Speaker
Description
In the last decades, a spatial dimension of the transformation of the new production model has been observed as a function of technological development. The latter, as early as the 80s, created a new network of global city-poles (mainly in the Global North) allowing the instant transfer of economic and social capital flows (mainly in the Global South). Thus, the geographical dispersion of international transactions brought about, on the one hand, new high-speed connections of global cities with the rest of the world and on the other hand the redefinition of the global network of existing and upcoming cities At the same time, in the last decades, there has been a frenzied construction boom of new cities from scratch, the narrative of which is called upon to face a multitude of risks such as climate crisis, demographic accumulation, economic development, and so on.
Today's global geography is based on two general development axes: the new global economy, through which economic and social flows of capital place the tertiary sector as an immediate investment priority, and the spatial effect that the aforementioned phenomenon brings. Thus, the new transnational urbanism includes not only existing stakeholders (states of the Global North, international firms, and institutions) and new players (states of the Global South, new investors) adding new poles to the network of flows but also new approaches related to urban planning practices. In this way, the rise of more than 150 new cities is a phenomenon that connects, on the one hand, the developed economies with the developing ones (North to South) and on the other hand - now - the developing economies themselves with each other (South to South) In addition, global cities play an integral role mainly on a supranational scale, as the network they create relies on their homogeneity rather than national and/or regional commonalities. Inductively, as the new cities foreshadow - on a large scale - a connection with the global market and international players, a connection is made with the aforementioned network and not based on their geographical location.
The new urban product, apart from its potential contribution to the global network, is of great ontological interest. In other words, apart from the large-scale and hetero-identifiable interpretation of new cities, the latter constitute an important socio-economic field of research. Thus, despite the various narratives about the unitary sustainability of cities (e.g. ultimate sustainable goals) as well as unified management (operational logic), the question of inclusion in new cities can be an "intermediate outcome" both for discourses regarding urban futures and for the narratives as such. As socio-economic inequalities are increasingly magnified and driven by increasing urbanization, new nodes in the global geographic palimpsest are set to be at the center of research and policy debate, both on a large (global) and small (local) scale. In this way, the question of inclusion in economic and social terms affects space both in terms of the movement of capital to and from the new cities and in terms of the dynamic process of produced urban morphology. More specifically, the intensive - in time and space - production of new cities orthonormalizes the multiplicity of the city's systems (resolve the complexity!) creating a new urban morphology where inclusion is put in jeopardy.
References
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van Noorloos, F., & Kloosterboer, M. (2018). Africa’s new cities: The contested future of urbanisation. Urban Studies, 55(6), pp. 1223-1241.
| Keywords | New-cities; Transnational urbanism; Fragility; Global-South; Inequalities |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
