Global cities, centripetal wealth transfer and uneven development

2021 ◽  
pp. 618-632
Author(s):  
Christof Parnreiter
Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christof Parnreiter

The central argument of this article is that global cities are, due to their clustering of producer service firms, critical governance nodes in global production networks. More in particular, the article scrutinises the role of producer service firms in uneven development and, especially, in the geographical transfer of value (Hadjimichalis, 1984). Because the direct as well as the indirect mechanisms through which value is transferred geographically require the intervention of producer service firms, global cities can be theorised as governance nodes for centripetal wealth transfers along global commodity chains. Moreover, and in the context of the persisting criticism that the global city concept has a bias towards Northern/Western cities, the article argues that the claim that global cities are critical places for the organisation of uneven development also holds for cities beyond ‘the usual suspects’. Referring to cases of how producer service firms in Hamburg and Mexico City erect entry barriers to protect their clients from competition and of how they shape labour relations at the expense of employees, I have maintained that governance is, as Sassen (2010: 158) has argued, indeed ‘embedded’ into the services provided. From that follows that even ‘minor’ global cities are strategic governance places from where the transfer of wealth towards the centres of the world economy is organised.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2110329
Author(s):  
Cheng Liu ◽  
Yu Deng ◽  
Weixuan Song ◽  
Qiyan Wu ◽  
Jian Gong

Uneven development theory and its corollary (i.e. rent-gap theory) are either excessively general or insufficiently flexible to expound the variations of gentrification with unique historical trajectories. A representative example is education-led gentrification in China. The lacuna restricts the explanatory power of rent-gap theory and justifies the fault line between the rent gap and two important phenomena: the forms of displacement identified by Marcuse and territorial stigmatisation. This paper recasts Neil Smith's insights about uneven development from two perspectives, temporal and social differentiations, and elaborates how the interplay between both differences engenders territorial stigmatisation and displacement. Moreover, as two diametrically opposed phenomena, territorial glorification (e.g. super-gentrification and education-led gentrification) and territorial stigmatisation are simultaneously situated in one framework, which is evaluated in education-led gentrification in Nanjing. Redirecting the empirical research from global cities to less established but more representative urban centres, this research shows the potentially wide applicability of the theoretical framework.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Ryan Morse

Mulk Raj Anand's self-description – in a 1945 broadcast about war-time London – as an ‘impatient modernist’ highlights Anand's ability to harness the velocity of broadcast production, transmission, and reception into an aesthetic of speed. Pairing Anand's unpublished BBC scripts with his war-time novel The Big Heart (1945), I show how Anand's work remediating contemporary texts for broadcast accompanied a shift in his approach to writing fiction, using the technique of intertextual scaffolding to accelerate composition. This article proposes that the name of Anand's impatience was realism – that Anand's fascination with literary modernists such as Joyce and Woolf was tempered with a desire for the immediacy and social embeddedness of realism and that broadcasting encouraged Anand in his attempt to pair modernism's cosmopolitanism and polyvocality with realism's speed, engagement, even ephemerality. Challenging the often feeble distinction between realism and modernist anti-representational technics, Anand's radio writing captures the contradictions of combined but uneven development.


2001 ◽  
Vol 2001 (4) ◽  
pp. 74-83
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Macklin
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (7) ◽  
pp. 1304-1319
Author(s):  
M.V. Moroshkina

Subject. This article examines the issues related to changes in reproduction capacity and heterogeneity of the development of Russian regions. Objectives. The article aims to assess regional differentiation and investigate the main factors influencing the uneven development of the areas. Methods. For the study, we used the methods of comparative and correlation analyses. Results. The article identifies groups of leading and lagging Russian regions and assesses the possibility of convergence of Russian regions according to the analyzed indicators, such as GRP, GRP per capita, and the output of industry. Conclusions. The results obtained can be used when preparing strategic policy documents, spatial development programmes and concepts. The observed heterogeneity suggests that the regions maintain their positions throughout the research period.


1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-331
Author(s):  
Mir Annice Mahmood

The book reviews the development experience of two major countries in Asia, India and China. India has followed a democratic liberal course in politics, based on Westminster-style parliamentary practices. However, its economic policy has tilted towards socialism, with government control on the major sectors of the economy. China, on the other hand, has evolved a political culture that is totalitarian in nature; all political power is concentrated in the hands of the Communist Party. Hence, economic decision-making was also centralised until a few years ago when China began a process of economic liberalisation. The book begins by defining what uneven development signifies. Development strategies and their outcomes are used to illustrate the phenomenon of uneven development. The author describes three such strategies, namely, industrialisation, sectoral/regional balance, and economic liberalisation. The effect of these strategies on the growth of output, inequalities in income consumption, and class inequalities in an intra-regional, inter-regional, and rural-urban divide are specifically discussed for both India and China. Other topics of interest that are dealt with in the book include technology policies and access to health and education services. The latter two subjects, in particular, are discussed in terms of class, regional background, and rural-urban bias.


2019 ◽  
pp. 79-89
Author(s):  
Khrystyna Prytula ◽  
Yaroslava Kalat ◽  
Iryna Kyryk

An integral part of the implementation of any reform is the emergence of the risks of its negative impact on one or another area of region development. The decentralization reform in Ukraine is not an exception. In its the context the most probable occurrence of negative phenomena is in the border regions, which could be prevented by first detecting them. In the scientific article, the authors focus on the analysis of a number of challenges for the development of border regions in the context of decentralization reform. Given the territorial remoteness of the central regions of the country and the capital, which today serve as areas of concentration of investment and economic activity, the border regions traditionally (this is typical for the border areas of the EU member states) lag behind the rest of the regions by the main socio-economic indicators of development. Among the main challenges facing the border regions of Ukraine today are the following: the provision of competitiveness in the context of European integration processes and reduction of the border barrier function; low level of economic security; the outflow of human capital and the issue of ethnic minorities. Based on an expert survey of representatives of the fifteen united territorial communities (UTCs), the possibility of such risks of decentralization in the border regions were defined as following: groundless use of local budget funds; emergence of significant imbalances between delegated new authority and available financial resources of the community; increasing uneven development of territories within the community; increasing uneven development of communities within the country; deterioration of the availability and quality of providing educational and medical services; deterioration of the quality of local government; reducing of the state influence on the management of local development processes; radicalization of political unions representing the interests of ethnic minorities in places of their compact residence; further economic decline of the territory of communities and so on.


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