As the American metropolis has turned inside out since 1970, the emerging outer suburban city has captured critical masses of leading urban activities from the central city that spawned it. Globalization increasingly shapes U.S. urban development in the 1990s, yet research to date has focused on the central city and mainly ignores the outer ring, where a growing majority of metropolitan residents live and work. Following a brief review of the unprecedented recent suburbanization of major economic activities, this article explores the rapidly expanding international role of suburban business complexes in large metropolitan areas, particularly Greater New York. Among the perspectives discussed are the world city hypothesis, relationships between telecommunications and urban form, high-technology industrial location processes, the influence of corporate headquarters on global information-flow networks, and the foreign presence in suburban America. It is concluded that globalization forces intensify and accelerate the suburban transformation of the American city. A new urban future is being shaped as fully developed suburbs become the engine driving metropolitan and world city growth.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
1. Louis H. Masotti, ed., The Suburban Seventies, vol. 422, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Nov. 1975).
2.
2. David L. Birch, “From Suburb to Urban Place,”The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 422:25-35 (Nov. 1975).
3.
Truman A. Hartshorn and Peter O. Muller, “The Suburban Downtown and Urban Economic Development Today,” in Sources of Metropolitan Growth, ed. Edwin S. Mills and John F. McDonald (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, Center for Urban Policy Research, 1992), pp. 147-158.
4.
Truman A. Hartshorn and Peter O. Muller, “Suburban Downtowns and the Transformation of Metropolitan Atlanta's Business Landscape,”Urban Geography, 10:375-395 (July-Aug. 1989).
5.
5. Hartshorn and Muller, “Suburban Downtown,” pp. 151-152.
6.
6. Obtaining comprehensive data between decennial censuses on the intra-urban location of employment facilities is not possible, but the Census Bureau's annual County Business Patterns may be used for eight large metropolitan areas whose suburban rings coincide with county boundaries. Philadelphia is one of them, and it is a good indicator of trends because this metropolis is often used as an economic microcosm of the nation. Total employment achieved critical mass in suburban Philadelphia as far back as 1972 and is estimated to be 71.5 percent in 1997. Disaggregated by sector, the 1997 suburban percentage of metropolitan employment in manufacturing is estimated to be 83.5; wholesale trade, 81.8; retail trade, 79.0; finance, insurance, and real estate, 61.3; services, 66.4; business services, 85.6; and health services, 64.2.
7.
7. David A. Heenan, “Global Cities of Tomorrow,”Harvard Business Review, pp. 79-92 (May-June 1977).
8.
8. A particularly concise statement of the urban significance of this revolutionary change is offered in Edward Blakely, “The New Technology City: Infrastructure for the Future Community,” in Cities of the Twenty First Century: New Technologies and Spatial Systems, ed. John Brotchieet al. (New York: Halsted Press/Wiley, 1991), pp. 229-236.
9.
9. U.S., Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, The Technological Reshaping of Metropolitan America, OTA-ETI-643 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1995), p. 123.
10.
10. For background on the development of this concept, see Paul L. Knox, “Globalization and Urban Economic Change,” this issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
11.
11. Urban geographers are no longer comfortable with this limitation, and their most recent investigations have begun to shed light on the globalization process in other, smaller, less well-known metropolitan areas. See the case-study articles in this issue of The Annals as well as Barney Warf and Rodney Erickson, eds., Globalization and the U.S. City System, special issue, Urban Geography, 1 Jan.-14 Feb. 1996.
12.
12. John Friedmann, “Where We Stand: A Decade of World City Research,” in World Cities in a World-System, ed. Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 23.
13.
Sassen's most important earlier work was The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
14.
14. Mitchell L. Moss, “New York Isn't Just New York Anymore,”InterMedia, 12:10-14 (1984).
15.
15. Sassen, Global City, p. 330.
16.
16. The points in this paragraph are drawn from Sassen, “On Concentration and Centrality,” pp. 70-73.
17.
17. Ibid., pp. 72-73.
18.
18. Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
19.
19. Manuel Castells and Peter Hall, Technopoles of the World: The Making of Twenty-First-Century Industrial Complexes (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 1.
20.
20. Ibid., pp. 1-9.
21.
21. Peter O. Muller, “The Suburbanization of Corporate Headquarters: What Are the Trends and Consequences?”Vital Issues (Center for Information on America), Apr. 1978.
22.
22. Garreau, Edge City, p. 27.
23.
23. Allen R. Myerson, “Tenneco Pulling Out of Houston for a New Base in Greenwich,”New York Times, 16 Sept. 1995.
24.
24. An analysis of the situation at the end of the 1980s is provided in Alex Schwartz, “The Geography of Corporate Services: A Case Study of the New York Urban Region,”Urban Geography, 1 Jan.-14 Feb. 1992, pp. 1-24. Schwartz's optimism for the CBD, however, is now harder to justify against data trends through the mid-1990s on Manhattan's corporate and employment losses.
25.
25. Sam Roberts, “New York Exports Its Talent as a Migration Tide Turns,”New York Times, 6 Mar. 1994.
26.
26. Ann Markusen and Vicky Gwiasda, “Multipolarity and the Layering of Functions in World Cities: New York City's Struggle to Stay on Top,”International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 18:168 (1994).
27.
27. Thomas Harvey, “Portland, Oregon: Regional City in a Global Economy,”Urban Geography, 1 Jan.-14 Feb. 1996, pp. 98-102.
28.
28. Garreau, Edge City, pp. 22-23.
29.
29. Doron P. Levin, “Motor City for Japanese in California, Their Strategy: `When in Rome...,' ”New York Times, 7 May 1990.
30.
Seth Mydans , “Asian Investors Create a Pocket of Prosperity: California Valley Avoids Region's Slide,”New York Times, 17 Oct. 1994.
