A World in Emergence: Notes Toward a Resynthesis of Urban-Economic Geography for the 21st Century

The argument in this paper is that we now need to move beyond the theoretical horizons of postfordism and to seek out a sui generis description of contemporary capitalism and its urban-economic geography. Three major characteristics of today's capitalism are singled out as exerting major impacts on the geographical reconstruction of the world as we know it: (1) digital technologies, (2) the new division of labor, and (3) the deeply intensifying role of knowledge and human sensibility in the labor process. The implications of these phenomena for urban form and regional development are discussed, with special reference to the cognitive-cultural economy of large cities. Recent transformations of the interstitial spaces between these cities are also considered. The argument goes on to place all of these issues in a wider spatial and organizational context in which the world is represented as a multifaceted, multitiered system of spatial convergence and differentiation. Some of the broad cultural and political meanings of this process are considered.