The international city hypothesis: An approach to the recent history of U.S. cities

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 28-52

  Abbott, Carl ^a  

^a PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0007909164     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/009614429702400102     Document Type: Review

References (125)

1. Charles C. Euchner, Playing the Field: Why Sports Teams Move and Cities Fight to Keep Them (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). In 1993, there were two Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas (CMSAs) with six major league teams (New York and Los Angeles); two with four teams (Chicago and San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose); and twelve with one team in each of the three major leagues (Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and the newly defined Washington-Baltimore CMSA).
2. World class is another term closely associated with competitive sports.
3. Kevin Monroe, "Tomorrow's Cities Are Global Cities," American City and County 104 (September 1992), 42-4.
4. On a world scale, the annual number of international travelers increased from 25 million to 325 million between 1950 and 1986 - from one person out of eighty to one out of twelve. Richard Knight, "The Emergent Global Society," in Cities in a Global Society, ed. Richard Knight and Gary Gappert (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989), 27.
5. Wilbur Zelinsky, "The Twinning of the World: Sister Cities in Geographic and Historical Perspective," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81 (March 1991), 1-31;
6. David Horton Smith, "Voluntary Inter-Cultural Exchange and Understanding Groups: The Roots of Success in U.S. Sister City Programs," International Journal of Comparative Sociology 31 (September-December 1990), 177-92.
7. Chadwick F. Alger, "The World Relations of Cities: Closing the Gap between Social Science Paradigms and Everyday Human Experience," International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990), 493-518;
8. Michael H. Shuman, "Dateline Main Street: Local Foreign Policies," Foreign Affairs 65 (winter 1986-87), 154-74.
9. Jean Gottmann, "What Are Cities Becoming the Centers Of? Sorting out the Possibilities," in Knight and Geppert, Cities in a Global Society, 63.
10. Anthony Sutcliffe, "Urbanization, Planning and the Giant City," in Metropolis, 1890-1940, ed. Anthony Sutcliffe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3;
11. David Harner, New Towns in the New World: Images and Perceptions of the Nineteenth-Century Urban Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 129-33;
12. Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (New York: Harper and Row, 1965);
13. Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820-1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);
14. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols. (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1926-1928).
15. Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Cities (London: Williams and Norgate, 1915);
16. Peter Hall, The World Cities (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).
17. John Friedman, "The World City Hypothesis," Development and Change 17 (1986), 69-83;
18. John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff, "World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and Action," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 6 (1982), 25-37;
19. quote from John Friedmann, "Reply" (to Rudiger Korff), Development and Change 18 (July 1987), 493.
20. H. V. Savitch, "Postindustrialism with a Difference: Global Capitalism in World-Class Cities," in Beyond the City Limits: Urban Policy and Economic Restructuring in Comparative Perspective, ed. John R. Logon and Todd Swanstrom (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 150;
21. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 294-5;
22. Manual Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 338-47.
23. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 324.
24. For the emphasis on internal patterns, see Robert Ross and Kent Trachte, "Global Cities and Global Classes: The Peripheralization of Labor in New York City," Review 6 (Winter 1983), 393-431;
25. H. V. Savitch, Post-Industrial Cities: Politics and Planning in New York, Paris, and London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988);
26. Edward Soja, Rebecca Morales, and Goetz Wolff, "Urban Restructuring: An Analysis of Social and Spatial Change in Los Angeles," Economic Geography 59 (April 1982), 195-230;
27. Robert Beauregard, ed., Atop the Urban Hierarchy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1989).
28. Nigel Thrift, "The Geography of International Economic Disorder," in A World in Crisis? Geographical Perspectives, ed. R. J. Johnston and R. J. Taylor (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 70;
29. Joe R. Feagin and Michael Peter Smith, "Cities and the New International Division of Labor," in The Capitalist City: Global Restructuring and Community Politics, ed. Smith and Feagin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 93.
30. Christopher Chase-Dunn, in "The System of World Cities, A.D. 800-1975," in Urbanization in the World Economy, ed. Michael Timberlake (New York: Academic Press, 1985), 271, asserts that "exchanges among the largest cities of the core are dense both within and across national boundaries, while peripheral cities exchange mostly with core cities and very little with each other."
31. Beauregard, Atop the Urban Hierarchy.
32. David R. Meyer, "The World System of Cities: Relations between International Financial Metropolises and South American Cities," Social Forces 64 (March 1986), 553-81.
33. Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (London: Routledge, 1990), 7.
34. James E. Vance Jr., The Merchant's World: The Geography of Wholesaling (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970),
35. and The Continuing City: Urban Morphology and Western Civilization (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
36. Perhaps the most detailed and comprehensive statement of global cities as new phenomena created by the rise of multinational corporations and advanced services is given by Sassen in The Global City. She emphasizes a structural change in the sectoral composition of the world economy as the cause of the emergence of world cities rather than spatial restructuring in itself.
37. Ferdinand Braudel, The Perspective of the World (London: Fontana, 1984),
38. and Civilizalion and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries, vol. 1, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 479-558;
39. Jan De Vries, European Urbanization: 1500-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
40. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979),
41. and The Modern World-System, Vols. 1-3 (New York: Academic Press, 1974-89);
42. Christopher Chase-Dunn, Global Formation: Structures of the World-Economy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
43. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);
44. Chase-Dunn, "The System of World Cities." In contrast, Friedmann explicitly decoupled his world city hypothesis from world-system theory.
45. Roderick D. McKenzie, "The Concept of Dominance and World-Organization," American Journal of Sociology 33 (July 1927), 28-42.
46. Chadwick F. Alger, " 'Foreign' Policies of U.S. Publics," International Studies Quarterly 21 (June 1977), 277-318.
47. Advocates of the world city/hegemony model argue that these same technical and economic changes are powerful centralizers of the global urban system.
48. M. T. Daly, "The Revolution in International Capital Markets: Urban Growth and Australian Cities," Environment and Planning A 16 (1984), 1003-20;
49. Michael A. Goldberg, The Chinese Connection: Getting Plugged into Pacific Rim Real Estate, Trade, and Capital Markets (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985);
50. Mitchell Moss, "Telecommunications, World Cities, and Urban Policy," Urban Studies 24 (1987), 534-46;
51. Robert A. Harper, "Metropolitan Areas as Transactional Centers," in Modern Metropolitan Systems, ed. Charles M. Christian and Robert A. Harper (Columbus: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co., 1982), 87-109;
52. Jean Gottmann, The Coming of the Transactional City (College Park: University of Maryland Institute of Urban Studies, 1983),
53. and "World Cities and Their Present Problems," in Survival Strategies: Paris and New York, ed. George Wynne (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1979).
54. Michael Parkinson, "The Rise of the Entrepreneurial European City: Strategic Responses to Economic Changes in the 1980s," Ekistics 58 (September-December, 1991), 299-307;
55. Alain Saliez and Pierce Verot, "Strategies for Cities to Face Competition in the Framework of European Integration," Ekistics 58 (September-December, 1991), 292-8;
56. Francois de Lavergne and Phyllis Mollet, "The International Development of Intermediate Sized Cities in Europe: Strategies and Networks," Ekistics 58 (September-December, 1991), 368-81.
57. See also the special issue "Urban Networking in Europe: Recent Initiatives as an Input to Future Policies," Ekistics 59 (January-April, 1992).
58. Klaus Kunzman and Michael Wegener, "The Pattern of Urbanization in Western Europe," Ekistics 58 (September-December, 1991), 282-91.
59. Norman S. B. Gras, An Introduction to Economic History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922).
60. Mark Abrahamson and Michael DuBick, "Patterns of Urban Dominance: The United States in 1890," American Sociological Review 42 (October 1977), 756-68.
61. Edward W. Fox, History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971);
62. Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000-1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985);
63. Eugene Genovese and Leonard Hochberg, eds., Geographic Perspectives in History (London, 1989).
64. See the case studies in Dennis Judd and Michael Parkinson, eds., Leadership and Urban Regeneration: Cities in North America and Europe (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990);
65. and in Knight and Gappert, Cities in a Global Society.
66. Several social scientists have noted in passing that cities may fill a multitude of international roles. However, they are too focused on describing single general processes to go into detail. For example, Joe Feagin and Michael Peter Smith, in "Cities and the New International Division of Labor," 3-4, mention that "different cities occupy a variety of niches in the capitalist world economy," but do not try to develop a nonhierarchical typology. John Logan and Todd Swanstrom make a single brief reference to "so-called world cities" and to "other cities [that] take on different functions within the changing international division of labor, from regional headquarters cities to centers of low-wage manufacturing." See their "Urban Restructuring: A Critical View," in Beyond the City Limits: Urban Policy and Economic Restructuring in Comparative Perspective, ed. John R. Logan and Todd Swanstrom (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 8.
67. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1991);
68. Leonard Eaton, Gateway Cities and Other Essays (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989);
69. A. F. Burghardt, "A Hypothesis about Gateway Cities," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61 (1971), 269-85;
70. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy.
71. A summary of the historical literature on competition among U.S. commercial cities is Carl Abbott, "Frontiers and Sections: Cities and Regions in American Growth," American Quarterly 37 (1985), 395-410.
72. Gottman, Coming of the Transactional City;
73. Matthew P. Drennan, in "Gateway Cities: The Metropolitan Sources of U.S. Producer Service Exports," Urban Studies 29 (April 1992), 217-35, misleadingly adopts the term gateway cities for transactional cities that specialize in producer services or information industries.
74. R. B. Cohen, "The New International Division of Labor, Multinational Corporations, and Urban Hierarchy," in Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society, ed. Michael Dear and Allan J. Scott (New York: Methuen, 1981), 300-10;
75. Joe R. Feagin and Michael Peter Smith, "Cities and the New International Division of Labor," 5-13;
76. Ingo Walter, Global Competition in Financial Services (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1988);
77. Howard Curtis Reed, The Preeminence of International Financial Centers (New York: Praeger, 1981).
78. Sergio Conti and Giorgio Spriano, "Urban Structure, Technological Innovation and Metropolitan Networks," Ekistics 58 (September-December, 1991), 315-23;
79. Richard Knight, "The Emergent Global Society," and Gary Gappert, "A Management Perspective on Cities in a Changing Global Environment," both in Knight and Gappert, Cities in a Global Society, 24-43 and 312-25;
80. Panayoits Soldatos, "Strategic Cities Alliances: An Added Value to the Innovative Making of an International City," Ekistics 58 (September-December, 1991), 346-50.
81. Thierry Noyelle and Anna Dutkin, International Trade in Business Services (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1988);
82. D. G. Price and A. M. Blair, The Changing Geography of the Service Sector (London: Belhaven Press, 1989);
83. Jacques Nusbaumer, Services in the Global Market (Boston: Kliewer Academic Publishers, 1987);
84. William Beyers, "Export Services in Postindustrial Society," Papers of the Regional Science Association 57 (1985), 33-48;
85. Drennan, "Gateway Cities."
86. The lists have two conceptual problems. First, we have no way other than subjective judgment to weight the relative importance of the categories. Second, use of rank position obscures the range and distribution of values for each indicator.
87. The study used solid numbers on foreign trade, foreign-born population, and foreign banks, plus rough rankings based on secondary literature for role as international information center, importance of foreign markets to local businesses, and foreign investment Carl Abbott, "Through Flight to Tokyo: Sunbelt Cities in the New World Economy," in Urban Policy in Twentieth Century America, ed. Raymond Mohl and Arnold Hirsch (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 183-212.
88. Sassen, Global City;
89. H. V. Savitch, Post-Industrial Cities: Politics and Planning in New York, Paris, and London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989);
90. John H. Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, eds., The Dual City: Restructuring New York (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991);
91. Susan S. Fainstein, Ian Gordon, and Michael Harloe, eds., Divided Cities: London and New York in the Contemporary World (London: Blackwell, 1992).
92. Ivan Light, "Los Angeles," in The Metropolis Era, vol. 2, Mega-Cities (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988), 56-96;
93. Frederick Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984), 53-93;
94. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992);
95. Spencer Olin, "Intraclass Conflict and the Politics of a Fragmented Region," in Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County since World War II, ed. Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 223-53;
96. Soja, Morales, and Wolff, "Urban Restructuring."
97. Some fragmentary literature is available from urban and economic geographers and from economists. However, the issue of economic internationalization at the metropolitan scale is most commonly treated in academic and professional business periodicals. Some of this literature is suspect for its extreme present-mindedness and its upbeat tone. Historians will find it a challenge to identify and access relevant archival materials - mayor's office records, port authority and development agency minutes and documents, chamber of commerce papers, and similar sources - as well as information about the activities and strategies of private firms.
98. Joe Feagin, Free Enterprise City (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988);
99. Richard Child Hill, "Industrial Restructuring, State Intervention, and Uneven Development in the United States and Japan," in Logan and Swanstrom, Beyond the City Limits, 60-85.
100. Feagin, Free Enterprise City;
101. Robert W. Gilmer, "Identifying Service-Sector Exports for Major Texas Cities," Economic Review (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, July 1990), 1-16;
102. Hill, "Industrial Restructuring," 74.
103. Ralph D. Griffin and Maryjane Sutherland, "Atlanta's Emergence as an International City," Global Trade 108 (September, 1988), 20-4;
104. Dana White and Timothy Crimmins, "How Atlanta Grew: Cool Heads, Hot Air, and Hard Work," Atlanta Economic Review 28 (January-February, 1978), 7-15.
105. The Mexican government encouraged the development of a platform economy by allowing private companies along the U.S. border to import components and inputs duty-free as long as 80 percent of the items were reexported and 90 percent of their workers were Mexican. The idea was to persuade American corporations to locate assembly plants south of the border. Further incentives followed, such as allowing full foreign ownership of factories. American firms that want to take advantage of the Mexican maquiladora program use Sections 806.3 and 807 of the U.S. tariff code, which charge duty only on the value added to American-made components assembled in Mexico. See W. H. Timmons, El Paso: A Borderlands History (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1990);
106. Niles Hansen, The Border Economy: Regional Development in the Southwest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981);
107. Robert B. South, "Transnational 'Maquiladora' Location," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80 (December, 1990), 549-70.
108. David A. Heenan, "Global Cities of Tomorrow," Harvard Business Review 55 (May-June 1977), 79-92;
109. Emmanuel N. Roussakis, "The Edges Come to Miami," The Bankers Magazine 186 (May-June 1981), 82-90;
110. Mira Wilkins, Foreign Enterprise in Florida (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1979);
111. Brookes McIntyre, "The Foreign Bank Presence in the Southeast," Economic Review (Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, January, 1986), 36-9.
112. Edward Haas, "The Southern Metropolis, 1940-1976," in The City in Southern History, ed. Blaine A. Brownell and David R. Goldfield (Fort Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977), 161-2;
113. Roger Lotchin, "World War II and Urban California: City Planning and the Transformation Hypothesis," Pacific Historical Review 62 (May 1993), 158.
114. John M. Findlay, "The Off-Center Seattle Center: Downtown Seattle and the 1961 World's Fair," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 80 (January 1989), 2-11;
115. Carl Abbott, "Regional City and Network City: Portland and Seattle in the Twentieth Century," Western Historical Quarterly 23 (August 1992), 293-322;
116. Neal Peirce, "Seattle Works Trade Magic through Learning, Cooperation," The Oregonian (August 23,1993).
117. National policy in Canada since the 1980s has stressed free trade agreements with the United States and Mexico and the expansion of economic connections with Pacific Rim nations. Canadian cities have had to analyze and pursue opportunities within this national policy environment. In the same way that Miami markets itself as a safe and convenient location for firms wanting to do business in Latin America, Toronto presents itself as an attractive location for European and Asian firms seeking access to the United States. Vancouver has built on its position as Canada's Pacific port to court Chinese investment and to promote a role as a Pacific Rim financial center. Since Mayor Jean Drapeau committed his city to Expo '67 and the 1976 Olympics, Montreal has tried to replace a declining port with an expanding role as an interna-tional meeting place and transactional center. See Michael Y. Seelig and Alan F. J. Artibise, From Desolation to Hope: The Pacific Fraser Region in 2010 (Vancouver: School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, 1991);
118. H. C. Davis and Michael A. Goldberg, Determination of the Comparative Advantages of Vancouver as an International City (Vancouver: Asia-Pacific Initiative, 1988);
119. Thomas A. Hutton and H. Craig Davis, Vancouver as an Emerging Centre of the Pacific Rim Urban System (Vancouver: School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, 1989);
120. Warren Magnusson, "Regeneration and Quality of Life in Vancouver," in Leadership and Urban Regeneration, ed. Dennis Judd and Michael Parkinson (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990), 171-87;
121. Jacques LeVeillee and Robert K. Whelan, "Montreal: The Struggle to Become a 'World City,' " in Judd and Parkinson, Leadership and Urban Regeneration, 152-69;
122. M. V. Levine, "Urban Redevelopment in a Global Economy: The Cases of Montreal and Baltimore," in Knight and Gappert, Cities in a Global Society, 141-52;
123. Peter Karl Kresl, "Gateway Cities: A Comparison of North America with the European Community," Ekistics 58 (September-December, 1991), 351-6;
124. Anne Francis and Pierre-Paul Proulx, "Comparison of Selected Indicators of International and Economic Activities in Montreal and New York," in The New International Cities Era, ed. Earl H. Fry, Lee H. Radebaugh, and Panayotis Soldatos (Provo: Brigham Young University, 1989), 119-60;
125. Hans J. Michelmann, "Calgary: A Nascent International City," in Fry, Radebaugh, and Soldatos, New International Cities Era, 161-83.