment prospects poses severe problems, notably for individuals in the earlyphases of their working lives. Many of these individuals are no longer focused on careersthat involve quasi-automatic upward mobility within the individual firm, and many of thefirms that employ them no longer even have traditional in-house personnel managementdepartments. Instead, upper-tier workers increasingly manage their own careers as theymove from project to project and from firm to firm, thereby building a wideningreputation and accumulating a portfolio of experiences. This mode of operation isintimately dependent on the formation of formal and informal social networks that makeit possible for individual workers to exchange information, to keep abreast of newdevelopments in their field, and to form a stable of acquaintances who can be called uponfor advice and help when needed. Upper-tier workers are inveterate participants in thesemultifaceted networks, which proliferate around work-related objectives in cities wherethe new cognitive-cultural economy is highly developed (Scott, 1998; Ursell, 2000; Battet al., 2001; Blair, 2001; Neff et al., 2005).

This is a world, however, in which the possibilities of large-scale politicalmobilization seem more and more remote, and in which collective action on the part ofmunicipal authorities seems increasingly to assume the mantle of a professionalized,technocratic activity lying outside the sphere of hard-edged political contestation. By thesame token, much of the intra-urban conflict over the welfare and distributional impactsof planning action that was so characteristic in the past (and that reverberated especiallythroughout the working-class neighborhoods of the Fordist city) has now more or lesssubsided into the background. In some respects, the only resonances that remain of therapidly moderating agonistic political atmosphere of the large metropolis emanate fromthe identity-based claims and conflicts that seem now to have overridden popular

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political agitation in regard to economic justice. Even in its relatively depoliticized formtoday, however, collective action in the resurgent metropolis is far from being a merelyneutral or disinterested force. Municipal authorities at the present time are acutelyfocused on the concerns of business (Harvey, 1989), and virtually everywhere areengaged in schemes directed to shoring up local competitive advantages and attractinginward investors. Major redevelopment projects, investment in urban amenities, placemarketing, the promotion of local festivals and large-scale sports events and so on figureprominently among these kinds of schemes, and indeed have become something of afocus of interurban competition in the global era.

A concomitant development on the urban policy scene has been a growing concernwith issues of ‘creativity’ and a widening search for instruments to harness the forces ofcreativity in order to promote local economic development (Florida, 2004). I havewritten at some length elsewhere about the deeply problematical notion of the creativecity (Scott, 2006). It is not my brief to examine this specific issue in detail here exceptto note in passing that the rise of a cognitive-cultural economy in major world citiespredictably puts aspirations to creativity, in one form or another, squarely on the urbanpolicy agenda. Cities like New York, London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, Osaka, Hong Kong,Seoul and Singapore, among numerous others, have all made explicit attempts topromote their status as creative cities and as global centers of the new cognitive-culturaleconomy (see, for example, Chang, 2000; British Department of Culture, 2001; HongKong Central Policy Unit, 2003; IAURIF, 2006; STADTart, 2000) and there is everyreason to believe that they will continue to intensify their search for this sort of economicand cultural influence in the future.

As it happens, much of the normative discussion about creative cities in the currentliterature puts considerable emphasis on the supposed efficacy of openness, toleranceand social diversity as the basis for moving forward on this front. These qualities are nodoubt excellent in and of themselves, and there can be little question that most of uswould prefer to live in cities in which they flourish compared to cities marked by closure,intolerance and uniformity. The significance of these qualities as active agents ineconomic development processes, however, remains an open question, and more to thepoint for present purposes, it is not even clear what specific relevance they may have forthe constitution of the city as a cultural community. In fact, the formula of openness,tolerance and diversity — without further careful specification — can serve as much asa foundation for isolation, individualism and mere mechanical difference as it can forsolidarity, camaraderie and meaningful political engagement of the citizenry in urbanlife. Something of the sort is already observable in the resurgent cities of contemporaryAmerica where elements of the formula are almost certainly more strongly present nowthan they ever have been in the past, but where the economic and social welfare of theurban community as a whole remains at a low ebb, and where so many of the basicstructural tensions of urban life fail to register durably in the public consciousness. Ofcourse, that is also partly why these same tensions occasionally spring forth intospontaneous open conflict. The point can be dramatically exemplified by reference to theLos Angeles riots of 1992, as well as to the disturbances that broke out in the immigrantquarters of the Paris suburbs in the latter part of 2005 and that then spilled over into otherparts of the metropolitan area. The paradox of the resurgent metropolis is the escalatingcontrast between its surface glitter and its underlying squalor, even as pious tributes tothe virtues of openness, tolerance and diversity in American society become more andmore a matter of course.

Conclusion: prospect and challengeThis extensive meditation on the state of the city has taken us from issues of theorganization of intra-urban space, through an investigation of the rise of a simultaneouslylocal and global cognitive-cultural economy, and then back again to the internal space of



the city as a distinctive site of political tensions and possibilities. Since the general crisisof Fordism in the 1970s and early 1980s, cities have resumed their long-term spiral ofexpansion, and with the ascent of the cognitive-cultural economy, selected cities aroundthe world have demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for growth, innovation anddemographic renewal. Despite contemporary claims to the effect that globalization andthe internet are about to transform human society into a placeless space of flows, theinexorable advance of urbanization continues apace. As I have shown, this advance hasbeen accompanied in many instances by dramatic qualitative shifts in the internal formand functions of the city, though always in the context of a basic urban dynamic rootedin a functionally polarized, or multi-polarized, structure of locations and land uses.Concurrently, large cities play a major role as the core components of a new regionalism,— that is, as localized systems of daily work–life interactions within a wider globalnetwork of relationships. In this sense, globalization can be understood in part throughthe interconnected mosaic of cities and city-regions that form its locational bulwarks.

In the light of this discussion, three main challenges revolving around regionalgovernance, economic growth and social equity can be discerned in contemporary cities.To be sure, these challenges go back to the very beginnings of urbanization in capitalism,though their shape and form vary greatly from one time period to the next, and they havetaken on new urgency as resurgent cities continue to build momentum. The firstchallenge flows from the widespread dysfunctionalities and inefficiencies that arise whenintra-urban space is politically and administratively fragmented, particularly in thesprawling global cities of today. It is of vital importance in these cities to recognize themultiple interdependencies and spillovers that pay no respect whatever to patterns ofmunicipal fragmentation, and to harmonize the institutional bases of urban governance.Despite this system-wide imperative, the difficulties of practical implementation areenormous, and there are always apt to be pockets of deep resistance to widermetropolitan political integration, as exemplified by the recent history of Montreal(Boudreau et al., 2006). The second challenge is focused on building and sustainingurban economic and cultural dynamism in the face of the ever mounting threats andopportunities of globalization. Success in this regard will depend in significant waysupon the degree to which the first challenge is met, but this second challenge also posesa unique and perplexing set of questions about how exactly policymakers should proceedin any attempt to coordinate and intensify local competitive advantages in the era of thecognitive-cultural economy. In particular, we surely need to move on from abstractconceptions of creativity and idealist visions of the power of disembodied talent, and toreframe the basic issues in terms of concrete developmental programs focused onspecific sectoral dynamics and the search for tangible employment opportunities. Thethird and no doubt most difficult challenge concerns the striking inequalities of income,opportunities and life chances that beset the contemporary metropolis, and that alsoalmost certainly undermine the full flowering of both its cultural and economicpotentialities. Associated with this challenge is the void that needs to be filled withrespect to issues of democratic participation in the public affairs of the city, and theconcomitant need to incorporate all segments of an increasingly disjointed urban societyinto one or another form of political community capable of articulating some sense ofshared destiny and of reining in the pernicious narcissism that seems to pervade so muchof life in the large metropolis of today.

Above and beyond these very specific challenges that individual cities must face, afurther major question can be raised in regard to the global community of cities as awhole. As we have seen, cities are increasingly subject to worldwide functionalintegration in an intensifying system of long-distance trade, social interaction andinformation exchange. The ultimate consequences of this process of integration areextremely difficult to gauge. That said, an argument drawing from notions about theinterplay of agglomeration economies and Chamberlinian competition might be madeto the effect that the process will in due course result in an increasingly polycentricand polyphonic system of economic and cultural production (Scott, 2005), in

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contradistinction to the homogenized landscape that some analysts see as the likelyeventual outcome of globalization. In any case, there are clearly going to be risingpressures for system coordination as a consequence of this situation, both to deal withpersistent intercity disequilibria as and when they make their appearance, and to mediateconflicts over the differential costs and benefits (both economic and cultural) ofparticipation in the global mosaic. In the long run, then, some institutional means ofabsorbing tensions and of redressing grievances in this putative global league of citysystems will no doubt eventually have to be arranged, above and beyond existingstructures of international consultation and cooperation.

Allen J. Scott ([email protected]), Department of Public Policy and Department ofGeography, University of California — Los Angeles, 1255 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA90095, USA.

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RésuméUne problématique urbaine est dégagée à propos des caractéristiques essentielles desvilles définies comme des ensembles d’activité humaine polarisés dans l’espace etmarqués par une symbiose interne poussée. Les racines de la crise qu’a subie lamétropole industrielle classique au XXe siècle sont mises en évidence. Est aussi étudié unnouveau type de dynamique économique urbaine apparu au cours des années 1980-1990, cette dynamique étant largement fondée sur la croissance et la diffusion dessystèmes de production cognitifs culturels. Parallèlement à ces évolutions, l’espaceurbain et la vie sociale ont connu des transformations radicales, et nombre de villes ontentrepris de revendiquer un rôle de centre culturel national et international. Cetargument est à la base de ce qu’on pourrait appeler l’hypothèse d’une résurgence desmétropoles. Il est montré que les effets de la mondialisation ont compté de façon crucialedans la genèse et la géographie de la résurgence urbaine. Trois grands dilemmespolitiques des ‘villes résurgentes’ sont soulignés: leur fragmentation institutionnelleinterne; l’accentuation de leur place d’agents économiques sur la scène mondiale etl’importance concomitante des approches collectives pour construire des avantagesconcurrentiels localisés; ainsi que l’intensification de leur désintégration et de leursegmentation sociales.

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