Lauren Scott
In this age of information, high-speed computers, and global transactions, one might speculate that cities are becoming less important *places*, that urban agglomeration becomes obsolete as advances in global telecommunications allow for significant labor, management, and resource dispersal. Within this scenario we are reminded of Third World women deftly operating sewing machines or carefully assembling electronic equipment, creating fashions and appliances for Western markets. All the while, the executive -- cellular phone, laptop computer complete with fax -- manages the office from home, a world away.
Despite speculations that cities are becoming *less* important places, some cities have become extremely important, earning them the title of "global" or "world" cities. While manufacturing in Detroit and other once powerful U.S. industrial centers fracture, reassembling off-shore in Mexico and other developing countries, cities like New York are expanding. New York, Tokyo, London, and a handful of other world cities are emerging as specific geographic control sites in a dynamic international economic order. In fact, it is precisely because of the geographic dispersal and complex organizational forms promoted by telecommunications, that agglomeration of command and control functions take shape within select urban regions (Sassen, 1991). This paper explores the influence of new spatial technologies on the social and spatial structure of the global metropolis.
Spatial Technologies and Urban Spatial Form
The world city thesis posits that corporations are expanding beyond national boundaries, establishing world wide networks of production and distribution (Hamnett, 1994). These broad processes are clearly evident: CEOs in companies, once catering exclusively to domestic markets, announce plans and strategies to garner large portions of new sales from international clients; corporations, once vertically integrated in the Fordist era, downsize, subcontract, and then reorganize production strategies to maintain maximum flexibility, often utilizing telematics to integrate all stages of the work process (Mitchelson and Wheeler, 1994). Operating within this global arena, access to financial information becomes crucial. International exchange-rates, interest rates, and price trend differences offer both new threats, and new opportunities (Cohen, 1981).
Faced with growing competition, many corporations employ subcontracting strategies to transfer the risk of maintaining overhead expenses and wages during periods of reduced labor demand (Law and Wolch, 1993). Other corporations reduce labor costs by decentralizing specific service and support tasks. Jamaica, for example, has emerged as a key location for overseas office work because of its high literacy rates and English speaking populations (Sassen, 1984). Key operators earn the equivalent of US$1.67 (January 1994 exchange rates) compared to workers in the United States who earn US$7-10 per hour (Mullings, 1995, 174). Pelton refers to this off-shore production as 'electronic immigration' in which the labor and skills of (often female) workers is imported from cheap 'tele-colony' locations around the globe via telecommunication networks (Pelton, 1992, in Graham and Marvin, 1996, 153).
Rapid advances in telecommunications, transportation, and computer technologies have been crucial to this global restructuring. These advances integrate select cities into an expansive 'networked economy' of instantaneous information, service, capital, and labor flows (Graham and Marvin, 1996, 162). Select world cities emerge as sites for corporate headquarters, foreign investment, and the production of legal, financial, managerial, technical, engineering, accounting, and consulting services needed to control complex and widely dispersed international operations. Cumulative concentration of financial and technological ventures, specialized labor, cultural facilities, and transportation infrastructure in these large cities, operates to sustain them as business and control centers atop a dynamic urban hierarchy (Graham and Marvin, 1996, 32). While a handful of the world's largest cities have benefitted most from advances in telecommunications, other cities have been completely bypassed (Graham and Marvin, 1996). Geography and history remain critical influences in the uneven development of electronic spaces.
Yet global restructuring processes are impacting more than just the largest metropolitan centers. Other urban spatial forms are developing to take advantage of growth in spatial technologies. The emergence of urban settlements straddling international borderlands, for example, reflects selective integrative processes at work to link these border frontiers into the circuitry of the global networked economy (Batten, 1995, 313). Other cities are developing into constellations of linked urban resources. Network and corridor cities evolve when two or more independent cities work together to achieve scope economies through reciprocity and knowledge exchange, aided by fast and efficient transport and communications infrastructure (Batten, 1995). Examples include the Stockholm-Upsala corridor and the Randstad Holland urban network.
Spatial Technologies and Social Polarization
The practice of global control -- the work of producing and reproducing the organization and management of a global production system -- has a number of structural outcomes. The concentration of advanced producer services and the occupational and income distributions that characterize these services, have contributed to employment growth at both the top and the bottom ends of the wage continuum (Sassen, 1986; 1991). At the top end, growing numbers of highly paid professionals are offered full-time, prestigious opportunities in business, law, finance, and management services. These professionals generate demand for a wide range of low order consumer services at the bottom end of the occupational hierarchy, supporting restaurants, retailing, cleaning, and the entertainment industries (McDowell and Court, 1994, 1398; Sassen, 1991). As the multiplier effect would have it, these often casual, part-time, and low-wage jobs generally outnumber the high-skilled professional jobs by a factor of two or three to one (Graham and Marvin, 1996, 142). Thus, global restructuring is not only creating opportunities for white collar information technicians and managers, it is also creating new spaces and economic opportunities for a large influx of immigrants from developing countries. The metropolis increasingly represents a world city, not only in terms of its linkages to the global economy, but also in the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural composition of its population (Castells and Mollenkopf, 1991, 400).
Diverging occupational opportunities contribute to the development of an unequal and polarized class structure within the global metropolis. Knox (1995) points out that while advances in telematics, especially telemedia, may have a homogenizing effect -- functionally integrating labor markets, consumer preferences, political institutions, and economic organizations -- these technologies also give rise to new cleavages. Labor, for example, continues to be fragmented along lines of race, gender, age, immigration status, and region (Knox, 1995).
Related to processes of social polarization are processes of spatial polarization. The largest and most affluent urban regions, already well equipped with telecommunications infrastructure, are best positioned to take advantage of continued corporate centralization and the growth of new industrial spaces. The less equipped and more peripheral urban regions, on the other hand, become increasingly locked into competition with less developed and newly industrializing countries over the spoils of decentralization (Graham and Marvin, 1996, 170). While the advantaged core cities and high technology zones increase their attractiveness for further technological investment, the disadvantaged periphery falls further and further behind.
Access to information technologies is also increasingly polarized. The physical hardware and technical skills needed to utilize information technologies become one criteria for access. It is not just a matter of the "haves" moving forward, while the "have-nots" stand still, however. Neighborhoods and entire counties are being bypassed by infrastructure development (Piana, 1995). Civil rights and consumer groups have cited patterns of "electronic redlining" in which neighborhoods with high concentrations of poor people and people of color are being excluded from plans to offer new on-line services and products, in favor of more affluent communities (Piana, 1995). At the same time, these marginalized communities experience diminishing access to existing urban services, products, and public resources (Graham and Marvin, 1996).
Participation in spatial technologies, information flows, and the profits associated with telematics increasingly shape social, economic, political, and cultural developments. Marginalization and a polarization of access to these technologies, however, means that only a small and select portion of society fuels these developments, shaping their social priorities. Effects of limited input into the evolution of telematics are evident in the products produced. For example, when 5th graders were given the opportunity to use CD-ROM encyclopedias to research "famous Americans", many came back empty-handed. While the average entry for famous white males was 28 inches of text, very little information was available on people of color, whose entries averaged only 5 inches of text (Piana, 1995, 20).
On the other hand, telematics and GIS also provide an ability to integrate society, to promote inclusion across time, space, and socio-economic barriers. A Boston neighborhood in Dorchester County plagued by gang violence and crime, for example, set up a community network. The network allows residents to share community news, organize crime watch activities, participate in a local food co-op, and post job listings. The project is fostering neighborhood cohesion and communication (Ross, 1995). Residents in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg are involved in a project to develop a database with block-by-block information on toxic emissions and respiratory health problems. The GIS is being developed to give residents political power against local industrial polluters, to help develop recycle and pollution abatement programs, and to draw financial resources to clean up their communities (Liebman, 1995, 27). LatinoNet, a national electronic clearinghouse for issues affecting Hispanic Americans, was launched in November, 1994. The purpose of this network is to "empower the Latino community" in the areas of cultural, legislative, and civil rights. LatinoNet provides news and information on employment, education, health care, public policy, and the arts (Lewis, 1995).
These projects, while successful, have not been priorities for the corporate and commercial entities dominating electronic space. Academics can provide an important voice in a dialogue which encourages community-oriented projects, free public access to the Internet, and social equity in the development and production of spatial information. GIS are already used extensively for environmental impact reporting; their use could be extended to provide analyses of social impacts and to ensure social equity. GIS has enormous potential to serve as an organizing framework for communication and inclusion.
Further Research
I bring a number of research interests to the Baltimore conference on Spatial Technologies, Geographic Information, and the City. The first is an interest in the relationship between telematics and new urban spatial forms: world city urban structures, corridor and network city clusters, and urban growth along international borderlands. A second research interest involves the relationship between spatial technologies and the new spaces and economic opportunities developing for immigrant workers: downgraded manufacturing employment within urban centers, retail and personal service jobs within the affluent neighborhoods of technical and professional workers, and 'electronic immigration' resulting from off-shore production. I am also interested in investigating the link between global restructuring and female labor force participation. The literature on world cities and telecommunications does not seem to adequately address how these broad processes are associated with the feminization of the labor force and consequent restructuring of gender divisions of labor. I am particularly interested in how spatial divisions of labor continue to be defined along lines of gender, race/ethnicity, and immigrant legal status.
Finally, and certainly most important to my dissertation aspirations, I am interested in exploring how GIS can be used to model broad economic and social processes associated with global restructuring and the expansion of telematics. Webber (1996), in his conference research notes, points out that we can no longer regard cities as unitary phenomenon, separate from the larger socio-economic systems in which they are entangled. Feminist geographers, exploring new concepts of space and place, define places (cities) as differentially located nodes in a network of relations -- unbounded, unstable, and spatially discontiguous (McDowell, 1993, 312). I am interested in exploring how developments in network analysis might supplement the more traditional census-type regional analysis to model information flows and issues of accessibility. Certainly GIS contains the tools to model these urban relations. The difficulty, of course, is determining the finite sets of attributes and spatial features to adequately represent so much complexity. I believe, however, that the efforts expended to meet this challenge will be well worth the rewards. Success would allow researchers to both test and contribute to urban social theory, help empower politically and economically marginalized groups, and contribute to sound and effective urban policy.
References
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Biographical Sketch
Lauren Scott is a first year Ph.D. student at San Diego State University. Her broad interests include GIS, urban spatial data analysis, immigration, and gender.