Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 41

The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the waning centrality of nation-state security imperatives that nuclear confrontation implied gave tremendous political-economic advantages to the forces of complex interdependence. These forces strengthened horizontal relations among a broad range of subnational and transnational actors, including NGOs, IGOs, multinational corporations, and, notably, municipal governments. Such forces, socially liberating yet subversive to state dominance, operated with increasing intensity both within and across national frontiers.³⁵ Meanwhile, infrastructure and technological advances, including new ports, canals, airports, and telecommunications networks, greatly increased physical connectivity.

Within this dynamic new post–Cold War international milieu, global cities, their mayors, and urban institutions such as think tanks and universities served as increasingly important focal points of the network building and information exchange, which laid the ground for more explicitly political roles. Cities emerged as dense nodes where synergies between the information revolution and Glaeser’s power of proximity could unfold. They enjoyed, after all, advantages of physical location and flexible interpersonal association that neither government bureaucrats nor nonurban locations could easily duplicate, allowing them to generate fresh perspectives on policy and politics.

It is important to reflect concretely on precisely how ICT amplifies network development and magnifies the power of proximity. ICT is crucial, first of all, in disseminating information efficiently and rapidly, allowing participants in far-flung locations to stay in touch. It also, however, makes direct human interaction easier, facilitating meetings, broadening access to information, and flattening hierarchies to the advantage of NGOs and grassroots policy activists. ICT, in short, boosts the returns from face-to-face interaction, even where the participants interact at some physical distance from one another.

Through these multiple functions, ICT leverages the value of direct interaction within ongoing human networks, ranging from companies to volunteer associations and from alumni networks to grassroots student activists. Such interaction is easiest in dense, cosmopolitan nodes of common-language speakers: English-speaking London is one good example, and Singapore another, for different reasons.³⁶ Where such urban nodes have sophisticated institutional support and financial resources at their command, interactions of broader global import and political relevance, including the emergence of specialized advisory industries, are enhanced still further, nurturing the quintessentially global political city institutions described in Part II of this book. The information revolution thus crucially fuels the rise of global political cities.