Global Cities Playing the Global Game: High-Skills to What End?

The dominant narrative on globalization emphasizes the importance of developing high-skill sectors with the greatest profit potential.  As developed countries have watched their middle class erode with the loss of manufacturing, economic development strategies have focused on expanding specialized service sectors—the sectors that manage the global economy.

Saskia Sassen argues that this approach ignores the array of jobs that accompany a high-skill, service economy.  The result can be growing economic inequality.  So what is the solution for rebuilding our middle class?

It seems that developing our innovation capacity—research and development—might be the way to go.  The Brookings Institute proposes significant investment in R&D for “advanced industries” such as advanced energy systems and photonics technology.  

Global cities aren’t waiting around for national governments to step up and promote these industries of the future.  New York City has recently invested in this idea.  Three new applied technology campuses have received funding and support from the city and will be opening soon.  These campuses will connect with cutting edge fields of the future.  However, Sassen would probably question the quality of job that might emerge from these sectors.  Will these schools focus on tech transfer to multinational corporations or will they focus on advanced manufacturing opportunities that will drive quality job growth?  It remains to be seen…

Holding on to Sticky Places in a Slippery Global Economy

Last week, I presented the concept of "sticky places" or places that are able to maintain their economic well-being throughout economic cycles.  However, there is debate about how much power local governments have over the ability to manage economic outcomes in an increasingly globalized economy.

Since the 1970's, globalization has mobilized capital and led to the decline of many industrial cities.  Some of these places have rebounded (e.g. Baltimore and Pittsburgh) as a result of strategic planning and economic restructuring.  So what is the playbook for government led urban regeneration?  Or in other words, where do you apply the 'sticky tape'?

Susan Fainstein explains how local governments vary greatly in their approaches to economic intervention.  While home rule allows U.S. cities a significant amount of autonomy, federal policies and the fragmented nature of federalism usually favor local policy that applies sticky tape to mobile corporations versus building sticky community-based assets.

This analogy is useful for evaluating the prevailing economic development model.  We have been applying sticky tape to something that is inherently slippery.  If we want a more impactful, sustaining, and widespread return on our public investements, we should devote our resources toward developing communities assets--human capital, social capital, etc--to which they are more likely to stick.

Sticky Places, Slippery Spaces

Why do cities prosper and why do cities fall?  This is undoubtedly a complicated question, but research into the spatial structure of cities provides us with a framework for investigation.

The theory of agglomeration tells us that firms colocate in urban areas to benefit from economies of scale and network effects.  This creates "sticky places" that easily attract and retain new firms.   

Economic geographer Ann Markusen describes four spatial structures of sticky places.  Two of those models --the 'Marshallian Industrial District' and the 'Hub and Spoke'--are well represented in the US.  Marshallian Industrial Districts (Silicon Valley) and Hub and Spokes (Seattle) differ greatly in their dependence on individual industries, with the latter being particularly dependent.

There are stories of success and failure for each model.  There is no ideal or utopian economic structure that guarantees the success of a city.  Instead, planners must be prepared when economic structures falter and lead the way in transitioning to a new structure that can connects assets with opportunities.  The key focus should be linkages: how do firms link to one another and where are the opportunities for development?

'Placemaking' in the Fourth Dimension

Whether you are a planner, an urbanophile, or just an active newspaper reader, you have probably come across the phrase “sense of place.”  To many, this concept might seem visceral—we travel through a neighborhood and grasp the strong character of its spatial environment.  In the era of placemaking, many planners are trying to establish or enhance the sense of place in communities.  For this purpose, we need a more measurable definition of place.

In “Politics and Space/Time,” geographer Doreen Massey rejects prior spatial theories and argues that space is very much a function of time.  Space is not an outcome, but a moment in time that is defined by historic and social relationships that describe the past and influence the future.

Today’s planners share both a placemaking agenda and new tools for understanding place.  However, our tools (census data, GIS, etc.) present a snapshot (2D or 3D) in time.  Without a more dynamic perspective of the forces that define space, how can we truly capture, understand, and improve our places?

An example of our technical limitations is a new search engine created by a University of Cincinnati professor.  This tool provides a heat map of similar places across the U.S. based on selectable environmental and socio-economic variables.  The ultimate goal is to "offer the user a total search for a sense of place."  This notion seems a bit naive in light of Massey's critique.  We must recognize that a static view of space or place is an incomplete view.  In the age of ‘big data’ how can we involve the 4^th dimension in our analysis of places and our attempts at placemaking?