Growing up in New York City almost my entire life, I am definitely biased: I am the kind of New Yorker who sees NYC as the center of the world. This week’s readings only reaffirmed that bias in me (although I am also aware that the rest of the United States exist as well).
New York City has had a head start in terms of its economy, being a very early developed city in the United States. As a global city, it had a high concentration of high skilled workers, but also left mass production to be done elsewhere–seemingly paradoxical. I found the way to justify this was by thinking of it as a hub/thinktank, from which ideas and products are dispersed to be mass-produced later. The intelligence, potential, and skill is all there, and then the “dirty work” gets transferred to elsewhere (cue making fun of New Jersey joke).
Sassen, in “The Global City,” explains that urbanized cities have undergone massive changes much in the same way that the economy has shifted over the years. Nonetheless, such cities still deal with production and especially production of ideas. That makes them remain economic centers of the world. As “global cities,” the citizens of those areas have to either keep up or fall down, creating an overall general economic inequality of its residents (further explained by Harvey’s writing).
It’s a dog-eat-dog world, as Harvey puts it, and NYC fully epitomizes that. That leads it to continue to bounce back up after major economic depression, after almost going bankrupt, and most significant to our generation–after a targeted attack on everything it economically stood for. The residents were shaken, their confidence crushed. Yet after the comforting pats on people’s backs after suffering tragedy and loss, New York City bounced back. Good? Well, yes it needed to get back to its old self to maintain its standing as a “global city.” But how good is that, really? That there’s no room for comfort? Dealing with grief? or the “American” values of camaraderie and brotherhood? A global city apparently has no place for anything but economic domination. “American values”? Maybe a resident in a typical New York accent would just say “ain’t nobody got time for that…”
