TABLE 10.1 Urbanization in Selected European Countries, 1990-2010
Urban development in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century is defined by the deconcentration of commercial, retail, and government services in the city center and the reconcentration of these land uses in functionally specialized regional minicenters. This spatial pattern is the product of the political economy of American late capitalism, as we show in Chapter 6. Other societies around the world exhibit their own patterns of urban and regional development, the result of individual historical circumstances, position within the world system, cultural influences, and other factors. Many share the increasing regional sprawl characteristic of the United States. Although large cities remain important centers of commerce and culture, most have suffered population loss in recent decades. Redevelopment and gentrification occurs within the central city, but most new commercial and residential development occurs in suburban settlement space. Metropolitan regions confront social and environmental problems that are intensified by locational inequities. Income and racial segregation is increasing and, in many cases, has led to serious inequalities in employment, housing, education, medical care, and other aspects of everyday life. The global economic crisis has impacted these problems particularly in Southern Europe.
For many years the study of urbanization in Europe was a relatively predictable affair. This is the oldest part of the globe with fully urbanized societies. In recent years, however, profound transformations have been taking place in Western and Eastern Europe. Shifts in industry to high technology, declines in manufacturing, and growth in the service sector are common to both the United States and Europe. In the past it was assumed (and presented as fact in many sources) that the pattern of urbanization in European countries was substantially different from that found in the United States. With a long history of urbanization, the European city center remained strong, there was a preference for life in the city and correspondingly less development in the urban fringe. But the evidence tells a different story. Since World War II nearly every European city has experienced a decline in central city population, and there has been substantial peripheral growth and increase in the suburban population. As we will see below, in most cases the suburban population is several times that of the central city. Metropolitan regions in Europe (and else-where) look more and more like the multicentered metropolitan regions described in Chapter 6 (Clapson, 2003). European scholars have labeled these developments as “postsuburban” (Phelps et al., 2006) and have focused on urban sprawl (Richardson and Bae, 2004)—just as in the United States. There are other similarities: the growing inequality among groups living within the city that results from the division between highly paid professionals and low-paid service workers; the growth of immigrant communities from former colonies; and the seemingly intractable problems of poverty resulting from the combination of job loss in manufacturing, segregation, and social exclusion, and more recently, cutbacks in social welfare (Brenner and Theodore, 2003).
Table 10.1 shows three measures of urbanization for selected countries in Western and Eastern Europe: the number of persons living in urban areas, percentage of population living in urban areas, and percentage living in regions with a population of 1 million or more. Although Europe was part of the first great urban empire under imperial Rome and is one of the most urbanized areas in the world, the figures show substantial differences in the level of urbanization across the region. Two countries in Western Europe (Belgium and Sweden) have 85 percent or more of their population in urban regions, whereas none of the Eastern European countries has more than 75 percent in urban regions. Two countries in Western Europe (Greece and Italy) have lower levels of urbanization, comparable to many countries in Eastern Europe. The highest level of urbanization among Eastern European countries is in Belarus and the Russian Federation.
While there are more than 500 cities with populations of 150,000 or more, relatively few persons live in urban areas with a population of more than 1 million persons (in most countries, the figure is less than 20 percent); Greece has the largest percentage. Athens, with a population of 4.1 million persons, is four times greater than the second largest city, Thessalonika, with a population of 800,000. This is an interesting case of urban primacy, where the urban system is dominated by one city; Athens alone accounts for more than half of the total population of Greece. After the unusual case of Greece, the United Kingdom (28 percent) and France (22 percent) have the largest proportion of residents living in large cities. London is the largest metropolitan region in Europe with a population of 11.9 million persons, moving ahead of Paris (11.7 million) and Moscow (11.5 million).
Remember that there is substantial variation in the definitions used to determine the urban population in these countries, ranging from a threshold of 10,000 persons (in Switzerland) to the qualitative designation of “towns and settlements of an urban type” (in Poland; see Box 1.2 in Chapter 1). While there is good reason to treat the information in Table 10.1 with some caution, the extent of urbanization
TABLE 10.1 Urbanization in Selected European Countries, 1990-2010
FIGURE 10.1 City Lights of Europe. SOURCE: NASA.
in Europe is evident in the satellite photograph reproduced in Figure 10.1. Large urban agglomerations can be seen in the industrial midlands of England and in the Ruhr River valley in northern Germany. Also noticeable are the city lights of the capital cities (Madrid, Paris, London, and Moscow) as well as Milan, Rome, and Naples in southern Italy. These urban agglomerations are similar to those shown earlier in Chapter 1 when we were looking at the large manufacturing regions along the Great Lakes and urban agglomerations along the East and West Coasts of North America. As noted above, fully half of the largest urban centers in Europe are located in the former Soviet bloc, but here a different pattern of urban development is evident. The large capital cities (Bucharest; Budapest; Minsk, Ukraine) can clearly be seen, but they are distinct from one another and not connected to other large urban agglomerations.
We begin with an overview of urbanization in Western Europe, whose recent history offers many parallels to the US experience. In subsequent sections we discuss Eastern Europe, or the former Soviet bloc countries, to examine urban conditions there. The final section deals with the case of Japan, which exhibits certain similarities to, but also differences from, the restructuring of settlement space that has characterized metropolitan development in the United States.
The countries of Western Europe have been urbanized for centuries, resulting in a well-developed urban hierarchy across the region and within individual countries as well. The United Nations estimated that 74.6 percent of the European population was urbanized at the beginning of the millennium. That number is expected to increase to around 82 percent by 2030 and then stabilize. As we saw in Table 10.1, not all of the urban population lives in large cities; about one-half lives in small towns of 1,000–50,000 persons; one-quarter lives in medium-sized cities of 50,000–250,000 persons; and one-quarter lives in cities of more than 250,000 persons.
In recent decades, Western Europe has experienced a restructuring of population and economic activities similar to those occurring in the United States. The urban population increased at a steady pace during the last decades of the century, and there has been significant sprawl due to the declining housing stock in the urban core, changes in household size, higher household incomes, and increased infrastructure such as public transportation and interurban railroads (the last factor very different from the United States). In many countries the central cities are declining (some have suffered population losses of 40 percent or more, similar to that of older industrial cities in the United States), and there is a marked increase in the development of suburban settlement space. In many European countries new towns (planned communities) have been developed in the suburban fringe. These trends interact with one another to produce multicentered metropolitan regions similar to those found in the United States.
The pattern of urban change is not consistent. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and to a lesser extent, Italy, have experienced decentralization of the population away from the large urban centers. Between 1970 and 2000, for example, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Belfast, and other cities in the United Kingdom all lost population. The population of Glasgow reached a peak of just over 1 million persons in 1931, remained at this level until 1961, and then began a long period of decline; the population of Glasgow is now just 588,500 but the population of the greater Glasgow region is more than 1,780,000. In Germany, Berlin, Essen, Dortmund, and other central cities also declined even while the larger metropolitan regions grew. Other countries such as Belgium, Luxembourg, and to some extent, France, continue to experience central city growth.
As is the case in the United States, long-term changes in metropolitan regions can be attributed to the restructuring of settlement space as a consequence of government policy and global economic shifts. Manufacturing has declined in many European countries, especially in the United Kingdom. Cities have reduced their labor forces and converted to service economies, but with smaller employment bases than in the past. High-technology corridors, the European equivalent of Silicon Valley, and other “new spaces” of production have emerged (Castells and Hall, 2004). Most
Box 10.1 European Cities Dominate Quality of Life
Europe’s cities dominated the world’s top ten for quality of living in 2012, claiming eight out of the ten spots. Vienna was the city rated with the best quality of living worldwide, with Zurich in second place. Other European cities in the top ten include Munich, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Geneva, Copenhagen, and Bern.
The rankings are based on a point-scoring index, which sees Vienna score 108.6, and Baghdad 14.4. Cities are ranked against New York as the base city with an index score of 100. The quality of living ranking covers 215 cities and is conducted to help governments and major companies place employees on international assignments.
Cities were also ranked by the best infrastructure based on electricity supply, water availability, telephone and mail services, public transport provision, traffic congestion, and the range of international flights from local airports. In 2012, while Singapore was at the top of this index (with a score of 109.1), Frankfurt ranked second place and Munich third. Copenhagen and Düsseldorf filled the next two slots.
Many Eastern European cities have seen an increase in quality of living. A number of countries that joined the European Union in 2004 have experienced consistent improvement with increased stability, rising living standards, and greater availability of international consumer goods.
In the city infrastructure index, German cities faired particularly well with Frankfurt the highest ranked in the region, followed by Munich and Düsseldorf also in the top five. German city infrastructure is among the best in the world, due in part to first-class air facilities and connections to other international destinations.
SOURCE: City Mayors—City Rankings (www.citymayors.com/sections/rankings_content.html).
prominent in this regard has been the development of “technopoles” and science parks such as the Louvain University Science City in Belgium, the Parc Cientific de Barcelona in Spain, Cambridge Science Park in England, the Sophia-Antipolis international business park near Nice on the Mediterranean coast of France (with some 1,100 companies), Silicon Glen in Livingston, Scotland, and in Russia, the Akademgorodok Science City (Brooker, 2009; Simmie, 1997; Smith, 1997). In Japan, the Tsukuba Science City dates from the 1960s, while the Kansai Science City was developed in the 1980s (Park, 1997).
These have become new sources of employment and growth based on a professional, skilled labor force along with low-wage services. Industrial restructuring has resulted in declining urban cores with considerable unemployment of the working class, while the periphery has grown and developed into an affluent, middle-class population base (Razin, Dijstm, and Vazquez, 2013). Welfare state programs have been cut back, leading to continuing problems with poverty and related issues, just as in the United States. The global economic crisis has intensified many of these problems, leading to threats of further cuts to government programs, increased agitation against immigrants, and even increases in poverty in the welfare states of northern Europe. A look at individual countries shows the impact of the restructuring of settlement space in greater detail.
As shown in Table 10.1, nearly 80 percent of the population of the United Kingdom was urbanized by 2010 and 28 percent of the population lived in urban areas with populations of 1 million or more. Additional information about the United Kingdom’s largest cities and their metropolitan regions is shown in Table 10.2. The prominent role of London in this urban system is quite apparent; with a population of more than 13.1 million persons, London is some five times larger than the second group of urban agglomerations with populations of 2 million. These include Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds, the older industrial cities of the Midlands.
It is important to note the extent of urban regional development in the United Kingdom. For all but the two largest cities, the population of the metropolitan region is at least twice that of the city center; even in London, with a city population of 8.0 million, the suburban population adds another 3.1 million to create a metropolitan area of nearly 12 million persons. In many of the larger cities, council homes (housing for working-class families built by local municipalities) were built in the suburbs, but the large increase in suburban populations has also been fueled by a move out of the city and the growth of smaller towns in the suburban fringe. This has been a long-term trend, as the development of the suburbs in the UK has followed a pattern similar to that of the United States, with the development of middle-class suburbs in the late 1800s.
The populations of the United Kingdom’s ten largest urban areas share certain demographic characteristics typical of a country with slow population growth. About 20 percent of the population is aged infant to fifteen years (the range is 18 percent in the Greater Glasgow Area to 22 percent in the West Midlands of Manchester). More than 15 percent is of pensionable age (65 years and above for males, 60 and above for females, with a range of 15 percent in the greater London area to 18 percent in Tyneside). These figures indicate a substantial dependent population (persons 0 to 15 and those of pensionable age), with dependency ratios ranging from 542 in the greater London area to 672 in the West Midlands urban area (Pointer, 2005). In the United States we have heard much concern about problems with social security because of the aging population (there are relatively fewer persons working to support a growing dependent population), and the United Kingdom confronts a similar problem, compounded by the recent declines in social welfare programs (see below).
TABLE 10.2 Largest Cities and Metropolitan Regions in the United Kingdom and Ireland
| 2000 |
2010 |
|||
| City | Metro | City | Metro | |
| London | 7,104,400 | 12,201,769 | 8,002,000 | 13,159,504 |
| Manchester | 394,700 | 2,515,914 | 488,200 | 2,615,144 |
| Leeds | 712,600 | 2,120,000 | 747,700 | 2,522,200 |
| Birmingham | 978,200 | Not available | 1,055,600 | 2,347,004 |
| Glasgow | 577,020 | 1,782,479 | 593,245 (a) | 1,789,003 |
| Dublin | 467,788 (b) | 1,481,019 | 527,612 (a) | 1,739,990 |
| Liverpool | 443,100 | 1,350,000 | 459,500 | 1,355,341 |
| Newcastle | 260,900 | 1,113,067 | 275,100 | 1,141,879 |
| Bristol | 381,500 | 988,949 | 421,000 | 1,090,080 |
| Cardiff | 306,300 | 1,049,756 | 339,500 | 1,085,526 |
| Leicester | 280,700 | 922,303 | 322,300 | 990,860 |
In the United States, one of the most significant changes affecting urban areas has been the increase in immigration and the emergence of new ethnic communities. Immigration has increased in the United Kingdom as well, most noticeably in the Caribbean and Indian populations. But this has been at a very different level from the United States; of the ten largest urban areas in the UK, five are more than 90 percent white, and three others are more than 80 percent white. More than 80 percent of the nonwhite population in the United Kingdom lives in the greater London area (in 2001, Asian or Asian British accounted for 8.1 percent and black or black British accounted for 9.5 percent of the population) where there are sizable black neighborhoods (primarily in East London) and Asian neighborhoods (primarily in the Heathrow area). The rich fabric of the ethnic Indian community in London is shown in the popular film Bend It Like Beckham, written and produced by an Indian filmmaker who grew up in the United Kingdom.
Deindustrialization has had a lasting impact on the United Kingdom. All the older industrial centers have experienced sharp employment declines due to factory shutdowns and wholesale job loss. Between 1978 and 1985 alone, manufacturing in Great Britain declined by 24 percent (Sassen, 1991:131). This followed a decade of comparable job loss in manufacturing. During this same period, employment in business services increased by 44 percent. The loss of manufacturing employment has continued in the new century; between 2000 and 2003, for example, there was a loss of another 2.7 million manufacturing jobs (London, 2003). Like the United States, Britain has undergone a shift from manufacturing to service industries.
FIGURE 10.2 Urban Redevelopment Along the River Clyde in Glasgow. Glasgow’s population declined from over 1 million in 1961 to just 6,000 in 2005, and most of the shipbuilding industry is gone, allowing for redevelopment along the River Clyde, including housing, office space, museums, and the new city auditorium. SOURCE: Shutterstock/Targn Pleiades.
Statistics for London are revealing. Between 1960 and 1985, London lost more than 800,000 jobs in manufacturing. After 1980 it reaped a harvest of new jobs in the expanding service sector. It was not until 1985, and for the first time in twenty-five years, that net gains in employment finally outstripped net losses. The shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy can be seen, where 27 percent of all jobs were in manufacturing and 69 percent were in services in 1971. Fifteen years later, in 1986, the number of manufacturing jobs had declined to just 15 percent, and the number of service jobs had increased to 80 percent (Sassen, 1991:205–210). Almost all of the new service employment in London is a result of the city’s continued historical role as a global center of financial activities. London, New York City, and Tokyo are today’s three global centers for finance capital, and their companies command and coordinate the increasingly dispersed world economy of manufacturing and marketing.
New manufacturing centers tied to high-tech development have emerged as part of this global restructuring in the United Kingdom. The M-4 highway corridor between London and Reading represents a center for electronics development that is similar to the I-128 peripheral corridor outside of Boston. In Cambridge, the government linked up with private venture capital and with Cambridge University to build a “science park.” It contains thirty new enterprises on fifty-five hectares and is similar to the “research triangle” that links Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh, North Carolina (and includes Duke University and the University of North Carolina).
But new employment in the service sector and in high tech has been unable to fully compensate for job loss due to deindustrialization. England has experienced a long-term readjustment that requires retraining of the labor force along with a smaller industrial sector. The need for drastic changes provided support for the Conservative Party in the 1980s, which dismantled the British welfare state by increasing private ownership of manufacturing and reducing publicly supported benefits (King, 1990). Although a complete transfer from public financing to market-based services has not occurred in Great Britain, many welfare state programs were partially converted to a pay-for-service basis or simply eliminated during this period (Forrest, 1991). This record is comparable to the downsizing of domestic programs in the United States. The selling off of formerly nationalized companies enabled the Conservative regime in the United Kingdom to avoid massive debt financing of the economy in the 1980s, unlike the case of the United States. Economic policies changed little under the Labor Party with Tony Blair as prime minister (1997–2007), and social welfare programs remain under attack in later governments. Chris Hamnett’s research shows how the transformation of London led an expansion of high-earning groups and a marked increase in both earnings and income inequality. The growth of the new middle class had major impacts on the nature of the London housing market, particularly in the growth of homeownership, rising prices, and the expansion of middle-class gentrification across much of inner London. This has been paralleled by the growing marginalization of the less skilled, the unemployed, and various minority groups in other areas of the city (Hamnett, 2003).
Privatization brought increasing misery to many in the British working class. The appearance of uneven development on a national scale has also brought social changes to the entire country. Mellor (1989) notes that shifts in national attitudes involve the replacement of a moral ethos that supported the welfare state and its reliance on redistributive policies to overcome uneven development with a new ethos based on social Darwinism, limited public programs, and a full reliance on the market economy. In current urban research, the trends described here are referred to as neoliberalism (Brenner and Theodore, 2003).
One outcome of economic restructuring in recent decades in the United Kingdom is that the police have had to expand their role as controllers of the population as crime and civil unrest have increased (Ball and Webster, 2003). As Mellor notes, “U.K. towns were, in international terms, safe places. Now burglary, often minimal in material effect, violates personal space and enforces discipline in the use of house and effects; assaults and/or harassment limit the freedom of movement of the elderly, children, black people, women and, increasingly, white men” (1989:591). The UK more generally, and London in particular, has led the way in surveillance of urban populations by the installation of cameras on public streets (Gold, 2004); it is estimated that a person traveling through London in the course of a typical day will appear on more than twenty security screens. The consequences of the global restructuring of economic opportunity are graphically shown in Trainspotting, a film depicting the lives of young men in Edinburgh, Scotland, when the city had the highest rates of heroin use and, as a result, AIDS infection, of any European city.
After years of successful redistributive policies under the welfare state, social exclusion, a term similar to our conception of hypersegregation, has increased under the neoliberal policies of the Conservatives. When a family can consistently count on the resources of a single wage earner, it has the resources to support the employment of others, even if their positions are not in high-earning capacities. However, those families suffering from job loss and periodic unemployment are falling behind and floundering in a sea of chronic poverty. One consequence of economic restructuring has been the rise of anti-immigrant and racist groups, particularly among urban youth. Opposition to these neofascist groups is brilliantly portrayed in Rude Boy, the documentary film by The Clash.
The urban population in France and most other European countries has been growing steadily. In the last two decades, the urban population of France increased from 42 to 46.7 million persons, and the percentage of the population that is urbanized increased from 74 to 77 percent. The growth that has occurred has not been in large cities. In 1990 just 23 percent lived in the four urban areas with populations greater than 1 million, and this figure decreased to 22 percent in 2005.
The population of the ten largest cities in France is shown in Table 10.3. Most notable about this urban system is the large number of urban areas with populations of 500,000 to 1 million and the dominant position of the capital city. With a population of approximately 11.7 million persons, the Paris metropolitan area has nearly six times the population of Lyon (1.7 million), the country’s second largest city. Paris is by far the largest city in this urban system and is an example of how the presence of a single large city can influence the development of other urban centers. (See Chapter 11 for a full discussion of the impact of primate cities, as this is called, on urban development.) France has long had one of the more centralized systems of urban planning in Europe, reflecting the position and influence of the Paris region.
As in the United Kingdom, an extended period of industrial decline led the restructuring of metropolitan regions in France. Coal mining, steel production, and textiles, located in the north and west, have been particularly hard hit by plant closings and layoffs. In one year alone (1982–1983), more than 185,000 industrial jobs were lost (Body-Gendrot, 1987:244). Cities such as Metz, Dunkirk, Nancy, Lille, and Roubaix have taken on the feel of declining Rust Belt cities in the United States. The French government intervened and propped up failing industries to retain jobs and the community quality of life. When these policies were not successful, however, supports were abandoned in favor of a competitive unburdening of unproductive businesses.
Deindustrialization has resulted in a social crisis for many working-class families and for French society more broadly. According to one observer, “Austerity brought about a deterioration of the social fabric . . . racism, demonstrations of workers against arbitrary decisions benefiting other workers, and petty delinquency. At the workplace, competition rose between the working classes . . . young vs. old, white vs. non-white, men vs. women, all fighting as the size of the pie was shrinking” (Body-Gendrot, 1987:244). The influence of right-wing political parties and racist ideologies can be attributed in part to this upheaval. Today racism is a major problem in France, and hate crimes target Jews, Arabs, and immigrants from North Africa.
Some French industries were able to respond with modernization programs. Changes in manufacturing processes, such as flexible production, just-in-time delivery, and computer-assisted manufacturing in the manner of the Japanese industries, were also adopted (Leborgne and Lipietz, 1988). The French government has been very aggressive in supporting electronics-related industries, software companies, and biotechnology. In conjunction with universities and business venture capital, new technopoles have sprung up in the Grenoble, Montpellier, and Toulouse regions, among others. These resemble the Oxbridge complex in Great Britain (the region of development around Oxford and Cambridge) and the larger university/high-tech industry regions of Silicon Valley and the Research Triangle in the United States.
The push to high-technology industries has affected higher education in the country. As elsewhere, more emphasis is now placed on technologically sophisticated degrees in engineering and science. To date, the changeover to a modernized, flexible, and high-tech economy has met with some success; for example, the French military industries are world leaders. But the older industrialized cities and their problems of decline, unemployment, and renewed racism remain.
In the fall of 2005, French cities experienced two weeks of civil unrest as ethnic minority youth took to the streets to protest high levels of unemployment and discrimination. The disturbances began on October 28, 2005, in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois following the accidental deaths of two teenagers who were running from police and tried to hide in a power station. The protests, including the burning of cars and public buildings, spread to other cities, notably Marseilles in the south of France. French rappers and hip-hop artists were blamed for inciting the rioters. A national state of emergency was declared on October 8 and was extended for a threemonth period beginning November 16. In total some 9,000 cars were burned, 2,900 persons were arrested, 126 police and firefighters were injured, and one person was killed. Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister who declared a “zero tolerance” policy against the protesters, was elected president of France in 2007.
In the United States we are familiar with urban unrest in the cities; what might seem unusual about these events is that they involved ethnic minority youth who lived in the suburbs of French cities. This unfortunate example demonstrates an important difference in the structure of metropolitan regions in France (differences that appear in other European countries as well). Paris and, to a lesser degree, other French cities are surrounded by a ring of older working-class suburbs created in the nineteenth century as the city expanded beyond the central city. In France the traditional word for suburb was faubourg, but the term banlieue is used to describe areas of low-income apartments and social housing; in the United States we might refer to these areas as housing projects or ghettoes (in England the term would be council homes). These are the areas where both older and recent immigrants have settled.
The Paris riots became signature events in Europe, where the term suburb is often equated with immigrant populations, and where problems of unemployment and poverty have taken root. At a broader level, the riots also speak to the problems of inclusion for recent immigrants, who often come from former colonial territories and have a different racial background from the French (Wacquant, 2008). In France, there has been additional conflict because the largest number of immigrants are Muslim (from Morocco, a former colony), and questions of cultural and religious difference have become important social issues. The French census does not collect data on ethnicity, but it is estimated that 6.8 percent of the population is foreign born (some 3.8 million persons), comprising 6.1 percent of the workforce (1.7 million persons). In recent years, the Roma population has also been the focus of much concern, and many of the same questions of identity and incorporation of the ethnic minority into French society have come to the surface (Gopnik, 2014).
TABLE 10.3 Largest Cities and Metropolitan Regions in France and Germany
| 2000 |
2010 |
|||
| City | Metro | City | Metro | |
| France | ||||
| Paris | 2,152,000 | 11,019,991 | 2,243,718 | 11,786,234 |
| Lyon | 422,000 | 1,588,910 | 1,293,288 | 1,725,177 |
| Marseille | 808,000 | 1,398,000 | 1,041,294 | 1,722,062 |
| Lille | 178,000 | 1,108,000 | 1,112,454 | 1,347,223 |
| Toulouse | 366,000 | 1,062,514 | 704,454 | 1,243,641 |
| Bordeaux | 213,000 | 1,299,777 | 714,191 | 1,449,245 |
| Nantes | 252,000 | 1,146,058 | 587,478 | 1,282,052 |
| Rouen | 102,000 | 1,239,940 | 486,298 | 1,250,411 |
| Germany | ||||
| Berlin | 3,382,169 | 4,922,511 | 3,442,675 | 5,036,223 |
| Hamburg | 1,715,392 | 3,056,199 | 1,774,224 | 3,192,336 |
| Munich | 1,210,223 | 2,410,083 | 1,330,440 | 2,654,726 |
| Stuttgart | 587,152 (a) | 2,601,109 | 601,646 | 2,673,463 |
| Frankfurt am Main | 646,550 | 2,481,064 | 671,927 | 2,673,463 |
| Koln | 962,882 | 1,851,563 | 998,105 | 1,899,930 |
| Düsseldorf | 569,364 | 1,518,575 | 586,217 | 1,525,774 |
| Dresden | 477,807 | 1,250,000 (b) | 517,052 | 1,350,587 |
Table 10.3 shows the population for the largest cities and metropolitan areas in Germany. Berlin, the capital city, is the largest urban center with a population of some 3.4 million persons—twice that of Hamburg, the second largest city and former center of the Hanseatic League on the North Sea. Munich, the largest city in the southern half of the country, is the third largest with a population of 2.6 million. The figures in Table 10.3 demonstrate the importance of the multicentered urban region. For all of the urban regions except Berlin, the suburban populations are two to three times that of the city (and in several, the figure is three or even four times greater).
The Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan corridor, comprised of five cities in the North Rhine-Westphalia region (Cologne, Essen, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, and Duisburg), is an important component of the urban system. These are the industrial cities of the Ruhr River valley, forming an urban agglomeration of more than 12 million persons. Fully half of the corporate headquarters for Germany’s top one hundred companies are located in Düsseldorf. This urban agglomeration is described further in Box 10.2, and it also is visible in the northern part of Germany in the satellite photograph in Figure 10.1.
Economic restructuring and uneven development has had a pronounced effect on this region. Called the Sud-Nord-Gefälle (south-north cleavage) in Germany, the older, northern industrial cities such as Bremen and Hamburg have been hardest hit by restructuring, while southern towns such as Munich and Frankfurt have become affluent. This pattern appears to be similar to the way economic changes have affected the United States, where the industrial manufacturing base of the Midwestern and northeastern Rust Belt (or Frost Belt) cities such as Buffalo, Detroit, and Pittsburgh declined, and the “new” Sun Belt cities such as Phoenix, San Diego, and Los Angeles prospered.
According to Haussermann and Siebel, the north-south split is a consequence of Germany’s shift to an export-oriented economy, similar to the case in Italy. In Germany, the southern region contains the automobile industry and also high-tech-based manufacturing—two economic sectors that have done well in the global economy. Steel production and the shipping industry, which are concentrated in the north, have been unable to compete effectively in the world system; consequently, cities based on these sectors have declined. In the 1980s the northern region containing the cities of Bremen, Hamburg, and Bonn experienced a decline in employment, while the southern region containing the cities of Munich, Baden, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart enjoyed an increase in employment (Haussermann and Siebel, 1990:377).
The reunification of West and East Germany has had important effects on German cities. The new German government committed more than $2 billion toward rebuilding the former East Germany, but that region still lags behind West Germany
Box 10.2 The Rhine-Ruhr Urbanized Region
The Ruhr River valley in northern Germany developed as an industrial area in the 1600s as rivers and canals helped transport raw materials and manufactured goods. Rail and road networks in the 1800s led to further expansion during the Industrial Revolution, when the main products were coal, steel production, and tanning of leather. Heavily damaged during bombing raids in World War II, the Ruhr remains Europe's largest industrial zone, and along with the neighboring Rhine-Main industrial area has established Germany as the world leader in mechanical engineering and the world's largest exporting nation at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The largest city in the Rhine Ruhr region is Cologne (with a population of 990,000). There are four cities with populations of 500,000 or more (Dortmund, Duisberg, Düsseldorf, and Essen) and over twenty cities of 100,000 or more. The entire metropolitan region has a population of over 1.8 million, forming an industrial landscape of unique size and with a population greater than that of the European capital cities. The metropolitan region is often mistaken as a single city because of the continuous urban development that blurs the boundaries of individual cities.
FIGURE 10.3 Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Following the reunification of Germany in 1989, the city of Berlin began an ambitious program to transform the city into “the capital of Europe.” Potsdamer Platz is the historical center of the city. SOURCE: Michael J. Zirbes.
and has been blamed for increasing budget deficits and a slowing of what had been the strongest of the European economies. A poll conducted in 2005 reported that only 24 percent of West Germans responded positively when asked, “Would it be better if the wall between east and west still stood?” The same newspaper account noted that stereotypes and resentments persist in both regions of the country, with some West Germans regarding East Germans as backward, while some East Germans regard West Germans as bossy “know-it-alls” (Associated Press, 2005).
Following reunification, Germany chartered an ambitious agenda to re-create Berlin as the “capital of Europe.” The Berlin Wall, which for decades stood as a symbol of the Cold War and divided the city, was removed and open space was redeveloped (particularly in East Berlin, which had suffered under the control of the Soviet Union). There has been extensive redevelopment of areas along the River Spree and of public spaces such as the Potsdamer Platz, which is said to represent a vision of Berlin for the third millennium (see Figure 10.3). Particularly notable are new buildings by world-renowned architects that make forceful statements about the city’s renewal (often referred to as resurrection)—an example of the symbolic side of urbanism that has been described as “hypercity” (Nas and Samuels, 2005). Berlin once again hosts a thriving arts community and has become a major tourist city bridging the east and west.
It is expected that populations will shift to centers of increasing employment wherever they are located in the nation. There has been difficulty absorbing the labor force of former East Germany, and there has been migration from other former Soviet countries as well. Unemployment is on the rise, as is racism. Fascist skinheads perpetrating violence and hate crimes against immigrants and Jews threatened to destabilize the government in the 1990s. In May 2005 the celebration of the sixty-year anniversary of the end of World War II brought more than 3,000 neo-Nazis to Berlin’s central plaza to protest against German guilt for the war and the opening of a new memorial to Jews killed in the Holocaust. They were opposed by an even larger group of 6,000 protesters, and some 10,000 police were used to keep the two groups separated. As in Italy and France, the renewal of racism in Germany has complex causes, although economic uncertainties following reunification are a contributing factor. Most Germans believe their economy can absorb the population of the former East Germany; nevertheless, the long-term effects of reunification remain unpredictable. Urbanization and conditions of life in the former Soviet bloc countries are examined in greater detail below.
The expansion of urban life in Europe after 1000 led to the development of a number of very important cities in Italy. By the 1500s, three of the five largest cities in Europe were located in Italy (Naples, Milan, and Venice). After this period, economic development would focus on Northern Europe, and the great Italian cities of the Renaissance have remained relatively small through recent times. As we saw in Table 10.1, while two-thirds (67 percent) of the Italian population lives in urban areas, relatively few (only about 10 percent) live in large cities of 1 million or more persons. Table 10.4 shows the largest cities in Italy and Spain. Rome is the largest city in Italy with a population of 2.5 million, and there are two other cities with populations of more than 1.0 million (Milan and Naples). Other great cities of the Renaissance—Florence and Venice—have populations of less than 400,000.
While cities in Italy are notable for the preservation of their historic core—much of the city center of Florence, for example, dates to the sixteenth century and is built around a nucleus of cathedrals dating to the 1300s—they all have experienced significant growth in the larger metropolitan region. This pattern results from migration to the urban centers from urban areas but is also determined by strong preservation laws that in effect prohibit new construction within the city core. Many Italian cities do not appear to have extensive suburbanization because much of the population is housed in apartment buildings that cluster outside the city, but in other cases the
TABLE 10.4 Largest Cities and Metropolitan Regions in Italy and Spain, 2000–2010
| 2000 |
2010 |
|||
| City | Metro | City | Metro | |
| Italy | ||||
| Rome | 2,570,489 | 3,704,396 | 2,724,347 | 4,154,684 |
| Milan | 1,268,062 | 5,249,727 | 1,295,705 | 5,233,985 (a) |
| Napoli | 1,007,464 | 3,060,124 | 963,661 | 3,079,685 |
| Torino | 879,285 | 2,165,299 | 908,825 | 2,297,598 |
| Palermo | 694,912 | 1,235,269 | 659,433 | 1,246,094 |
| Genoa | 620,920 | 876,806 | 611,171 | 883,180 |
| Firenze | 362,808 | 933,265 | 365,659 | 991,862 |
| Spain | ||||
| Madrid | 2,882,860 | 5,185,931 | 3,273,049 | 6,335,807 |
| Barcelona | 1,496,266 | 4,386,979 | 1,619,337 | 5,352,034 |
| Valencia | 739,014 | 1,724,732 | 809,267 | 2,512,597 |
| Seville | 700,716 | 1,381,084 | 704,198 | 1,864,884 |
| Zaragoza | 604,631 | 780,883 | 675,121 | 948,063 |
| Malaga | 531,565 | 734,162 | 568,507 | 760,705 |
| Bilbao | 353,173 | 1,066,170 | 353,187 | 1,136,862 |
SOURCE: Eurostat Data Explorer.
NOTE: Five other cities in Italy (Bari, Catania, Taranto, Brescia, and Salerno) have metropolitan populations of 1.0 million or more.
(a) 2011 population
metropolitan population has spread to adjacent cities, resulting in the pattern of multicentered regional development that we have become familiar with.
Tourism is important for many local economies and for the nation as a whole, but it has created serious problems for many Italian cities. Some have referred to Florence as an adult Disneyland because of the scale of tourism, and sustainable tourism is an important area of discussion and study. Local residents complain of the high cost of housing in the city center, and there is extensive residential development of more affordable apartment housing along the Arno River valley. Following a devastating series of floods in the 1960s, the population of Venice has declined by half, and it too has been labeled an artificial city (although there are neighborhoods that are residential, much of the workforce employed in the service industry live on the mainland; Davis and Marvin, 2004). The concern over the impact of tourism on Italian cities is a special case of a more general concern with tourism in the Mediterranean region as a whole (Loukissas and Skayannis, 2001).
For decades Italy remained one of the most underdeveloped areas of Western Europe. The north was highly industrialized with an urbanized labor force centering on Milan and Turin. The south, in contrast, remained rural and dependent on agriculture (Martinelli, 1985). Population in the south was unstable, as native sons often left home to migrate to cities in the north or immigrated to other countries (including Australia, Argentina, Canada, and the United States) in search of employment. But the process of economic restructuring that has operated in the rest of the industrialized West has changed the sociospatial pattern of development in Italy as well. The middle and southern regions, known as the Mezzogiorno, developed a vibrant industrial employment base concentrated in the small-craft tradition of the region. This includes apparel, textiles, footwear, wood products such as furniture, metal working, and clay and glass products. Firms in this region have been very successful by adopting custom design and flexible industrial methods. They engage in small-batch production, which can be changed and customized for new orders relatively easily. Many observers believe that these firms would serve as a model for the new type of “flexible” manufacturing (called post-Fordism) that would prosper in the global economy (Scott, 1988; Piore and Sabel, 1984).
Increased foreign competition, especially in the automobile industry, threatened the northern region, and by the 1990s the cities of Turin and Milan no longer were the employment meccas they had been in the past. Changes were made in the industrial base to regain the competitive edge of such companies as Fiat Automobiles and Pirelli Tires. After more than a decade of cooperative agreements, in 2013 Fiat entered into a deal to acquire Chrysler, the US automobile manufacturer that had declared bankruptcy in 2009. In Turin, existing plants modernized according to the Japanese style that has also been copied by American automakers. Automation was introduced, and assembly line production turned over to robotics. Wholesale use of electronic or computer-assisted manufacturing was also incorporated into production. Finally, the just-in-time system was adopted by assembly plants to reduce operating costs by eliminating inventory problems. Under this system, assembly plants do away with holding large inventories of items they require in production. Instead, they work with suppliers outside the plant but within the region to provide what they need at the time they require it in the assembly process. Coordination of supplies is accomplished with the use of computers that monitor all aspects of the distribution and production schedules.
The successful adaptation of Italian industries to changes in the global marketplace stabilized migration patterns within the country. Transformations as a consequence of restructuring have been celebrated by some observers as a new model of growth that other advanced nations undergoing change should copy. The fate of cities depends progressively more on their ability to attract and retain mobile capital investment. Capital, in turn, must restructure and acquire greater flexibility in responding to the increasing demands for small-batch, customized production. Caught by the decline in manufacturing employment and the threat of plant closings or layoffs, workers must settle for less job security and a growing need to work closely with business for the sake of their mutual survival.
Much of Italian industry is oriented toward exports. The global recession hit Italy hard, especially in the Mezzogiorno region. Once again the specter of layoffs and recession has destabilized politics as the standard of living for both working-class and middle-class households is threatened by economic restructuring. Right-wing political parties have made gains in recent elections, and there is a strong backlash against the Roma (gypsy) population and illegal immigrants from the former Italian colonies in North Africa.
During the early Middle Ages, the cities of Spain were the largest in all of Europe; Córdoba, the capital of the Moorish empire, was for several centuries the largest city in the world (see Chapter 2). In the 1500s, Catholic Spain rose to world dominance, and millions of dollars of wealth poured into the country from colonies in the Americas and Asia. But the wealth generated by this mercantilist empire did not produce a well-developed urban system, nor did it lead to industrialization in the 1700s and 1800s. The Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, which resulted in the triumph of the fascist state that survived until the 1960s, created further divisions that made development more difficult. As a consequence, and unlike most other European countries, Spain is not highly industrialized, and agricultural production remains important for a significant proportion of the population. Most of the manufacturing has been centered in the Madrid region, and the urbanization pattern in this country is not as balanced as in the other European nations we have considered so far.
As we saw in Table 10.1, the proportion of Spain’s population living in urban areas increased slightly from 75 percent in 1990 to 77 percent in 2005, while the number of persons living in large cities of 1 million or more increased from 20 percent in 1980 to just 24 percent in 2000. The populations of the largest cities in Spain are shown in the bottom half of Table 10.4. Madrid (the capital, with a population of 3.2 million) and Barcelona (1.6 million) are the two largest cities. There are four other cities with populations more than 500,000. This urban system is very different from what we have seen in other areas of Europe, in large measure because the level of industrialization has not led to the concentration of population in large industrial cities. But in recent years, Spain too has been affected by the worldwide restructuring of the global economy.
Older industrial districts, such as Villaverde, have declined and are plagued by job loss and poverty. Small manufacturers, much like the businesses of Italy’s Mezzogiorno, have remained successful, especially those involved in metal working, crafts, and printing. The capital city of Madrid itself has been changing from a manufacturing economy to a service economy and a building boom of office towers along La Castellana Boulevard caused by the growing importance of finance-related business services and an increase in service-related employment.
Spain is an interesting case because of industrial development during the 1980s under the direction of a socialist government. The 1992 Summer Olympics served to showcase Spain’s other large metropolis, Barcelona, as well as to stimulate the nation’s economy. The global recession of the 1990s, however, hit the country hard, as it did all other export-oriented economies. Consequently, there has been a slow-down in the sociospatial restructuring of metropolitan areas in Spain even before the recent global financial crisis.
The countries in Eastern Europe were occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II and existed under communist domination for seventy years. For the better part of four decades, they were included under the label second world, signifying the Cold War distinction between the first world (the United States and the developed Western nations) and the third world (nations in the developing world). They now have joined the capitalist West, but questions about the future development of this heavily urbanized area remain. A United Nations report summarized these concerns in the following manner:
The countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are undergoing an economic, political, and administrative transition which is reflected in shrinking gross domestic products, high unemployment and declining fertility and life expectancy. While some countries have shown signs of economic stabilization (e.g., reduced rates of inflation and economic contraction), it will take time to establish new institutions and redefine the role of the public and private sectors . . . Wasteful consumption and productive patterns, long-term neglect, and misdirected policies have led to serious environmental degradation. Toxic industrial pollutants affect health and agriculture. The transition to market economies calls for new regulatory regimes to accommodate greater participation by non-governmental organizations and the private sector. (United Nations Population Fund, 1996)
The complex history of Eastern European countries, and the important social and political issues surrounding their reintegration into European urban history more generally, is described in Box 10.3, which presents the program statement of a 2005 conference titled “Cities After the Fall: European Integration and Urban History Conference.” A number of other works have sought to explain the transformation of these cities and their incorporation into the world system (Hamilton, Andrews, and Pichler-Milanović, 2004).
Box 10.3 Cities After the Fall
In his book Images of the American City, when Anselm Strauss posed a simple question, “What time is this city?” he was asking about the character of urban temporal orientation and about how it had a formative effect on the character of a city. One could pose the same question in contemporary East Berlin, Riga, Lviv, Vilnius, Minsk, or Wrocsaw, in Gdansk, Kaliningrad, Novgorod, Szczecin, Tallinn, or Odessa; in each case, either storied pasts or supposed European futures would probably insinuate themselves into the contemporary answer. The post-communist projections of the past and the future engender Janus-faced imageries of era and geography in these cities, which, in turn, are strongly influencing their representation and (planned) reconfiguration. A process of cultural reorientation and European integration that began circa 1990 continues.
The reorientations are geopolitical as attempts are made to integrate into a “Western” and “European” context after the fall of the Soviet Union. The transformation of these cities is helping redefine the regions and the modern borders of Europe. One could claim that a “New Europe” takes place and form in these cities, which gravitate to Habsburg, Baltic, Imperial Russian, or Germanic past and propose their own futures in ethnic-national, European, Western, and global contexts. The tourist industry as well as political parties, private heritage societies and government organizations, and other political and economic interests are all involved in this historical and geographical repositioning. Concretely the shift in urban time and place expresses itself in the grand and subtle changes to the urban fabric, which is beginning to accommodate the new order and orientation.
In many cases, there is a strained discourse between the versions of an urban past and the variously envisioned future(s), while the opposing arguments are being set in stone or in steel and glass.
SOURCE: “Cities After the Fall: European Integration and Urban History Conference,” Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Spring 2005.
By 2000, some 68 percent of the population in Eastern Europe lived in urban areas—one of the highest levels of urbanization in the world. But as we saw in Table 10.1, the level of urbanization varies substantially from country to country (54 percent in Romania is the lowest, 73 percent in the Russian Federation the highest). There are seven cities with populations of more than 2 million persons, as shown in Table 10.5. Many Eastern European countries exhibit an uneven pattern of urban development, where one large urban center dominates the country. Only Russia seems to have been able to develop a balanced urban hierarchy.
Table 10.5 shows the population for the largest metropolitan areas in Eastern Europe. There are several distinctive features about this regional urban system. It is dominated by Moscow, the capital of the former Soviet Union, with a metropolitan region population of some 11.4 million persons. The second largest metropolitan area, St. Petersburg, with a population of 4.8 million, is the former capital built in the 1700s as Russia sought to become a world power alongside the European monarchies. These are followed by a group of cities with populations of 1 to 3 million that for the most part represent the capital cities of older nations in Eastern Europe (Warsaw in Poland, Budapest in Hungary) or the newly independent countries of the former USSR (Minsk in Belarus, Kiev in Ukraine).
In 1970 only six Russian cities had more than 1 million persons. By 2000 there were more than a dozen cities with a population of at least 1 million. The two largest cities—Moscow and St. Petersburg—are the consequence of Russia’s long history as a centralized state. Moscow is not only the largest city in Eastern Europe, but it also is the second-largest European city. It accounts for half of all banking activity in Russia, along with one-third of its retail sales and one-third of national wholesale trade. Although there are more than a dozen Russian cities with populations of 1 million or more, the concentration of economic power and political control under the Soviet
TABLE 10.5 Largest Urban Agglomerations in Eastern Europe, 1975–2010
| Population |
||||
| City | Country | 1975 | 2000 | 2010 |
| Moscow | Russian Federation | 7,623,000 | 10,005,000 | 11,472,000 |
| St. Petersburg | Russian Federation | 4,325,000 | 4,719,000 | 4,842,000 |
| Kiev | Ukraine | 1,926,000 | 2,606,000 | 2,805,000 |
| Bucharest | Romania | 1,702,000 | 1,949,000 | 1,935,000 |
| Minsk | Belarus | 1,120,000 | 1,700,000 | 1,847,000 |
| Budapest | Hungary | 2,005,000 | 1,787,000 | 1,731,000 |
| Warsaw | Poland | 1,444,000 | 1,666,000 | 1,718,000 |
| Novosibirsk | Russian Federation | 1,250,000 | 1,426,000 | 1,472,000 |
| Kharkov | Ukraine | 1,353,000 | 1,484,000 | 1,453,000 |
| Ekaterinburg | Russian Federation | 1,135,000 | 1,303,000 | 1,348,000 |
| Prague | Czech Republic | 1,126,000 | 1,172,000 | 1,265,000 |
| Nizhni Novgorod | Russian Federation | 1,273,000 | 1,331,000 | 1,253,000 |
| Sofia | Bulgaria | 977,000 | 1,128,000 | 1,175,000 |
| Samara | Russian Federation | 1,146,000 | 1,173,000 | 1,165,000 |
| Omsk | Russian Federation | 954,000 | 1,136,000 | 1,153,000 |
SOURCE: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2013). World Population Prospects: The 2011 Revision. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/CD-ROM/Urban-Agglomerations.htm.
state means that none of these cities developed as metropolitan centers for a larger urban region. This role was reserved for the two cities with former federal status: Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In the past, discussion about Eastern European cities among urbanists focused on whether there is a specific difference in patterns of growth that can be attributed to Communism—was there a particular urban form that might be identified as the Socialist City? But according to Friedrichs, “Except for a short period in the early 1920s, there are no specific socialist types of land use, distribution of new housing, internal organization of residential blocks, or location of companies” (1988:128). There was some effort to develop urban structures more friendly to the working population in the years following World War I, when much of Europe was governed by a succession of socialist and left-wing political movements, before the solidification of rightist regimes under Fascism. There are some peculiarities of land use and population distribution among cities and metropolitan regions in the former Communist countries that differ from patterns in the West. These involve the nature of the central city due to an absence of the finance capital sector, the pattern of population distribution and the housing shortage, and most important, an absence of a capitalist real estate market.
All Eastern European countries have large capital cities, the result of both historical patterns of development as well as centralization under the Soviet system. Some, such as Hungary and Poland, have very uneven development due to the dominance of their main centers—Budapest and Warsaw, respectively. Others, such as the Czech Republic and Russia, have a more balanced system of cities. In every case, the central sections of the major cities are quite old, dating back several hundred years to their founding. Under the Communist governments, original buildings in the city center were not torn down. They remain standing in many cases and many are in terrible shape. The lack of ambitious office building schemes, characteristic of many Communist cities, stands in contrast to the capitalist city, where finance capital and its associated business services, such as accounting and legal consulting, have taken over the downtown. In most Communist countries, the state directed investment in real estate and economic development; thus, their downtowns do not contain an active real estate market of office buildings that services the needs of corporate and finance capital. As a result, the shift to the service-oriented economy is occurring more slowly in these countries than elsewhere in Europe.
One of the most notable changes in urbanization in the Eastern European countries has been the decline in central city population and increase in the suburbs and urban periphery; this development is common to all countries, and of course similar to that observed in Western Europe. Once the specific state-sponsored incentives that concentrated housing and other development within the urban core were lifted, the population in these countries rapidly moved out of the central cities.
Family and household income differences in Eastern European cities historically were not as disparate as in the rest of Europe or the United States (Ladanyi, 1989). In the United States, both the wealthy and the poorest classes are highly segregated, and in many European cities, working-class families live in the suburbs. In Eastern European cities, such as Budapest, there is some segregation of the wealthy classes and the poor, but the rest of the population is evenly spread out in the city despite some differences in family income.
The reason for this contrast in the Soviet city was the operation of government subsidies for housing, which prevented the poorest people from being concentrated within urban spaces. Thus, a major difference between formerly Communist societies and capitalist ones such as the United States was the active role of government in providing affordable housing for the poor (although, as we will see below, the total volume of available housing is inadequate). In the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of the public housing units were converted to private housing. Paradoxically, however, under the Communist governments, the more affluent people have also enjoyed considerable state housing subsidies (Ladanyi, 1989). Consequently, it is not the market that has created uneven development in formerly Communist countries, as it does under capitalism, but state intervention itself. This kind of uneven development and privilege produced by state favors for the elite was a common complaint about Communist practice for decades; however, it is comparable to the economic advantages of the capitalist class in the United States.
With the fall of Communism, housing subsidies are declining, and as the market takes over, segregation is increasing. As noted above, much of the public housing has been converted to privately owned housing. The construction of new, privately owned housing represents efforts to alleviate the chronic shortage of housing in these societies. The shift to an active capitalist real estate market has produced the first significant signs of capitalist-style uneven development within urban settlement spaces, such as a growing number of homeless people and a sharp rise in the cost of rental housing, which hits elderly pensioners particularly hard.
Eastern Europe has been the scene of immense social change due to the transition from Communism to a market economy. The most significant change has been the growth of the real estate market and a new, second circuit of capital for formerly Communist countries. It remains to be seen how this restructuring will affect
Box 10.4 Social Problems in Eastern European Cities
The contraction of state-sector employment without commensurate growth of private-sector employment has led to a decline in real wages, pensions, and social transfers within a general context of high inflation. The breakup of the former Soviet Union generated severe disruptions in the old trading and monetary regimes, which resulted in catastrophic declines in GDP of about 45 percent during the 1990–1996 period.
Over the following decade, the region saw rising income inequalities. Poverty and unemployment also increased significantly. It has been observed that the failure of rapid privatization in Russia, for instance, “was not an accident, but a predictable consequence” of the absence of competition policies and the institutional and legal infrastructure needed to support successful reform efforts. The region’s poor housing conditions are reflected in recent slum estimates, which reveal that in transition economies, about one-tenth of the urban population live in slum conditions, without adequate access to basic services, or in crowded housing units. In 2002, about 46 percent of residents of the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries lived on less than $4 per day, compared to 10 percent in Western Europe. Fifty-three percent of the Russian population, 23 percent in Romania, 28 percent in Latvia, 62 percent in Kazakhstan, and 88 percent in Kyrgyzstan have to survive on even less.
Trafficking and smuggling of human beings operated by organized crime networks in countries whose economies are in transition has become of particular concern to national governments and the international community. Although Asian countries have been the primary suppliers of women to the sex trade for decades, the collapse of the Soviet Union has made former Soviet republics such as Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and Russia major source countries of women into prostitution. Trafficked women from this region are delivered into prostitution throughout the world, and there are estimated to be a half million women from Central and Eastern Europe working in prostitution in the European Union alone.
Today the dream for a better life seems to have vanished in the face of the millions of new poor exposed to living conditions that can be similar to those living in the least developed nations. Across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, household poverty has increased fivefold during the last twelve years and its social by-products are discernible everywhere: sharp increases in alcoholism—especially among men—suicide, and mortality, as well as a decline in marriage and a rise in divorce rates.
SOURCE: “Poverty, crime and migration are acute issues as Eastern European cities continue to grow,” City Mayors—Urban Society (www.citymayors.com/society/easteurope_cities.html).
settlement space within urban areas; however, we can use the US case as a guide for future projections. Some early indications suggest that segregation has increased, deconcentration of population has accelerated as suburbanization occurs, and the service economy has begun to replace manufacturing as the principal sector. Old buildings remain, and in many countries there has been little new office construction. This situation most likely cannot last as the capitalist urban land market takes over and the pressures to switch to a service-based economy prevail there as they have in the capitalist West. We can even expect drastic renovation or renewal programs, led by private investment, for the construction of high-rise office towers in the Eastern European cities of the future.
Because of its dominant position in the Pacific Rim and early transition to an industrial power, Japan has contained large cities for hundreds of years. Tokyo, for example, had over 1 million people as early as the 1700s when it served as the capital (called Edo at the time) of the shogun empire. The modernization of Tokyo following the Meiji Restoration resulted in a continuous migration from rural areas to the expanding metropolitan region surrounding the capital city (Bestor, 1985). Since World War II, Japanese cities have developed as large regional agglomerations or multicentered metropolitan regions. The greater Tokyo metropolitan area is estimated to contain 34 million people, a quarter of the entire population of Japan, while the city of Tokyo alone had more than 8 million persons in 2000. This large urban agglomeration is comparable to that of New York and Los Angeles combined. The overall level of urbanization of the Japanese population, some 80 percent of the total, is comparable to that of many Western countries.
The population of the largest metropolitan areas in Japan is shown in Table 10.6. Two urban centers dominate this urban system. The Tokyo metropolitan area (35.7 million) includes the cities of Tokyo (8.9 million), Yokohama (3.7 million), and Kawasaki (1.4 million), and another 24 million persons living in other cities and urbanized areas linked to these cities. The greater Osaka metropolitan area (18.7 million persons) includes the cities of Osaka (2.7 million), Kobe and Kyoto (1.5 million each), and another 13 million persons in the urbanized areas linked to these cities. The Japanese urban system includes one other great metropolitan area (Nagoya, with a population of 8.9 million) and a number of other metropolitan areas with populations of more than 1 million.
Modern Japanese cities developed as trading and commercial centers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When industrialization developed in the West in the nineteenth century, it was embraced by Japanese business along with the aid of the monarchy. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Japan was already a major industrial power, with extensive manufacturing areas producing textiles and
TABLE 10.6 Largest Cities and Metropolitan Regions in Japan, 2000–2010
| 2000 |
2010 |
|||
| City | Metro | City | Metro | |
| Tokyo | 81,300,000 | 34,000,000 | 8,949,447 | 35,682,460 |
| Yokohama | 3,426,000 | Not available | 3,689,603 | Not available |
| Kawasaki | 1,249,000 | Not available | 1,425,678 | Not available |
| Osaka | 2,598,000 | 16,750,000 | 2,663,710 | 18,763,950 |
| Kobe | 1,493,000 | Not available | 1,544,873 | Not available |
| Kyoto | 1,467,000 | Not available | 1,474,473 | Not available |
| Nagoya | 2,171,000 | 8,000,000 | 2,263,907 | 8,923,445 |
| Sapporo | 1,822,000 | 2,500,000 | 1,914,434 | 2,606,214 |
| Fukuoka | 1,341,000 | 2,250,000 | 1,463,826 | 5,590,378 |
| Hiroshima | 1,126,000 | 1,725,000 | 1,174,209 | 2,064,536 |
SOURCE: Thomas Brinkerhoff, Principle Agglomerations and Cities of the World. Statistics Bureau of Japan.
other goods. After the massive loss of labor and industrial production following World War II, Japan initiated ambitious industrialization schemes focusing on exports, which were remarkably successful in establishing Japan as a global economic power (Lee, 1982; Berry, 1989; Honjo, 1998).
Japanese cities have not experienced the deconcentration of population and employment observed in US cities, nor have they undergone a shift to services on the same scale as cities in the United States and older industrialized countries. Today manufacturing remains important to the Japanese economy. Work is highly centralized within city boundaries even though the suburban population is growing. Each day several million commuters ride into the central city by public transportation, often traveling as much as two hours each way. Japan is unlike the United States in other respects as well. Due to a free market in real estate, a general shortage of land in the country, and the centralization of employment within large cities, housing and rental prices are astronomically high, and Tokyo is often rated as the world’s most expensive city in which to live. It has become increasingly difficult to own a home in a Japanese city, and most housing space, in terms of square feet, is extremely small by US standards.
The success of Japan’s export-oriented industries in the global economy produced important changes in settlement space patterns for the entire Pacific Rim. Japanese industries introduced a number of innovative techniques, such as just-in-time methods, that increased their competitiveness. They also embarked on regional schemes of manufacturing in search of cheap labor (much like US companies), which had an impact on other Asian countries, in particular South Korea and Taiwan. But the real impact occurred because of Japan’s success in foreign trade earnings, and by the end of the twentieth century, it became a major repository of the world’s finance capital. In recent decades, the Japanese economy has experienced slow growth and a profits squeeze from the increasing costs of Japanese labor. This has resulted in the kind of response adopted by US firms, namely, the shift of some production to other countries with cheaper and more compliant sources of labor. While marketing and control remain located in Japan, there has been an increase in the amount of component-part production farmed out to Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore (Douglas, 1988; Berry, 1989:203).
Japan is experiencing another trend common to the United States and Europe. Japan has always restricted its immigration, which is why its labor force and urban populations have remained more stable than those in countries such as the United States. Lately, however, illegal immigration is becoming noticeable as the global flow of investment and people integrates the Pacific Rim countries. Typically, such immigration occurs because the low-wage, menial jobs that are necessary in a developed economy are no longer being filled by the domestic population because of increases in the quality of life and training levels. Sassen (1991:308) notes that since the late 1980s, there has been a rapid increase in the number of illegal aliens working in Japan; typically, they enter the country with tourist visas and overstay their officially permitted time. It is estimated that in the 1990s there were 200,000 illegal male workers in Japan doing manual labor, from construction to restaurant jobs. Almost all of these were from Asia. The largest groups were from Taiwan, South Korea, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Pakistan.
Japanese cities are not characterized by the kind of social segregation found in the West, although the wealthy are isolated from the rest of the masses. However, they exhibit uneven development with regard to the lack of services and facilities. Extreme housing and space shortages still affect the city’s inhabitants. There are few parks, medical facilities, and community centers in Tokyo. The city does contain an extensive mass transit network, as do other Japanese cities, but all Japanese cities suffer from pollution, smog, noise, and overcrowding (Nakamura and White, 1988). Other areas of the country are plagued by extensive pollution resulting from industrial development that the government has not controlled.
Population demographics will have an impact on Japanese cities and metropolitan areas in the coming decades, but in a way very different from other Asian countries (see Chapter 11). The fertility rate is already very low and is expected to decrease rapidly, as we have already seen in some Western European countries. It is estimated that Japan’s population in 2050 may be only 100 million—a decrease of 17 percent (Fuji, 2005). Japan generally has not seen the decline of urban centers similar to that of the United States or Europe. Fuji suggests that Osaka may be the most appropriate urban comparison. Osaka reached its peak population of 3 million in 1985 but has decreased since then (to 2.6 million in 2010). Observers suggest that cities in Japan are shrinking for a number of reasons. Port cities such as Nagasaki and Kobe have declined relative to other cities; manufacturing centers such as Kitakyushu are “company towns” vulnerable to the relative success of just one company or economic sector; and in some instances companies have moved out of older industrial cities to locate in the capital. As a consequence, the Tokyo metropolitan region prospers while other cities may decline.
Recent urban development in Japan has involved the construction of technopoles and other spaces that bypass the established urban agglomerations. In the 1980s new technopoles were energetically constructed with massive government support, a feature that differs from the United States, which has yet to undertake such federally sponsored development. Most projects are joint ventures by the state, universities, and private capital, such as the giant Tsukuba “science city” centered on Skuba University outside of Tokyo. More recently, technopoles have been developed in the peripheral regions of Japan—those areas previously bypassed by development—such as Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kyushu, and the area along the Sea of Japan. One of the most ambitious of these projects is the “silicon island” developed on Kyushu, centered in Kumamoto City (Fujita, 1988). This region has become a leading producer of microchips and boasted a population of over 1.8 million in 2008.
Japanese housing and real estate issues are worrisome, and the shortage of affordable housing units means that fewer and fewer workers will be able to find places to live within reasonable commuting distance of their place of employment. But many negative effects are outweighed by the long-term success of Japanese economic growth. Industrial expansion brings the growth of multicentered metropolitan regions outside of Japan’s traditional manufacturing centers—Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. Financial investment flowing from Japan has fueled the economies of the Asian tigers and thereby restructures the entire Pacific Rim (as well as the United States, Canada, and Australia, in addition to the less developed countries of Asia and Latin America) for a new round of urban growth.
Cities and metropolitan regions in the developed nations have undergone significant economic restructuring to service-based economies, with a reduced scale of government aid similar to that in the United States. New techniques of post-Fordist manufacturing have been introduced in the successful industries, including automation and Japanese-style flexible methods of production. High-technology corridors, similar to Silicon Valley in the United States, have also appeared, such as the M-4 corridor in England. Finally, there is an increasing integration of large corporations and transnational firms that, like their American counterparts, conduct business around the globe.
Economic restructuring has also brought an increasing array of urban problems. Crime, poverty, and the declining quality of life, almost unheard of as European concerns, are now becoming serious problems. Hate crimes, anti-immigrant sentiments, and racism are on the rise. Unemployment has increased because of related economic changes that have hit the working class especially hard. Cutbacks in the traditional European welfare state have made the problem of poverty more severe. Since the level of funding for public assistance varies greatly among the countries of Western Europe, despite recent EU programs, fears have been expressed about the migration of poor households to areas with appreciably better social programs than another during a time of economic hardship.
In recent decades, large numbers of workers from the developing world have entered developed societies in the hope of obtaining work. Several million Turks, Kurds, and Greeks, for example, live in Germany. Millions of North Africans have migrated to France, and even the Danes, who have always lived in a homogeneous society, are now concerned about the high Muslim birthrate in their country. It is now quite common to have African, Middle Eastern, or Asian cab drivers in Paris, London, and Berlin (not just Los Angeles and New York). Domestic servants, undocumented workers, and low-skilled, labor-intensive factories or sweatshops composed of developing world workers are increasingly common in all these cities. Even Japan, which restricts immigration, has a growing number of illegal aliens from Asia who come there in search of work.
Global economic restructuring therefore brings an increasingly mobile flow not only of capital investment and goods but also of people. Immigration from developing world countries to Europe has affected the social order of these once relatively homogeneous societies in notable ways. The growing presence of foreigners is reflected in the increasing mix of ethnic restaurants that have sprung up in city centers. This drawing together of the first and developing worlds in a common urban experience is increasingly characteristic of contemporary Western cities. All of these elements have combined to produce changes in the social order of once homogeneous European societies. Uneven development in wage levels creates a growing disparity between well-off professionals and low-wage service workers. Migration and ethnic cultural influences have met with increasing numbers of hate crimes, racism, and anti-Semitism in a post-Holocaust Europe.
Common problems confront the urban future in Europe, Japan, and the United States, including the growing lack of affordable housing; challenges from the flow of immigrants who are often illegal aliens; declines in manufacturing employment; and the uneven development of economic opportunities for city populations due to the restructuring of the economy and the emphasis on high-tech skills. Despite comparable declines in central city population, extensive suburbanization, and postsuburban development on the periphery, no industrialized country has experienced the kind of inner-city collapse and decline in the conditions of everyday life comparable to the US experience. In this respect the United States presents a unique case to the world—although parallels may be found in cities such as Calcutta and Nairobi in the developing world, as we will see in the next chapter.
global restructuring
welfare state
deindustrialization
social exclusion
sustainable tourism
banlieue
1. How is the pattern of urbanization in other industrialized countries similar to that found in the United States? In what ways does it differ from that in the United States? What factors are responsible for these differences?
2. Many of the changes in urban systems and metropolitan areas in other industrialized countries are similar to those in the United States. How have changes in the global economy affected metropolitan areas in Western Europe? Have these changes made these cities more similar to or more different from those in the United States?
3. What are the effects of deindustrialization and other changes in the global economy on cities in Western Europe? What are some of the important differences in the ways in which national governments responded to these changes?
4. In what ways does urbanization in Eastern Europe differ from urbanization in Western Europe? Explain the effects of the housing shortage and central city decline in cities and metropolitan regions in these countries.
5. How are the history and pattern of urbanization in Japan different from those of other industrialized countries? How have changes in the global economy affected new urban developments in Japan?