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Saskia
Sassen: University of Chicago Chicago, USA
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IMPACTS
OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES ON URBAN ECONOMIES AND POLITICS
(Page 1)
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globalization and telecommunications have contributed to produce
a spatiality for the urban which pivots on de-territorialized
cross-border networks and territorial locations with massive
concentrations of resources. This is not a completely new feature.
Over the centuries cities have been at the intersection of processes
with supra-urban and even intercontinental scalings. What is
different today is the intensity, complexity and global span
of these networks, and the extent to which significant portions
of economies are now dematerialized and digitalized and hence
can travel at great speeds through these networks. Also new
is the growing use of digital networks by often poor neighborhood
organizations to pursue a variety of both intra- and inter-urban
political initiatives. All of this has raised the number of
cities that are part of cross-border networks operating at often
vast geographic scales. Under these conditions, much of what
we experience and represent as the local turns out to be a microenvironment
with global span. |
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new urban spatiality thus produced is partial in a double sense:
it accounts for only part of what happens in cities and what
cities are about, and it inhabits only part of what we might
think of as the space of the city, whether this be understood
in terms as diverse as those of a city's administrative boundaries
or in the sense of the multiple public imaginaries that may
be present in different sectors of a city's people. |
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the following pages, I unpack some of the elements that condition
this complex pivoting on cross-border networks and territorial
localizations focusing particularly on the urban economy and
on the new types of place-centered politics of the global that
we see emerging. |
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