Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 16: 111–114, 2001.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Book review

Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? P. Marcuse and R. van Kempen(Eds.), 2000, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., Oxford, price £15.99. ISBN 0-631-21290-6.

Has a new spatial order emerged in cities around the world? Has thisnew spatial order been caused by the processes of globalisation? These twoquestions animate this collection of essays. The hypothesis can be stated ina strong version: Globalisation causes a new urban socio-spatial order. Or, itcan be stated in a weaker version which sees economic globalisation as oneof a number of factors affecting urban structures. Either hypothesis dependson specifying what is meant by globalisation and by the ‘new spatial order’.The introductory essay by Marcuse and Van Kempen defines the latter bydeveloping Marcuse’s typology of the quartered city (1989). Globalisation isdefined primarily in terms of the mobility and transnational nature of capital.This political economic definition is set against other factors: Patterns ofmigration and demographic developments, ‘race’ and racism, the changingrole of the public sector and changing patterns of choice.

Two provocative general essays follow the introduction. Beauregard andHaila point out the significance of the institutions surrounding fixed – thatis, immobile – capital in creating continuities in urban structures. Goldsmith,in a highly speculative essay, argues that American racism affects the restof the world because the separation of black and white people in the Statesshapes the way (white) Americans frame their influence on key internationalagencies, the IMF and World Bank. To some extent, this essay simply repro-duces the problem of American intellectual imperialism by failing to noticehow such a causal mechanism is attenuated by other factors, most notably thecultural, social and political structures within which these agencies operate.

These general essays are followed by seven case studies of specific cities:Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, Tokyo, New York, Brussels and Frank-furt. An eighth essay looks more generally at the major Australian cities. Thecase studies are based on detailed analyses of socio-spatial forms, althoughthe essays on Tokyo and Australia are difficult to follow. All the essays attackthe strong version of the Marcuse-van Kempen hypothesis, which gives a very

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lively sense of dialogue and debate throughout the collection. A number ofsignificant points are made, depending on how each author finds an entry intothe argument against the hypothesis.

Several authors point out that the typology of spaces which comprisethe quartered city does not apply outside Europe and the States. Differentand locally meaningful typologies are required in non-Western cities. Devel-oping such typologies requires dipping into a more Durkheimian approach,a point which is best illustrated in Keil and Ronneberger’s discussion of thenew spatio-political formations which underlie conflicts in the dispersed cityregion around Frankfurt.

Equally, it is necessary to develop the concept of globalisation in a waywhich systematically distinguishes how this broader process affects citiesdifferently. In this context, Singapore provides an interesting exemplar. Witha fair claim to being a ‘truly global’ city – that is, a centre for internationalfinancial control – Singapore is a city-state with an authoritarian governmentstrongly committed to containing interracial conflict. It does so by dispersingits minority populations throughout its socially built housing stock. This isaccomplished through using investment to buy off dissent and through aquota system to manage the segregative effects of market mechanisms whichhave emerged as the stock has passed into individual flat ownership. Thesepolicy mechanisms are the counterpart of an economic strategy which, firstly,created a Fordist economy in Singapore and, then, managed the shift into apost-Fordist international financial centre.

‘Race’ and ethnicity are central themes running throughout all the casestudies. Most of the authors simply treat race/ethnicity as a visible sign ofthe spatial partitioning of cities. To some extent, this reflects the analyticalproblems associated with this variable in standard approaches in politicaleconomy. It also reflects unresolved ambiguities in the quartered city typo-logy, which skates over the problem of how to distinguish between an “ethnicenclave” and a “ghetto of exclusion”. Such a distinction depends, at heart, ondualist analyses to disentangle and relate both structure and agency in formingthe patterns of choice and constraint which lead to racial/ethnic concentra-tions of within cities. These ambiguities ultimately rest on the question ofwhy and in what circumstances does race/ethnicity matter. Logan’s excellentdetailed analysis of New York City highlights many of these ambiguitiesby showing that an ethnic pecking order has characterised this global citysince the nineteenth century, that some non-black ethnic enclaves persist, thatethnicity is strongly related to the colonisation of particular positions in thelabour market by specific ethnic groups, and, most crucially, that it does notreflect a simple black/white split. Logan argues that globalisation must beseen in terms of the movement of people as well the movement of capital, a

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point which is echoed in the case study of Brussels. Turning to Europe, thereare additional ambiguities around citizenship and nationality which also ariseas a result of ‘ever closer Union’. The general weaknesses in the analysisof race/ethnicity are, to some extent, a consequence of most authors beingmore concerned with arguing that American style black ghettos do not existelsewhere, rather than in exploring issues of race/ethnicity directly.

The sense of dialogue and debate running through the collection as awhole is enhanced by the editors’ conclusions, which revise their initialintroductory statement to take account of the arguments within the essays.Nevertheless, there are some important limits on the conclusions. The mostimportant is that they remain within the limits of the analytical frame set outin the introduction, although they elaborate, refine and reshape the categoriesthey started with. In particular, they argue for focusing on ‘places of change’,calling them ‘soft locations’ in a phrase taken over from American zoningpractices. This focus on place in socio-spatial structures is one choice.Equally, the editors could have opted to focus on the actors and institutionswhich lie at the interface between the social and the spatial in shaping cities.At a more general level, the conclusions ascribe too much to the contin-gencies of comparative analysis. The material within the case studies wouldsupport the development of a more systematic analytical model specifying theintervening variables between (some specific definition of) globalisation andsocio-spatial structures. By remaining within the original frame of reference,the conclusions do not fully reflect the subtlety and originality of some of thecontributors.

Some important broad methodological lessons can be learned bycontrasting this richly nuanced collection of essays with other approaches tocomparative analysis. Political economy gives an outside-in, bird’s eye view.And the globalisation hypothesis tends to put a very economistic slant onthe analysis. How can the politics be brought back into political economy?The essays in Padovani (1995) show one way in which the same structuralfactors which interest Marcuse and van Kempen can be brought togetherwithin a more institutionally grounded analysis. This is done by explaininghow localised political, social and economic formations shape cities. Equally,grounded insights can be gained from ‘inside-out’ analyses, such as the studyof ten ‘socially excluded neighbourhoods’ (perhaps they should be calledenclaves of exclusion in a quartered city framework?) recently completed forthe European Commission (Allen et al., 2000). Based on an ‘everyday life’approach, the study shows how ‘outside in’ processes of spatial concentration,containment and stigmatisation interact with ‘inside’ processes of neighbour-hood life cycles and status differentiation to create weak urban actors andmaintain these (not always ethnically differentiated) enclaves over time. Both

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the Padovani and Allen et al. studies show how the historical persistenceof urban socio-spatial structures, a point made by most of the authors inthe Marcuse-Van Kempen volume, is not just a matter of depersonalisedinertia. Rather, specific social and political resources are mobilised withincities in order to maintain existing structures. Taken together, these threevolumes complement each other in developing a range of different ways ofunderstanding the socio-spatial structures of cities.

References

Allen, J., Cars, G. and Madanipour, A. (2000) Social Exclusion in European Neighbour-hoods: Processes, Experiences and Responses, The European Commission, Brussels,SOE2-CT97-3057.

Marcuse, P. (1989) Dual city: A muddy metaphor for a quartered city, International Journal ofUrban and Regional Research, 13, 697–708.

Padovani, L. (Ed.) (1995) Urban Change and Housing Policies: Evidence from Four EuropeanCountries, Dipartimento di Analisi economica e sociale del territorio, IUAV, Venice,Ricerca no. 19.

Judith AllenUniversity of Westminster