Nonetheless, telematics and globalization have emerged as fundamental
forces reshaping the organization of economic space. This reshaping
ranges from the spatial virtualization of a growing number of economic
activities to the reconfiguration of the geography of the built
environment *for* economic activity. Whether in electronic space or in
the geography of the built environment, this reshaping involves
organizational and structural changes. Telematics maximizes the
potential for geographic dispersal and globalization entails an economic
logic that maximizes the attractions/profitability of such dispersal.
One outcome of these transformations has been captured in images of
geographic dispersal at the global scale and the neutralization of place
and distance through telematics in a growing number of economic
activities. Yet it is precisely the combination of the spatial
dispersal of numerous economic activities and telematic global
integration which has contributed to a strategic role for major cities
in the current phase of the world economy. Beyond their sometimes long
history as centers for world trade and banking, these cities now
function as command points in the organization of the world economy; as
key locations and marketplaces for the leading industries of this period
(finance and specialized services for firms); and as sites for the
production of innovations in those industries. The continued and often
growing concentration and specialization of financial and corporate
service functions in major cities in highly developed countries is, in
good part, a strategic development. It is precisely because of the
territorial dispersal facilitated by telecommunication advances that
agglomeration of centralizing activities has expanded immensely. This
is not a mere continuation of old patterns of agglomeration but, one
could posit, a new logic for agglomeration. It is a logic that operates
mostly for strategic sectors; a majority of firms and economic
activities do not inhabit these major centers.
Centrality, then, remains a key property of the economic system but the
spatial correlates of centrality have been profoundly altered by the new
technologies and by globalization. This engenders a whole new
problematic around the definition of what constitutes centrality today
in an economic system were i) a share of transactions occur through
technologies that neutralize distance and place, and do so on a global
scale; ii) centrality has historically been embodied in certain types of
built environment and urban form. Economic globalization and the new
information technologies have not only reconfigured centrality and its
spatial correlates, they have also created new spaces *for* centrality.
As a political economist interested in the spatial organization of the
economy and in the spatial correlates of economic power, it seems to me
that a focus on place and infrastructure in the new global information
economy creates a conceptual and practical opening for questions about
the embeddedness of electronic space. It allows us to elaborate that
point where the materiality of place/infrastructure intersects with
those technologies and organizational forms that neutralize place and
materiality. And it entails an elaboration of electronic space, the
fact that this space is not simply about transmission capacities but
also a space where new structures for economic activity and for economic
power are being constituted.
Saskia Sassen