Global Networks, Linked Cities

Rating:
Summary: Outsourcing, in a broader context
Review: With the ever decreasing fall in the cost of communication, both digital and analog, this book speculates that a new global phenomenon may be emerging. A few years ago, during the height of the dot com boom, others suggested that the Web might give rise to the disaggregation of cities or cultural hubs, because cheap communications might let creative individuals work from virtually anywhere with a fast bandwidth connection to the Internet.

But as many major cities in developing countries achieve this thick connection, another possibility emerges, as suggested by this book. It is now possible for some of these cities to parlay this connection and a well educated workforce into a globally prominent role. In part by assuming some of the functionality hitherto almost exclusively taken by first world cities. Think for example on how Silicon Valley is outsourcing some of its work to Mumbai or Bangalore.

The book's suggestions of future global cities is intriguing. Though when they suggest this of Hong Kong, one might argue that it is already a global city by any reasonable measure of how plugged in it is into the global economy.