1.whatglobalization in this article? iandsome key detailsabout it;reflect on them;

2.are they complimentary or contradictory definitions?

3.Do they all seem to have a place or do some cancel others out?

4.Do yousee what a huge phenomenonglobalizationis when you look at all the definitions together?

CHAPTER 17

The Improbable Life of an Urban Patch Deciphering the Hidden Logic of Global Urban Growth

By: Jeb Brugmann

w e begin this chapter by exploring a typical city neighborhood to understand how it works as a microcosm of the global system of cities. To begin, imagine the classic image of Earth seen from space. You will surely see the familiar pattern of great seas and continents; deserts, polar regions, and forests; the blues, tans, whites, and greens that we have come to know through astronauts' eyes. These vast natural systems and territories are what ecologists call our planet's biomes. Each has its distinct currents and cycles; each has its unique, complex communities of plants and animals. But there is something truly odd about this image. You'll note that in this view your city neighborhood does not appear. In fact, in this prevalent image of Earth ironically photographed during Earth's most rapid period of urbanizationwe see a world without a single city. This deceptive view of our planet, and its widespread embrace, epitomizes the extent to which we have left our cities, and thus our future, out of view. To find your city neighborhood, we have to put this image aside and look at Earth from a different perspective. Imagine that same view from space, but this time at night.1 In this view, all the natural biomes are hidden in solar shadow and a totally different reality is exposed. Dense concentrations of light dominate continents and cluster on coastlines, revealing their own patterns. The United States and Europe are completely alight. A thick band of light extends all the way from Europe and the Middle East, across Russia and Siberia, to northern Asia. The lights then spread down the brightly profiled landmasses of Japan and South Korea, spill along the eastern half of China to Indonesia, and collect into a pool that illuminates the entire Indian subcontinent. The southern and northern coasts of Africa are ringed with light, and the glow in the eastern regions of South America extends around the southern and western coastlines. Light trickles out into the Amazon basin and up the western rise of the Andes.

These vast areas of light are evidence of a new ecological orderof the urban biome we are creating. We have only partial measures of urban populations, economics, health, financial flows, and resource consumption. But we know this much: we cannot see the few lights of a village from space. The dots, dense clusters, or long bands of light that extend across our continents are the growing City. The flow of energy represented by the continental constellations of light is indicative of many other Earth-changing flows that connect cities into metropolitan clusters and regional systems that, in turn, connect into the City, a phenomenon now as vast and commanding in Earth's order as the great oceans.

One point in this system of light is your city neighborhood. Zoom in from space, and the blues, tans, and greens give way to urban grays and browns. At first, the city structure looks like some kind of industrial hive or a piece of modern art, but because you have become habituated to it, you will recognize its patterns. You will discern the arrangement of streets and city blocks, of residential and industrial areas, and of canalized rivers and ports. Zoom in further and you will find the unique arrangement of streets, buildings, and green spaces that distinguish your urban patchthe urban equivalent of a tiny mountain crag or a ripple in a river. Now we can begin to understand the familiar yet ever-surprising character of the City.

• take in my own urban patch I leave my computer and go to the rooftop of my home. This is a quiet, mixed-income neighborhood in Toronto, Canada. From here I can see about five hundred feet in all directions. The two- and three-story homes of my neighbors face me to the east, across the street. Behind them lies the small neighborhood park. Beyond the park, I can see the rooftops of a small social housing project and a large high school. To the west, behind a row of trees, I see the back of another row of houses like mine. These houses face one of the bigger, mixed retail-residential avenues that border our neighborhood in each direction. There is another school across this avenue, and to the southwest I can see a high- rise housing complex. Directly to the south of my house, the single-family homes extend as far as I can see, and to the north, through the full canopy of mature maple trees and above the tops of other homes, I can glimpse the taller buildings on the districts main avenue. It seems a typical, uneventful place.
• average day unfolds. A few weeks ago, the neighborhood held its annual fireworks display and organized a cleanup in the park. Neighbors have been commiserating about the noisy, swearing teenagers on the basketball court and sharing a consoling word about the passing of an elderly neighbor who hadhvedhere since the neighborhood was built. A century ago this mans parents saw a pasture on this place, where it met a small, wooded ravine whose stream flowed down past the old brickyard and under the train tracks, and then passed through a colony of factories and workers' houses before it reached the shore of Lake Ontario two kilometers to the south. Our urban patch sits over the filled and leveled top of that ravine.

Among the accomplished writers, actors, musicians, and artists and the established professors, journalists, advertising professionals, lawyers, and civil servants who own property here, a stunning variety of recent immigrants have also laid claim in this small area. Some came from distant villages and are building their

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first footholds in the City. They have brought trades, extended families, and customs with them. They have not abandoned their places of origin but use our patch to extend their opportunities across those chains of light on the darkened Earth.

Twenty years ago this area was dominated by Greek and Italian immigrants. Most came in the 1950s, leaving behind countries unsettled by war. Now the annual Greek Independence Day parade on the main avenue seems like a relic of another time. An Ethiopian family owns and runs the corner store across from the school. A Korean family owns the discount store, and a Turkish family owns the shoe repair shop. These shops are across the street from a new Starbucks. Down the sidewalk from Starbucks, a Mexican immigrant has set up a burrito shop. Across the street, a Japanese man purchased a building for his sushi restaurant, and nearby two Jamaicans run a barbershop for the local Caribbean population. Another barbershop was located near the subway station for the Greeks and other Europeans, but when the two Greek barbers retired, they leased their shop to a barber from Bangladesh. The Greek men who ambled by the shop every day to theircafsand political clubs have been replaced by the daily flow of hundreds of predominantly South Asian men on their way to prayers at the neighborhood mosque. When we take our sons into the barbers now, we are invited to sit not with a copy of Sports Illustrated but with a copy of the Qur'an.

In the fifteen years I have lived in this place thatallsitself "the Pocket," it has developed a whole new community of Muslim immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and East Africa. Fifty percent of the children at our neighborhood elementary school do not speak English as their primary language. Cricket has become a regular sight in the park where our sons play baseball and hockey. Single-family homes and simple retail storefronts are used in new ways. Some have been divided into rooming houses, where new arrivals first take up residence as they look for work and wait for family members to arrive. Other homes are used during the workday as informal day care centers. On the avenue immediately west, next to an old Estonian church, an extended family from a small town in Gujarat owns four homes. Here the multiple couples, parents, in-laws, aunts and uncles, siblings, and cousins have re-created a life typical of the traditional "joint homes" in their native western India. On the main avenue five hundred feet to the north, near the old Italian grocery shop and the Baptist church (that still attracts worshippers of Caribbean origin each Sunday), another successful Gujarati family has established a clothing manufacturing and retail business. When'I buy'my business clothes there, I am treated with a courtesy and level of service that is extremely rare in the franchised retail landscape of North America.

The public stolidity and discipline of our new Muslim village contrasts sharply with other developments in this urban patch. One of the rooming houses became the residence of a drug dealer, and then of a prostitute who openly did fast favors for her roadside recruits behind an apartment building on a nearby street. To track the drug trade, the police placed undercover agents at the local doughnut and coffee shop. One January night a dead man was dumped in the alleyway behind our neighbors' homes immediately across the street. More recently, three men threatened a couple in the park with razors when they would not surrender their

252PARI' IV SPACESANU EN VIKONMEN1 S

wallets. Life in our patch of settled affluence and aspiring immigrants continues, although it also hosts an underworld of crime and illicit commerce that does not fit the image of a good neighborhood, even if this is a normal reality in most parts of the urban world today.

I increasingly notice similarities between fife in my Toronto neighborhood and life in cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Manila, and Johannesburg, where I have been conducting business. In those cities, low-income garbage scavengers who sell their materials to recyclers have long been an unofficial part of their city's system of solid waste management. Here in Toronto, subsistence scrap collectors do regular late-night rounds to scoop up metal appliances and furnishings that have been left for the municipal collectors. Other scavengers pick the valuable aluminum cans from our recycling bins, a practice that became so widespread that it cost the municipal recycling program an estimated million dollars each year, forcing the city to pass a law to stop it. A new deposit fee on wine bottles has spawned another specialization, whose "proprietors" have staked out territorial routes, which they "service" with repurposed shopping carts to collect the spoils from stoops and verandas of the areas wine-drinking homes.

Just a few hundred feet beyond the abstract border of our urban patch, people from other distant lands have created a microcosm of world affairs in a low-income housing complex. Women from different parts of the Caribbean rim their traditional micro-banking activities, in which members make monthly contributions to savings pools and disburse the proceeds to a different woman each month. A group associated with the Dinka rebel movement of southern Sudanrefugees from their country's twenty-two-year civil warplan their return. Afghani exiles from Taliban rule have been returning home to rebuild their businesses. Senior officials of Somalia's new national government have recently resided here, and the current prime minister of Somalia lived in a low-income housing project a few miles away.

Beyond the housing project to the southwest is a predominantly Chinese commercial district where we often shop. Here, rival extortion and drug gangs profit from the many restaurants and grocers. They occasionally have shoot-outs on the streets and have recently felled an innocent bystander. Stolen and contraband goods can be purchased from backrooms and basements. People wonder why the police cannot contain the gangs that operate so openly.

Students in our neighborhood high school, to the east, commute from an area where Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger insurgents have long operated an extortion scheme, which generates as much as $12 million a year for their insurgency. Human Rights Watch reports that extortion fees in this neighborhood are set at $1 for each day that each Tamil family has lived in Toronto. Tamil small business owners are "asked" to pay as much as $25,000 to $100,000 per annum?

These are some of the increasingly common signs of the changing life within any urban patch in the world today. I cannot begin to document or even imagine the connected worlds that are invented and taking root in this little place, which little more than a century ago was a stream, some field, and trees.

Even the natural order of things in our neighborhood defies expectations and stereotypes. People think of urban environments as depleted and spoiled, but they are not.

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They are enriched by hundreds of species, native and exotic. Toronto's urban neighborhoods host substantially greater numbers of species than the temperate rural landscapes that surround the city. In addition to domestic pets, some from continents far away, our patch hosts populations of woodland raccoons and skunks that five in denser populations than those found in their natural habitats beyond the city limits? These animals have fully adapted to urban living, digging nests into our rooftops and feeding surreptitiously on our leftover food. Foxes have been seen visiting the neighborhood, following the remnants of the old ravine through the train yard to the neighborhood park. The varieties of plants are even more exotic. We have avid gardeners in this patch. My twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot front yard hosts nearly one hundred perennial plant species. As a result of the exceptional ecological richness of our urban patches, greater Toronto has more plant and animal species than many whole countries.

The biology of a metropolitan area like Toronto maybe unstable in comparison to natural ecosystems. Our patch depends on vast quantities of materials, commodities, and energy that are extracted from distant other ecosystems, processed in far-flung patches of the City, and shipped to us here. But managed properly, our cities are full of untapped efficiencies and potentials. For example, one of the primary efficiencies of Earth's green and blue ecosystems is the way energy is recycled along an entire food chain, passing itself in ever new nutrient forms from one species to the next. Mimicking this pattern, energy recycling is becoming an important aspect of Toronto's evolving brown and gray ecosystem. The city government established a company that uses the waste steam from four downtown energy plants to provide an efficient heating solution for 140 high-rise office buildings, running the steam through a twenty-five-mile system of pipes. Then, in 2004, the same company opened a district cooling system that draws cold water from deep in Lake Ontario to serve one hundred major office buildings. The deep lake water, which is extremely clean, then flows into the Toronto water system. From there the used water is treated and returned to the lake (albeit with many different new trace chemicals). This clever infrastructure creates an urban ecology that is more symbiotic with the natural one. It reduces the electricity used in standard air-conditioning systems by 90 percent, it reduces air pollution and massive discharges of hot water into the lake from electrical plants, and it eliminates the use of ozone-depleting CFCs.

Our five-hundred-foot patch has also hosted odd ecological conflicts. For some years, a network of Greek and Eastern European immigrants made a living by collecting large earthworms at night from, among other places, the high school playing field, to be sold along a value chain to distant recreational fishermen. One resident of Greek heritage was a veritable kingpin in the so-called dew worm trade, a supplier to a regional industry that exported more than five hundred million worms to the United States each year. Nightly worm-gathering sorties in our high school playing field so depleted the worm population that the field became barren. Even weeds struggled to survive. The municipality eventually challenged the local worm industry, which one study described as including a daily informal auction in a restaurant where freelance pickers met with refrigeration truck operators to transport the worms to the U.S. border.5 The city's crackdown on the trade was

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part of a whole new regime for managing the urban environment, in which neighborhood trees, fields, wildlife, pets, waste, household chemicals, and parking spaces became, at least in theory, centrally regulated.

• spite of all this exotic detail, when guests visit our neighborhood, they remark that our area is comfortable, interesting, and charming. Our quaint neighborhood resembles many urban neighborhoods that we take for granted throughout the world. The faces and players might be different, but the dynamics of this Toronto urban patch are probably little different from the dynamics of the neighborhood that you can see from the roof of your city home or office. These are the dynamics of the fast-evolving world order that I have proposed we simply callmuch as we refer to the ice caps, the steppes, the rain forests, or the seasthe City.
• is important to understand what drives the enterprising convergence of so many different undertakings in a single city blocka Starbucks located two hundred feet from a drug house in the midst of a new outpost of the Gujarati diaspora close by where distant insurgencies are financed and foreign governments planned. Further, we need to understand the imperatives that drive the merging of cities throughout the world into a single, converging system that is re-ordering the most basic dynamics of global ecology, politics, markets, and social life.
• its root, we can only comprehend and ultimately steer the City's growth and the new pressures, competitions, and struggles it creates by understanding what makes cities places of so much opportunity. People and organizations don't go to cities for their problems. If cities were primarily the problem centers of the world, as they are so often portrayed, then it would seem logical that people and money would flee them. Their populations would not be increasing. Multinational companies would not be competing for new building sites. Dubai would not be host to thirty thousand (or 24 percent) of the world's construction cranes, just as Shanghai had a quarter of the world's cranes in the 1990s. People and organizations build and flock to cities and will continue doing so because they are massive generators of opportunity. Cities offer advantage in the worldunique chances to secure greater income, to organize for political rights, to benefit from education and social services, to meet other entrepreneurs or gain competitive position in a market. Cities, relative to other forms of settlement, offer what we can simply call urban advantage. The further concentration of hundreds of millions in cities, whether through risk-taking squatter communities, multinational companies, ethnic groups, social movements, guerrilla movements, or transnational gangs, reflects the multitude of strategies to claim some bit of control over a city's urban advantage so they can leverage it for their own advantage. If we don't understand what makes up urban advantage, then we can't understand the City.

Most cities, unless they are entirely new, have accumulated a unique legacy of urban advantage, bequeathed by the strategies of earlier urban pioneers who designed and built their cities in specific ways to secure their own advantage. If your city is lucky, those pioneers had insight about the basic elements of urban advantage that could be developed from the city's location and historic circumstances. Often this took the form of a strategic location itself, like Toronto's location by a protected harbor during a time of colonial warfare, or Chicago's location at the

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meeting point of two great shipping basins, or Bangalore's location on a high plain between the strategic centers of Mysore and Madras. Then, if your city's fortune holds, its pioneers learned how to arrange a mix of activitiesproduction, commerce, culture, and residential lifeinto a fixed spatial relationship with each other to created an efficient social and economic dynamism, which economists have explored as "agglomeration economies," but which I call a local citysystem to also embrace its social and ecological elements.

Take Bangalore, for instance. In the 1990s, it became a world-changing city, seemingly from nowhere. But its growth into a leading center of high-tech industry was built on a centuries-old foundation of developed urban advantage. Consider the city's historic practice of developing through distinct, specialized districts. First there was the old city where textile production, commerce, and residential activities were clustered efficiently together. Then came the nineteenth-century military cantonment, which joined barracks, housing for officers, military grounds, and later military research and production in another distinct citysystem. In the twentieth century, the city developed specialized industrial townships, where large primary manufacturers and supporting, small workshops were built adjacent to workers' housing and the retail establishments and vendors that served them. Then successive national and state governments endowed the city with every imaginable kind of scientific and research institute, again using a clustered campus model of urban development. This process started with the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science in 1909 and with its numerous spin-off research institutes over the decades. The process of scientific endowment within a clustered area of the city never really stopped. It extended to the National Aeronautics Laboratories (1960), the Indian Space Research Organisation (1969), and the Indian Institute ofManagement (1973) and to more recent institutes on information technology (IT), telematics, electronics, physics, and every other imaginable field of scientific inquiry.

By 1980 the city had scores of collegesand hundreds of thousands of students producing a fresh labor supply for its technical industries. Further hands-on training was offered through an explosion of private sector training companies. By 2000, Bangalore had 760 firms offering IT training alone. As its industries and technical institutes developed, the city created and attracted young talent. And while other major Indian cities became congested and unmanageable, Bangalore had physical room to grow and intellectual room to experiment.

Repeating the industrial township approach used decades earlier, in the late 1970s Bangalore's state government created the setting for the future IT sector in the form of an industrial park called Electronics City. In the 1980s, new software start-ups like Infosys joined the city's first generation of electronics companies in Electronics City. Here their proximity, shared needs, and shared frustration with the poor infrastructure engendered both the politics and economics for the country's first scaled broadband communications system in 1992. So great was Bangalore's legacy of urban advantage that with the simple addition of a new fiber-optic infrastructure in Electronics City, the city's software companies stood ready to profitably meet the huge new challenge faced by expanding transnational companiesthe

integration of their separate national business operations and acquisitions into more seamless global operations through new software systems. Bangalore's rise did not appear from nowhere. It was built on a foundation of urban advantage that could support unprecedented growth.

When people are asked to describe the basic stuff of cities, they tend to mention streets, sewers, drains, housing, factories, and skyscrapers. Or they get even more basic and list concrete, steel, brick, glassand lots of busy people. These are the things that visibly make what was once a marsh or village or small town a budding city. But clearly, a place like Bangalorejust one of countless specks of light on that extended global Cityderives its energy from more potent forces, from some other raw stuff of a city. That stuff is the four basic elements of urban advantage, which make cities everywhere magnets for every kind of ambition: what I call their economies of density, scale, association, and extension.

The first thing that anyone notices on entering a city is the concentration of people and their activities. Simple as it is, this density has been little understood, and its benefits are too often squandered through the low-density development of cities today. The density of cities is their most basic advantage over any other kind of settlement. Without density of settlement, most of what we learn, produce, construct, organize, consume, and provide as a service in the world would simply be too expensive. Density increases the sheer efficiency by which we can pursue an economic opportunity.

The scale of cities is the second building block of urban advantage. It increases the sheer volume of any particular opportunity, producing what we call economies of scale. Scale permits the splitting of fixed costs and known risks over a large enough group of users to make an activity attractive or service profitable in a big way. In this way, the scale of cities increases the range of opportunities and level of ambition that can be viably pursued in them and thereby the scale of the impacts that urban pursuits can have on the world.

The scale and density of interactions among people with different interests, expertise, and objectives then combine to create the third basic economy of cities. Together they exponentially increase the variety of ways and the efficiency with which people can organize, work together, invent solutions, and launch joint strategies for urban advantage. I call this collaborative efficiency economies of association. Like-minded people have only so much time and opportunity to happen upon the people and organizations with whom they can invent, plan, and launch their strategies for advantage in the world.

Finally, economies of density, scale, and association together provide the cost efficiencies and user communities to extend their organized strategies to other cities through infrastructure investments and technology applications. Shipping ports, airports, telephone, cable television, and fiber-optic networks depend on the combined economies of density, scale, and association in cities. We accurately call these systems urban infrastructure because their economic viability is uncertain without the supply efficiencies created by density and scale and the demand efficiencies created by association. The net result is a new kind of advantage: economies of extension. Extension is the ability to link the unique economic advantages of one city with those of other cities to create whole new strategies for advantage in the world.

Tnese elements of urban advantage are what allowed an unknown Los Angeles neighborhood gang to develop into a transnational criminal organization in less than fifteen years, just as it allowed Bangalore software entrepreneurs to leverage their relationships with companies in Europe and North America into a new business process outsourcing industry. Cities, and specific groups within cities, design and use urban infrastructure to extend their strategies and forms of association (e.g., commerce, politics, and crime) across a network of cities. They combine the unique advantage of one city with others to create whole new strategies for advantage in the City. Globalization is this process of developing new advantage from the unique economics of an extended group of citiesfrom their spatial designs, infrastructures, cultures, and local markets. Local urban affairs, therefore, are more (not less) important in the global era. They define the potential and the burdens of the expanding City.

There are two aspects to density in the growth of cities. Proximity reduces the time and energy and therefore the cost required to move people and materials around to achieve any objective. It is easy to do the math. Take an urban water system. If we are building a water system for a suburban neighborhood where homes are 120 feet apart versus a downtown neighborhood where homes are twenty feet apart, we have to use one hundred feet of extra pipe for each home in the lower- density neighborhood. If each neighborhood has one hundred houses, then a higher-density neighborhood saves an impressive two miles of pipenot to mention the costs for installation and maintenance and for pumping the water through it. But in my city, a person living in a low-density neighborhood pays the same rate for water as the people in my high-density neighborhood. The water department loses money on the low-density neighborhood, and our neighborhood must help make up the difference through our water rates and tax payments. The same basic math applies to every other service. If the city's average density goes down, then the underlying economics of the city deteriorate. Someone has to make up the difference. If people in low-density suburbs had to pay the full cost for their infrastructure, a great many of them would likely reconsider where they live.

When mutually supportive activities are located in proximity to each other, their concentration has a further synergistic effect. The economics of collaboration generally improve. Companies organize their different functions into a headquarters office or a campus to secure the other beneficial aspect of density: economies of concentration. Cities can exponentially increase these economies by clustering complementary activities together.

The economics of concentration were further driven home to me in Mumbai, where low-income vendors of bananas or tomatoes set their tables right next to each other on the street. There might be fifteen tomato vendors on one sidewalk together. On the surface this seems unwisethey are placing themselves right next to their competition. But the economic dynamics of density are such that by concentrating, they gain the benefits of a more scaled grocery operation. They created a unique go-to destination for tomatoes.

258 PART IV SPACES AND ENVIRONMENTS

One can see this use of clustering to create the proxy advantages of scale on city streets all over the world. If you walk along the main avenue of our Toronto neighborhood you will find a group of individual stores that specialize in homedcorand furnishings. They have organically concentrated together without any coordination or plan. On the surface, like the Mumbai fruit vendors, they are in competition with each other. But by concentrating together, they are using density to create what amounts to a specialized home furnishings market that attracts and serves customers from across a much larger area of the city, increasing the total pool of patrons for each individual store.

Like proximity, concentration can also provide physical economic benefits. Take high-rise apartment buildings as an example. In a world struggling to increase its energy efficiency, the high-density high-rise is an obvious solution. A freestanding home that is thirty feet long and twenty feet high has four walls of six hundred square feet each and a nine-hundred-square-foot roofa total of thirty- three hundred square feet exposed to Toronto's winter cold or Miami's summer heat. However, a condominium of the same size that is located in the middle of an eight-story building has just one wallsix hundred square feet exposed to the elements, through which winter cold or summer heat seeps in. Everything else being equal, the energy efficiency of a high-rise district adds in a very basic way to a city's urban advantage.

Density is the first thing that distinguishes a city from other forms of settlement because it is the city's first and most basic source of advantage. The second thing that you'll notice on entering any city is its scale. Ten years ago the restaurant and shop owners along a mile stretch of our main avenue decided to organize an annual festival in which they all sell their foods and goods on the sidewalksto the entire city. Now the festival attracts one million visitors in a two-day period alone. Festivals in cities around the world are the most traditional and accessible form of scaled market operation. The same economic dynamic that made this work in our little urban patch also transformed a collection of competing, individual commodity traders in Chicago into the world-renowned Chicago Board of Trade or supported the investments required for dozens of clustered software start-ups in Bangalore to grow into a global high-tech hub with hundreds of thousands of employees.

The combination of density and scale economies underpins the third basic advantage of cities: association. The concentration, proximate convenience, and number of interactions between the people in a citywith their different ideas, talents, desires, and intentionsallow societies to efficiently organize into myriad groups with shared pursuits and strategies. The economics of association starts as a simple self-organizing process among small groups of like-minded people. For instance, the Muslim families in my neighborhood, from very disparate places and backgrounds, can join together into a common religious community and pool their resources to expand and upgrade their austere mosque. Like-minded neighbors can easily raise funds to upgrade and manage the activities in our neighborhood park. The businesspeople on the main avenue, from so many different countries and cultural backgrounds, can associate to created a common festival and commercial identity.

Ona larger scale, city dwellers from many places and backgrounds meet, mix, plan, and engineer electorates, companies, NGOs, shadow governments, systems of criminality, and insurgencies. The economics of association in cities permits the efficient organization of talent into labor markets (like the huge new market for software technicians in Bangalore), research collaborations (like the development of e-mail and the Internet in Cambridge), and industries (like the organization of the Gounder migrants in Tiruppur). The efficiency of urban association underlies the basic process of human invention and innovation. People of all backgrounds are drawn to cities to break from the restrictions and injustices of traditional rural societies and to reorganize themselves into new communities. By facilitating new forms of association, our cities increase the pace and variety of human invention and social change.

Finally, when people and organizations associate to leverage advantages from their city, they also raise resources to build the infrastructure to tap into the opportunities of other cities. Extension from city to city is the story of my neighborhoods globally collaborating artists, activists, businesspeople, and diaspora communities, and of its criminal organizations, war extortionists, and multinational franchises alike. What starts as a local criminal gang in Hanoi or Los Angeles can extend its influence here to Toronto and thereby find new opportunities in the global City. For instance, not long ago Toronto-area police uncovered an alliance between Asian and Hungarian criminal organizations, reportedly involving one family in our urban patch, which had jointly stolen $7 million in postal checks from regional post offices. Similarly, what starts as an insurgency in Sri Lanka can develop into an international financing system that uses personal identification numbers (PINs) to track the annual payments of tens of thousands of households and small businesses in Toronto's Tamil diaspora population.

Once associates extend their reach across a group of citiesfor instance, connecting New York retailers and marketers, and their unique advantages with the design industry that emerged from the unique advantages of Milan and Barcelona, with the manufacturers that emerged from the unique advantages of Tiruppur the shared urban advantage of these places can be leveraged to support a new value chain in the global City. These alliances have developed what I call an urban strategy. Others call it something less precise: globalization.

Today, extended urban networks drive the political developments of entire countries, as in the case of my urban patch's influence on Somalia, or the earlier worldwide urban networks of South Africa'smigranti-apartheid leadership, which sourced the finance, know-how, weaponry, and political support to overthrow the Afrikaaner apartheid regime. Likewise, local commercial communities demand and enable investments in new extension infrastructure, like the early demands of Bangalore's budding high-tech companies for a fiber-optic network. The shipping ports and airports, telephones, and Internet services that these extended networks demand provide the nervous system for the City.

Density, scale, association, and extension drive development in every urban patch, whether in a Toronto neighborhood,a Machaasquatter camp, a little inner- city immigrant district like Pico-Union, or a high-tech incubator district in Bangalore.

----anuorganizations of every sort have joined the rough-and-tumble clamor to shape the raw economics of urban patches everywhere into spatial arrangements and building forms that offer them unique advantage. This makes the development and spatial designs of each city a constant around-the-clock competition. The most basic challenge of every city is to transform that competition into a governed negotiation to create shared urban advantages for all whose ambitions bring them to the city. The distinct ways in which cities and their different urban patches succeed or fail in creating these shared advantages determines their contributions, for better or worse, to the world City system.