Cities Benefit from Globalization

President Obama held an passionate speech for international collaboration at the United Nations this week. He called for trade and coordination instead of building walls, tariffs and trade barriers.

Anti TTIP demonstration Berlin

“The acceleration of travel and technology and telecommunications — together with a global economy that depends on a global supply chain — makes it self-defeating ultimately for those who seek to reverse this progress. [...]“Today, a nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself. ...I want to suggest to you today that we must go forward, and not backward.[....] 
too often, those trumpeting the benefits of globalization have ignored inequality within and among nations; have ignored the enduring appeal of ethnic and sectarian identities; have left international institutions ill-equipped, underfunded, under-resourced, in order to handle transnational challenges."  (President Obama at the UN)

Obama about globalization at the United Nations

As a post World War II child I thought that it was an inevitable and desirable future that the peoples of the world would finally see collaboration as better than conflict or war. The European Union seemed a fine example. Knowledge, wealth and culture exploded. As Obama pointed out, the people of the world in almost all countries are better off today than they ever were in history in terms of poverty, food security, education, and health. In spite of their greatly increased number. Alas, facts don't seem to matter when it comes to how people feel about the world. History shows many examples of periods of prosperity and progress being followed by reversal and restoration,  phases when nations recoiled from pathways that had seemed to be an inevitable trajectory of progress. Unfortunately much of the world seems to be entering just such a regression.

Global city: London

There is no doubt that globalisation is facing its biggest political test in decades. The UK’s June vote to leave the EU and the prospect that this year’s US presidential contest could see the election of an avowed protectionist have raised fears that the model that has governed the global economy for more than 70 years is unravelling.(Financial Times 9/22/16)

Usually, not much good has come from going backwards. The time after 1918 can be seen as an example. The industrial revolution undermined and undercut the old power structures, which in a last hurrah to save their skin engaged with gusto in World War I, an exercise that brought the insight that there wouldn't be any more glorious wars if there ever had been any. It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. But the old powers were not quite ready to give up. That was true especially in Germany, even though the country experienced a fantastic renaissance of science and the arts after its political revolution of 1918 which replaced a tired monarchy with a Republic and parliamentarian democracy. That seemed to have made the militaristic old guard obsolete. Berlin flourished and became one of the most vibrant cities in the world, that is,until the Great Depression hit and made people fearful, hateful, and distrustful. That melange was the perfect soil for Hitler who found the enemy "outside," in other countries and other cultures who were all out to destroy the "Vaterland". International treaties were questioned as not being in the best interest of the nation and subsequently broken. What followed was the world's largest catastrophe yet.

Avalon: The American promise. Immigration

After WW II the great City of Berlin lay in ruins and the best minds of an entire nation had either been killed or had fled to the United States. It took over 60 years for the City of Berlin to recover at least physically and once again become a vibrant and livable city that could attract people from around the world. It became once again a city that thrived on diversity. Until now.
In medieval times in Europe, cities were autonomous all by themselves, they were surrounded by walls, had their own lords and laws and were armed to the hilt and belligerent. Then, they finally were integrated into the larger unions that became nations. The more tribes, fiefdoms and city-states dissolved towards nations, the more wealth and knowledge was accrued. In a virtuous cycle, the size of political entities expanded further, united by currency, language, and a cultural consensus.

In the decades after WWII nationalism got a bad rap. Nation states lost importance in favor of international  pacts such as NATO and economic collaborations such as ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), the EU, the African Union and UNASUR (Unión de Naciones Suramericanas). The more travel and trade barriers were lowered in favor of common goals uniting nations over large swaths of geography, the more the participants thrived.

TPP demonstrators

As trade globalized, so did companies, information, and social life. The increase in activities that were not defined by borders but by common interest, common technology, and common information, naturally made the definition of nations less important and made the centers where information, trade and knowledge flow freely more important. Such centers are universities, large corporations, big cultural institutions, and cities.

As the nation state descends into paralysis and democratic dysfunction, cities are reemerging as problem solvers going boldly where states no longer dare to go (Benjamin Barber, The Guardian 10/24/2013)

It is no overstatement to say that cities, more precisely metropolitan areas. are the beneficiaries of openness, collaboration, free trade and the reduction of national boundaries.  Cities like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, cities which had been the official ports of entry for a steady flow of immigrants, have experienced the benefit of openness and diversity for a long time, even though fear has sprouted strange restrictions all along, particularly in the strongly racial Immigration Act of 1924 which sought to curb Italian, Jewish and Asian immigrants in favor of Germans and Nordic states. In fact, the heydays of those cities coincided with strong immigration just as today's new flourishing centers from Miami to San Diego and LA have an economy that is fueled by immigrants and trade. Baltimore to this day is a city that needs international trade, from its port to Johns Hopkins University and Hospital and its own new global corporate underdog Under Armour.

In today's global metro centers the language is English, the code is from Microsoft or Apple and the means of communication can be found on smart-phones that have identical icons, no matter the country, the national language or culture. Those icons point to apps like Facebook, Uber, Pinterest or LinkedIn. With the strong dominance that the United States has in all those arenas, it is especially curious that so many in this country should feel so threatened by globalization.

Voices that want to turn back the clock towards nationalism are heard from Vienna to Berlin and from Warsaw to Washington. Several large trade agreements such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), The Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement between the EU and Canada (CETA) are in peril. If they fail and even NAFTA may potentially be re-opened, not only global trade will suffer but cities will be particularly affected. Anybody doubting that should carefully observe how London fares after Britain voted to leave the EU.

Today the City is hovering on the brink of Big Bang II. As the repercussions of the vote for Brexit unfold, much remains at stake. Banking and finance contributes more to the UK economy than any other sector. Around 35 per cent of EU wholesale financial services activity takes place in London as well as 59 per cent of international insurance premiums, helping to generate a trade surplus of £72bn for the UK in 2014. While mounting popular resentment over immigration levels fuelled Britain’s decision to leave the EU, nearly 11 per cent of the City’s 360,000 workers come from elsewhere in the union. EU membership brought the financial sector two key benefits — access to these skilled migrant workers and a free passport to sell products and services across the region’s “single market”. Both are now threatened.(Financial Times, Sept. 1, 2016)

"Big Cities benefit from trade, so why are Democrats stalling it" asked Nina Easton in the Fortune Magazine of  Sept. 4, 2014. The answers have to do with what Dani Rodrick of the Harvard School of Government calls the "political trilemma" where democracy, national determination and globalization are pulling in different directions. Supranational entities such as the European Union, multinational corporations or even global non-profits, indeed, have a deficit in legitimization. Democracy is still organized in the well defined entities such as cities and nations. Multinational elections such as for the European Parliament have remained too abstract for people to feel really represented and any delegation of power to those abstract far away places was not welcomed by the peoples of the nation states.

Global center: New York

Ironically this legitimate concern regarding international openness works against cities in that it de-legitimizes and slows globalization from which cities benefit. But the discontent also works for cities because they are such perfect entities for democracy to work on a local level that is tangible enough to be understood and controlled by the constituents. That ambiguity is not all.

Cities are ideally situated to provide the network of democracy that is missing on the global scale, They can engage in international agreements such as the Global Green City Initiative and nimbly respond to global warming, technology and governance challenges that frequently gridlocked national parliaments can't seem to muster. Were it not for the internal walls that many cities  have erected within themselves in developed and in emerging economies alike, walls that reflect the divisions of their nation states in exacerbated form, the divisions of class and race, of rich and poor, of those with power and without that dominate today's urban reality.

For cities to really be the engines of the 21st century, they have to show on a small scale how those rifts can be overcome, rifts that incidentally also pull apart the larger unions or the nation states, rifts that divide Greece from Germany in the EU, Scotland from England within the UK, Northern Italy from its southern provinces in Italy.

American cities which reel from the chasm between these concurrent realities that are present in Charlotte, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore to name just a few places nearly torn apart by conflict, are well positioned to also become the first to find creative models to finally overcome those rifts. Again, an opportunity to be trailblazers towards more equity and a more equitable distribution of benefits that could be applied to global trade as well.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff, JD

Cities for Nations?, Tim Bunnell 2002

Share: