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Cities Today: A New Frontier for Major Developments

Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University

The article examines several major structural trends contributing to the shift from the Keynesian routinized city to the strategic city that begins to emerge in the 1980s. Among the trends examined is the growth of the firm-to-firm economy, which includes corporate and industrial services as well as "urban manufacturing." These kinds of services tend to be produced in cities, even when the firms being served are nonurban, such as mines, steel plants, or large factories. A second key, and counterintuitive, trend is the ongoing importance of spatial centrality for our most advanced economic sectors. The more globalized and digitized a sector becomes, the more its firms suffer from incomplete knowledge about their markets. Urban centrality enables the making of what the author calls urban knowledge capital: a collective production that is more than the sum of the knowledge of the professionals and the firms present in a city.

Key Words: intermediate economy • urban manufacturing • centrality • knowledge economy • informal creative economy

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 626, No. 1, 53-71 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0002716209343561


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