Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century

concerned with the importance of specific places in the
geography of global flows.
As important as economic globalization has been for
cities, the transformation wrought by cultural globalization
(whether that is understood in terms of the globalization
of media images and patterns of consumption, or
new migrations) is at least as important. For example,
Maoz Azaryahu (1999) argues that controversy over the
siting of a McDonald’s close to an Israeli war memorial
was as much about the endorsement and adoption of
American values as it was about the commodification of
a sacred space. It is also about appropriate symbolic distances
and barriers (the McDonald’s was more acceptable
when its “golden arches” were de-emphasized and
the smell from the deep-fryers was filtered). Marcuse
(1995) articulates this theoretically by noting that the
“globalization of the city” has led to new spatial
configurations of urban space. This space is not at all
marked by openness (as the image of a borderless world
the very notion of “globalization” plays upon) but
instead by walls. Specifically, Marcuse argues that in contemporary
technologically advanced cities, five distinctive
types of residential area are emerging: elite quarters
built as enclaves and isolated buildings which also serve
as a site for “command and control” functions for the
city and economy (see also Dear and Flusty 1998; King
1999); gentrified districts occupied largely by the
“transnational producer-services class” and the cultural
workers of the global city; a suburban city for skilled
workers, civil servants, and middle-level professionals; a
tenement district occupied by immigrants and other
low-paid workers; and “an abandoned city, the end
result of trickle-down, left for the poor, the unemployed,
the excluded” (Marcuse 1995: 246). The irony, Marcuse
suggests, is that in such a city it is the walls (both real and
metaphorical) rather than the connections between the
quarters of the city that are of most importance. The city,
he argues, is at its most divided at least since the medieval
period (see also Davis 1990).
The “global city”—whether seen in terms of economics,
culture, or urban structure—and the reconfiguration
of geographical scale—whether seen as an
economic process, a point of political struggle, or a form
of social relations—indicate a profound transformation
in the way urban life is lived. The important point
that needs stressing here is that urban representations
are not just about meaning but also about the material
conditions of day-to-day life in cities and how these
material conditions change. The “urban problematic” is
every bit as important to understand now as it was when
Marston and her colleagues tried to come to terms with
the eclecticism that categorized urban geography a
decade ago. While changes in urban theory have created
new avenues for research, even more important have
been changes in the spaces of cities themselves—the
rapid urban restructuring that marked the last quarter of
the century. The balance of this chapter attempts to chart
just a few of the transformations in urban space and
urban theory—and lived experience.
Urban Transformations
Urban Geography · 249
Tiananmen, Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest.
As protestors in 1989 took to parks, streets,
squares, and town centers across Asia and Eastern
Europe, events clearly indicated the vital importance of
urban space to political control—its structure and representation,
its use and occupation, its power and control.
The revolutions of 1989 were not only revolutions in the
halls of government; they were popular uprisings filling
the very urban spaces that had to this point provided the
setting for the reproduction of the society the people
were protesting against. By transforming space, society
itself was transformed (Lefebvre 1991).
In the decades surrounding 1989, American and
Western European urban streets and parks were caught
up in the urban restructuring that accompanied what
Harvey (1989) identified as a thorough sea change in the
global political economy and were transformed by the
explosive growth of homelessness (Dear and Wolch
1987; Takahashi 1996; Wolch and Dear 1996). Women
and children, men both young and old, people of color as
well as whites, found themselves thrown onto the streets,
there to make whatever life they could in the putatively
public spaces of the city. Meanwhile, the urban and
suburban middle classes more and more found their
entertainment in the spaces of the mall and festival marketplace,
spaces themselves that seemed to portend a
new relationship between property, citizenship, and consumption.
By the beginning of the 1990s, the continued
rapid pace of urban restructuring contributed to a
growing sense of what some analysts describe as a “crisis”
of the city: an end to urbanity and all that has implied for
the construction of a vibrant public sphere (Berman
1984; 1986; Davis 1990, 1998; Goheen 1994, 1998; Zukin
1995). Some have argued that this transformation has
led to cities characterized by fragmented social and
spatial relations in which the construction of a “public”
is impossible. At the same time, others note that the