The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Thomas Friedman is a widely-acclaimed journalist, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of four best-selling books that include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). His eminence as a journalist is clearly demonstrated in the way he prepared for The World is Flat. He traveled throughout the world, interviewing in depth the political and business leaders who have the most direct, hands-on knowledge of the truly incredible developments occurring in the business structures and technology of globalization. Only a journalist who moves freely at the highest levels could interview the likes of Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce; Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman of Sony; Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Wee Theng Tan, the president of Intel China; David Baltimore, president of Caltech; Howard Schultz, founder and chairman of Starbucks; Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys in Bangalore - and many others, each of whom gave him the inside story of how, specifically, the barriers of time and space separating economies, workforces, sources of capital, and technical abilities are crumbling. The result of this unfolding story, already far along but with much farther to go, according to Friedman, is that "the world is flat." With some notable exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic swathe, everything is connected with everything else on a horizontal basis, with distance and erstwhile time-lags no longer mattering. Friedman describes in detail the galloping globalization that has unfolded in even so limited a time as the past five years. Under the impetus of a worldwide network of interconnectivity, the world economy is much-changed from what it was at the turn of the century a mere half-decade ago. Friedman quotes the CEO of India's Infosys: "What happened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables," while (Friedman paraphrases him) "computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software - e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing...." Microprocessors today have 410 million transistors compared to the 2800 they had in 1971. And now, "wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere." The effect on productivity is revolutionary: "It now takes Boeing eleven days to build a 737, down from twenty-eight days just a few years ago. Boeing will build the next generation of planes in three days, because all the parts are computer-designed for assembly." The most strikingly informative aspect of this book, however, is not about technology. Most especially, Friedman explores the rapidly evolving global business systems, each constantly regenerating itself to keep ahead of the others. These are systems that span the continents seeking the lowest-cost providers of everything from expert scientific and engineering work to the lowliest grunt work. Friedman points out that India produces 70,000 accounting graduates each year - and that they are willing to start at $100 a month. It is no wonder that Boeing employs 800 Russian scientists and engineers for passenger-plane design when "a U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design hour, a Russian costs about one-third of that." Friedman describes a call center in India where outbound callers sell "everything from credit cards to phone minutes," while operators taking inbound calls do "everything from tracing lost luggage for U.S. and European airline passengers to solving computer problems for confused American consumers. …

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

The Limits to Capital

Neil Brenner has in the past few years made a major impact on the ways in which we understand the changing political geographies of the modern state Simultaneously analyzing the restructuring of urban governance and the transformation of national states under globalizing capitalism, 'New State Spaces' is a mature and sophisticated analysis of broad interdisciplinary interest, making this a highly significant contribution to the subject

New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood

Será que a desigualdade de rendimentos aumentou durante os últimos tempos? Quem ganhou e quem perdeu neste processo? Este processo afectou todos os países da OCDE uniformemente? Em que medida é que maiores desigualdades de rendimentos são a consequência de maiores diferenças nos rendimentos dos trabalhadores e até que ponto são afectados por outros factores? Finalmente, como é que a redistribuição governamental através do sistema de benefícios fiscais afecta estas tendências?

Book Review: OECD, Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries:

Over the past decade, the concept of financialization has moved from the periphery to the mainstream of scholarly inquiry across several social–scientific disciplines, human geography among them. The subject of a burgeoning, variegated literature advancing both theoretical delineation and empirical substantiation, processes of financialization, on many accounts, belong alongside those of globalization and neoliberalization as the defining dynamics of late modern capitalism. In the spirit of fostering a constructive dialogue, this article develops a broadly based critique of such accounts, one structured around the core idea of limits. Financialization, it suggests, is substantively limited, both as a concept and as the array of real-world processes to which that concept variously pertains. The article identifies and fleshes out five key sets of such limits and the connections between them: analytic, theoretic, strategic, optic, and empiric limits. If the concept of financialization is to do substantially ...

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2043820615588153

The limits to financialization

A distinctive feature of urban spaces lies in their high infrastructural density. Because buildings, roads, stadiums, airports are all capital-intensive, they rely in turn on financial infrastructures that circulate not passengers, power or data, but capital more or less temporarily fixed in the urban built environment (Harvey, 2001). Like many infrastructures (Edwards, 2003), financial ones remain invisible to most but for cases of major disruptions. Think, for instance, of how the subprime crisis revealed the interconnection between households’ mortgages and capital markets. This relative invisibility should, however, not obfuscate the importance of financial circuits in the design, construction, exploitation and ownership of the urban built environment (‘urban production’ from here on).
Researchers in urban studies unevenly pay attention to financial circuits, understood here as the sociotechnical systems that channel investments in the forms of equity and debt into urban production. Major accounts of city-making under neoliberalisation from the 1990s and 2000s are a case in point. Such studies mainly focus on evolving rationales for public intervention and the resulting changes in public actors’ modes of operation where welfare provision gives way to entrepreneurial policies (Harvey, 1989; Moulaert et al., 2003; Tasan-Kok and Baeten, 2012); the growing importance of private investments and the concomitant reconfiguration of public spending is mostly acknowledged as a contextual factor, while the ‘private investors’ and ‘international finance capital’ targeted by public authorities remain in the background of analyses. There is thus a dearth of conceptualisation and of evidence on how private financiers and investors, collectively or individually, shape or adjust to this new context and on the role played by those acting at the interface between public and private bodies. It is thus important to go beyond simplistic analytical distinctions, such as ‘public subsidies’ versus ‘private investments’ and to scrutinise financial circuits as relevant …

Introduction: The financialisation of urban production: Conditions, mediations and transformations

The 2008 global financial meltdown has redirected attention to the entwinement of financial markets and the urban built environment. Against that background, recent works in urban political economy have focused on how city governments support the rent-maximisation strategies of landowners, thereby reinforcing ‘the increasing tendency to treat land as a financial asset’ (Harvey, [1982]2006). However, this perspective paradoxically understates the importance of market finance actors, neglecting to demonstrate how, in practice, such financial investors, who have been shown to adopt selective investment practices, shape urban redevelopment projects. In this article, the role of financial investors is analysed through a case study of a large-scale redevelopment project on the outskirts of the Paris city-region (city of Saint-Ouen). The analysis of negotiations over urban design and economic development issues – raised by property developers seeking to fashion commercial properties as investment assets – reveals the unevenness of a local authority’s ability to implement an agenda that potentially diverges from the expectations of financial investors. Accordingly, given the growing importance of investors in the ownership of the built environment, the article considers urban redevelopment as the outcome of power relations that originate in the circulation of investors’ expectations. These expectations are met through translating market finance categories (risk, return and liquidity) into elements of the urban fabric. This bears substantial consequences for policy-making, given the current context of austerity, as municipal authorities are increasingly constrained to rely on property markets. Urban redevelopment projects are thereby increasingly shaped to provide investment assets for financial investors.

/pdf/building-cities-on-financial-assets-the-financialisation-of-43dfhnibfd.pdf

Building cities on financial assets: The financialisation of property markets and its implications for city governments in the Paris city-region

Halbert L. and Rouanet H. Filtering risk away: global finance capital, transcalar territorial networks and the (un)making of city-regions: an analysis of business property development in Bangalore, India, Regional Studies. This paper contributes to ongoing debates on the ‘landing’ or anchoring of global finance capital into the urban built environment. Inspired by recent advances from the school of Territorial Economics, it develops the concept of transcalar territorial networks (TTNs) to explain the processes that result in ‘fixing’ foreign financial capital into business properties. The paper demonstrates that TTNs contribute to filter away the risks that foreign investors associate with the complexity of local–regional property markets. It also highlights the potential consequences on the spatial, economic and social dynamics of city-regions.

Filtering Risk Away: Global Finance Capital, Transcalar Territorial Networks and the (Un)Making of City-Regions: An Analysis of Business Property Development in Bangalore, India

Vandermotten C., Halbert L., Roelandts M. and Cornut P. European planning and the polycentric consensus: wishful thinking?, Regional Studies. European Union planning documents enhance the values of polycentrism as a tool to promote a more efficient, equitable and sustainable development. This paper highlights how and suggests why a descriptive approach of the European urban system became progressively a normative concept. It examines how biases in the measurement of polycentricity in the European Spatial Observatory Network (ESPON) 1.1.1. report (2005) are related to this normative approach. The empirical findings do not suggest any clear correlation between more polycentricity and more economic efficiency or even more spatial equity. The paper examines the reasons for the European Union tenacity to promote polycentrism. This concept seems to be the result of a political compromise and a strange hybrid between two competing approaches for the future of the European space. Vandermotten C., Halbert L., Roel...

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00514707/document

European Planning and the Polycentric Consensus: Wishful Thinking?

Financialisation and housing are predominantly associated to mortgages for homeownership and securitisation techniques. This paper looks at how financial markets influence the development industry,...

Ludovic Halbert

Papers

Introduction: The financialisation of urban production: Conditions, mediations and transformations

Building cities on financial assets: The financialisation of property markets and its implications for city governments in the Paris city-region

Filtering Risk Away: Global Finance Capital, Transcalar Territorial Networks and the (Un)Making of City-Regions: An Analysis of Business Property Development in Bangalore, India

European Planning and the Polycentric Consensus: Wishful Thinking?

Financial markets, developers and the geographies of housing in Brazil: A supply-side account