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Fassil Demissie 2 Globalization and the Remaking of Chicago THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES the fundamental transformation that has taken place in contemporary Chicago in relation to both the globalization process and associated rise of neo-liberal approaches to public policy. In the first portion of this chapter, I present a general framework for interpreting globalization. Here, globalization is presented as one aspect of a new accumulation regime in which global cities play a pivotal role in the circulation of capital, commodities , images, and people. I emphasize the centrality of global cities as strategic sites in the functional repositioning of cities within nation states and across the globe. Against this background, I review one aspect of the globalization process, namely the deindustrialization of Chicago’s economy, which has led to a significant loss of manufacturing employment whileconcentratingattendantsocialcostsonthe city’s working poor and racial minority populations . The last section considers the speci fic transformation of Chicago’s central business district (CBD) for corporate services, retail activity, tourism, culture, and upscale residential development. This transformation, which has been spearheaded by Chicago’s corporate elites and municipal leadership, expresses the broader neo-liberal agenda to transform parts of the city made obsolete by mid to late twentieth century deindustrialization. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the social implications of the type of downtown redevelopment that has occurred in Chicago since the 1980s. REVISITING THE CONTESTED MEANING OF GLOBALIZATION Many scholars have examined the contours and depth of the globalization process and its effect on cities and regions across the world. They have analyzed the degree to which globalization has set in motion processes such as deindustrialization, defined as the shift to service-based economies and the introduction of new, advanced information technologies; the privatization of public services; and the growth of low-wage and casual employment, unemployment , urban poverty, and racial and social polarization. At the same time, the traditional role and function of particular cities has been redefined as these cities emerge as strategic sites for new types of capital, commodity, and information accumulation and circulation, thereby contributing to the emergence of a redefined hierarchy of cities (Friedmann 1986; Sassen 1991, 1994). On the political front, these economic and social transformations have typically been accompanied by a neo-liberal urban agenda to revitalize inner cities through restructuring the institutions of local government to support sustained and intensified urban redevelopment (Brenner and Theodore 2002). The neo-liberal urban agenda is spearheaded by local corporate elites and allied municipal leaders intent on responding to the dictates of globalization (as it is conventionally understood) and typically in consonance with redefined national urban policies (Sites 2003). 20 Fassil Demissie David Harvey (1989a) argues that globalization is a manifestation of the worldwide condensation of space and time, in which space grows smaller and time more instantaneous. He calls this process “time-space compression,” in which the speeding up of economic and social processes has experientially shrunk the globe, so that distance and time no longer appear to be major constraints on the organization of human activity (Inda and Rosaldo 2002, 6). For Harvey, the process of time-space compression (and hence of globalization) is neither incremental nor continuous. Rather, it occurs in discrete phases consisting of short, concentrated bursts inherent in the capitalist economic system and manifesting itself in periodic crises of overaccumulation (Inda and Rosaldo 2002, 6). Anthony Giddens, on the other hand, considers globalization to involve a profound reorganization of time and space in social and cultural life; his work emphasizes the stretching of social life across time and space. Giddens (1990, 14) captures this process with his notion of “time-space distanciation,” referring to the “condition under which time and space are organized as to connect presence and absence.” For both Harvey and Giddens, globalization involves a fundamental transformation of social and cultural life, which in turn produces new kinds of cities and a globe-spanning urban system. David Held and his co-authors (1999, 2) suggest that cities are strategic nodes for the “widening, deepening and speeding up of world-wide interconnectedness in all aspects of sociallife.”Becausecitiesprovidethedensetechnological infrastructure and expertise that enables transnational corporations to coordinate and control worldwide economic activity, they have emerged as the primary site for incoming and outgoing of foreign investment, labor, transport, and communications, processes that compressandunifythedense,networkedinfrastructure of the globalized world. As local urban, regional, and national economies merge into a single networked global system, so the argument goes, they form...

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