| Scott
D. Campbell
Assistant Professor College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan 2000 Bonisteel Blvd. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069 sdcamp@umich.edu (734) 763-2077 |
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Research Assistants:
Myriam Figueroa-Melendez Holly Flynn Past Research Assistants:
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Selected Links to Related Sites:
| Capital Cites (general)
"Understanding Capital Cities" (draft version) Specific Capital Cities... Berlin
Washington, D.C.
Ottawa
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Putrajaya, Malaysia
Putrajaya home page Cyberjaya (high-tech twin city) Global Cities
Other Links:
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Project Summary:
This project examines the changing role
and identity of national capital cities in a contemporary, comparative
context. I analyze the consequences of four phenomena:
the emergence of the "information city," threats to the monopoly power
of nation-states, the rise of a transnational network of global economic
cities, and the replacement of spatial with virtual networks. Are
these forces elevating the power of internationally-oriented advanced service
metropolises while demoting the status of traditional, nationally-oriented
capital cities? The answer will likely be complex, with some capitals
indeed losing out to economic centers (Washington to New York, Bonn and
Berlin to Frankfurt, Ottawa to Toronto), while those capitals with combined
political and economic dominance actually benefit from these public-private
partnerships (London, Tokyo). This project builds directly upon the
author's past research on Berlin and other government-dependent cities,
and combines both statistical analysis and comparative case studies.
Specific Issues to be Explored: Past
research, gaps, and research questions
Capital cities are an easily defined but poorly
understood class of cities. Often marginalized in urban research
as merely administrative centers, capitals are also symbolic theaters for
national ideology, a reflection of the larger national stance towards urbanism,
a catalyst of national economic development, and at least historically
a bridge between local culture and the "imagined community" of the nation-state.
There is no theoretically precise academic literature that concisely explains
the role of capital cities in the modern era. The various themes
found in capitals have been fragmented and absorbed by other disciplines.
The resulting literature on capital cities consists of a diverse collection
of writings by architects, historians, political scientists, urban planners
and sociologists ó each addressing different aspects of capital
cities, without creating a single, explicit theory of capital city development.
Though there is a wealth of writings on the description, history and architecture
of individual capital cities, a bibliographic search for theoretical writings
explicitly on capital cities leads to a surprisingly short set of readings
(Clark and Lepetit 1996; Cornish 1971; Eldredge 1975; Gottmann 1977; Gottmann
1983; Gottmann 1985; Taylor, LengellÈ, and Andrew 1993; Vale 1992).
As Rapoport notes, "...little has been written about capitals as a type,
as opposed to specific capitals..." (Rapoport 1993, 31).
In my previous research on the urban economic
development of Berlin, I directly confronted this lack of capital city
theory (Campbell 1999). Berlin's bizarre history offered the unusual
opportunity to observe the loss and recent recovery of the national government
seat. The city's rapid, 20th Century transformation as the capital
of an imperial, then a republican, then a fascist, and finally to a decentralized
democratic government, demonstrated the challenge for capital cities to
adapt to (or resist) broader historical revolutions. The capital
city debate in 1991 between Berlin and Bonn ó as well as subsequent
controversies over renovation of historic buildings and architectural plans
for new government buildings ó revealed a broader debate over national
identity. Political battles in the city highlighted the alternately
collaborative and conflicting relationship between the local residents
and the national power-brokers. Finally, the current economic policy
of restoring Berlin to its prewar status as a world economic city is conflicting
with the harsh new realities of global economic networks.
The experience of Berlin is so exceptional
that a literal generalization to other capitals would be unwise.
However, exceptional cases are catalysts for rethinking theory (George
1979; Yin 1994). From this Berlin research I identified broad questions
that should form the foundation of a more general capital city research.
How do capital cities as a group differ from non-capitals? How do
individual capital cities differ from one another (e.g., based on city
size, year of origin, function, national government structure)? How
has the role of capital cities changed over time in response to the historical
transformation of the nation-state? How does the nation-state express
its identity through the capital city (in particular through its architecture)?
What is the local political structure of national capitals (and how does
the call for municipal autonomy conflict with national interests)?
What is the impact of the location of capital cities and of political efforts
to relocate capital cities (such as in Brazil, Australia, Germany and Japan)?
Finally, is there a unique local economy of capital cities? The value
of such research is not only to understand this specific type of city,
but also to understand the larger interaction of political and economic
networks in the emerging global urban system.
Approach
For this present research project, I shift from
the exceptional case of Berlin to a broader, comparative analysis to examine
the future of national capitals. The traditional role and identity
of capital cities is being threatened by several converging structural
changes. I analyze the consequences of four phenomena:
the emergence of the "information city," threats to the monopoly power
of nation-states, the rise of a transnational network of global economic
cities, and the replacement of spatial with virtual networks. These
forces will not eliminate the need for capitals; but they will reshuffle
the current hierarchy of world cities, shift the balance of public and
private power in capitals, and threaten the current dominance of capitals
as the commercial and governmental gateway between domestic and international
spheres.
Information City
I situate capitals as a specific form of an "information
city": not just in its late 20th Century incarnation as a high-tech,
financial and media center (Castells 1990), but also in its older role
as a center of governmental and military information processing, of political
decision-making, of power-brokering, of census and tax gathering.
"A capital is a transactional crossroads catering to the problems and needs
of vast areas from where transients come to the capital, in more or less
regular and recurrent fashion, to transact diversified business or gather
information" (Gottmann and Harper 1990, 81). The capital
has become the huge processing center of the modern bureaucratic state
ó with high-profile, front-office leaders and low-paid back-office
government clerical workers ó analogous to the insurance, financial
and legal processing found in the private sector of contemporary "information
cities." As the boundaries between the public and private sector
increasing blur, the data of this public information city extends far beyond
the traditional documents of diplomatic treaties, military strategy and
tax records to be remarkably similar to private-sector information used
by the insurance, financial and legal businesses (such as the processing
of medical, unemployment and retirement payments, loans, interest rates
and repayment schedules). In a decentralized federal system,
the capital is analogous to the corporate headquarters: the result
of the spatial division of labor, with the primary decision-making in a
single, central location, and the implementation/production in many locations.
Changes in the nature of government information, the processing of information
and the information technologies themselves will alter the role of capital
cities.
The Changing Role of the Nation-State
If the modern nation-state is a relatively recent
construction, so too is the capital city that administers the modern nation-state.
The capital city is the spatial concentration of this modern national power
in single, specific location, reinforcing the spatial division of labor
between the governing and the governed. This traditional monopoly
of power and authority of capital cities is threatened on two fronts.
From below, growing home rule and regionalist movements decentralize power
from the national capital to regional centers. This has also taken
the form of population decentralization efforts in many nations after 1945
(Hall 1993, 79). From above, the rise of supranational institutions
(such as the European Union) has added a level of political power above
that of nation-states, and thus above capital cities. National capitals
are thus increasingly embedded in a more complex hierarchy of political
centers.
The Rise of Global Economic Cities
Economic changes also threaten the traditional
role of capital cities. International economic markets have elevated
the role of global cities, the command-and-control centers of the global
economy (Knox and Taylor 1995; Sassen 1991). These transnational
networks both supplement and undermine the traditional role and influence
of capital cities over national and international economic development.
In addition, the shift from manufacturing to services as the foundation
of urban economies has transformed the traditional distinction between
industrial cities and capital cities, creating a new dichotomy between
the post-Fordist global city and the more traditional capital city.
The ascendance of this transnational economic network of cities challenges
this political network of national capitals. The consequences are
mixed. The advanced service orientation of post-industrial nations
undermines capitals with strong manufacturing dependencies, yet it may
actually benefit other capitals with strong private sector advanced services
(such as London and Tokyo). The administrative functions and skills
of a capital city overlap with the work of the advanced services in the
private sector, making for potentially useful public-private synergies
in capital cities ó just as there were symbiotic relationships between
private manufacturing and the military, infrastructure and consumer needs
of the state in the 19th Century capital city.
But the footlooseness (declining ties to place)
of private-sector services may also foreshadow the future geography of
government administration as well. If, as some have argued, we are
coming into a space of flows rather than a space of places (Castells 1996),
and if the network is more important than the node, then the geography
of political power could shift from a nodal center (the fortress, the palace,
the Baroque capital city) to the network (the institutional and infrastructural
connections between a decentralized administrative system).
From the Spatial to the Virtual: The
End of Capital Cities?
At the extreme, is a single point capital really
necessary anymore? One could imagine a new political geography beyond
the very traditional notion of political power being physically concentrated
in one urban center. Echoing the rise of the virtual office, corporation
and university, a government could maintain its institutional centralization
yet be spatially ubiquitous. The "virtual capital" would have an
electronic parliament or congress. The scenario is a non-place capital
city: a nation without a capital city, but rather with a spatially
decentralized network of political administration and control. The
logical conclusion would be direct democracy through the Internet, leading
not to the Marxian notion of the state withering away, but rather to the
withering away of the capital city. The World Wide Web would replace
the World City.
Yet working against this virtual capital is the
mighty inertia of capital city infrastructures and place-based political
power: face-to-face contact, the human element of special-interest
lobbying, the non-standardized process innovation of political work, and
the fear that geographic isolation leads to loss of political influence.
Enthusiastic 20th Century predictions of technologically-driven radical
decentralization have generally been undermined by forces of recentralization.
The more likely scenario for the capital city of the twenty-first century
is a hybrid of a single pole of centralized functions and decentralized
administrative networks: that is, a hybrid governmental space of
central place and flows. Patterns of this can already be seen in
federal countries such as Germany and the United States, where district
courts, regional offices, decentralized research centers and agencies conduct
government work outside the capital city. This research seeks to
identify the next steps in this spatial reallocation of political work.
Methods/Techniques
This study will use both statistical analysis
and comparative case study approaches. The former will allow for
the development of a typology of capital cities, and provide basic trend
data on the changing urban functions of capitals. The study will
include a stratified selection of cities from both political and economic
hierarchies. The first group are cities that occupy positions in
the global urban hierarchy loosely reflecting their nation's respective
positions in the world's political economy: first tier global cities
(London and Tokyo), as well as second and third tier (Paris, Madrid, Stockholm,
Moscow, Seoul, Beijing, Mexico City and Vienna). The second group
are cities whose political and economic positions are disparate, including
both non-capital cities that are key urban centers in the global economy
(New York, Toronto, Frankfurt and Sydney) and the opposite: capitals
with modest economic roles (Washington, Ottawa, Canberra, Brasilia, Bonn).
Measures of the changing role of capital cities
include economic variables (e.g., employment in key sectors such as international
finance; number of corporate headquarters; airport traffic, per capita
income), political variables (e.g., government employment, number of international
and NGO agencies) as well as basic demographic variables. This data
will allow for the comparison of the city's position in political and economic
hierarchies. The goal is the development of a systematic data
base on capital cities that will serve both for aggregate analysis, classification,
and the identification of individual cases for further study.
The use of case studies will then allow for a
more detailed examination of dynamic, causal relationships in select capitals.
This case study approach is well suited for the examination of contemporary
cities where it is difficult to separate phenomena from the larger urban
context (a characteristic of interdependent urban processes); a complex
range of variables; and heterogeneous sources and forms of evidence.
References
Campbell, Scott. 2001. Cold
War Metropolis: the Fall and Rebirth of Berlin as a World City.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (forthcoming).
Campbell, Scott, and Susan S. Fainstein, eds.
1996. Readings in Planning Theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Castells, Manuel. 1990. The Informational City.
London: Basil Blackwell.
Castells, Manuel. 1996. The rise of the network
society. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Clark, Peter, and Bernard Lepetit. 1996. Capital
cities and their hinterlands in early modern Europe. Aldershot, Hants,
England: Brookfield, Vt.: Scolar Press; Ashgate Pub.
Cornish, Vaughan. 1971. The great capitals; an
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Eldredge, H. Wentworth, ed. 1975. World Capitals:
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Fainstein, Susan S., and Scott Campbell, eds.
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Gottmann, Jean. 1983. Capital Cities. Ekistics
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Gottmann, Jean. 1985. The Study of Former Capitals.
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Gottmann, Jean, and Robert A. Harper, eds. 1990.
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