Abstract
To begin this review, I must stress that this is a marvelous book. Struggling Giants reaches far beyond the interest of sociologists dealing with issues of urban planning and becomes relevant for all sociologists dealing with issues connected to the development of modern society, whether they are concerned with welfare regimes, social policy, education, housing, health or with broader theoretical issues like globalization, capitalism, system theory, inter-organizational theory, governmentality, or political cultures. It can benefit people interested in the development of much smaller cities like Copenhagen. The problems and dynamics analyzed in this book seem to be typical for a lot of cities facing the challenges of global competition in the transition from manufactory-based production to a business structure based on the leadership, coordination and finance of global networks of design and specialized units of manufacturing relocated in lower-cost areas in Asia. Furthermore, the book is well disposed with a narrative structure like a crime novel, playing with your imagination in a way that makes you try to get in front of the writing to guess its possible conclusions, sometimes realizing that you forgot some important clues or evidence, sometimes drowning in the wealth of details necessary for consideration.
To be exact, the book encloses seven distinct chapters: an introduction, four monographs of the four cities, a summary and a conclusion. The introduction gives a brief overview of the economic, historical, and cultural profile of the four chosen global city regions simultaneously, as a frame of reference for reading the specialized studies of each, and a methodological argument for the choice of these specific cities as cases for discussing the more general issues concerning the governability of modern global city regions. The main argument is that, though many urban centers have shrunk in size, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo have retained their status as important centers of commerce. At the same time, they have undergone massive social, economic, and political changes, and they have been in a constant struggle to maintain their economic position. They are among the five most globally connected cities in the world with respect to the networking of global firms, and among the seven most attractive centers measured with respect to the location of major corporate headquarters, the total amount of revenue generated by these corporations, financial flow, ease of doing business, and other signs of competitiveness. This makes it interesting to compare the way they have addressed problems connected to the global competition between global city centers as well as the challenging issues linked to transportation systems, commuting, education, tourism, migration, life quality, services, cultural and leisure activities, and social issues such as housing, poverty, crime, spacial segregation, and homeless people. Though they have been ranked as comparable for economic resources and global influence, they are different in cultural and social resources as well as history and position in relation to the national state. Tokyo has almost no crime and less expenditure on social issues due to a tradition of lifetime employment and strong family obligations. Paris has a taken-for-granted self-esteem as a universal cultural center. Paris and London have been dominating centers for national governance and commerce since the Middle Ages, and Tokyo has been the national center of administration. Without having the status of a national capital, New York City is the center for modern art, cinema, theater, and design in the United States, a position that Tokyo aspires to but has never had in Japan. Each city has its own ups and downs, recessions and crises in different periods during the past thirty years.
The four chapters that follow the introduction investigate these different prerequisites for each of the four cities by outlining thirty years of negotiations and conflicts between different actors on local and national levels. The key question is to what extent they succeeded in forming a regional leadership that could address all these different and complicated problems on a strategic level and gather enough power and authority to implement their strategic plans.
The answer to this question, according to the authors, is that they did not. The city regions connected to New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo covered several states, districts, communes, departments (or whatever they were called), and these entities never agreed to form a unified authority for the whole region. Neither did agreement come to different associations among business operators, and the conflict between national interests and local authorities further blocked tendencies to develop a strong city-region authority that could challenge the national authorities because of the magnitude of their economic and cultural strength.
So the conclusion is that these cities have become dominating global city-regions not as a result of a uniform strategy for getting that position, but as a result of negotiations and collaboration between complex networks of actors and interests mingling their way from single issue to single issue on a short-term perspective. The easiest objectives for consensus were connected to questions of economic competiveness and certain infrastructural programs for transportation and commuting. Initiatives related to quality of life such as cultural activities, parks, and renovation of old harbor areas were left to inner city authorities, and social problems were to a great extent ignored or handed over to national rules and social services. The autonomy of the city-regions was either established in accordance with the general legislation defining the relation between national and local authorities, or blocked by national interests. The governance of the joint city-region seems, in many aspects, to be turned over to the national government and located in certain ministries and departments.
Of the three ideal-types of city-region governance determined as “integrated governance,” “pragmatic adjustment,” and “polycentric competition,” all three global cities seem to fall into the category “pragmatic adjustment,” and the final question presented in the book is, will they be able in the future to cope with the accumulating social and infrastructural problems related to the concentration of resources on a strategic regional level, or “continue to muddle along”?
Having stressed my fascination with this book, it is of course necessary to note that “no one is perfect.” It might have been more straight forward to present the three ideal types of governance in the introduction. While reading the presentation of problems and governmental conflicts, I was asking myself what were the frames of reference for judging the one or the other form of governance as being problematic. In certain ways networking and negotiations among equally powerful actors were always seen in contrast to an idea of an integrated, rational, and strategic governance addressing the complex issues of the city region as a whole. So a reader keeps guessing what might be the expectation of the authors. An initial claim stressing the research interest in locating the actual governmental processes with regard to these three ideal types of governance would have helped the reader to understand the choice of issues being addressed.
Another element missing from this book was theoretical reflections on a general level. Every now and then the authors mention different kinds of cultural premises as well as local visions and shifts between liberal, Keynesian and “developmental” models of governance, which leads me to ask if these changes are due to discourses of governance spreading internationally among political leaders and implemented with respect to local cultural premises as kinds of governmentality with local variances. The material presented could also lead to questioning the stability of the recent structure of the global capitalist market, where the four cities are benefitting from low transportation costs and huge differences in wages and profitability between different regions in the world. How long will this situation last, and how risky would it be to invest all strategic planning on the presumption that this situation will last?
Another question that remains unanswered is, What caused the transformation from a period dominated by the rebuilding of the nation states after WWII and its focus on central state planning and public welfare systems? The widely spread governmentality of the period from 1950 to 1980 is a shadow of a former period in a presentation that focuses almost exclusively on the thirty-year period from 1980 to 2010, when neoliberalism came to dominate the thinking of political leaders worldwide. A more basic discussion of the differences between these two periods might have given the analysis an interesting perspective.
All together, Struggling Giants generates interesting issues and questions, stirring the reader’s mind with its magnificent material.