The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21)

by Joel Kotkin

  CHINESE CITIES UNDER MAOISM

  Such attitudes would have been unthinkable in the early years after the Communist revolution. The Communists had risen to power largely through their support of peasants and rural villagers. Their vanquished rivals, the Kuomintang, drew their strongest backing in the coastal cities and their cosmopolitan elites.25

  Once in control in 1949, Communist leader Mao Zedong sought to steer his country’s development away from the “corrupt” coastal commercial centers and toward countryside and interior towns. He consciously curbed big-city growth by restricting rural migration. Periodically, as during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, the Communists also “sent down” large numbers of young urbanites to the countryside to learn from the peasantry and provide manpower for massive development schemes.

  As a result, China urbanized at a slower pace than elsewhere in East Asia and the rest of the developing world. At a time when cities such as Hong Kong, Bombay, and Mexico were enjoying rapid population growth, many of the country’s established commercial centers—Guangzhou (Canton), Tainjin, and Shanghai—expanded only modestly. In contrast, Beijing, center of the all-powerful Communist bureaucracy, continued to grow, adding twice as many people as Shanghai between 1953 and 1970.

  In all cities under the Maoist regime, many traditional aspects of Chinese urban life were suppressed. Old shrines were either abandoned or destroyed. Public markets, a critical component of Chinese cities for millennia, were discouraged. Once “riotous with life,” China’s commercial cities became largely drab places, albeit with drastically less crime, prostitution, and open corruption.26

  THE FOUR MODERNIZATIONS AND THE REVIVAL OF CHINESE CITIES

  China’s urban evolution shifted dramatically following Mao’s death in 1976. Under Deng Xiaoping’s “Four Modernizations,” Beijing gradually loosened its strict control over municipalities. Local officials now encouraged private initiative and outside investment. The creation of special economic zones, such as that in Shenzen between Hong Kong and Canton, attracted the largest amounts of foreign capital, much of it from Hong Kong, Taipei, and Singapore. Within fifteen years, the area around the Pearl River Delta had become much like the British Midlands in the mid-nineteenth century, not only the “country’s workshop,” but rapidly the workshop of the world.27

  Arguably more so than at any time in Chinese history, the country’s cities now assumed primacy as central places in the national life. Freed from strict controls on their movements and seeking new opportunities, rural migrants streamed toward the cities by the tens of millions.

  In less than a generation, street-level life in China changed dramatically. Streets previously filled with bicycles were now choked with automobile traffic. New modern office buildings, hotels, and high-rise apartments dwarfed the old Stalinist-style state buildings along the major boulevards. Public markets reappeared, offering an ever wider variety of meats, vegetables, and fruits to an increasingly affluent public.

  SHANGHAI’S RESURGENCE

  The cosmopolitan culture Maoism had sought to stamp out once again returned, particularly in the coastal cities.28 This was especially true in the old colonial bastion of Shanghai, which progressively challenged both Hong Kong and Tokyo for the role as Asia’s premier business center and location for foreign investment.

  Shanghai also embarked on some of the world’s most ambitious infrastructure projects, including a new subway system and airport improvements. The largest development, the massive Pudong New Area, across the Huangpu River from Shanghai, started construction in 1990; within a decade, a whole new city had arisen, complete with a greenbelt area, luxury hotels, 140 high-rise office buildings, sleek roadways, a modern ferry terminal, subways, and an underground pedestrian tunnel.29

  China’s rapid urban resurgence brought with it many of the challenges associated with rapid development. Millions of migrant workers—the “floating population”—have followed the path trod earlier by impoverished Lancashire farmers, Irish peasants, and European immigrants in Chicago or New York. They crowded into small apartments at often exorbitant prices. Millions of Chinese urbanites worked at jobs that were dirty, dangerous, and often insecure. Prostitution, bald-faced corruption, petty crime, and other “vices” associated with the old China now returned, sometimes with a surprising vengeance.30

  SUBURBIA COMES TO EAST ASIA

  For all these similarities with the old industrial cities, the rising urban centers of Asia are products of a primarily decentralized age. Unlike the highly centralized urban centers of Europe or North America, these regions are developing in an era where the automobile, telecommunications, and industrial technology shape the contours of urban geography.

  As great towers rose over Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Seoul, the pressures for outward development accelerated. Some among East Asia’s expanding urban middle class increasingly coveted the fast-paced urban lifestyles of New York or Tokyo, but much of the new housing, factories, and shopping malls headed out to the periphery. This phenomenon could also be seen in such other Asian cities as Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Manila, all of which developed elaborate suburban areas that attracted both affluent residents and industry.31

  Some of those working in the new office parks, factories, and research facilities sought to move into comfortable and rapidly expanding auto-dependent suburban developments that sometimes looked suspiciously like somewhat denser versions of the outskirts of Los Angeles or San Jose.32 Like their counterparts in the established Western cities, these Asian urbanites were finding their “better city” in an expanding archipelago of suburbs. 33

  CONCLUSION

  THE URBAN FUTURE

  The process of ascent and decline of cities is both rooted in history and changed by it. Successful urban areas today must still resonate with the ancient fundamentals—places sacred, safe, and busy. This was true five thousand years ago, when cities represented a tiny portion of humanity, and in this century, the first in which the majority live in cities. 1

  The world’s urban population, only 750 million in 1960, grew to 3 billion by 2002 and is expected to surpass 5 billion in 2030. These swelling ranks of city dwellers face a vastly changed environment in which even the most powerful urban area must compete not only with other large places, but with an ever wider array of smaller cities, suburbs, and towns.2

  THE CRISIS OF THE MEGACITY

  These shifts will be felt most acutely among the sprawling megacities of the developing world. In the past, size allowed cities to dominate the economies of their hinterlands. Today, the very girth of the most populous megacities—Mexico City, Cairo, Lagos, Mumbai, Kolkata, São Paulo, Jakarta, Manila—is often more a burden than an advantage.3

  In some places, these urban giants have been losing out to smaller, better-managed, and less socially beleaguered settlements. In East Asia, the critical nursery of twenty-first-century urbanism, Singapore and, to a lesser extent, Kuala Lumpur have integrated themselves into the global economy more successfully than the far more populous Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila.4

  Similarly, bloated size has, as one observer noted, “robbed Mexico City of its economic logic.”5 Burdened by crime, congestion, and pollution, La Capital is often bypassed by entrepreneurs and ambitious workers for faster-growing, better-run cities such as Querétaro, Guadalajara, and Monterrey, or across the border to urban areas of el norte itself.6

  In the Near East, megacities like Cairo and Tehran have suffered to keep pace with their exploding populations, while smaller, more compact centers such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi have flourished. Dubai, a dusty settlement of twenty-five thousand in 1948, saw its population approach 1 million fifty years later, while avoiding the economic stagnation that has haunted most of the Arab world.7

  As in Dubai, cosmopolitan attitudes and the accumulation of unique skills continue to have a major impact in determining successful cities. Openness to varied cultures and the clever employment of talent helped relatively small cities such as Tyr
e, Florence, and Amsterdam play outsize roles in their times. Similarly, in the twenty-first century, a small cosmopolitan city such as a Luxembourg, Singapore, or Tel Aviv often wields more economic influence than a sprawling megagiant of 10 or even 15 million.8

  THE LIMITS OF THE CONTEMPORARY URBAN RENAISSANCE

  As the twentieth century drew to a close, megacities in the advanced countries seemed to be enjoying brighter economic prospects. There was a statistically small but notable increase in residential development even in some long-abandoned downtowns. Many people now predicted that the most cosmopolitan “world cities”—London, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, and San Francisco—had indeed irrevocably “turned the corner.”9 “Neither Western civilization nor Western cities,” suggested one keen observer, the historian Peter Hall, “show any sign of decay.”10

  This new optimism rested largely on the impact of global integration and the worldwide shift from a manufacturing to an information-based economy. Cities like New York, London, and Tokyo, argued the theorist Saskia Sassen, occupy “new geographies of centrality” that provide “the strategic sites for management of the global economy.” 11 Behind these giants, she identified a secondary list of global centers, including variously Los Angeles, Chicago, Frankfurt, Toronto, Sydney, Paris, Miami, and Hong Kong.

  These cities clearly enjoyed far better prospects than the rapidly shrinking great industrial cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leipzig, Osaka, Turin, and Detroit, which increasingly suffered from technological obsolescence and competition from developing countries. “The ‘things’ a global city makes,” Sassen suggested, “are services and financial goods.” These products, it was widely assumed, needed the unique skills and capabilities that existed only within the “global city.” 12

  THE “DESTRUCTION OF DISTANCE”

  Such an assessment may be replacing the excessive pessimism of the 1960s with a magnified sense of optimism. Even the most evolved “global cities” now find the advantages of scale diminished by the rise of new technologies that, in the words of the anthropologist Robert McC. Adams, have accomplished “an awesome technological destruction of distance.”13

  The ability to process and transmit information globally, and across great expanses, undermines many traditional advantages enjoyed by established urban centers. Throughout the last third of the twentieth century, secular trends, particularly in the United States, pointed to a continued shift even of corporate headquarters to the suburbs and smaller cities.14 In 1969, only 11 percent of America’s largest companies were headquartered in the suburbs; a quarter century later, roughly half had migrated to the periphery. 15

  These developments contradict the notion that a handful of megacities exercised the ultimate “command and control” centers of the global economy. Many elite service and financial firms remained in the established centers, such as Boston, New York, or San Francisco, but the clients “calling the plays” were just as likely to be operating in distant suburbs of Seattle, Houston, and Atlanta, or from abroad.16

  Even high-end services, the supposed linchpin of “global city” economies, have continued to disperse toward the periphery or smaller cities. This was even more marked among firms in the largest generator of new growth, the entrepreneurial sector.17 Improvements in telecommunications promise to further flatten economic space in the future, with choice jobs able to shift to exurbs and even small cities such as Fargo, Des Moines, and Sioux Falls.18 One result has been the shift in the very landscape of growth, with suburban office parks widely favored over gleaming high-rise towers.19

  The global securities industry, for example, once overwhelmingly concentrated in the financial districts of London and New York, has gradually shifted an ever larger share of their operations to their respective suburban rings, other smaller cities, and overseas. The headquarters might remain in a midtown high-rise, but more and more the jobs are located elsewhere. 20

  One particularly striking case comes from the retail industry. For much of the twentieth century, New York dominated a great deal of the retailing world; by 2000, not one of the sector’s twenty largest firms was located there. New York–based fashion designers, advertising executives, trade show organizers, and investment bankers continued to play an important supporting role. The most critical power-shaping global retail lay elsewhere, in firms such as Wal-Mart, which operated effectively from Bentonville, Arkansas. 21

  These decentralizing trends have taken an unmistakable toll on the overall economic relevance of New York, still the most important of the advanced world’s megacities. In the last three decades of the twentieth century—a period of explosive job growth across the United States—the city’s private sector created virtually no new net employment. A powerful service economy still remained, but as the historian Fred Siegel suggested, the long-term trends showed the city slipping further behind the nation “with each new turn of the cycle.”22

  Even in highly centralized Japan, software and other technology-centered activities have begun to move away from the great centers of Osaka and Tokyo and outward to outlying prefectures. In the same way, Hong Kong has hemorrhaged both high-tech manufacturing and engineering positions to surrounding parts of mainland China. The rise of “telecities” around the world suggests the emergence of new high-end industrial pockets, including in the less urbanized sections of France, Belgium, and Korea.

  The increased application of home commuting threatens to reduce even further the roles once played exclusively by urban regions. The evolution of a home-centered economy, in its infancy today, promises elite knowledge workers an unprecedented latitude in choosing where they live and work.23

  THE RISE OF THE EPHEMERAL CITY

  Under these circumstances, even the best-positioned urban areas face severe demographic and economic challenges. Many of the young people lured to these cities in their twenties often depart when they start families and businesses. Increasingly, upwardly mobile immigrants, critical contributors to the urban resurgence, join the exodus. European, Japanese, and other East Asian urban centers face an even more extreme demographic crisis. Low birthrates are reducing the ranks of young people, the group most attracted to large cities, while choking off the traditional pool of immigrants from the countryside. 24

  With economic growth, even in high-end services, shifting elsewhere, many leading cities in the advanced world increasingly rest their future prospects on their role as cultural and entertainment centers. These cities may now be morphing, as H. G. Wells predicted a century earlier, from commanding centers of economic life toward a more ephemeral role as a “bazaar, a great gallery of shops and places of concourse and rendezvous.” 25

  Cities have played this staging role since their origins. Central squares, the areas around temples, cathedrals, and mosques, long provided ideal places for merchants to sell their wares. Natural theaters, cities provided the overwhelmingly rural populations around them with a host of novel experiences unavailable in the hinterland. Rome, the first megacity, developed these functions to an unprecedented level. It boasted both the first giant shopping mall, the multistory Mercatus Traini, and the Colosseum, a place where urban entertainment grew monstrous in its size and nature.

  In the industrial era, noted the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, “the techniques of amusement” became “more indispensable to make urban suffering bearable.” By the twentieth century, industrialized mass entertainment—publishing, motion pictures, radio, and television— occupied an ever larger hold on the life of urban dwellers. These media-related businesses also accounted for a growing part of the economy in such key image-producing cities as Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Bombay.26

  By the early twenty-first century, this focus on the cultural industries began to inform economic policies in many urban areas. Instead of working to retain middle-class families and factory jobs or engage in economic competition with the periphery, urban regions placed increased focus on such ephemeral concepts as fashionability, “
hipness,” trend, and style as the keys to their survival.

  In Rome, Paris, San Francisco, Miami, Montreal, and New York, tourism now stands as one of the largest and most promising industries. The economies of some of the fastest-growing centers, such as Las Vegas or Orlando, rely largely on the staging of “experiences,” complete with uniquely eye-catching architecture and round-the-clock live entertainment.27

  Even in such unlikely places as Manchester, Montreal, and Detroit, political and business leaders hoped that by creating “cool cities,” they might lure gays, bohemians, and young “creatives” to their towns.28 In some places, the accoutrements of this kind of growth—loft developments, good restaurants, clubs, museums, and a sizable, visible gay and single population—succeeded in reviving once desolate town centers, but hardly with anything remotely reminiscent of their past economic dynamism. 29

  Cities in continental Europe—notably Paris, Vienna, and post–cold war Berlin—particularly embraced this reliance on a culturally based economy. Having largely failed to regain its status as a world business center, Berlin now celebrated its bohemian community as its primary economic asset. The city’s relevance was increasingly defined not by the export of goods or services, but by its edgy galleries, unique shops, lively street life, and growing tourist trade.30