Towards a new 'global city'?

In 1991, sociologist Saskia Sassen published the book The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, where she condensed the fruits of a decade of research around the concept of the global city, which has since been indisputably associated with this author.

Sassen argued how the globalization model associated with the new neoliberal stage of capitalism entailed the concentration of key economic and financial functions in certain cities, among them, and notably, those listed in the title of her book. These cities would have consequently become essential nodes of said globalization, that is, large-scale advanced service centers, playing a fundamental role in the management and coordination of global economic networks. To this should be added their role as places for innovation and high-level decision-making.

It is from the recognition of this importance of metropolises in the global context that a fierce competition among cities worldwide is launched to be part of this select club. Barcelona, one year after the book's publication, saw its opportunity thanks to the celebration of the Olympic Games and largely knew how to take advantage of it to emerge at the upper levels of the global urban hierarchy in certain aspects such as creativity or quality of life.

Another derivative of this revalued role of the urban is the perception, still little reflected in evidence, of the decrease in the relevance of states in the global geopolitical landscape in favor of cities. It is true that cities are increasingly organizing themselves on an international scale to influence decisions that affect them, which in any case continue to be made by states or by supranational bodies where representation is held by states. To the point of sometimes acting in a contrary direction to what the cities would have adopted (the case of Brexit, for example).

During the last three decades, in any case, the idea of the global city has occupied the imaginary of urban development and has conditioned the strategies, management, and projects of cities of all types anywhere on the globe.

But geopolitics matters, and it is evident that the global scenario in this sense has changed notably since Sassen published her work. It is precisely another book, The Belt and Road City: Geopolitics, Urbanization, and China's Search for a New International Order, by Ian Klaus and Simon Curtis, that draws attention to an incipient change in trend. The authors link it to the large-scale urbanization project that accompanies China's ambitious international infrastructure investment plan, the Belt and Road initiative popularly known as the new Silk Road.

For the last three decades, the idea of the global city has occupied the imaginary of urban development

The initiative has three major axes of physical infrastructure that seek to expand China's political and economic influence westward. Thus, on the main land axis, urban corridors are configured towards the interior of Asia along new road and rail lines that largely recover the layout and nodes of the original Silk Road, reaching the very heart of Europe. There is also a maritime axis, articulated through ports that are being remodeled and expanded with Chinese capital and companies, from Southeast Asia to the Mediterranean. The third axis, much shorter in length, but equally strategic for Chinese interests, is the one that provides a quick outlet to the sea from Central Asia through Pakistan.

Klaus and Curtis consider that this great investment deployment by the Chinese government can lead to a change in the global city model, due to three fundamental factors.

Emerging Eastern cities expand following 21st-century urban planning principles

In the first place, the decline of the current model itself, whose symptoms of exhaustion, accentuated by the shocksof 2008 and 2020, manifest themselves in multiple ways: disruptions in the housing market, adaptation costs to the climate crisis, growing inequality accompanied by spatial segregation, etc. All of this seasoned by uncertainty in the future of globalizationfrom the moment Donald Trump has returned to power in the United States with a clear intention to impose restrictions on international trade.

Secondly, the enormous and rapid population growth experienced by Asian and African cities, mainly, in contrast to demographic stagnation in Europe and North America, will be another factor that will potentially relegate traditional metropolises to less prominent positions in the global urban hierarchy, at least in demographic terms. Something that will be of great relevance if at some point cities manage to effectively become actors with much greater influence on the global scene.

Finally, thirdly and as the focus of the argument of the aforementioned book, the very nature of the Belt and Road initiative implies several fundamental elements in the forging of new cities or the development of existing ones.

An important factor is the widespread application of urban design incorporating environmental criteria. While mature Western cities must face the difficult and costly task of remodeling urban fabrics, rehabilitating buildings, and adapting infrastructures to the demands of climate change, their emerging Eastern counterparts are expanding following urban planning principles in line with the circumstances of the 21st century. An example in this regard are sponge cities, like Jinhua, designed or remodeled to absorb water in case of major floods based on nature-based urban solutions.

This is not always the case, of course, nor is urban growth, even with these principles, free of environmental costs or uncertain results, such as some new Chinese cities (Ordos, Kangbashi or Zhengzhou, for example) that have been classified as ghost cities for failing to attract the expected population volumes. Some expert voices, however, consider that it is only a matter of time.

Similarly, investments in technology that accompany urban ones entail competitive advantages for these cities. To what extent this urban technology expands and competes with that from the West can pave the way for the sorpasso of Eastern cities. A technology, by the way, that follows Chinese standards and those of its corporations, constituting another factor of political and economic influence over the territories where the initiative is deployed.

Finally, the omnipresence of technology links with another key element that underlies all the above and is fully consistent with the political and social model of current China: total control over the population. A kind of urban Big Brother supported by video surveillance and facial recognition systems, the restriction of activities and even movements (exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic) and social credit methods. Kashgar, located near China's border with Kyrgyzstan and with a significant Uyghur community, of Muslim religion, comes quite close to a dystopian image of what technology applied for undemocratic purposes can mean.

Rather than waiting to see which global city model prevails, it is urgent to propose our own model

In this sense, the case of Hong Kong may be illustrative of the potential urban paradigm shift in global terms.An incipient member in the 1990s of the select group of global cities, today, and after its handover to China in 1997, it has progressively disconnected from the financial networks in which it once stood out and now presents all the characteristic elements of the urban model that the initiativeBelt and Roadexpands on a large scale and at a fast pace.

A model, it must be warned, that we cannot rule out ending up seducing a certain number of Western metropolises, given the admiration that has been professed from certain forums towards Chinese urban development or towards cities like Singapore or Dubai, with a dubious democratic curriculum, also considering the growth of European and North American political options that sympathize with authoritarianism.

Thus, practically unknown cities today, such as Xiong'an (a thousand kilometers inland from Shanghai in China), a large-scale new green city experiment; Horgos (on the border between China and Kazakhstan), an enormous dry port and logistics center in the heart of the Asian continent; Astana (capital of Kazakhstan), emerging as the great financial center of the region, or Gwadar (coast of Pakistan), the key port for the connection between the land route and the maritime route, could be the new global ranking monopolizers in the near future, along with the great Chinese metropolises that have already been standing out in the 21st century (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, etc.).

Once again, Europe finds itself at the crossroads between two worlds or, if preferred, between two great hegemonic powers, each of which radiates particular signals towards urban development. The future of European urban areas will depend on the continent's capacity to renew its infrastructures and urban fabrics and to bet on its own model, while also managing to connect, on an equal footing, with the infrastructure networks that link us to the rest of the world.

In short, rather than waiting to see which global city model prevails, it is urgent to propose our own model that, for example, rejects both the perverse uses of technology (whether by states or by large corporations) and the lack of control over global financial operators who view cities as mere objects of speculation. Because even the global city makes no sense if it does not prioritize the safeguarding of the local, starting with the people who live in it.