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Chicago-based rock band Pelican released the album City of Echoes last week. According to their website, Pelican has been touring domestically and internationally for several years now. Their latest album attempts to encapsulate their collective sense of place gained from roaming from club to club and from city to city in the age of globalization. While the album's monotonous melodies sometimes make the listener anxious and sometimes outright bored, according to one of the band's guitarists Laurent Schroeder-Lebec, quoted in a June 14 SF Station review, they are so on purpose to convey the album's main theme.
"City of Echoes stands for the feeling of sameness brought on by globalization. It's visiting countries and seeing slight differences through the window, only to end up at the club and feel like you didn't see anything at all, but it's also a tribute to the joy that burns inside when you reach a place and people who don't speak your language are rooting for your songs and welcoming you into their unique
environment."
The album's title track and a track entitled, "Bliss in Concrete", shift from steadily vacillating cruising rhythms to abrupt and shattering sections that serve to shock and disorient the listener. The often monotonous portions are greater than than shifting beats and seem to accentuate the globalization theme. The sameness is frustrating, yet comforting, serving to dilute the "culture shock" when it appears. The title track is available on the band's MySpace page and the "Bliss in Concrete" track is available on the intro to the band's homepage, where albums are available for sale. For a short history of Pelican and the making of its new album check out a recent Decibel cover story on the band.
MasterCard released a new ranking of global cities, "Worldwide Centers of Commerce". The list ranks London as the top commerce center in the world based on the methodology below. Most of the methodology factors seem to be variants of one factor, "Financial Deregulation". Another factor, "Knowledge Creation and Information Flow" seems to stray from the crowd, but I wonder how the authors of the study quantify that score. Still, the amount of data and insight provided on the MasterCard site is worth a look. A full list of the rankings and a fact sheet document are also provided.
Research Methodology
* Legal and political frameworks (10%) - Degree to which legal and political frameworks enable the emergence of a Global Center of Commerce.
* Economic stability (10%) - Degree to which a Center of Commerce is handicapped by an unstable economic environment, currency, or unpredictable inflation.
* Ease of doing business (20%) - Availability of quality, cost-competitive trade logistics; level of interconnectedness; and ability to attract and retain talent due to a high quality of living.
* Financial flow (22%) - Measurement of the city's actual output or financial achievement.
* Business center (22%) - Degree to which the city intermediates the flow of goods, services, people, finances and information, etc.
* Knowledge creation and information flow (16%) - Degree to which information flows freely and knowledge is generated.
There was an interesting feature in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle entitled, "GLOBALIZATION COMES FULL CIRCLE: Illegal immigration from Africa repeats a cycle that began with early humans following their food supply to other continents". The piece puts the most recent waves of immigration from Africa to Europe in a historical context by pointing out that it is only a larger repeat of countless migrations going back 60,000 years. It is instead the degree of income inequality between wage earners in Dhaka, Senegal and Barcelona, Spain (the two cities mentioned in the article) that encourages countless thousands to brave the Atlantic Ocean waters between Senegal and the Canary Islands in hope of a better life. Of curse, one could say the same about those who die suffocating in overheated trucks or dehydrated in the Sonora Desert while crossing our southern border. This week as a heavily muddled immigration "reform" bill died a murky death in the US Senate, it is important to remind ourselves of the plight of the immigrant and of the often brutal hypocrisy that that we in the developed world find ourselves in when debating a subject which at its center is so simple to comprehend both emotionally and economically.
According to a June Brooklyn Rail article, "The "Greening" of New York City", New York labor activist Kim Moody's new book, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present, provides an excellent analysis of the growing income inequality in New York's five boroughs since the mid-1970s. Moody argues that the city's notorious fiscal crisis during that year sent tremors through municipal officials which led them to take a drastic, more corporatist policy turn. Richard Wells, the author of the review, juxtaposes Moody's narrative within the context of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's recently released 25 year vision for the city, PlaNYC. Interestingly enough, the plan does not address the fact that New York City's poverty rate, 22 percent, is now twice the national average and that the top 20 percent of of New York earners now make 52 times more than the bottom 20 percent. The Mayor's plan seems to get mixed reviews across Gotham's political spectrum - see links below.
A 7 May BBC Article, Shanghai: Creating a Global City, details China's largest city's meteoric rise to prominence over the past 20 years. The article examines the growing concentration of wealth in Shanghai, the center of an urban agglomeration now larger than New York City. The number of migrants that have moved to the city during this period seemingly dwarf any peacetime migration of recent memory, as an estimated 4,000,000 people have relocated from China's rural areas. For more information on the effects of globalization on Shanghai, check out the links below.
Welcome to Global Shrinkage. This blog is designed to document the effects of globalization on communities, with a primary focus on large cities and urban neighborhoods. So often the globalization discussion tends to focus on global trade and economic rights issues. The polarization of wealth in large global cities (New York, London, Hong Kong, etc.) is having a profound impact both on rural communities and smaller urban areas throughout the world. Also, this concentration of wealth is having consequences at the neighborhood level. In many of the cities which are reaping the greatest economic benefits from economic globalization, large segments of their citizenry are being displaced by rising rents, condominium conversions, and large increases in service costs in longtime middle-class and working-class districts. It is not the purpose of this blog to take sides on what is a very divisive issue. Economic polarization is fact. The richest income brackets and the lowest income brackets are augmenting across the developed world. Some say this is an inevitable outcome of global transportation improvements and the need for more low-income workers in the developed world. Others say there are alternatives. Throughout the course of this blog the focus will be on the effects, and though there will be an effort to present both views with each posting, an absolutist pro-con focus will be avoided at all costs.
Chicago-based rock band Pelican released the album City of Echoes last week. According to their website, Pelican has been touring domestically and internationally for several years now. Their latest album attempts to encapsulate their collective sense of place gained from roaming from club to club and from city to city in the age of globalization. While the album's monotonous melodies sometimes make the listener anxious and sometimes outright bored, according to one of the band's guitarists Laurent Schroeder-Lebec, quoted in a June 14 SF Station review, they are so on purpose to convey the album's main theme.
