Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
inescapably anti-democratic. The maintenance of an independent, critical
perspective among the media, particularly regarding corporate power, is
threatened by the steady oligopolization of the industry. Worse, corporate
media giants are highly unlikely to espouse any critical political views that
o
er meaningful challenges to the established social order. Far from consti-
tuting some utopian domain of free speech, therefore, as early technocrats
predicted, corporate concentration of telecommunications, the media, and
the Internet may well reinforce and deepen social polarities (Warf 2007).
ff
Global cities as motors of postmodern time-space compression
In de
ance of predictions that digital technologies would render urban areas
obsolete, postmodern globalization also witnessed a resurgence of “global
cities” at di
fi
erent levels of the international urban hierarchy (Sassen 1991).
Such places are tied through vast tentacles of investment, trade, migration,
and telecommunications to clients and markets, suppliers and competitors,
consumers and producers around the world. Global cities serve as the home
to massive complexes of
ff
firms, producer services, and corporate
headquarters, or “command and control” centers in the world system. Typic-
ally, the trio of London, New York, and Tokyo is positioned at the top, with
cascading layers demarcated by successively smaller roles in the world econ-
omy, including cities such as Paris, Frankfurt, Toronto, Los Angeles, Osaka,
Hong Kong, and Singapore (Beaverstock et al. 2000).
The core of such conglomerations allow for dense networks of interaction
necessary to the performance of headquarters functions, including: monitor-
ing frequent changes in niche product markets; negotiating with labor unions;
keeping abreast of new technologies and government regulations; keeping an
eye on the competition; staying tuned to an increasingly complex
fi
financial
fi
financial
environment; initiating or resisting leveraged buy-outs and hostile takeovers;
seeking new investment opportunities, and so forth. Because their
raison
d'être
cannot be reduced to the “economic,” but includes a vast variety of
formal and informal cultural and political interactions such as tourism, the
media, and fashion industries, global cities are more than simply poles for the
production of corporate knowledge (Knox 1995). The crux of global cities'
role in the post-Fordist world economy is to serve as arenas of interaction,
allowing face-to-face contact, political connections, artistic and cultural
activities, and the easy mingling of elites (Thrift 1994b; Budd 1999). At
their core, global cities allow the generation of specialized expertise upon
which so much of the world economy depends (Howells 1990). Rather than
simple structural outcomes of the worldwide division of labor, global cities
are contingent social constructs constructed and maintained by actors (Smith
1998).
The functionality of global cities can be understood by invoking the
well-known distinction between explicit (or standardized) and tacit know-
ledge (Polanyi 1967). Explicit knowledge refers to standardized forms of
fi
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