What does it mean to see the city with the eye of global capital? The definition of ‘city’ is constantly being reconfigured according to how the needs of capital dictate urban development, as the ongoing explosion of Joel Garreau’s ‘edge cities’ and the commodification of the old urban center both attest. These changes can be experienced firsthand without the aid of a camera or a computer.
For Garreau the development of the city is simultaneously one of expansion and concentration. Sprawl and density are not opposed, but advance together. In an upcoming book, Garreau refers to this as the “Santa Fe-ing of the World,” or “places the entire point of which is face-to-face contact” which he identifies with the influence of the Internet and the unprecedentedly free flow of goods and services on social interaction. The new urban space, he argues, is increasingly organized according to the social and business needs of the world’s middle and upper middle professional classes. Hence a trendy downtown area like New York’s East Village and the middle-of-nowhere upper-class compounds offered by Santa Fe develop according to the same logic: the modern professional’s need for quality ‘face time.’ A consequence of Garreau’s account is that the middle and upper middle classes are placed in the driver’s seat of history — not as the agents of production like the proletarians were for Marx, but as the ‘early adopters’ of telecommunication technology and the careers and lifestyles that go along with it.
This could well be an accurate description of the underlying motive that initially drove our project. As strangers to Durham, our lives organized by the Duke University orbit, we wanted to engage our surroundings, to orient ourselves both spatially and socially to communities maintained outside of Duke and Research Triangle Park, a major center of biotech and medical research and Durham’s other principle economic hub. It would be a great understatement to say that the city’s economic hubs are not necessarily its social hubs. While Duke fosters close camaraderie among its undergraduate student body, Durham tends to be either left out or bought out. Our association with Duke made us feel more like strangers in Durham than we already were, despite the fact that Duke is one of the area’s largest employers. Like many other American cities, Durham’s downtown was a victim of ‘de-industrialization,’ with most urban development since then progressing by unplanned sprawl. Raleigh-Durham ranks 3rd on a national survey conducted by Smart Growth America for negative symptoms of sprawl, including little mixing of residences with businesses and other services, below average residential density, poorly connected street networks, and a dearth of areas that serve as town centers.
And yet, as we found in our brief but ongoing exploration, communities are built in spite of these limitations. Undoubtedly there are more community projects throughout the city, more and less diffuse than the ‘indie’-green-DIY-progressive networks that became our focus. We found only those that were most accessible to us. That is to say, we found only those most compatible with our interests, those people most like us. The choice we made to carry out this project via the Internet was as practical as it was symptomatic of the habits, resources, and educational background we broadly share with our ‘subjects.’ The Internet is a major part of what gives these dispersed communities their strength; it is not a neutral fact that almost every site we mapped has a well-maintained website. Anti-corporate or no, their presence will only enhance (and some are included in the funding of) the major development projects of the city government, nonprofits, and various corporate sponsors in their attempts to revitalize the downtown area. A diverse, young, media-savvy urban culture and an active arts scene are part of what pop theorists like Richard Florida (whose rubric also includes a ‘Gay Index’) deem necessary for the rise of the ‘creative class,’ or ‘knowledge workers’ or ‘cultural creatives’ – buzzwords that essentially refer to the professional class appropriate to an information-driven economy. A certain degree of social and ecological awareness along with basic community-building skills is important for a class that is expected to be increasingly self-reliant.
However, what popular accounts such as these leave out are the very people destituted and excluded by the new arrangements of personnel and capital. Globalization theorist Saskia Sassen has argued against both the idea that telecommunication advances have made concentration (centers of production, state forms) obsolete and that concentration is driven primarily by the taste of the new global elite. On the contrary, the greater the possibility of dispersal, the greater the need for centralized control functions, which tend to be located in urban areas. As she puts it, it is “precisely because of the territorial dispersal facilitated by telecommunication advances that agglomeration of centralizing activities has expanded immensely. This is not a mere continuation of old patterns of agglomeration but, one could posit, a new logic for agglomeration.” A steadily ‘denationalizing’ state apparatus is one of these command centers, financial centers like Wall Street and the Stock Exchange are another type. Specialization of production and services is another centralizing tendency – Durham’s largest employers by an enormous margin are in the education and medical industries. Part of Sassen’s objective is to reveal the actual processes underlying dominant narratives like ‘globalization,’ and so her focus is always on production, necessarily including the ‘supplementary,’ underrepresented labor that makes the macro-developments possible:
“This focus on the work behind command functions, on production in the finance and services complex, and on marketplaces has the effect of incorporating the material facilities underlying globalization and the whole infrastructure of jobs typically not marked as belonging to the corporate sector of the economy: besides the already mentioned work of secretaries and cleaners, there are the truckers who deliver the software, the variety of technicians and repair workers, all the jobs having to do with the maintenance, painting, renovation of the buildings where it all is housed.”
This approach differentiates Sassen from another leading globalization theorist whose overall account is broadly similar, Manuel Castells. Castells narrates this phenomenon from the dominant perspective, as a transition from the space of places, determined by local custom, to the space of flows, determined by the needs of global capital. He defines ‘place’ narrowly as “a locale whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity” (423). For Sassen, ‘the global’ is internal to ‘the local’ – globalization always requires the configuration of local places whose ‘form, function, and meaning’ are multiple and contradictory, despite its homogenizing tendencies. In this she takes a more traditionally materialist perspective – social change may be dictated from on high (’market forces,’ etc.), but it is always built from the ground up.
Along with ‘invisible’ labor as a ‘side effect’ of market-drive concentration come the non-corporate cultures associated with it. “Diversity” is then the second type of concentration for Sassen after the economic, and it includes ethnic and traditional cultures as well as (we might add) the ‘alternative’ cultures of artists and other non-corporate culture producers. Sassen refines the observations of people like Garreau as follows: “Advanced services are mostly producer services; unlike other types of services, they are not dependent on vicinity to the consumers served. Rather, economies occur in such specialized firms when they locate close to others that produce key inputs or whose proximity makes possible joint production of certain service offerings. Moreover, concentration arises out of the needs and expectations of the people likely to be employed in these new high-skill jobs. They are attracted to the amenities and life-styles that large urban centers can offer.”
Sassen refers to the concentration of non-corporate culture as the ‘other’ of dominant, normalizing corporate forms (the urban grid, office buildings, upscale chains such as Starbuck’s) that follow economically driven concentration. But if Durham is any indication, developers are following the advice of the mainstream critics mentioned earlier and attempting to take some of these ‘others’ — or rather, what amounts to a certain aura of ‘otherness’ — into account, as a potential investment in the city’s future. They are recognizing that their desired professional workforce approaches potential living spaces as lifestyle consumers, and that ‘diversity,’ in the form of things like well-funded independent arts organizations, thriving small businesses, historical preservation, tolerance of alternative lifestyles and sexualities, and authentic ethnic cuisine, is in demand. And if they don’t, they can be pressured by groups who represent these interests, such as ABCD Durham, a community listserv that in 2004 successfully influenced the city government to reduce the size of a proposed Clear Channel-managed events center to be built next to the American Tobacco development. They became an acknowledged force within city planning discussions and provide mutual assistance to members. ABCD Durham is one local example among many of how the Internet can enable disparate communities, uniting an amorphous (sometimes self-proclaimed) “creative class” around development issues. Perhaps even more fundamentally, a network of bloggers keeps them informed and connected despite (though nevertheless preserving) occupational, neighborhood, and cultural differences. Our project is an example of both these phenomena.
What we may be witnessing (and participating in) is a cultural shift among a certain expanding but still relatively small class of managers and tastemakers. It is a shift in preference, perhaps generational in nature, away from the homogenizing effects of what Sassen calls the corporate grid form that grew to dominate the 20th century, and toward particularity, difference, sustainable living, and the cultivation of local authenticity. Whether or not these changes take hold, real estate prices will have nowhere else to go but up. Is it possible to reconcile emerging methods of diversity-minded development with adequate accommodation for all forms of diversity?
At any rate, the possibilities offered by the Internet to include and connect previously alienated groups of people are not without real limits. Returning to Castells, he points out that “the real social domination stems from the fact that cultural codes are embedded in the social structure in such a way that possession of these codes opens the access to the power structure without the elite needing to conspire to bar access to its networks” (416). Technological access is only one barrier to participation in the communities encountered through our project. Language, education, to some extent race, and the shared background of class are others. As Sassen puts it in an interview, “there is a poor man’s email and there is a rich man’s email.” Indeed, electronic/digital telecommunications media are quite literally a type of cultural code. As such, they are embedded in a whole range of other codes — there is no separate ‘digital realm’ (another older article by Sassen on this subject can be found here and here). The shift partially documented here would be a one not primarily in the modes of production but in the modes — and hopefully also the severity — of exploitation, exclusion, and eviction.
Books referenced:
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
