Anchoring Urban Development: Globalisation, Attractiveness and Complexity

Abstract

Since the work of Hoyt in the 1930s, economic theories of urban development have stressed the primacy of manufacturing because of the existence of a regional multiplier effect. This model was extended to traded services and, in the last 10 years, to the residential and presential economy, taking into account the fact that mobile consumers and residents also bring monetary flows into regions. The city today is both a productive agglomeration and a place of living, for both local and extra-local consumers, heralding the end of the primacy of manufacturing. In this article, we go a step further and consider the primacy of other kinds of export, either based on selling competitive goods or on attracting consumers. Due to changes in globalisation and to the rise of interurban competition for spending, incomes earned on exports are less and less likely to be spent locally, and instead flow out, progressively invalidating the multiplier effect. Consequently, the hypothesis of this article is that the main issue for urban development theories and practices is combining competitiveness in terms of exports with attractiveness to local as well as to external consumers. In this article, we call complexity the idea of pushing aside the focus on exports in order to understand the tensions and synergies between all activities and populations present within the urban space. In order to formulate new research questions, we build a typology of urban income flows and activities.

Urban growth, from manufacturing to consumption and financialization: the case of China’s contemporary urban development

“…While Anglo-American countries such as the United States and the UK are iconic of the key role played by a pure form of financialized built environment in capital accumulation due to the direct connections between cities and global financial markets based on both the securitization of mortgages or large capital finance actors as urban property owners; China is rather iconic of countries where the transformation of 'land and real estate into financial assets' operate within bankbased financial systems and State land ownership. At the same time, China's case is illustrative of a process started in the early 1980s, first by large cities in North America and European countries, and numerous cities today developing without or re-orientating their economy out of production activities with positive and negative outcomes (Crevoisier & Rime, 2020).…”

“…Nowadays, the 'land/built environment-finance and urban economic development nexus' has to be viewed from a more complex combination of production and consumption activities that are dependent on territorial contexts and urban governance (Crevoisier & Rime, 2020). Moreover, the driving role of real estate in contemporary economies and the connections between global and national financial systems and cities are variegated.…”

“…Recently, scholars have established that local spillovers from production are no longer automatic due to the changing scale of consumption. Cities are no longer places of just production, but ones of consumption, which relates to urban revenue and activities that capture the expenses and incomes of increasingly mobile residents and consumers for retail, leisure and culture purposes (Crevoisier & Rime, 2020;Markusen & Schrock, 2009). The emerging field of the literature in financial geography has demonstrated the driving role of finance in the formation of the built environment in contemporary capital accumulation by emphasizing the increased linkages between globally organized financial markets and cities (Aalbers, 2012(Aalbers, , 2019Moreno, 2014;Weber, 2015).…”

Industrial metabolism and territorial development of the Maurienne Valley (France)

“…This is why we propose considering territorial capability as a localised collective capability to act on local resources in a system of multi-scale flows. These flows are constitutive of territories and determine their development dynamics (Davezies 2008 ; Crevoisier and Rime 2020 ). This is why territorial capability depends on the collective capacity of a territory to act on material, immaterial and social flows by relying on the resources at its disposal.…”

“…The territorial economics focuses on the flows of income generated and attracted by the territory, as well as on the stakeholders and populations from which they originate. These studies use the concept of the revisited economic base model (Talandier & Davezies 2009 ; Segessemann and Crevoisier 2016 ; Ruault 2018 ; Crevoisier and Rime 2020 ). These authors analyse the mechanisms by which wealth circulates.…”