Global Cities and Ordinary Cities in the Planning Perspective

A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Ciccarelli, Silvia; Gemmiti, Roberta; Salvati, Luca Conference Paper Mind the gap! Global cities and ordinary cities in the planning perspective 51st Congress of the European Regional Science Association: "New Challenges for European Regions and Urban Areas in a Globalised World", 30 August - 3 September 2011, Barcelona, Spain Provided in Cooperation with: European Regional Science Association (ERSA) Suggested Citation: Ciccarelli, Silvia; Gemmiti, Roberta; Salvati, Luca (2011) : Mind the gap! Global cities and ordinary cities in the planning perspective, 51st Congress of the European Regional Science Association: "New Challenges for European Regions and Urban Areas in a Globalised World", 30 August - 3 September 2011, Barcelona, Spain, European Regional Science Association (ERSA), Louvain-la-Neuve This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/120103 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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Global cities and ordinary cities in the planning perspective Attilio Celant, Roberta Gemmiti, Silvia Ciccarelli, Luca Salvati Abstract This paper presents a critical debate about the selectivity through which the existing literature identifies the critical factors in both urban development and competitiveness. It highlights the need to establish policies aimed at “ordinary cities” (Amine Graham, 1997) and “ordinary geographies” (Jonas e Ward, 2007). By analyzing the case of Rome, Italy, this paper explores the consequences of such literature for planning choices, especially for those cities that are not supported by a mature system of governance. It is well established that cities and urban regions are considered the most significant organizations and social units in the post-industrial era. The academic focus on urban regions was a result of the convergence between studies on competitiveness and disciplines like Regional Economy and Economic Geography, which tended to focus on the relationship between post-industrial capitalism and the process of regionalization. Since the first studies on industrial de-verticalization and emerging patterns of production localization, the literature has increasingly related the economic success of firms to specific characters of territories, including face-to-face contacts, knowledge spill over and relationships based on trust. All cities are therefore framed to look like the leaders of the global urban hierarchy: Global City Regions and Mega City Regions, large territories combining hard and soft infrastructures, socializing spaces, multi-culturality, talent, tolerance; cities offering a network structure made up of Marshall nodes of production. The rigidity of the current conceptions of urban competitiveness, supported also by international organizations (OCDE, 2006; Territorial Agenda, 2007), often leads to negative consequences for urban planning policies in cities that are not yet supported by a developed system of governance. This is the case for Rome, where planning policy has followed guidelines proposed by existing literature. The article argues that the oversimplification of urban development and competitiveness can result in planning policies divorced from the real issues, thus causing a unique set of social and environmental consequences. 1. Introduction Which is the contribution of the experience of Rome to the national and international development? Which is the competitiveness level of the city on the global arena? Which are the strengths and weaknesses of its productive system from a planning perspective? These questions offer the inputs to investigate on planning patterns for ordinary cities (Amin and Graham, 1997) in a phase of the economy during which, now more than ever and at all the geographical scales, cities are considered as engines for the economy. Rome is a southern European capital, showing a good demographic dynamic and a pretty good level of richness and occupation. However, it is not able to control and orient the global economy and society. This is also what results from the different rankings offered by the international literature, where Rome is always positioned at a lower level than the top of the global urban hierarchy. This is probably due to the fact that Rome presented a particular development path, sometimes forced to apply specific policies, which made it a tertiary city, tourist not by natural evolution, never industrial and still agricultural if we look outside of the compact city. During the last two decades the local institutions chose a new development pattern, with the aim of increasing the level of international attractiveness and visibility, focusing mainly on tourism and culture. At the same time, the planning choices tried to modify the settlement and the functional structure of the city, trying to adjust the traditional gap between centre and periphery. This has represented a big effort, inspired to the models of development and competitiveness experimented by global cities, which unfortunately resulted ineffective. Keeping in mind the scientific debate to draw critical inputs and useful proposals for the development of the city, this paper offers an investigation of the context of Rome, its productive and territorial structure and the recent planning choices. The objective is not to understand how Rome could become a global city, as this would not be an objective in line with its characters and potentials. Rather, the intention is to benefit from the international literature and the patterns proposed for global cities to understand and criticize the choices made for Rome as an “ordinary city”. The negative effects produced by the planning policies, indeed, are partially due to the oversimplification through which sometimes the complex relationship among city/economy/development is presented. At the same time, the geographical category of the global city seems useful, anyway, to formulate some indications for the development of Rome in the next years. 1. Global cities. Inputs from the literature The global city is a well known metaphor through which the relationship between a urban centre and its economic development is being interpreted. The globalization process and the ICT development changed this relationship; the concepts of concentration, hierarchy, spatial agglomeration and inner scale economies used to describe the city, but at present the context is quite different. Even during the industrial era the international character of some cities was highlighted, mainly from the political, cultural, economic and media point of view. However, these cities remained linked to their countries of origin, as they represented a fundamental channel of internationalization (Hall, 1966).During the 80s it became evident the need to change the interpretative framework in order to understand the tremendous change that was going on. What was happening was the progressive creation of a global system of production and trade exchange among a global network of cities (or, rather, large urban regions). The capability to dominate these urban systems depended on the fact that in these areas it was concentrated the majority of the international economic and productive capital, by that time already free from distance constrains (Friedmann e Wolff, 1982). They also worked as nodes of coordination and government of an economic, entrepreneurial, social and cultural system scattered and fragmented across the space of global flows (Sassen, 1991; Castells, 1996). As a consequence of the convergence between the studies upon the network of “territorialized” production and the globalization process, the global cities, nodes of control and orientation of the economy and society, assume in the XXI century the physiognomy of the so called global-city regions or mega-city regions. This geographical category helps in the definition of a urban formation of wide dimension, made up of a network of Marshall local economies, able to attract and keep sectors and functions of key relevance for the global economy: i) financial and production services; ii) command and control functions; iii) cultural and creative industry; iv) tourism (Scott, 2001; Hall e Pain, 2006). Cities at the top of the global urban hierarchy are thus described in a very different way from the Fordist city: on the one hand, the functions have changed and own a different range of operations, as it happens for example in tourism and

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