The world of the early 21st century already looks dramatically different from the world of the late 20th century.  Globalization is bringing many different and far-flung areas into greatly intensified relations of competition and cooperation with one another. The First, Second, and Third Worlds have gone. New kinds of interpenetrating political institutions are multiplying at many different scales. Economic relations of production and consumption are being revolutionized by new digital technologies. Cities and their surrounding regions, contrary to many earlier predictions, continue to grow and spread. Distinguished Professor Emeritus Allen J Scott examines how the emerging cultural–cognitive economy of the 21st century is producing urban landscapes.

In my new book, A World in Emergence, my goal is to work out how these different elements are constituted and how they shape the formation of the contemporary geographic landscape. The chief focus of the book is on the enormous resurgence of cities all over the globe in the last few decades, in significant degree as a function of the recent worldwide intensification and spread of revivified forms of capitalism. This resurgence and the new regionalism that accompanies it will almost certainly come to be one of the defining features of the geography of the 21^st century.

I suggest in the book that a distinctive new form of capitalism has been coming into existence since about the 1980s on the basis of microelectronic technologies and the ways in which they drive out standardized forms of work and encourage a vast expansion in types of human capital based on the cognitive and cultural assets of the labor force. Accordingly, I refer to this new order of things as “cognitive-cultural capitalism”, i.e. a system that revolves in major degree around production sectors like software and technology-intensive industry, business and financial services, fashion-oriented sectors, and cultural products such as music, film, and electronic games.

The cognitive-cultural economy is bringing into existence a distinctive new historical wave of urbanization and spatial development, focused especially on large metropolitan areas or global city-regions. Most of these city-regions are located in North America, Western Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, but other parts of the world are also subject to its influence in various ways. With the rise of this global network or mosaic of city-regions a reorganization of older national urban hierarchies into a more integrated global system is steadily coming about.

As this new developmental wave deepens and widens, so the emerging global network of city-regions has started to override the old core-periphery system that has hitherto characterized much of the historical geography of the modern world. Global city-regions on every continent are now emerging as major economic motors and political actors on the world stage. Indeed, according to the United Nations, more than half of the world’s population today lives in cities, and up to three-quarters of all economic activity occurs in the same centers. To be sure, not all cities participate equally in the new capitalism, and there remain numerous parts of the world where urban life is still resolutely focused on more traditional forms of social and economic existence. That said, these other cities are also sites through which developmental impulses are strongly channeled, and more and more of them are now acceding to the global mosaic, just as cities like Seoul, Taipei, Bangkok, and Mexico City have done before them.

At the same time, the internal social and physical characteristics of the cities that participate most insistently in this new trend are undergoing dramatic transformation. For one thing, the long-established economic base of these cities in manufacturing is steadily diminishing, and in many cases has effectively disappeared, at least in its older fordist forms. This means, too, that the traditional white-collar/blue-collar mode of socio-spatial stratification in these cities is waning rapidly. Instead, as the cognitive-cultural economy continues its rise, an alternative kind of urban social stratification is coming into being. This consists, on the one side, of an upper stratum of highly qualified elite workers, and, on the other side, of a lower stratum comprising a growing fraction of low-wage service-oriented workers. The latter fraction increasingly provides supporting services for the elite, either directly (e.g. via domestic labor of many different kinds, including child care) or indirectly (e.g. via the maintenance of urban functions such as janitorial work, taxi driving, and restaurant services). For this reason, we might say that a sort of new servile class has also come into being in cities where the cognitive-cultural economy now dominates.

An important corollary of the rise and geographical concentration of the cognitive-cultural economy is a greatly intensified process of gentrification and aestheticization in major world cities. One manifestation of this trend is the continued and extensive colonization of formerly blue-collar inner-city neighborhoods by members of the cognitive-cultural elite. This is all the more evident given that so many of the jobs performed by the elite are concentrated in central business districts, thereby increasing the demand for appropriate housing nearby. Another manifestation is in the increasing intensification and aestheticization of land uses that is occurring in response to the build-up of high-level cognitive-cultural production activities and associated cultural infrastructures in these same central city areas. Notable examples of this phenomenon are London’s Docklands, the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

The overall result of these intersecting processes is an emerging cosmopolitan system of gigantic urban centers, and, as such, this system is steadily taking its place as one of the more potent and visible elements of the new world order. Each of the city-regions that make up the system represents an important concentration of economic and political activity, but each of them is also riven by social conflicts, rooted above all in the deepening inequalities that they harbor. Unfortunately, political capacities for dealing with the multiple problems generated by this state of affairs remain woefully underdeveloped. Equally, strategic institutional arrangements for more efficient supply of public goods and for building competitive advantage across individual city-regions also largely remain in a primitive stage of development.

My prediction is that in the end, major global city-regions will be forced, by reason of their mounting internal and external predicaments, to deal in a forthright manner with these issues. This will also greatly boost their role as major centers of economic and political power in the global order of the 21^st century.

Allen J. Scott is distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California – Los Angeles. He is the author of numerous books and papers on questions of economic and urban geography and associated policy issues. He was awarded the Prix Vautrin Lud in 2003, the Anders Retzius Gold Medal in 2009, and a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Jena in 2011. He currently lives in Paris.

A World In Emergence: Cities and Regions in the 21st Century