Saskia Sassen: University of Chicago Chicago, USA   THE GLOBAL CITY: STRATEGIC SITE/NEW FRONTIER (Page 3)   A NEW GEOGRAPHY OF CENTERS AND MARGINS The ascendance of information industries and the growth of a global economy, both inextricably linked, have contributed to a new geography of centrality and marginality This new geography partly reproduces existing inequalities but also is the outcome of a dynamic specific to the current forms of economic growth. It assumes many forms and operates in many arenas, from the distribution of telecommunications facilities to the structure of the economy and of employment. Global cities accumulate immense concentrations of economic power while cities that were once major manufacturing centers suffer inordinate declines; the downtowns of cities and business centers in metropolitan areas receive massive investments in real estate and telecommunications while low-income urban and metropolitan areas are starved for resources; highly educated workers in the corporate sector see their incomes rise to unusually high levels while low- or medium-skilled workers see theirs sink. Financial services produce superprofits while industrial services barely survive. The most powerful of these new geographies of centrality at the global level binds the major international financial and business centers: New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney, Hong Kong, among others. But this geography now also includes cities such as Bangkok, Taipei, Sao Paulo and Mexico City (Sassen 2000b). The intensity of transactions among these cities, particularly through the financial markets, trade in services, and investment has increased sharply, and so have the orders of magnitude involved (e.g. Noyelle and Dutka, 1988; Knox 1995). At the same time, there has been a sharpening inequality in the concentration of strategic resources and activities between each of these cities and others in the same country. Alongside these new global and regional hierarchies of cities, is a vast territory that has become increasingly peripheral, increasingly excluded from the major economic processes that are seen as fueling economic growth in the new global economy. Formerly important manufacturing centers and port cities have lost functions and are in decline, not only in the less developed countries but also in the most advanced economies. Similarly in the valuation of labor inputs: the overvalorization of specialized services and professional workers has marked many of the "other" types of economic activities and workers as unnecessary or irrelevant to an advanced economy. There are other forms of this segmented marking of what is and what is not an instance of the new global economy. For instance, the mainstream account about globalization recognizes that there is an international professional class of workers and highly internationalized business environments due to the presence of foreign firms and personnel. What has not been recognized is the possibility that we are seeing an internationalized labor market for low-wage manual and service workers; or that there is an internationalized business environment in many immigrant communities. These processes continue to be couched in terms of immigration, a narrative rooted in an earlier historical period. This signals that there are representations of the global or the transnational which have not been recognized as such or are contested representations. Among these is the question of immigration, as well as the multiplicity of work environments it contributes in large cities, often subsumed under the notion of the ethnic economy and the informal economy. Much of what we still narrate in the language of immigration and ethnicity I would argue is actually a series of processes having to do with a) the globalization of economic activity, of cultural activity, of identity formation, and b) the increasingly marked racialization of labor market segmentation so that the components of the production process in the advanced global information economy taking place in immigrant work environments are components not recognized as part of that global information economy. Immigration and ethnicity are constituted as otherness. Understanding them as a set of processes whereby global elements are localized, international labor markets are constituted, and cultures from all over the world are de- and re-territorialized, puts them right there at the center along with the internationalization of capital as a fundamental aspect of globalization. How have these new processes of valorization and devalorization and the inequalities they produce come about? This is the subject addressed in the next section. more