City as a Political Idea - UNIV PLYMOUTH

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ignore. The case of Bilbao (with its most famous, though not only attraction: the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry) is the best and most inspiring – because successful – example here. The case of Bilbao also illustrates what I understand by the term ‘globally recognisable city’ because Bilbao does not fulfill the criteria for classification as a global city by the GaWC, despite being a well known and popular city. Tourism as a tool for growth, however, also has its dark side – in fact, it creates a huge amount of very low paid and unskilled jobs. On this basis, it is difficult to build the global position of a city.

      Cities grow and become increasingly important actors on the stage of the world economy. ‘Urban citizenship’ projects are being spoken about more and more, which seems to indicate the growing political ambitions of large cities who are trying to discount their economic success, and economic and cultural importance. Exactly – large. For it is only the big cities, global cities, that grow and get richer. Others die. Interestingly, the process of shrinking cities does not only apply to small cities. In former East Germany this process is one of the most dramatic in the world. A medium sized city – with seemingly huge growth potential – is dying.

      The situation is different in Polish cities. Above all, Poland has one of Europe’s highest rates of polycentric cities. The spatial structure of Polish cities is much more balanced than that of many of our neighbours – especially that of the more centralised Latvia – where the power of capital is overwhelming. Economically, and in terms of human resources, Riga comprises half of Latvia. Similar patterns can be seen in Estonia, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The spatial structures of Spain and Portugal are also considerably more centralised than the spatial structure of Poland. The position of Warsaw in Poland – from an economic and demographic point of view – is balanced by other centres. Each of the existing regional centres – Tricity, Wrocław, Poznań (barely, but still) and Silesia – have a chance to become important centres on a European scale. However, this has not happened because of the centralist tendencies of Warsaw and the animosity of local governments, as well as a provincial way of thinking that limits minds to the Polish territory and fails to acknowledge the existence of potential future scenarios.

      But this is only a digression – most important is the fact that, in contrast to Germany, the process of shrinking is only just beginning in the Polish cities, and relates more to the outflow of population movement in the centre and periphery than to the suburbs or neighbouring municipalities. Or rather, I am concerned because the mass emigration of Poles changes the situation of Polish cities in an obvious way – population outflow is already beginning to be noticeable. Wrocław, for example, even organised a campaign to promote the city, aimed at attracting a young, skilled workforce, necessary for the investments proliferating outside Wrocław. The same process has for many years set the rhythm of life in smaller towns and cities in the Opole region, and others near the German border. Many cities in the Opole region – and increasingly in other areas of Poland – seem to exist in two phases: one lasts almost all year, when the city is asleep – and appears almost dead. The second exists in the moments when people employed in Germany, Holland, Ireland, Great Britain, Sweden, etc. come home to visit their families.

      If the big cities – and the capital accumulating in them, both financial and human – are becoming stronger, then small towns are losing that capital. The strength of the city, what makes it such a great machine for growth, is its social and economic diversity. In a big city with limited space there are countless processes of growth, development and decline. However, the concentration and diversification of these processes means that they naturally interact, reinforcing or mutually stimulating each other and often – brutal though it may sound – devouring one another. This diversity and abundance only exists from a certain moment. The city only becomes real – becomes ‘City’ – when the number of exchange processes exceeds a certain limitation. Of course, such a definition of the city is quite arbitrary because the city (in the sense of an administrative unit) is usually defined in terms of its number of residents – indeed, it looks quite different in different countries. Population is of great (perhaps even decisive) significance, but millions of people concentrated in a small space are still a crowd, not a city. These statements reflect the point I have made several times before, that small and medium sized cities are dying because they stand out from the ‘natural’ organic network of dependencies. Big cities, however, are becoming part of a wider network. Their links with other cities – institutions operating on a global scale, large international companies and even countries (with which, though they have their own problems, the city continues to interact) – make them cease to have a consistent, recognisable structure. Cease to be autonomous beings. At first glance it seems completely natural, even obvious and inevitable. Is the whole world not becoming a single network? Are state networks not a network economy?

      Cities become hubs of economic flows and relationships – that is their economic strength and potential for growth. The more this spider’s thread is focused at a single point in space, the richer and more economically powerful the city becomes. This power and wealth, however, is to some extent illusory, and may be better defined as virtual. Since wealth lies in the networks, the economic power of the city is in fact temporary. This wealth is not rooted in the City – it simply passes through it. Manuel Castells writes about this, coming to the obvious conclusion that the city does not actually exist anymore. The traditional structure of settlement networks (described by Walter Christaller) was based on a hierarchy of trade and mutual dependence. This structure existed in a much more limited space, delineated by the possibilities of traveling from one medium to another, than the contemporary structure. It is the so-called ‘ecological footprint’ of the city, the area in which the city ‘feeds’ that was once the area most adjacent to the city. Today – especially in the large cities – we find a global footprint. It is split and fragmented. Often, the relationships between the cities themselves – even if those cities are on different continents – are stronger and more important than the cities’ relationships with their peripheries. A classic example is NY-LON, the relationship between the City of London and New York’s Wall Street, which is almost symbiotic. This rupture (or in any event a strong weakening) of spatial relationships between strong cities and their surroundings is a fundamental threat to small and medium sized cities. And here is a paradox: the more global a city is, the stronger it becomes, but its links with traditional – and one might say ‘natural’ – ‘stock’ weaken.

      So if it is the case that the bigger cities grow, the less they need the towns and cities that have been traditionally associated with them, then the primary question becomes a matter of identifying the natural and significant relationships existing in the modern world. These links are, of course, capital ties. They do not apply, however, only to the large corporations. According to a report by UNESCO, the second largest flow of money in the world economy (the first one concerns oil) is the money sent by migrants to their countries of origin. The money that banks get from this is significant, despite there being a powerful addition to their revenues from the direct stream of capital flows that never stop anywhere.

      In the short term, this movement of capital otherwise ‘in exile’ is one of the most important factors that could save small towns. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider a rescue technique for small towns, which will lead us to more fundamental questions. To allow the influx of capital ‘in exile’ to really become an opportunity for development in small towns, it has to be stimulated and involved in a broad program of ‘binding’ residents with these places. That is what I meant earlier when mentioning the development of Hong Kong, and its use of the loyalty of people who are not current residents. A kind of loyalty to place, to the ‘brand’ of the town, is essential. Nobody sends money to (and thus no one invests in) a place with which they do not feel a bond. Therefore, the binding of emigrants to their home cities must be one of the key strategies in raising the capital needed for their development. To some extent, this is already happening in certain places – the best example is the ‘three for one’ program run by Mexico. It is premised on the fact that three institutions (state, city and bank) add three U.S. dollars between them to each dollar that an emigrant invests in ‘social infrastructure’. These cities have to offer something different; something unique, something that will make people who are leaving them want to maintain a certain connection. At this point we come to the core issues. Cities (as any company or species) grow if they manage to

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