neil brenner, new state spaces

chapter one, introduction (1-27)

(2): important--"this book is intended to broaden and deepen the geographical imagination of contemporary state theory by investigating the major role of urban regions as key sites of contemporary state institutional and spatial restructuring. rather than treating cities and city-regions as mere subunits of national administrative systems, i suggest that urban policy--broadly defined to encompas all state activities oriented towards the regulation of capitalist urbanization--has become an essential political mechanism through which a profound institutional and geographical transformation of national states has been occurring. my claim is not simply that the institutional infrastructure of urban governance is being re-defined but, more generally, that transformations of urban policy have figured crucially within a fundamental reworking of national statehood since the early 1970s. a geographically attuned and scale-sensitive approach to state theory is required in order to decipher the new state spaces that are being produced under contemporary capitalism."

(2): we are talking about the last three decades, of course, following the decline of "spatial keynesianism." (faced with challenges of urban industrial decline, welfare state retrenchment, european integration, and economic globalization). "as of the early 1980s, national states began to introduce new, post-Keynesian spatial policies intended to reconcentrate productive capacities and specialized, high-performance infrastructural investments into the most globally competitivve city-regions within their territories." -- the need to (a) enhance global competitive advantages and (b) attract mobile capital.

(3): to what extent, though, will we be romanticizing the postwar period, here? "the postwar project of national territorial equalization and sociospatial redistribution has thus been superseded..."

(3): two arguments outlined here:

1. that city-regions "have become key institutional sites in which a major rescaling of national state power has been unfolding."
   
2. that "national state institutions continue to play key roles in formulating, implementing, coordinating, and supervising urban policy initiatives, even as the primacy of the national scale of political-economic life is decentered."
   

(4): let's try and think about this a bit more, particularly wrt to other ways in which the state has been theorized; surely we're not abandoning schematics that do use the state, singular?--"i believe that the generic concept of the state has become increasingly problematic. the notion of statehood seems to me a more precise basis for describing modern political institutions, because it does not ontologically prejudge..."

(5-7): three trends

1. global economic integration--"national territorial economies are becoming more permeable to supranational, continental, and global flows of investment."
   
2. urban and regional resurgence--"a renewed importance for major fractions of industrial, financial, and service capital..." (citing the global city, industrial districts, learning regions, offshore centers, etc.)
3. the consolidation of new supranational and cross border-institutions--EU, NAFTA, APEC, ASEAN, MERCOSUR, IMF, World Bank, G8, etc., etc.
   

(8): three methodological challenges

1. scale as a proccess, rather than fixed thing
2. intrinsic relationality of all scales, and their embeddedness within broader hierarchies (this is emphasized again in box 1.2)
   
3. postdisciplinary challenge

(12-13): definition of uneven geographic development--"the circumstance that social political, and economic processes under capitalism are not distributed uniformly or homogenously across the earth's surface, but are always organized within distinct sociospatial configurations--such as urban agglomeration regional clusters, rural zones, national territories, supranational economic blocs, and so forth--that are characterized by divergent socioeconomic conditions, developmental capacities, and institutional arrangements..."--outlniing the contradictory interplay of equalization and differentiation...

(14-15): important--we will clearly need an account of the interests that move states, for here, so far, we are seeing the state as a hammer--it can be wielded to alleviate or exacerbate uneven geographic development. turning point was the late-1970s.

(16): KEY--"during the fordist-keynesian period, the problem of uneven geographical development was generally construed as a matter of redressing 'insufficient' or 'imbalanced' industrialization on a national scale. the task of state spatial intervention, under these conditions, was to mold the geography of capital investment into a more balanced, cohesive, and integrated locational pattern throughout the national territory. by contrast, with the rescaling of state space and the proliferation of urban locational policies during the post-1970s period, this project of national territorial equalizaiton has been fundamentally inverted. it is no longer capital that is to be molded into the geogrphay of state space, but state space that is to be molded into the geography of capital." [again, though, this formulation sets us up as keynesians, when we would really like to break the chains]

(16-17): why, with post-keynesian, we can expect crises [well, but what about keynesianism?]

(18): state rescaling as 'ideal-type', or 'real abstraction'? setting the theoretical stage.

(18-21): three levels of abstraction (see box on page 19)

1. abstract--capital accumulation, class struggle
   
2. meso--keynesianism, neoliberalism
   
3. concrete--actual policies
   

(21): in this book, mainly concerned with meso level (but of course, involves other levels, too)

(24): citing jessop as postdisciplinary take on the State

chapter two, the globalization debates (27-

(28-29): globalization as an opportunity to bring space back in to analyses of capitalism--and, obviously, an opportunity to dispose of the 'cartesian' notion of the fixed, nation-state--"to challenge the iron-grip of the nation-state on the social imagination'"

(29): KEY--"thus, one of the central intellectual barriers to a more adequate understanding of contemporary global transformations is that we currently lack appropriately historical and dynamic conceptualizations of social space..."

(30): not 'deterritorialization', but 'reterritorialization'

(30): important, the crux of the contention: we need to transcend the imaginary of the nation-state, and move toward an understanding of the new sociospatial configurations. importantly, "the effort to transcend state-centric modes of analysis does not entail a denial of the national state's continued relevance as a major locus of political-economic regulation."

(30): this chapter sets out its stall to critique the 'global territorialist' approach, and the 'deterritorialization' approach

(31): "the notion of globalization is first and foremost a descriptive category denoting, at the most general level, the spatial extension of social interdependencies on a worldwide scale."

(32): "in other words, all aspects of social space under modern capitalism must be understood as presuppositions, arenas, and outcomes of dynamic processes of continual social contestation and transformation." [bringing the 'social' in, but, like harvey, it seems ever-so-abstract...]

(33): important--insofar as we will be thinking about 'causes' behind global transformation, the dynamics seem to be located in capitalism's inherent tendency to see 'every limit... as a barrier to be overcome'. in other words, we need to think carefully about how this will dovetail with the question of shifting state strategy (if the keynesian and then post-keynesian paradigms were indeed driven, in his argument, by the notion that this was what was (a) best for national ecomonic growth, and/or (b) best for labor). how, in other words, to bring the State into a capital-centric account?

(33): we have a deterritorialization-reterritorialization chronology--first, capital annihilates barriers; then, second, it fixes itself in space as a means to extending its orbit.

(34): these spatial configuration as 'forces of production' (now we are wading into knotty theoretical formulations--though this begins with harvey, of course.)

(35): this particular deterritorialization-reterritorialization is part of the "longue duree dynamic of deterritorialization, reterritorializaiton, and uneven geographic development that has underpinned the production of capitliast spatiality throughout the modern era."

(35-36): six implications of this broad theorization

1. global restructuring as a conflictual, uneven, dialectical process
2. global restructuring as both spatial and temporal
3. global restructuring unfolding upon multiple spatial scales
4. not involving total obliteration of sociospatial scales (i.e., the state), but their reconfiguration
5. stems from a diverse range of political-economic causes (reogranization of capital accumulation, consolidation of neoliberalism, financial deregulation, accelerated technological change, new population movements, geopolitical shifts, transformation of global labor force...) [how do we move to a coherent account of what actually happened, as the capital-centric account initially implied? or is this very much a case of overdetermination by all of this?]
6. states as essential geographical arenas

(37-38): important--here begins the section on the epistemology of state-centrism, which has three most essential spatial assumptions (see box 2.1)

1. space as static platform, not social (spatial fetishism)
   
2. social relations organized within containers (methodological territorialism)
   
3. assumption that social relations are organized at a national scale (methodological nationalism)
   

(41): the intellectual plausibility of this frame, he's arguing, was contingent--it can be traced to "the late nineteenth and early twentieth century historical-geographical context in which the social sciences first emerged, during which the territorial state's role in encaging socioeconomic and politicocultural relations within its boundaries dramatically intensified."

(43): and even then, there was a tendency to see what you expected to see, through it--reify it, rather than see a tendency in operation ("to conflate the historical tendency toward the territorialization of social relations on a national scale--which has undoubtedly intensified during much of the twentieth century--with its full historical realization")

(44): important--the two (mistaken) assumptions of the deterritorialization thesis

1. that globalization is non-territorial, borderless, supraterritorial.
2. that globalization entails the contraction of state power, or its erosion.

(45): first mention of 'glocalization' (swyngedouw)

(45): the relativization of scales (jessop)

(47-48): the (nonsense) notion of integration into 'global society'

(48-49): more profound critique of those who see globalization as preconstituted structures, rather than qualitative re-structuring...

(49-52): important, critique of wallerstein as 'state-centric'--"however, considering wallerstein's avowed concern to transcend state-centric models of capitalist modernity, national state territories occupy a surprisingly pivotal theoretical position within his conceptual framework... wallerstein's conceptuion of global space is.. most precisely described as an inter-state division of labor... in this sense, wallerstein's concern to analyze the global scale as a distinctive unit of analysis does not lead to any qualitative modification in the way in which this space is conceptualized... the global and the national scales are viewed as structural analogs of a single spatial form--territoriality... to be sure, wallerstein conceives global space as a complex historical product of capitalist expansion, but he acknowledges its historicity only in a limited sense, in contrast to previous historical systems such as world-empires. for within the cpaitalist historical system, space appears to be frozen into a single geometric crystallization."

(52-53): two general methodological conclusions:

1. emphasis on the global spatial scale does not necessarily lead to the overcoming of state-centrism
2. state-centric conceptions of global space mask the national state's own crucial role as a site and agent of global restructuring.
   

(55): the prospect of 'placelessness' (!)

(56): important--three serious deficiences of deterritorialization approaches

1. historicity of territoriality is an either/or, presence or absence (?)
2. telationship btw global space and national territoriality is a zero-sum game
3. most crucially, "deterritorialization approaches bracket the various forms of spatial fixity, spatial embedding, rescaling, and reterritorialization upon which global flows are premised."
   

(57): important--"a major agenda of this book is to advance an interpretation of contemporary global restructuring as a rescaling of the nationally organized sociospatial configurations that have long served as the underlying geographical scaffolding for capitalist development."

(57): important--remember, two types of deterritorialization under discusssion: of capitalism, and of the state.

1. of capital (57-60): more-or-less asserting that a territorialization moment is unavoidable, still. "we are witnessing, rather, a profoundly uneven rescaling and reterritorialization of the historically entrenched, state-centric geographical infrastructures that underpinned the last century of capitalist industrialization." capital cannot ever enjoy pure placelessness.
   
2. of the state (60-64): the state, also, is most definitely not dead. "national states began actively to facilitate the process of geoeconomic integration through a variety of policy strategies..." as panitch writes, "capitalist globalization... takes place in, through, and under the aegis of states."

(63): and why the urban? well, "as we shall see, large-scale urban regions represent crucial geographical, institutional, and political arenas in which the rescaled geographies of statehood under contemporary capitalism are being forged and contested."

(66-67): in sum, four methodological challenges:

1. historicity of social space--"historically specific character of national state territoriality as a form of sociospatial organization."
   
2. polymorphic geographies--"national state territoriality is today being intertwined with... an immense variety of emergent forms (supranational institutions, etc.)"
   
3. the new political economy of scale--decentering of the national scale of political-economic life
   
4. the remaking of state space--key role of national states in promoting sociospatial transformations.

chapter three, the state spatial process under capitalism (69-113)

(70): "just as a fish is unlikely to discover water, most postwar social scientists viewed national state territories as pregiven natural environments for sociopolitical life." -- the 'territorial trap'

(70): fordist-keynesian period as a period of historically unprecedented attempt at closure [we can interrogate this, since it ought to give us some clue what 'closed' and 'open' denote; not absence of world trade, certainly]

(70): at times, though, there seems to be a simplified periodization (more simplified, in other words, than the harvey narrative)--we have moved from westphalian, to post-westphalian [if we wanted to draw the periodization out, i am worried that it, as abstract narrative, doesn't match the concrete level] -- this is emphatically misleading, though, for he does also went to stress its indeterminacy during the modern period (see 76)

(72): critical--"of particular importance, in this context, is a sustained inquiry into the conditions under which inherited geographies of state space may be transformed from relatively fixed, stabilized settings in which state regulatory operations occur into potentially malleable stakes of sociopolitical contestation. concomitantly, there is an equally urgent need for a more explicit theoretical conceptualization of the determinate social, political, and economic processes through which transformations of state space unfold."

(72): KEY--"i argue that state space is best conceptualized as an arena, medium and outcome of spatially selective political strategies" [how does this work, then, with the argument that it is potentially malleable and open to political contestation? because it is difficult to argue that its rescaling in the neoliberal period was a response to political contestation--it was in the service of capital. so a kind of political influence, but there is no role for understanding it as a tool to be wielded, in this account, correct? in other words, the question is: is it that capital has captured the state, in the neoliberal period? or is it that the state has decided to go with capital?]

(75): citing Ollman on the dialectic, in order to emphasize process over fixity

(76): "while Weber was highly sensitive to the historical specificity of modern state territoriality relative to premodern political geogrphies, he was considerably less interested in its evolution within the modern interstate system."

(77): five functions of the modern state

1. war-making and military defense
2. the containment and enhancement of national wealth
3. the promotion of national identities
4. institutionalization of democratic forms of legitimation
5. the provision of social welfare

(77): spatial scales are tied to "regulatory strategies"

(78-80): important, state space:

1. in the narrow sense--changing configuration of state border, boundaries, frontiers
   
2. in the integral sense--changing substantive ways in which institutions are mobilized to regulate social relations (state inverventions into economic process, etc.)

(81): critical--"the crucial point, therefore, is that the question of which scale of regulatory activity is primary within a given configuration of state power is essentially an empirical-historical one, and not a matter that can be settled on an a priori basis."

(84): important--summarizing his understanding of jessop's notion of strategic-relational theory of the state--"most crucially, neither the state's spatial form nor historically specific forms of state spatiality are ever structurally pregiven; rather, they represent arenas and outcomes of spatially selective political strategies. this conceptualization forms a theoretical linchpin [of this book]" [see also 89]

(84): underdetermined nature of the value form

(85): the state form as analagous

(85): KEY--according to jessop, "the separation of the state from the circuit of capital may seriously constrain its ability to function as an agent of capitalist interests." (the state, then, as a site of contestation). "the state form is an undeteremined condensation of continual strategic interactions regarding the nature of state inteverention, political representation, and ideological hegeony within capitalist society. accordingly, 'there can be no inherent substantive unity to the staet...; its always relative unity must be created...' for jessop, the funcitonal unity and organization coherence of the state are never pregiven, but must be viewed as emergent, contingent, contested... it is only through the mobilization and consolidation of state projects... that the image of the state as a unified organizationl entity can be projected into civil society." (SEE FIGURE 3.4, pg. 86)

(87): state as site of strategies, as generator of strategies, and as product of strategies.

(91-93): important:

1. state spatial form (defined with reference to the principle of territoriality--it is territoriality that underpins the potential autonomy of state institutions from other social forces within civil society)
2. state spatial projects (oriented toward state's institutional structure--initiatives to differentiate state territoriality into a functionally coordinated, coherent regulatory geography)
   
3. and state spatial strategies (oriented towards circuit of capital--influence the geographies of development, reshape geographies of capital accumulation)

(95): two dimensions

1. a scalar dimension (a hierarchy among a variety of scales)
   
2. a territorial dimension (jurisdictional units)

(96): "the relation of state institutions to patterns of uneven spatial development is frequently an object of intense sociopolitical contestation." [but, and i think we would all agree, it is possible to push this to lengths that would be absurd--we are still talking about a state that is in the broad interests of capital, perhaps more in the way althusser specified...]

(104): all of this is becoming frustratingly formal!

chapter four, urban governance and the nationalization of state space ()

(114-115): ok--"state rescaling has emerged as an important political strategy through which diverse governmental coalitions have attempted to manage the disruptive consequences of a deeply rooted socioeconomic crisis." [again, question of response to politics and contestation, or in line with capital's broad interests]

(115): definition of spatial keynesianism--"spatial keynesianism was a multifaceted, multiscalar, and contradictory amalgamation of staet spatial projects and state spatial strategies that were constructed in response to some of the major regulatory dilemmas associated with postwar fordist urban-entrenched patterns of uneven spatial development by spreading urban growth as evenly as possible across the entire surface of each national territory.."

(116): in this chapter, wants to 'get at' the state by looking at the way in which it strove to regulate urban development/urbanization.

(117): key--"I argue that spatial Keynesianism was composed of a variety of spatially selective political strategies through which wester European antional states attempted to manage the distinctive patterns of urbanization and uneven spatial development that crystallized across western Europe during the Fordist-Keynesian period..."

(120): urban development in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evolution of capitalism from liberal-competitive to state-managed; a new industrial geography of the second industrial revolution

(122): fordist period as the high-water mark of national capitalism

(128): see box, "key axes of regulation under fordist-keynesian capitalism"

(130): here, a point at which to ask the question of the place of labor in pushing the State--"the goal of state action, in this context, was less to enhance the productive force of capitalist sociospatial configurations than to spread the industrialization process as evenly as possible across the entire surface of the national territory."

(133): compensatory mechanisms, myrdal -- targeting of peripheralized spaces (136)

(171): "spatial keynesianism was not dismantled through a single, catastrophic rupture. rather, its constitutive elemnts were eroded due to a confluence of distinct processes of restructuring, leading in turn to path dependent, politically contested regulatory realignments and institutional modifications within each national state apparatus."

chapter five, interlocality competition as a state project

(172-173): "in contrast to the redistributive agenda associated with the Kenesian welfare national state, the competition state attempts to promote economic regeneration by enhancing the global competitive advantages of its territory..."

(176): we have seen--

1. state spatial projects--establish customized, place-specific regulatory capacities in major cities, city-regions, and industrial districts and more generally, to decentralize key aspects of economic regulation to subnatinoal institutional levels.
   
2. state spatial strategies--reconcentration of socioeconomic assets and advanced infrastructural investments within globally competitive city-regions.
   

chapter six, alternative rescaling strategies

(257-261): SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT

1. ABSTRACT: A. curret round of global restructuring represents an intensification and re-workign of uneven spatial development / B. state influences this through diverse political strategies / C. towards a processual concpetualization of state spatiality, which calcify into distinct sociospatial configurations
2. MESO-LEVEL: A. post-1980s western europe, which has facilitated transnational corporate accumulation strategies... has produced intense economic dynamism within a select group of powerful, globally interlinked cities... / B. an inverstion of state appraoches to the regulation of uneven development; redistribution abandoned, competetiveness prioritized. / C. patterns of state spatial selectivity have been transformed; new projects and strateiges designed to make major cities competitive. (towards RCSR--rescaled competition state regime)

(261): this configuration, it is argued, is permeated by crisis-tendencies.

(304): from second-cut, to third-cut RCSR?

graham and martin, "splintering urbanism"

---prologue and introduction---

(2): potable water problem, a la karachi -- poor pay much more, per litre

(4): the gated community

(5): "through such trends the physical fabric of many cities across the world is starting to fragment into giant cellular clusters -- packaged landscapes mad up of customised and carefully protected corporate, consumption, research, transit, exchange, domestic, and even health-care spaces..." [the question, of course, is how new is all of this? the tone of the paragraph implies that it is all a recent development. but if we read engels on manchester, we're unlikely to come away with anything that, at this high level of generality (spatial inequality), is much different]

(5-6): helicopters in sao paulo

(8): important--"when our analytical focus centres on how the wires, ducts, tunnels... that interface and infuse cities are constructed and used, modern urbanism emerges as an extraordinarily complex and dynamic sociotechnical process."

(8): something like harvey/sassen, fixity amid mobility: "In this perspective, cities and urban regions become, in a sense, staging posts in the perpetual flux of infrastructurally mediated flow, movement and exchange... The constant flux of this urban process is constituted through many superimposed, contested and interconnecting infrastructural landscapes."

(9): noting the incongruity between the ideology of 'equality of access' to public infrastructure (post WWII), and the cases being documented of the immense inequality of current systems of access (this is where the historical sequence is important).

(9): six parts

1. complex interdependencies of infrastructure networks and urban societies;
2. how contemporary urban change involves trends toward uneven global connection, combined with reinforcement of local boundaries;
3. failure of urban studies in this regard
4. ibid
5. exploring crisis in contemporary urban life;
6. toward a critical urbanism

(10): important--"our starting point... is the assertion that infrastructure networks are the key physical and technological assets of modern cities."

(10): four critical connections between infrastructure networks and contemporary urbanism--"the starting points of this book"

1. the sociotechnical process of networked infrastructure coordinates much of what goes on in cities
2. "infrastructure networks... unevenbly bind spaces together across cities, regions, nations, and international boundaries... the configurations of infrasturcture networks are inevitably imbued with biased strugles for social, economic, ecological, and political power..."
3. as sunk capital, represent "long-term accumulations of finance, technology... organizational and geopolitical power..."
4. delineate "urban culture"; "what Raymond Williams (1973) termed the 'structures of feeling' of modern urban life"

(13): what's unique about this era and today's networked infrastructures:

1. intensity, power, speed and reach of connections
2. pervasiveness of reliance on urban life
3. scale of technologically mediated urban life
4. duplicating, extending variety, density of networked infrastructures
5. speed of sophistication of the more powerful and advanced infrastructrues

(13): "much of the material and technological fabric of citeis, then, is networked infrastructure."

(13): KEY--as evidenced by their prologue, they are discussing the privatization of networked infrastructures, too (earlier, remember, they used the term "internationalizing capitalism.")

(14): the de-coupling of function from place? ("...information technologies may also support the 'renucleation' of work, home, and neighborhood services... activities that were often separated into single-use zones during the development of the industrial, functional city..."

(15): at the very least, they're foregrounding the inequality of this "networked society" ("selectively connecting together the most favored users and places")--see also quote from Castells

(16): unnevenness and inequality, they're arguing, force us to rethink the notion of "internal coherence" (which the ideology of post-war public infrastructure would have thought absolutely necessary)

(17-20): invisibility of "infrastructure" to the disciplines that have tackled the city

(21-22): against "technological determinsm"--"the problem with such approaches is that they tend to reify technologies as having overwhelming power in ushering in simple and discrete societal shifts which seem to amount to some natural process of urban evolution... once again, the forms and processes of city life tend to be simply read off as the deterministic result of the intrinsic nature of the new generation of technology..."

(28): graphite crystal bomb -- dropped by US in Kosovo

(30): "the aim of this book is to reveal the subtle and powerful ways in which networked infrastructrues are helping to define, shape, and structure the very nature of citeis, and, indeed, of civilisation. To begin the process, we would point to four crucial starting points for our task of constructing a critical urbanism of contemporary networked societies."

1. "chains of related innovations bind infrastructrue networks closely to broader technological systems; these, in turn, are seamlessly woven into the fabric of social, economic, and cultural life."
2. "technologies and infrastructure networks must therefore be considered as sociotechnical assemblies... rather than individual causal agents..."
3. synergies between old and new infrastructure systems
4. architectural importance of infrastructure networks
   

(33): KEY, summary passage--"...The book constructs a new and broad framework for exploring the relations between contemporary cities, new technologies and networked infrastructures. It argues that a parallel set of processes are under way within which infrastucture networks are being 'unbundled' in ways that help sustain the fragmentation of the social and material fabric of citeis. Such a shift, which we label with the umbrella term splintering urbanisms, requires a reconceptualization of the relations between infrastructrue services and the contemporary development of cities."

(34): important--"networked infrastructrues," and their development, as a window to power ("...much of contemporary urban life is precisely about the widening and intesnifying use of networkd infrastructures to extend social power, the study of the configuration, management and use of such networks needs to be at the center... of our analysis")

(35): importance of a global system, given the interconnectedness (even if uneven) of the world-system. and thus, "we do this by arguing that practices of splintering urbanism are starting to emerge in virtually all cities across the globe, whether in the developed, developing, newly industrializing or post-communist worlds, as local histories, cultures and modernities are enrolled into internationalizing capitalist political economies in various ways..."

---chapter 2---

(40): from 1850-1960, "there was a general movement... from the piecemeal and fragmented provision of networked infrastructures to an emphasis on centralized and standardized systems... At the same time, WEster powers imposed adapted versions of the ideal of the standardised infrastructure network across Africa, Latin America... but only for the urban spaces of the colonisers and their associated socioeconomic elites..." Process, they gone to say, that created the "new industrial metropolis" in place of the "older compact commercial city."

(41): the new networked infrastructures were instrumental for "the widespread application after World War I of Fordist notions of scientific management, rational organisation and the mass production of standardized goods..."

(41): summary paragraph, of sorts--"over the period 1850-1960, single, integrated and standardised road, water, waste, energy, and communications grids covering municipalities, cities, regions, and even nations. These were legitimised through notions of ubiquity of access, modernization and societal progress, all within the rubric of widening state power." Based, also, on notions of "rational, comprehensive planning--progress toward 'unitary' cities.

(42): the rational turn is being read through the imprint of networked infrastructures (networked infrastructures as a site in which we can see this broader turn in action)--"networked-based modernity thus promised the joys of perpetual trasnformation towards a scientifically rational and technologically intense urbanism."

(42): important--acknowledging the falsities of the ideology of standardization--in actual fact, "modernizing cities were always about rupture, contradiction, and inequality" [again, we are going to have to ask about what exactly this move to 'splintering urbanisms' consists in]

(43): the four pillars of the "modern infrastructural ideal"

1. ideologies of science that dictated "standardized infrastructure monopolies" (44-49)
2. modern urban planning's aceptance of this ideal (49-66)
3. how modern ideal became implicated in home-based consumption (66-73)
4. how modern municipalities and nation-states became founded on providing modern infrastructure to a territory (73-
   

(44): i am finding it very difficult to embrace the anti-modern logic of this pillorying of the 'rational', modern infrastructural ideal [isn't there, also, a place for struggle? w-class fight for decent life? rather than the unfolding of an entirely objective philosophical ideal? but we cannot overstate our point, either -- think paris]

(44): all this, they are arguing, gave "urban engineering" a value-free, rational air

(45): triumphalism of modern infrastructural ideal (legibility of progress)--"a pervasive age of technological optimism became concretised in grand technological visions for cities realized through integrated infrastructural and urban planning."

(47): "...laden with lustrous promises of modernity..."

(47): important--"central to this period, then, was the emerging dominance of the notion of the city as an abstract object to be managed and controlled."

(50-51): the telephone

(52-53): the idea of "urban cohesion"--"in the face of the apparently chaotic urbanization in nineteenth century industrial cities, as well as the miseries faced by the working classes, health crises, and uncoordinated infrastructures, urban planning was widely seen in this period as the means to realize technological progress..." the novelty of modern urban planning (vs. planning in pre-modern times), they're arguing, consists in the notion that "comprehensive, integrated networks of streets could be laid across whole urban areas..." [Haussman's 'regularization' of Paris, from 1853-1870]

(56): sewers and the de-odorized city

(56): not till the interwar period that "access to quality water and sewerage networks, at standard tarriffs, became normalizeed as part of the modernizing social world."

(59): the upside of the 'public' ideal, however modernist--the "private, gated streets" in London were eventually incorporated into the "unitary public street system."

(60): in the US, the rectilinear grid "became the norm for organizing metropolitan expansion."

(60): also, "functional planning" -- separation of 'work', 'housing', 'leisure', 'transport'... ("in this way, the emerging political economy of industrial capitalism would be manifested in a planned built environment."

(62): important--one obvious, important fallacy of this modern infrastructural ideal is that envisions a harmonious resolution of the "contradictory tendencies of capitalist urban development..." (city as a machine, or organism)

(64-65): Corbusier and the "straight-line"

(66): infrastructure and consumption--reaches its greatest intensity in the first half of the twentieth century; "Fordism" as legible through the "integrated energy, transport, water and connumications grids so central to the modern planning ideals of the time." [all must have access]

(66): "Fordism," too, "imposed considerable requirements upon urban inrastructure systems" -- due to 'territorial segregation' and 'dispersed production' (here, discussed as MoProduction, primarily)--"requirements were met by massive national and local state investment in standardized and dependable infrastructure services."

(67): important, Fordism goes to Europe/Japan ("interwar" in US)--"As the interwar practices of US Fordism diffused into Europe during postwar reconstruction, a twenty-five-year boom followed, based on the virtuous linkage of mass production techniques, mass consumption and advertising based on the nuclear family household, Taylorist work organization, collective wage bargaining, the hegemony of the large corporation, Keynesian demand management, the welfare staet and the mass production of standardized housing." [again, it is the unfolding of a rational, modernist ideal--rather than in any way the product of 'struggles on the ground']

(68): "urban rationalization" consolidated between the 1920s and 1960s -- "distance was less and less a barrier to interaction, mobility, and exchange..."

(68-69): tracing the impact of this development on gendered normative/cultural behavior (the nuclear family, the housewife as salesperson--linked, of course, to demand management)

(70): "gendered construction of the telephone"

(71): important--the decentralization that went hand-in-hand with the construction of the American suburban ideal was enabled by these technological revolutions in infrastructure provision (a technical condition of possibility, in other words)

(72): contemporary house as a 'machine for living' -- hooked up to the infrastructural network

(73): enter the State, and efforts to provide "near universal access" to infrastructure networks--and not simply sinister; this entailed a "fight against the vested interests of private capital."

(74): infrastructure networks as the 'connective tissue' of the new modern nation-state (here being dated to 1880-1950)--an attempted 'quantum leap to ubiquity', in the form of attempt to standardize access (here, example of "new Deal") [in sum, an important way in which the 'nation-state' congealed] (see also 77, where they cite also the Nazis and the autobahns)

(74): citing brenner to suggest, also, linkages between infrastructures and industrial policy--the former provide/enable the "general conditions of production."

(77-78): noting that, especially at the outset, owing to the high capital outlays and lumpy nature of investments involved, infrastructure provision was always considered the duty of 'natural monopolies.' little space for competition, commodification. furthermore, "the rationalization and the interconnection of local networks to create national 'grids' thus allowed economies of scale to be realized in all infrastructural domains." the nationally-regulated, large-scale, vertical enterprise was a must.

(80): considered also to be public goods, which carried with it three properties

1. 'joint supply', meaning supply to one person could be extended to others at little cost
2. 'non-excludability', meaning others could not be prevented from using the service (e.g., roads)
3. 'non-rejectability', meaning it must be equally consumed by all (e.g., traffic control system)
   

(80): State also needed to manage negative externalities

(81-87): the colonial question, which they divide into two phases:

1. formal colonialism (1820s-1930s) (82-84): "investments" designed to meet two objectives--first, export of primary materials; second, to create well serviced urban cores for political and administrative control/coordination
   
2. and neocolonialism (1940s-1980s) (84-87): for the most part, continuity (?)--nonetheless, the infrastructural networks were now taken as symbols of a country's having arrived ("the assertion of an embryonic national identity in the form of airports, four-lane highways..."). they're noting two approaches to infrastructural development, modernization theory (84-85) and ISI (85-87).
   

(82): spatial apartheid in the colonial city

(88): summary paragraph--"...variations of the modern infrastructural ideal were an essential component of the elaboration of modern nation states and urban planning movements. They were central to the construction of modern notions of time and space... the helped symbolically and materially to support the construction of national identies..."

---chapter 3---

(91): important--from the late 1960s, a series of critiques emerged that called the modern infrastructural ideal into question. they link this, immediately, to the end of "the long capitalist boom from the 1950s to 1970s." and ideologically, too. from the right: "in most contexts, it seems, politically neoliberal critiques of the 'inefficiencies' of centralized public control and ownership have fuelled a widespread wave of infrastructural liberalisation and privatisation which is still accelerating." from the 'left': "powerful social and cultural critiques have dramatically exposed its inadequacies... notions of urban planning and the city have also experienced radical overhaul..."

(92-136): five things that undermined the modern infrastructural ideal

1. the urban infrastructure 'crisis' (92-94)--speaking about actual physical crisis, which has been tied to the crisis of the 1970s, in general (physical deterioration of infrastructure, which was linked to the "widespread fiscal crisis at all levels of the US state.... expenditure was approaching the point at which it could barely maintain investment in net infrastructure" (94))
   
2. changing political economies of urban infrastructure development (94-103)--the internationalization of capitalism, coupled with widespread fiscal crisis of the State. "infrastructural privatization is a growing trend in all types of nation state..."as a result, seeing three features, mainly: a. retreat of state-backed provision / b. imperative of local competition / c. retreat of idea that networked services are 'public'. result, of course, is that "infrastructure provision" is prey to the whims of financial capital, which is interested only if"there are ways to guarantee certain rates of return" (97). they remind us, too, of the role of compulsion--debt repayment and the gutting of the public sector (99). all this, then, is obviously contributing to the process of splintering/unbundling, which assists Capital find steady, higher profits in providing for the Few (think, too, of the historical, political importance of cross-subsidizing and ideal of universal access, in the case of the 'modern infrastructural ideal'--see 103, the "position of the poor"). the city is being unwound; in its place are arising global-local linkages (100) amidst a sea of unevenness.
   
3. collapse of modern notion of comprehensive urban planning (103-114)--"the technocratic... styles of urban planning most closely allied with the rolling out of the modern infrastructural ideal have also found it difficult to survive the shift to an increasingly globalized political economy driven by liberalized flows of capital... it has also lost much of its legitimacy in Western nations as a result of... powerful 'postmodern' social and cultural critiques" (103); a shift to "projects," rather than "comprehensive plans." flux/change is putting the homogeneous, 'fixed' city to bed. and as far as the challenge from the left goes, "the instruments of modern planning, ostensibly developed to support coherence and urban egalitarianism, have often been appropriated to support fragmentation and social exclusion" (111).
   
4. physical growth of metropolitan regions (114-123)--shift from "core-dominated cities to polycentric and extended urban regions." the increasing importance of the urban periphery, and marginality. a 'single urban soup'. "the spectacular growth of urban peripheries tends geographically to eclipse or even isolate the networked cores that were the legacy of the modern infrastructural ideal" (116).
   
5. challenge of social movements (123-)--"the shift from the modern to the postmodern urban condition" -- "the ways in which a wide range of new social movements have brought resistance to bear on the technical and ideological assumptions that underpinned the establishment and propagation of the modern infrastructural ideal." the welfare state 'consensus', in other words, was not a 'consensus' at all. [but again, here we are going to try and be sensible--for all critiques are not equal, and we must move forward.]
   

(95): # of TNC's = 37,000 in 1990

(101): 're-infrastructuring' in the form of trade zones, export-processing areas, etc.

(102): "collective consumption" as a 'historically-specific phenomenon' -- though this raises, of course, the question of the conjunctural nature of neo-liberalism (what are we going to do with the swathes of humanity excluded from the mkt?)

(104): technocratic ideal was rocked by the "turmoil of social, economic, and cultural change between the 1960s and 1980s."

(108): referencing Jane Jacobs as progressive critique of the modern ideal

(108-109): robert moses and his "utopian new city of unified flow whose lifeblood was the automobile"--the purpose, of course, was "maximizing regional markets, productivity, and ease of circulation."

(110): i will just register that you don't, at all, need 'postmodernism' to critique the technocratic ideal -- the democratic ideal will do just fine (see 111).

(113-114): key, the 'city' as site of infrastructural development is being called into question--"...with the growing emphasis on global-local rather than intra-urban connections, the notion that the level of the city per se is the most appropriate scale at which to manage and articulate infrastructure is transcended..." [echoes of sassen's point about the global city as a subset of the conventional urban]--however, cities as "increasingly powerful actors" at the same time? "cities remain as places where significant and potent power exists to plan and act to address complex and ambivalent position of place within globalizing vectors of flow..."

(117-121): the role of the car in fracturing the urban landscape, even as it began as a key innovation of the 'modern infrastructural ideal': "a central paradox of processes of splintering urbanism is that the extension of standardised highways and roads across and beyond the metropolitan region -- ostensibly to support metropolitan ingegration -- has tended in practice to support the partitioning and fragmentation of urban space..." (118, see also 121) the car has supported the notion that personal enclosure is private freedom (119). it stretches the 'urban space', creating distances that can no longer be crossed by those without a car.

(121-122): the prospects of the 'infinite city' [but this needs interrogation; can we speak of unevenness and exclusion, yet also be prepared to accept that everyone is going to be 'urbanized' in the same way?]

(122): now, "position and centrality are configured less by geographical location with respect to 'downtown' than by the conditions of buildings and places with respect to global-local networked infrastructrues like international airports, high-speed rail and port terminals..."

(124-128): the feminist critique -- profoundly gendered sense in which the construction of urban infrastructure networks unfolded.

(126): despite technological innovations, time spent on housework changed very little from the 1920s to the 1960s

(128-129): failure of modernization or ISI in developing cities, as well. no 'trickle down'

(130): relevant, the 'fixity' of 'infrastuctural networks'--"at independence, colonial states faced massive problems as they inherited infrastructure networks designed to serve metropolitan rather than local needs... physically-embedded networks could not simply be rerouted to link bypassed regions... virtually all railways built in Africa since independence have replicated the colonial pattern of linking enclaves with the nearest port..."

(131-132): water systems as a site of "negative redistribution of income."

(133-135): the environmental movement -- advancing environmental standards, an attack on the 'large-scale centralized technologies surrounding the modern infrastructural ideal'

(135): pushing back, too, against "standardization."

(136): KEY PAGE--the 'profound ambivalence' with which they greet the collapse of the modern ideal. this is deeply disapponting--encapsulates the tension obvious in their treatment thus far. they lament the collapse of 'universal access,' but make a gesture towards the possibly liberatory aspects of this new attentiveness to "urban diversity". the poor and the dispossed may win out in these new markets tailored to their needs? what the fuck? clear that here we are seeing the possibly scary start of shared libertarian proclivities?

---chapter 4---

(138): framing of infrastructural unbundling--two tasks: (1) how it works in practice; (2) how it reshapes social and spatial relations in cities.

(140-141): "new technical capabilities"--tracing different, small-scale alternatives to the infrastructural ideal, most of which have come around as a result of technological and demand changes, it seems (but the idea that these will 'provide to the poor' is not really disputed very fundamentally, here? something odd is going on...).

(141): three forms of network unbundling:

1. virtual segmentation: "division of vertically integrated infrastructure networks"
2. horizontal segmentation: division into regional monopolies
3. virtual segmentation: layered divisions onto existing infrastructure (differential lanes on the highways, for example)

(145): four characteristics that influence marketability of infrastructure

1. character of the service (public good, private good)
2. conditions of production (extent to which its production is contestable)
3. environmental externalities
4. character of users' demand

(146): public goods (air traffic control) --> common pool goods (rural water systems) --> toll goods (toll highways) --> private goods (electricity generation/distribution)

(147): (1) "main deterrent to competition in infrastructure provision is the magnitude of sunk costs in the event of exit from the market. the costs are sunk to the extent that they cannot be recovered for other uses..." (2) related restriction is need for co-ordination. and (3), of course, "high economies of scale."

(149): opposed to conceiving of this transition as "privatization" or "deregulation" -- "the process is actually much more complex and 'messy'" (see 150-151 for their typology)

(152-161): in place of public/private, seven possible pathways:

1. the status quo--increasing untenable, as pressure is put on developing countries to reform public infrastructure
2. commercialised infrastructure--still run by gov't, but objective is that it runs on its revenues.
   
3. delegated infrastructure--suppliers competing for the right to supply a market (governments creating market conditions)
4. privatized infrastructure (ownership and operation)
5. privatized infrastructure (private competitors)--here, a "combination of technological and regulatory change is making competition possible..."
6. community infrastructure--"devolution of infrastructure planning and management, with a higher degree of user and community involvement."
   

(154): example of Guinea and the water sector -- is this book really becoming an apologists' guide to privatization? "the benefits of privatization are ambiguous... many studies show short-term benefits to producers, consumers, and employees(!), but longer-term effects have not been demonstrated..." (156)

(156): "between 1988 and 1993, the global value of infrastructure privatization was over US$ 30 billion... over 60 per cent of all infrastructure privatization by value has taken place in Latin America... "

(159): "evidence from the united states points to substantial economic gains from deregulation"!!! what is happening to this book?

(166): "imaginative ways are being developed to facilitate competition in different elements of the networks [of water/waste] or for the right to supply the market." [the tone is neutral at best] "public regulation is necessary to ensure access for low-income customers..."

(166): summary passage, these six pathways lead to two main conclusions:

1. only a limited number of options require unbundling; only two create competition.
   
2. a huge degree of diversity in the pathways away from integrated networks...

(167): important--"we believe that the key to developing an understanding of complex connections between unbundling and urban restrucuring is to explore the uneven nature of three forms of what we call 'infrastructural bypass'" (1. local bypass (168-171), which connects valued users and places; 2. 'glocal' bypass (171-173), which connects valued locals to global circuits; 3. virtual network bypass (173-175), use of new information/communication technologies to distribute competitive infrastructure services over a single physically integrated network(?))

(168): under heading of 'local bypass', noting (1) the creation of parallel infrastructure networks which arise to provide for "valued zones and users"; (2) segmentation of existing infrastructure networks; (3) coping strategies of the "least valued" users--inadequate treatment, i should think. here their own value-freeness is to be indicted.

(171): "glocal bypass often coexists with major physical planning schemes that link the customisation of places targeted at meeting the needs of global capital and foreign direct investment"

(174): certainly not benign--innovations towards the virtual network bypass can "be used to plan the construction of new physical networks and support the development of strategies used to effect disengagement from the least valued users."

(176-178): five conclusions from these preliminary discussions of "splintering urbanism"

1. "process of inrastructural unbundling analyzed above are likely to reshape dramatically relations between cities and their networked infrastructures... This is a multiscalar process... generally, it involves intensifying the connections between most valued users and places while simultaneously weakening the connections with least valued users and places."
2. infrastructural unbundling is not a simple process, but can take many different forms
3. not easy to characterize the trajectories of individual cities along pathways of unbundling...
   
4. "crucial to stress that changing infrastructural landscapes of cities are more complex than the displacement of the old by the new..."
5. "all infrastructures have not been unbundled... they lack the private sector interest in providing services..."
   

---chapter 5---

(179): to understand why we are seeing what we're seeing, we will need to engage "four strands of theory"

1. theories of large technical systems (180-184)--marked by growth, stabilization and then decline; "the large technical perspective therefore helps demonstrate how systemic changes appear in the whole technological fabric of society..." "instead of being static material artefacts to be relied on without much thought, they are, in effect, processes that have to be worked towards..." "precarious achievements" (182)
   
2. actor network theory (184-190)--"contemporary life is seen to be made up of complext and heterogeneous assemblies of both social and technological actors..." "so--and this is of crucial importance--unbundled infrastructure networks and fragmented cities emerge as two sides of the same overarching societal process." [ok, so what--i could have told you that, already; why the hell do we need bruno latour?]
   
3. political economy of capitalist infrastructure (190-202)--[see below]
   
4. relational theories of contemporary cities (202-)--first, reject idea that space, place, and time have any essential, predefined, or fixed meaning--worked out through social action, in dynamic ways (203). second, they lack any essential order or coherence (204).
   

(179): important, ontology of city/infrastructure-- "we aim to do this in a parallel way which does not overprivilege cities over infrastructure, or infrastructure over cities. in fact, we want to avoid the problem that has beset so much literature in the field, that of separating the ontological status of 'infrastructure' or 'technology' from the 'urban' or the 'city', as though they stand in a state of simple distinction."--"seamlessly coproduced"

(187): "city as cyborg"(!)

(190-): seven key arguments of spatial political economy

1. "infrastructure as fixed supports for the space-time mobilities of capitalism" (190)--"production of infrastructure networks to transcend time and space barriers simultaneously requires those infrastructure networks to be geographically fixed in space."
2. "the differing time-space capabilities of infrastructure networks" (193)
3. "as locally dependent capital (193)--"materially embedded in territory," require capital to be sunk--making it expensive, uncertain and risky investment.
   
4. "time-space compression," which is very uneven and partial (194)
5. "strategic localism" (197)--"changing geometries of infrastructural power tend to be bound up with internationalization, liberalization... such transformations mean that the modern nation state... is tending to leak its power..." spatial scale itself, as a historical product. with brenner, noting, in particular, the ascendancy of the 'glocal' scale.
6. "the pay per revolution" (199)--"redistributive role of infrastructure networks in modern welfare states is under severe strain." commodification.
7. towards hubs and spokes and tunnel effects (200)--increasing punctures and ruptures, in place of "homogenizing infrastructures"

(204): the move from a 'uniplex' to a 'multiplex' city

(208): "terminal architectures"

(209-210): Castells' dystopic 'network society' -- high value, glocal connections; whole swathes becoming redundant [but this is so obviously overstated, even if it gets at some truth, unintentionally]

(210): mike davis, and LA

(210-211): the 'figured' and 'disfigured' city

(214-216): four key conclusions

1. the seamless interdependence of the city and infrastructure networks
2. urban infrastructure networks are only ever temporarily stabilized, and always involve constant effort (in flux, never fixed)
3. the appearance of the 'glcoal', and the '"reduction of emphasis on standardized connective fabrics within cities"--unevenness
4. the need to work through social structures in action, rather than assuming fixity

[YAWN]

--chapter 6--

(220): three key aspects of 'infrastructural unbundling': 1. "wider trends toward social polarization" / 2. withdrawal of cross-subsidies / 3. socially polarizing effects of information and communication technologies.

(221): supporting trends: broader shift towards social and geographic polarization (estimate that roughly 30-40 percent of the population in the core is effectively 'tenured' within the global economy; less in developing countries--otherwised a chunk of casualized workers and about half who are structurally excluded).

(222): 'secessionary networked spaces' (malls, business parks, highways, gated communities) [what they are also calling 'rebundling']

(226): 'air-conditioning'

(227): "clear production-side forces are shaping the packaging of urban landscapes and the rebundling of cities. in all the above cases, local and international real estate interests seem to be intent on packaging together larger and larger luxury spaces...; at the same time, they work harder to secure such spaces from incursion... from the new urban poor" [here, interestingly, citing Logan 1993--is this a place to ground, historically, the "urban growth machine"?]

(228): key, networked infrastructures have molded to the secessionary space--"the logic of unbundled infrastructure networks helps such spaces to connect very closely with the highly capable.. infrastructure networks necessary to support and sustain their operation."

(232): important, the death of "public space" and the escalation of "public control"--the "other" side of the narrative--the degree to which splintering urbanism has been matched by the intensifying attempt to exercise social control over a given 'public' space (what they call 'normative ecologies' of who belongs).

(233): the end of cross-subsidies, which were so crucial to the goals of the "modern infrastructural ideal" -- replaced by a project-by-project logic, and the notion of 'fiscal equivalence' (234)

(234): "infrastructures and services start to be developed on the basis of the price of delivery and the desire for maximum profits: explicit social redistribution tends to be withdrawn from the equation." (aka, the 'rebalancing of tarriffs')

(236): important, the 'end' of the formal citizen: "there has been a notable shift from treating the user population as a largely homogeneous group of citizens, with notional or formal rights, to a heterogeneous group of consumers, carefully differentiated according to how lucrative they are to serve." [an interesting point to raise the question of the affinity between left- and right- libertarianism]

(236): at&t making 80 percent of their profits from 20 percent of their customers

(240): the ACORN classification(!)

(243): again, advances in technology enable this "unbundling"--the possibility, then, of a "new biology of control" (biometric scanning in san francisco, in gaza)

(244-246): the internet as 'global ghetto'; UNDP's figures are 2% of global population (the figures are outdated, but the principle is certainly not--latest figures say 24.7%, though UNDP may want to measure a subset of this population)

(246): yes--the "public" gets reduced to a cosmpolitan, resolutely bourgeois 'public' sphere.

(249): the seven (six?) spaces of seduction: 1. privatized highways (249)--social bias of the private highway (254) /2. remodeling of the internet into a corporately dominated communications medium (251) / 3. splintering streetscapes (256)--the private, air-conditioned walkway / 4. theme park/business improvement district, "malls without walls" (261) / 5. the gated community (267), which rely on replicating high-quality public services through private means ('privatopia') / 6. at the level of the home (284), secession from "immediate urban environments."

(264): the concept of a normative 'space-time' ecology

(266): "themed places" as 'large-scale urban control zones'

(269): widespread absence of pedestrian sidewalks in suburban malls

(271): disney and a "private political structure."

(275): "...of all secessionary network spaces, the risk of common interest developments prompting the collapse of the overarching municipal tax system is perhaps strongest..."

(281): gated communities and secession in johannesburg, after the breaking down of the pass-law system

(288): wacquant and "advanced marginality" -- "we need to recognize that marginalization from the ability to use and configure networked infrastructures and technologies is as central to the experience of poverty as lack of food, money or formal employment."

(289): important-- "marginalized groups often remain heavily dependent on whatever public, welfare and social services exist... but, under the influence of wider shifts away from universal, Keynesian welfare regimes to neoliberal, individualist ones, these, in turn, may be 'reconverted into instruments of surveillance and policing of a surplus population..." [here, parenti's argument about the prison system is very appropriate]

(290): four cases of exclusion: 1. transport in splintered metropolis (290)--"for many low-income people the social experience of life in marginalized places is one of being tightly confined by time and space barriers rather than being liberated from them." / 2. exclusion from IT networks (291) / 3. water provision in the"Developing World" [why caps?] (296), where "prospects for major extension seem weak" / 4. + 5. fuel and power resources (297)

(292): homelessness and the "sanitization" of the urban space in the US ('out of sight', 'out of mind')

(296): here, an interesting, telling aside -- that "even" the modern infrastructural ideal was better than neoliberalism at dealing with informal settlements [might tell you a thing or so about the common system that undergirds the two, no?]

(297): "in jakarta... over half the population still obtain their water from vendors, at as much as thirteen times the cost of the piped water used to irrigate the golf courses and landscaped gardens of the extending new town complexes..." [goodness.]

(298): pre-payment reduces the public image costs of "disconnection"

(302): SUMMARY--"these new urban forms have major implications for the democratic possibilities of the city. they seem to signal the collapse of the coordinated public nterprise of interlinked infrastructural monopolies and comprehensive public city planning. they mean the effective abandomnet of the (always problematic) ideal of the cohesive, integrated and open city that can be characterized as having some organic unity. we are clearly losing the 'ideal of the city as a special place: the center of democratic exchange...' highly uneven commodified competition of the production of both networks and spaces becomes the single dominant ethos of the city; increasingly you are what the market dictates for you."

---chapter 7---


(305): the 'archipelago' economy -- "glocalization"

(306): ash amin and nigel thrift "argue, however, that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to generate 'artificially ' such self-sustaining international economic nodes..."

(307): neil brenner and "de-linking"

(307): important--"the key result of these trends is that all cities, whether they be 'global cities... [or other cities]... seem to be facing variations of the same broad logics of development." [this, though, is not true--last week's conversation about shenzen, case-in-point -- but they have a framework which can assimilate this -- seen next page "we suggest that the intersections between globalization, liberalization, new technologies and infrastructural practices have crucial iplications for the development of urban economies in [all places] alike..." we just need to make explicit the correct way to deploy this.]

(308): the seven types of places that are emerging: 1. global financial service cities (new york, london) /2. development enclaves in 'megacities' / 3. emerging enclaves of innovation / 4. industrial spaces for innovation and production /5. spaces configured for inward investment in manufacturing... / 6. 'back office' enclaves for data processing / 7. spaces configured as 'logistics zones'. [this is key, actually -- demonstrates, really, that glocalization's unit is no longer the 'city', but, more, a kind of 'space' that is not 'local']

(309): moreover, they want to highlight four key supports for the economic changes being documented in this book: 1. changing role of states, "increasingly entrepreneurial" (309--citing brenner) /2. urban municipalities (310), pursuing 'glocal' strategies /3. infrastructure capital (311) /4. corporate capital

(327): aspiring "global cities" in the third world

(344-345): utilities advertised to foreign investors ("glocal infrastructure provision")

(348-349): pearl river delta as case in-point--"such spaces are specifically built for foreign capital..."

(363): interesting, export processing zones--"emblematic of the use of corporate networks to exploit spatial separation and geographical division.. 'we make computes, but we don't know how to operate computers'..." "export processing zones are therefore logistics enclaves whose high levels of infrastructural servicing, and connectivity elsewhere, tend to contrast sharply with their disconnection from their surrounding city or region and its poor infrastructure..."

(372): two choices, re: what lies beyond the 'glocalized' world: 1. accept the deteriorating world of the modern infrastructural ideal / 2. "to take action to splinter oneself and one's space away from the modern, monopolistic infrastructure network, in the hope of achieving more suitable higher-quality or more reliable connections that way"[???] [and a very poor discussion, here]

(377): BUT--"as we shall see in Part Three, cities continue to be mixed economic and social spaces... attempts at economic and technological secession are ambivalent, contradictory practices that are open to resistance and challenge. as we shall see then, such continued mixity and ambivalence offer a key hop.e to any attempt at working towards the economic democratization of the twenty-first century splintering metropolis."

---conclusion/epilogue---

(384): calling for a "series of caveats" in their analysis; themselves recognizing that they don't want to overstate their points. two tasks: 1. wider, historical context / 2. the necessary limits of 'splintering urbanism'.

(385): recognizing the risk of "overgeneralization" -- there is no simple, 'function' fit between the city and the needs of global capitalism.

(386): important, they recognize also that "the dialectic of privacy and closure versus openness and mixing has been played out since the very beginning of urban life." .. "the modern infrastuctural ideal was never materially achieved in practice. it was always as much a symbolic and discursive construction as a technological reality. it was closely bound up with the wider legitimation of modern national and local states... unevenness and bias... remained in all cities..."

(387): noam chomsky citation, out of nowhere!

(387): important, "we should be cautious not to fall into the trap of romanticizing the modern infrastructural idea... the normative concept of the networked city that was at the root of the modern idea was totalizing and centralized..." [again, the critiques were raised earlier--isn't this far too totalizing? even criticizing re-distribution as "paternalistic". we don't need to rehabilitate the welfare state to avoid this trap. to the ramparts!]

(388): secession, similar to the modern infrastructural ideal, as a "dream" - "just as unrealisable as the fantasies of clearn, functional, and perfectly geometric order promulgated by modernist visionaries... we therefore need to be wary of assuming the easy emergence of utterly separated premium network spaces..."

(388): six reasons why this is more messier than they'd like: 1. always 'open' and 'porous', in practice / 2. must maintain connectivity with wider public networks (like labor, for example) /3. sheer diversity cannot be parcelled out so easily, multiple spillover effects. / 4. spaces continue to exist where resistance can be constructed. spaces of 'public mixing' (392) still exist.

(393): merrifield's response to davis' dystopia.

(394): we cannot forget the creativity and sheer inventiveness of urban inhabitants [a bit hokey, all this]

( 395): "most practices of resistance are more prosaic and quotidian...", transgression and rebellion [uh-oh; this is not promising, in the least... skateboarders as the new vanguard]

(396): struggles against the 'representations' of the periphery. [PLEASE!]

(397): the very cursory mention of actual movements is refreshing.

(397): kaliski and the prospect of finding 'public' in the privatized.

(400): NGO's in nepal and colombia; Orangi Pilot Project [uh-oh.]

(405): interesting, the conjuncture: "we would therefore expect social and political tensiosn within many cities to increase. A central theme of urban politics... in the first decades of the new millenium will therefore centre on the struggle between the 'glocal' forces... versus the imperatives of infrastructrual, urban, and technological democratization and the need for more egalitarian and democratized practices and principles of development."

(406): towards a 'spatial imaginary', which can bridge the multiple heterogeneities without suppressing difference (here they cite harvey)

(407): "urban democratization" -- "heterogeneous interaction and continued mixing"

(408): an urban politics of difference that is not an urban politics of segregation, which is willing/ready to come to terms with "the common experience of the contemporary, capitalist urban condition." [recalls Lefebvre]

(409): and YES -- they bring the State back. "new forms of intervention by state and public institutions... are required directly to encourage democratic practices..."

(411): the "tyranny of spatial scale" -- "the assumption that the urban scale must, necessarily, be the dominant scale of action and organization... we must recognize that real democratization must be pursued [at different levels]"

(417-419): questions for further urban research.

saskia sassen, the global city

xix-xxii: the seven hypotheses

(1) - geographic dispersal of economic activities is a key factor feeding the importance of central corporate functions;
(2) - central functions are so complex that large global firms are compelled to outsource them to 'highly specialized service firms.'
(3) - these highly specialized service firms are 'subject to agglomeration economies.' as a result, "global cities are, in this regard, production sites for the leading information industries of our time."
(4) - the more headquarters outsource their most complex functions, "the freer they are to opt for any location" for the work actually done in their headquarters;
(5) - specialized service firms are engaged in providing a 'global service,' which encourages global city-global city partnership;
(6) - a growing number of high level professionals in cities "have the effect of raising the degree of spatial and socioeconomic inequality evident in these cities."
(7) - the dynamics described in hypothesis six lead to "the growing informalization of a range of economic activities..."

(3): cities' four-fold new functions: (1) highly concentrated command points; key locations for finance; (3) sites of production of innovations; (4) markets for the products and innovations of this new services economy.

(5): "the fundamental dynamic posited here is that the more globalized the economy becomes, the higher the agglomeration of central functions in a relatively few sites, that is, in global cities... there is a new logic of concentration."

(5): the "global city" as a site of production of "highly specialized services and financial goods" [note, this does not tell us anything about cities, in general--in that sense the explanandum is not the "urban," but an atypical subset]

(6): wanting to focus on the "practice" of global control--"the work of producing and reproducing the organization and management of a global production system and a global marketplace for finance," a process in which the "global city" has a critical role. [she is less interested, she says, in the 'familiar issues' of the power of larger corporations. but is this simply an excuse to dull the heinousness of what she's describing?]

(8): question, also, about the relationship between the city and the nation-state

(10): and finally, the morphology of the new service sector--what about the low-wage jobs that supply this high-wage service sector?

(12): important--here some reflections on why this transition has happened, and how to theorize it. it is not the case that new industries have emerged to replace old ones; at least it is not that simple. what has happened, instead, is a "deep structural process of decline," in which "growth" and "decline" have to be theorized more holistically. simply and specifically, i guess, this is the idea that we are seeing the geographic dispersal of manufacturing, which has engendered the need for the new. [the question, though, is why we need to see the 80's and 90's as "high-flying," rather than periods of stagnation. this motivates a question re: whether the change she is documenting can be attributed to technological shifts, as is somewhat implied, or whether there's something else, more internal to the pure dynamics of capitalism, which has spurred it. i suppose the two theorizations are not mutually exclusive, but there is a sense in which sassen has evacuated the latter paradigm from her analysis.]

(12-13): more on the systemic connection between 'decline' and 'growth'. four working hypotheses:
(1) geographic dispersal of manufacturing, which contributed to the decline of old industrial center [and] [created] a demand for expanded central management...
(2) the growth of the financial industry... benefited from policies and conditions often harmful to other industrial sectors, notably manufacturing (do we mean hiking the interest rates in '79?)
(3) "a transformation in the economic relationships among global cities, the nation states where they are located, and the world economy..."
(4) a "new class alignment" in the global city [a species of "structured coherence," perhaps?]

(19): it might be important to clarify the causal connections between these three observations, because elsewhere it seems to be distinct from what she is proposing here: "a leading argument in this book is that the spatial dispersion of economic activities and the reorganization of the financial industry are two processes that have contributed to new forms of centralization insofar as they have occurred under conditions of continued concentration in ownership or control." [recall panitch and gindin, in other words, who suggest that 'the reorganization of the financial industry' was necessary for Capital to come to terms with 'transnationalization'. also, is the last clause suggesting a positive, normative project--that this process could (and should) have happened under different "conditions [of] ... ownership [and] control."

(20): what we have seen, in effect, is a de-centering of transnational banks (and the TNC's, of course), and the concomitant rise of the "major centers of finance."

(19): interesting, if cryptic sentence: "whether internationalization is essential to the major outcomes, notably the acute pressure, toward agglomeration in leading cities, is difficult to establish and is perhaps a question of theory." [what to make of this? we can have the global city without globalization? unlikely. but this is why her doing the work of theory would be immensely helpful; is she eschewing that task even though she thinks it worthwhile?]

(20): question of the concept of "productive innovation" in finance, insofar as she is anticipating the possibility of "non-productive innovation." what is the distinction? hasn't recent history proven the fallacies of celebrating precisely this same fact of innovation, insofar as it has proved to be 'smoke' and 'mirrors'? or are we speaking of a subset of the kind of innovation that she wants to speak about. [my position seems justified--"innovations" are made explicit on page 21 as "derivatives" and "hedge funds"]

(21): explicitly naming the 'long wave' objection (what is different about this round of 'financialization' from what transpired at the turn of the century?)

chapter two

(23): "capital mobility" is not simply the ability of capital to move across space; the concept must also assimilate the fact of increasing centralization.

(26): mention of 'transnationalization' as a political strategy to break 'fordism', but also a technical consequence of new strategies that were "designed to separate low-wage, routine tasks from highly skilled tasks..."

(28-29): seems too lumpy -- discussing "transnationalization" at the same time as mentioning how many women work from their suburban homes? i understand the affinity, but could this not be said to be symptomatic of some larger failings to systematize data with an appropriately theoretical frame?

(30): sassen's notion of the "redeployment of growth poles," which helps us observe that geographic dispersal has gone hand-in-hand with increasing concentration of capital ["such a parallel decentralization of ownership has not taken place. The large size of firms has made it possible to internalize transaction and circulation costs, thereby reducing the barriers to capital circulation and raising capital's ability to equalize the profit rate." [marxist commitments, clearly...]

(31): perhaps we can start, here, to ask what "productive innovation" in finance might mean? "opening up of regional markets"; "offshore banking" --> all leading to a "renewed concentration in and orientation toward major financial centers, beginning in the early 1980s... not mere geographic retrenchment but was in fact associated with new forms of capital mobility..." "The central activity is now the buying and selling of instruments over and over again, thereby maximizing the circulation of financial capital.."

(32): "increased capital mobility has brought about a homogenization of economic space..." [but, in a way compatible with uneven development, of course.]

(32): important--quite bleak implication for one type of development strategy, here. peripheral labor can now be employed without ever escaping its peripherality. no more "labor aristocracy," which she identifies as a very specific historical phenomenon. technological/communication revolution has enabled high-tech industries to incorporate sweatshop labor. this tendency towards dispersal, she's implying, "neutralizes the politico-economic consequences that Marx associated with the generalized increase in the capital intensity of production..."

(33): labor in this service economy, more mobile/transnational/unequal -- (1) both highly trained personnel, and (2) unskilled service labor

(33-36): useful summary of argument of chapter 2

chapter 10: a new urban regime?

(329): "the most pronounced development is the massive increase in the volume of transactions of the financial industry, by far the most significant international industry."

(330): "most foreign direct investment is now in services."

(331): "the weight of economic activity since the 1980s has shifted from production places, such as Detroit and Manchester, to centers of finance and highly specialized services."

(331): her central amendment to a traditional 'world-systems' narrative--the need for 'control'/'organization' is not inherent in fragmentation ("cannot be taken for granted") but needs to be produced.

(331): "global cities as sites for the production of global control capability."

(332): a list of the kind of firms that comprise this "global control capability"--isn't this a bit underwhelming, if we're honest? -- "advertising, accounting, legal services, business services, certain types of banking, engineering, and architectural services."

(332): hmm--on the one hand she is drawing attention to the enormous importance of finance, as service. but on the other hand, she doesn't want to include the production of financial instruments as a "service." the question, then, is obvious: is the popular narrative that it is these instruments and the games they play that account for the enormity of financial activity? or is it actually true that the services that actually comprise global control capability dominate the world economy? the latter seems very counter-intuitive, especially if you consider the amount of money that was trading on the derivatives market (220 trillion dollars, or something like this...), and all this. having said this, it does seem like she acknowledges this, to an extent; i would only say that what i've read of her argument does not foreground the parasitism of this fact.

(332): the potential for other global cities, besides the trinity -- the possibility of regional and national markets that need a more locally-oriented site of control capability.

(333): and KEY--her larger argument assimilates the understanding that manufacture and the proletariat, in fact, HAVE NOT declined. "I argue it is these transformations that constitute the shift to a service-dominated economy, rather than the mere fact of a shift in employment from manufacturing to services, a process usually centered on the growth of consumer services. On the contrary, I posit that the period of massive growth of consumer services is associated with the expansion of mass production in manufacturing." [but this does raise the question: why do we need to speak about this as "an economic system dominated by such management, servicing, and financial activities? see page 334] see also discussion below

(333): between the global cities, the emergence of a "transterritorial economy" [though not, at all, a self-sufficient economy, remember--it could not exist without manufacturing]

(334): important--an explicit consideration of the place of manufacturing economy. and again, the implications are bleak, insofar as they portend an increasing divergence between the fortunes of the global city and the nation. "Yes, manufacturing matters, but from the perspective of finance and producer services, it does not have to be national... One of the key points developed in this book is that much of the new growth rests on the decline of what were once significant sectors of the national economy, notably key branches of manufacturing that were the leading force in the national economy and promoted the formation and expansion of strong middle class."

(335): MOST IMPORTANT--new, more severe forms of "increased social and economic polarization" associated with this transformation. and this, of course, may one day call into question the foundations of the new growth, too. "At what point do these tensions become unbearable? At what point is the fact of homelessness a cost also for the leading growth sectors? How many times do high-income executives have to step over the bodies of homeless people till this becomes an unacceptable fact or discomfort? At what point does the increasing poverty of large numbers of workers begin to interfere with the performance of the core industries either directly or indirectly? It is perhaps the social involution that this mode of growth brings about in significant sectors of a national economy that may be more devastating to its own growth than the decline of manufacturing at the national level, since there is significant manufacturing growth globally, and in that sense there is grist for the mill of the producer services complex."

(335-336): and then, also, the obvious tension between the "growth of these leading 'industries'" and the decline of the health of the nation-state (in burgeoning budget deficits due to the decline of national economic sectors)

(336): barriers to entry, which is critical for the absurd hacks who want to transform this into a normative project ("And most cities lack the mix of resources which creates organizational complexity in leading cities. We are entering a whole new phase in the development of urban economic cities.")

(337-338): narrative of suburbanization and the rise of the middle-class in the US; in UK, "social provisioning" in the form of a "national public health system" and "public housing"; in Japan, "massive reinvestment to expand the infrastructure for production rather than that for social reproduction."

(339): a move away from production for internal consumer markets, and towards international markets as symptomatic of the larger shift away from the Fordist phase.

(340): IMPORTANT, even if she doesn't answer it, she is asking exactly the right question, here: "This development [away from Fordism] raises a number of questions about the intersection of economics and politics and about the 'natural' tendencies of capitalist economies. Was the social compact of the postwar period the result of the weight of local politics in a phase of economic development that gave local claims unusual powers? And is what we are seeing today--increased economic and social polarization--the 'natural' outcome of the operation of the economic system when political claims carry little weight?"

(340): identifiying an "ideology of globalism," within which "localities are seen as powerless in an era of global economic forces."

(340-341): important--high-income workers vs. management of these service industries--argument, here, is that there is an important distinction to be drawn between the two. the former have no claims over their places of work; they can be fired at the drop of the hat. they are tied to it through "conspicuous consumption," which "serves a strong ideological function of securing the alliance of these workers." [many questions, of course, but perhaps useful to use this as a way into the question of "productive" and "unproductive" labor -- the argument is that "they are ultimately a stratum of extremely hard-working people whose alliance to the system leads them to produce far more profit than they get back in their admittedly very high salaries and bonuses." but how? is their labor not more destructive, than productive, insofar as they're engaged in the re-distribution of surplus value? or are they actually 'facilitating' the creation of 'surplus-value'? or perhaps these two are not mutually exclusive?

(341): let's not overplay the role of these people, as a mass, in the larger population. she acknolwedges that they are "numerically small", but seems to peg the prominence of a "new social aesthetic" to their rise, nonetheless. i suppose we'll have to admit that this culture exists, of course; though it's prominence is open to contestation. they are certainly not involved in an active "war of position." they don't care about winning "hearts and minds." clearly, with sassen, we are still justified in deriding this as the culture of an unaccountable and seceding elite.

(343): all this, again, seems to represent a "new urban regime" [what does this mean, though--theoretically--for questions re: its stability?]

(344): again, engaging the earlier question of the role of finance--how to make sense of this, exactly? ("This is not to say that finance was unimportant then and manufacturing is unimportant today. Nor is it simply that the financial industry has replaced the auto industry as the leading economic force.

epilogue

(346): there are six sets of debates
(1) re: the global city as model (347-355);
(2) re: place and role of finance
(3) producer services;
(4) relations among cities;
(5) inequality in global cities;
(6) are global cities a new spatial order?

(347): concept of "incipient de-nationalization" -- is this helpful? elites willingly surrendering the state to capital?

(348): no such entity as a single global city--"the global city is a function of cross border network of strategic sites... The global city network is the operational scaffolding of that other fuzzy notion, the global economy."

(349): she is not assuming homogenization--rather, her point is "the development and partial importation of a set of specialized functions and the direct and indirect effects this may have on the larger city."

(349): what work does this distinction do, exactly--"It is not simply a matter of global coordination but one of the production of global control capacities."

(349): she is concerned, after all, with a "whole infrastructure of jobs typically not marked as belonging to the corporate sector of the economy."

(350): "The place-ness of the global city is a crucial theoretical and methodological issue in my work. Theoretically it captures Harvey's notion of capital fixity as necessary for hypermobility."

(350): important--she understands herself as making a "distinction between what is encompassed by the global city model and the larger urban entity called New York... What may have not been stated with adequate clarity... is that the effort... was to understand the impact of the global city function on the larger city, to see whether this impact is beneficial for a larg sector of the population or not..." [i think we can push this much, much further than she has--and then, having done that, doesn't it destabilize much of what is 'formally' advertised in this book?]

(351): one answer to why this prism of the global city is useful (again, though, not because it might tell us about cities, but because it tells us something specific about the global economy): "The concept of the global city introduces a far stronger emphasis on strategic components of the global economy, and hence on questions of power... Overall, I would say, the concept of the global city is more attuned to questions of power and inequality."

(354): speaking, explicitly, of "the global city," as it exists today, as a construction of today--"one of the marking features of the organizational architecture of the current phase" of capitalism.

(358): "indeed it let me to start a major new multiyear project on the role of the state in globalization and the impact of the latter in altering the logic explaining whose claims become legitimate"

(358): acknowledging that 1980s and 1990s "increasingly delinked finance from its role as servicing the 'real' economy." and also that financial turn "is not the first time this happens in recent Western history..." "But in my reading there are distinctive features that differentiate the current phase rom earlier phases."

(360): KEY, responds to the questions I posed earlier--"what is specific about the shift to services is not merely the growth in service jobs but, most importantly, the growing service intensity in the organization of advanced economies: firms in all industries, from mining to wholesale buy more accounting, legal, advertising, financial, economic forecasting services, and so on, today than they did twenty years ago... Cities emerge as important production sites for what are key inputs for firms in all industries."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

neil brenner critique in "review of international political economy" (1,1, 1998)-- reference point of sassen's concept of "systemic discontinuity" is a static nation-space; she has not seen how the reconfiguration of the state, itself, is concomitant to the same processes that have shaped the city. thus her conclusions about the state suffer because they reify an earlier, temporary form, in effect (he is drawing attention, instead, to regional configurations--not unlike taylor).

peter taylor critique in "review of international political economy" (1, 2, 1994)--sassen misses three things: (1) the focus on three cities is inadequate for an understanding of the world urban hierarchy; (2) her theorization of the state is absent, rigid, inadequate--he wants to mention the possibility that different states will take different tactics re: the production of the global city; (3) her theorization of the 1980s runs roughshod over the realization problem; in effect, taylor is drawing attention to the contradiction of neoliberal restructuring (capital will still need to find a market for its goods). this is why he thinks it is the 1980s that are temporary, rather than the social democratic solution of yesteryear.