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Finding Our Way

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By VICKIE CHACHERE

vchachere@tampatrib.com

Published: November 23, 2008

TAMPA - Globe-trotting sociologist and economist Saskia Sassen is accustomed to touching down in a random city and getting an instant feel for the place.

So when she landed in Tampa on Monday for a series of events at the University of South Florida and a key address at the 2008 Coastal Cities Summit, Sassen had Tampa pegged.

"It seems like a very clean city," she noted just hours after arriving. "But it takes quite a long time to get from one side to another."

That is, literally, Sassen's surface assessment of Tampa. But the renowned expert on globalization is one known for digging deeper in to what makes major cities tick. She is part of a small but fascinating brain trust of academics who are figuring out what globalization means as it unfolds.

A prolific author on globalization and an oft-quoted expert source in the international press, Sassen is a professor at Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought and the London School of Economics. She is credited with coining the term "global city" and is known for looking behind the economic and social mechanisms of the world's great cities to understand how they work, why they work and how these cities are interconnected.

For a city like Tampa, whose citizenry isn't always certain what the future holds or where Tampa fits into the world around it, Sassen's perspective is illuminating. She argues that cities looking to secure the economic and social futures need to take a hard inventory of the things they do best and understand how that fits into the new global scheme. The great cities are ones that have taken their historical industries and carved out niches of expertise that make them essentially the center of their own universe, she says. Think London with its financial sector or Chicago with its expertise in agribusiness. For Tampa, globalization might be taking a new assessment of the strengths of its port in international trade and building more on that foundation.

The one thing she does not think benefits cities is the copying of each other's models. In other words, Tampa doesn't need to be like Miami or Orlando or Atlanta. But it must take full advantage of its unique strengths.

Sassen agreed to an interview in advance of her trip to Tampa, but she was in Beijing, so it was carried out by e-mail.

What do you see as the future of a city like Tampa? Do midsized cities have any chance of competing with global cities for corporate headquarters or building a high-level work force?

As economic globalization has expanded in the 1990s and onwards, the number of major and minor global cities has grown. Two trends lie behind this, and they are often overlooked. One is that different cities have different strengths and particular specializations.

Depending on what economic sector a global firm operates in, it is going to prefer some types of global cities over others for the specialized services legal, accounting, insurance, etc.. If you are a steel firm that wants to go global, you don't go to New York for these specialized services, you go to Chicago. Thus a city like Tampa has its own particular strong points compared to Miami or New Orleans, just to mention other cities in the larger region.

Can you talk a little bit about the message you delivered at the Coastal Cities Conference?

What I was just saying about global cities was the subject. It means that the specialized differences of cities get valued in the global economy, and that cities compete less with each other than is typically thought. Cities should not aim at becoming the same. The critical dynamic is the opposite: recover the deep economic history of a city. Chicago has become one of the major global cities because it is so different from New York in terms of its specialized knowledge economy. It developed its specialized services from handling steel companies, agribusiness, heavy transport and so on. When we look at the growth of global cities through this eye, all kinds of things begin to happen. And it also tells us that there is no perfect global city.

What do you think Barack Obama's election means for globalization in a political and economic sense? He's immensely popular in Europe, but some of his campaign statements suggest a protectionist bent. How do you read the situation?

It represents a possibility and a lot of good will. I am sure that Obama will not squander this good will the way President George Bush did after Sept. 11, another moment of great global good will towards the U.S. More concretely, I think that Obama will create a bridge to the world that is less centered on war and on finance, and more centered on other issues. Yes, he is likely to be more concerned about protecting American jobs, but I can imagine him launching a series of initiatives with other governments to contribute to genuine job-centered economic development in poor countries so that fewer people would emigrate out of despair. I can imagine him using the struggle for an environmentally sensitive economy to establish collaborations with other key governments. So the Obama effect would be to change the meaning of globalization rather than eliminate globalization.

It makes me think of what economist John Maynard Keynes wanted out of the post-1945 Bretton Woods agreement: that national states would work together to protect their national economies from excessive international fluctuations. That is not protectionism. It is international collaboration aimed at maximizing the number of countries that can have sound economies.

Do you think the global economic crisis should have the United States - its government and its corporations - rethinking the global economy? Is it a good idea to have so many nations' financial institutions so intertwined that when you have something like the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, it causes worldwide reverberations?

This is clearly an issue. There is full agreement that the subprime mortgage crisis was made in America, and it was made by financial firms (not, as is sometimes suggested, by low-income households not knowing how to handle a mortgage). And so was the credit-default swap crisis which now represents $55 trillion of outstanding debt.

There are two issues: One is that with interlinked markets even countries that never offered subprime mortgages or credit default swaps get caught in the downward vortex. And the second one, on which there is growing agreement globally, is that the lack of adequate regulation was a major contributor to the excesses that led to the crisis.

But these interlinked markets also make it difficult for a country to pull out of the global financial system. I don't see that as a realistic option. We are dealing with a global financial system that will require concerted action by governments to get a better balance between innovation and abuse.

Public opinion polls seem to indicate that Americans are growing less certain that free trade and globalization are a benefit to them personally. Should they feel threatened?

I do think that the current forms of global corporate globalization are enormously problematic, even though they have brought jobs and incomes to some poorer countries. To the outsourcing of jobs we can add that multinational firms are paying less and less in taxes in their home countries - especially in the U.S. That is an additional negative. However, we have long been interlinked globally and that is not about to go away. We need a more responsible corporate globalization. We cannot allow the excessive extraction of profits that begins to be the common pattern in the late 1980s. These firms could survive happily with more reasonable profit levels and salaries for their top personnel and dividends for their shareholders.

Let me add that there are other kinds of globalization that are very interesting and full of promise: the growing range of struggles to protect our environment, to protect the rights of workers, and so on. We should work at strengthening these; they would also be a counterpart to excessive corporate greed.

Editorial writer Vickie Chachere is a student in the University of South Florida's globalization studies program.

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