This document discusses themes related to globalization, urbanization, and cities. It covers topics such as transnational flows, agglomeration, inequality, and sustainability. Specific examples discussed include the Haussmann plan in Paris in the 1850s which required major slum clearances, and more recent evictions of poor communities in many global cities to make way for redevelopment. It also presents models of urban economic development and discusses some key global public policy challenges faced by cities today.
14. “Cities are highly complex systems of advantage, which shifting alliances try to shape to their advantage by building and using them in often competing ways.” Jeb Brugmann, Welcome to the Urban Revolution, Ch. 6, p. 103 (2009)
15. “…the dominant narrative about economic globalization is a narrative of eviction because its key concepts – globalization, information economy, and telematics – all suggest that place no longer matters. And they suggest that the type of place represented by major cities may have become obsolete from the perspective of the economy... “It is an account that privileges the capability for global transmission over the concentrations of built infrastructure that makes transmission possible, that privileges information outputs over the work of producing those outputs, from specialists to secretaries, and the new transnational corporate culture over the multiplicity of cultural environments, including reterritorialized immigrant cultures, within which many of the ‘other’ jobs of the global information economy take place. “The overall effect is to lose the place-boundednessof significant components of the global information economy.” SaskiaSassen, “Analytic Borderlands: Economy and Culture in the Global City” (2002)
16. “As in 1860s Paris under the fanatical reign of Baron Haussmann, urban redevelopment still strives to simultaneously maximize private profit and social control… “Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly in the name of “progress,” “beautification,” and even “social justice for the poor” to redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners, and middle-class commuters… “The most intense class conflicts over urban space, of course, take place in downtowns and major urban nodes…where globalized property values collide with the desperate need of the poor to be near central sources of income.” Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2006)
45. MPPA DL-452: Grading A total of 1,000 points may be awarded in this course. Grades are awarded according to the following breakdown: 900-1000 = A; 800-899 = B; 650-799 = C; 0-649 = F.