Settlement Systems: Past and Present
And
Andrew Jorgenson
Institute for Research on World-Systems
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
chriscd@mail.ucr.edu
Both
cities and states got larger with the development of social complexity,
but they did not grow smoothly. Rather there were cycles of growth and
decline and sequences of uneven development in all the regions of the world
in which cities and states emerged. It was the invention of new techniques
of power and production that ultimately made possible the more complex
and hierarchical societies that emerged. The processes of uneven development
by which smaller and newer semiperipheral settlements overcame and transformed
larger and older ones has been a fundamental aspect of social evolution
since the invention of sedentary life. The
role of city systems in the reproduction and transformation of human social
institutions has been altered by the emergence and predominance of capitalist
accumulation. Whereas the most important cities of agrarian tributary states
were primarily centers of control and coordination for the extraction of
labor and resources from vast empires by means of institutionalized coercion,
the most important cities in the modern world have increasingly supplemented
the coordination of force with the manipulations of money and the production
of commodities. The
great wave of globalization in the second half of the twentieth century
has been heralded (and protested) by the public as well as by social scientists
as a new stage of global capitalism with allegedly unique qualities based
on new technologies of communication and information processing. Some students
of globalization claim that they do not need to know anything about what
happened before 1960 because so much has changed that the past is entirely
non-comparable with the present.Most
of the burgeoning literature on global cities and the world city system
joins this breathless presentism. But claims about the uniqueness of contemporary
globalization can only be empirically evaluated by studying change over
time and by comparing the post-World War II wave of globalization with
the great wave of international trade and investment that occurred in the
last decades of the nineteenth century. All social systems have exhibited
waves of spatial expansion and intensification of large interaction networks
followed by contractions. The real question is which aspects of the most
current wave are unique and which are functional repetitions of earlier
pulsations. Historical comparison is essential for understanding the most
recent incarnation of the system of world cities. According
to the theorists of global capitalism it was during the 1960’s that the
organization of economic activity entered a new period expressed by the
altered structure of the world economy: the dismantling of industrial centers
in the United States, Europe and Japan; accelerated industrialization of
several Third World nations; and increased internationalization of the
financial industry into a global network of transactions (Sassen 1991).With
the emerging spatial organization of the new international division
of labor, John Friedmann identified a set of theses known as the world
city hypotheses concerning the contradictory relations between production
in the era of global management and political determination of territorial
interests (Friedmann 1986).Saskia
Sassen and others have further elaborated the global city hypotheses.Global
cities, it is argued, have acquired new functions beyond acting as centers
of international trade and banking. They have become: (1) concentrated
command points in the organization of the world-economy that use advanced
telecommunication facilities, (2) important centers for finance and specialized
producer service firms, (3) coordinators of state power, (4) sites of innovative
post-Fordist forms of industrialization and production, and (5) markets
for the products and innovations produced (Sassen 2001a, 2000, 1991; Brenner
1998; Yeoh 1999; Hall 1996; Friedmann 1995).These
structural shifts in the functioning of cities are argued to have “impacted
both the international economic activity and urban form where major cities
concentrate control over vast resources, while financial and specialized
service industries have restructured the urban social and economic order”
(Sassen 1991, pg 4). During the 1990’s New York has specialized in equity
trading, London in currency trading, and Tokyo in size of bank deposits(Slater
2000).Beaverstock, Smith
and Taylor (1999) use Sassen’s focus on producer services to classify 55
cities as alpha, beta and/or gamma world cities based on the presence
of accountancy, advertising, banking/finance
and law firms.Peter Taylor and
Jon Beaverstock are co-directing the Globalization and World Cities Study
Group and Network at Loughborough University.Their
website is a valuable resource for the study of systems of world cities
(http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/). The
most important assertion in the global cities literature is the idea that
the global cities are cooperating with each other more than the
world cities did in earlier periods. The most relevant earlier period is
the Pax Britannica, especially the last decades of the nineteenth
century. If this hypothesis is correct the division of labor and institutionalized
cooperative linkages between contemporary New York, London and Tokyo should
be greater than were similar linkages between London, Paris, Berlin and
New York in the nineteenth century.Obviously
communications technologies were not as developed in the nineteenth century,
though intercontinental telegraph cables had already been laid, and Japan
was not yet a core power in the world-system. But the nature and strength
of coordination among the world cities of the nineteenth century needs
to be examined in order to support the hypothesis of greater contemporary
integration that the global cities literature assumes. Another
important hypothesis of the global cities literature is based on Saskia
Sassen’s (1991) observations about class polarization and the casualization
of work within globalizing cities. The research of Gareth Stedman Jones
on Irish immigration into London’s East End in the nineteenth century (Jones
n.d.) shows that a somewhat similar process of peripheralization of
the core was occurring in the Pax Britannica. Much
of the research on the global city system is based on case studies of particular
cities that seek to identify the processes leading to their emergence and
positioning within the larger system (Baum 1997; Grosfoguel 1995; Todd
1995; Machimura 1992; Kowarick and de Mello 1986).Janet
Abu-Lughod (1999) traces the developmental histories of New York City,
Chicago, and Los Angeles through their upward mobility in the world city
system.While these U.S. metropoles
share similar characteristics with other world cities, they have substantial
differences in geography, original economic functions, transportation,
and political history to serve as fascinating cases for comparative analyses
of globalization. With
appropriate data, social network analysis can be a valuable tool
for studying the webs of flows and connections among cities, including
flows of capital, commodities, information, and people (Smith 2000; Smith
and Timberlake 1995).Network analysis
produces quantitative indicators of structural characteristics of networks
and of nodes (cities) within networks.For
example, measures of network centrality are useful for examining the hierarchical
aspects of the world city system.Quantitative
measurement of the structures of connections and dominance relations among
cities—whether these be based on links to global commodity chains, international
business, financial and monetary transactions, or critical flows of information,
can provide an important window on change over time in the global urban
hierarchy (Smith 2000:157).The data
necessary for analyzing the structure of the world city system are difficult
to obtain because most statistical information is aggregated at the national
level rather than at the city level. But researchers are making heroic
efforts to locate data on characteristics of and interactions among cities. Using
airline passenger flows between the world’s leading cities for 1977-1997
Smith and Timberlake (1998, 2001) offer evidence of change in the structure
of the world city system.These data
estimate the frequency of face-to-face contacts among corporate executives,
government officials, international financiers, and entrepreneurs that
grease the wheels of global production, finance, and commerce (Smith 2000).Among
other findings, their results place London, New York City, and Tokyo near
the top and center of the global city hierarchy, supporting Sassen’s views
(Smith and Timberlake 1998).Further,
while many core cities continue to occupy central positions in the global
hierarchy, network roles of other cities have shifted during this time.Latin
American world cities have declined in their central positioning and strength
in network linkages, while Asian cities and secondary cities on the west
coast of the United States (Pacific Rim) have moved into more central positions
within the world city system (Smith and Timberlake 2001). Settlement
systems continue to be a fundamental framework for the analysis of social
change. The gigacities in both core and semiperipheral countries, and the
amazing density of cities on most continents that is revealed by satellite
photos of city lights at night would seem to portend Isaac Asimov’s Trantor,
a planet entirely encased by a single steel-covered city. But the Earthly
settlement system may be soon facing sticky wickets that even Asimov did
not envision. If the reaction against twentieth century globalization is
anywhere near as tumultuous as was the reaction against nineteenth century
globalization we are in for a rough ride in the next decades. Whether or
not the global cities can keep solidarity among themselves is crucial to
all of us, because no one wants new World Wars under contemporary technological
conditions. The global village needs to invent mechanisms of integration
that can transcend the centrifugal forces that have revisited the modern
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A research project at the Institute for Research
on World-Systems (University of California, Riverside) is studying the
relationships between the growth/decline phases of large cities and the
rise and fall of empires over the past 3000 years. The project is also
examining the causes of an apparent synchronicity of both city and empire
growth/decline phases in East Asian and West Asian/Mediterranean regions
from about 650BCE to about 1500 CE (Chase-Dunn, Manning and Hall 2000).
More information about this project is available at http://irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/citemp.html
Slater,
Eric. 2000. The Return of
the Capitalist City: Global Urbanism in Historical Perspective.
Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Sociology, State University New York,
Binghamton.