(Paper prepared for presentation at a conference on GLOBAL TENSIONS, Cornell University, March 9-10, 2001)

Soon after the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the Rodney King verdict, the Los Angeles Times (Robin Wright, May 25, 1992) published an article entitled "Riots Called Symptom of Worldwide Urban Trend." The article focused on a recently issued United Nations report on world urbanization trends that argued that what happened in 1992 was part of "an urban revolution taking place on all six inhabited continents, brought about by conditions very similar to those in Los Angeles: crime, racial and ethnic tension, economic woes, vast disparities of wealth, shortages of social services and deteriorating infrastructure." Supporting this view, the article also reported bluntly that 1) the U.S. has the largest gap between wealth and poverty in the developed world; 2) this gap is widest in New York and Los Angeles; and 3) this urban polarity in the country�s two largest cities is now comparable to that found in Karachi, Bombay, and Mexico City. Pointedly, the report went on to predict that "urban poverty will become the most significant and politically explosive problem of the next century."

In any assessment of the major "global tensions" affecting life in the 21^st century, a strong argument can thus be made that specifically urban tensions must be ranked among the most socially explosive and politically challenging. That these tensions revolve primarily around deepening poverty and its related conditions of urban deterioration provides a useful starting point for analysis and discussion. But it is also important to begin by recognizing that urban tensions today, all around the world, are significantly different from what they were thirty years ago, and must be addressed in ways that reflect the distinctive properties of the contemporary condition, that is, with an understanding of the new urbanization processes that have been reshaping cities and urban life everywhere in the world over the past three decades. It must also be noted that these specifically urban tensions are not confined to the urban scale, but reverberate across all scales from the local to the global.

That urban poverty is a significant and politically explosive problem is certainly not new. For many parts of the world, this statement could have been made at almost any time in the past two centuries. What is new, however, is above all the emphatically shared globality of the problem. Something akin to an urban revolution has been happening to cities everywhere in the inhabited world, so that today most of the world�s major cities have similarly volatile conditions of urban poverty and social polarization. Looked at in a slightly different way, what this suggests is that never before has the general urban condition been so similar among the major metropolitan areas of what we have traditionally called the First, Second, and Third worlds. Significant differences remain across cultures and continents, but the distinctive qualities of urbanism as a way of life have become shared to a degree never before achieved, at least since the origins of the industrial capitalist city.

This increasingly shared urbanity, and especially the growing tensions associated with deepening urban poverty and social polarization, are largely the product of two major forces that have been dramatically reshaping nearly every aspect of contemporary life over the past three decades. The most widely studied of these forces of change is the globalization of capital, labor, and culture, which has been affecting every one of the world�s large cities, albeit in radically different ways.

Indeed, an integral but relatively understudied constituent of these globalization processes has been the worldwide diffusion of large scale urbanization and, to a lesser degree, the advanced systems of industrial production that have hitherto been confined to First World countries and cities. Among its many effects, globalization has redefined the size of cities, creating a reorganized and re-networked hierarchy of giant global city-regions, some of which now surpass 25 million inhabitants, a size considered almost inconceivable thirty years ago. Suggestive of the deepening poverty integrally associated with this globalization of industrial urbanism (often misrepresented as "postindustrial"), is the expectation that within the next decade or two the majority of the world�s population will be living in metropolitan regions of more than a million inhabitants.

Intertwined with the globalization of capital, labor, and culture has been a profound and more endogenously generated economic restructuring, especially pronounced with respect to the longstanding First World interdependence between the urbanization and industrialization processes. The past thirty years has seen a dramatic transformation of the economic base of First World cities, a transformation that has come to be described as a shift from Fordist and Keynesian systems of mass production and mass consumption, concentrated in large urban-industrial regions such as the Ruhr, Northeast England, and the American Manufacturing Belt, to postfordist systems of flexible and information intensive industrialization, associated with the vertical disintegration of the production process and the spatial re-agglomeration of firms in new clusters or districts, many of which had never been industrialized before.

In the advanced industrial countries, this "new economy" has been the product of combined processes of deindustrialization, primarily affecting the older Fordist urban economies, and reindustrialization, mainly in new postfordist industrial city-regions. The new economy has also spilled over into major cities in what are now called Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs), the national counterparts to newly industrialized urban areas such as Silicon Valley in California and the "technopoles" of Europe and Japan. Contributing still further to this global urban convergence, the new economy has also been extending its effects into the socialist urban fabrics of the former Second World in ways we are only beginning to comprehend. This global reach of what collectively can be called the new urbanization processes has carried with it the growing urban tensions associated with deepening poverty and inequality.

In Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Blackwell, 2000), I focus attention on the new urbanization processes being generated by globalization and economic restructuring. I describe their cumulative impact as the postmetropolitan transition, a reconfiguration of the modern metropolis into a significantly different metropolitan form and way of life, reflecting a new phase of urban industrial capitalism. The postmetropolitan transition offers a more comprehensive interpretive framework for examining what the UN called an "urban revolution" and for elaborating upon the major causes and consequences of the contemporary urban condition, especially in the world�s major globalized city-regions. In particular, the composite impact of these new industrialization processes help us to understand better the primary sources of the politically explosive expansion of urban poverty that has seemingly been built in to the new urbanization processes. In what follows, I try to summarize some of the major new developments that have contributed to the widening gap between the rich and the poor and to the intensifying urban tensions that characterize contemporary urbanism.

Increasing cultural heterogeneity, arising from extraordinary increases in transnational migrations, have been key factors increasing tensions in nearly all the world�s major city-regions. Globalization and migratory diasporas have created what are surely the most culturally and ethnically heterogeneous cities the world has ever known. While for many a source of survival as well as creativity and social mobility, such heterogeneity has also multiplied the possibilities of inter-cultural conflict and violence, and generated a new form of "cultural politics" that revolves around complex questions of difference, representation, identity, citizenship, and local democracy. This new cultural politics, mixing together resurgent traditionalism with new forms of cultural hybridity and transnational identity formation, is still in formation, but even in its early stages it has come into frequent conflict with older and more established structures of power and authority, multiplying the sources of urban tension.

Further magnifying tensions and adding to the shared globality of contemporary urbanism has been what some call the "third worlding" of major First World city-regions, as immigrant populations preponderantly from poor countries become an increasing part of urban life and livelihood. The growth of large immigrant populations, and especially their perceived competition for local jobs and welfare services, has triggered significant antagonism from resident groups defending their economic and political turfs in the city. New rounds of racism and discrimination have thus been generated, often in association with nativistic movements aimed at expelling the newcomers.

The urban landscape has thus become increasingly filled with a dense multiplicity of cultural and economic cleavages that not only reflect local or national differences but also the international conflicts and confrontations that arise in the global geopolitical economy. The old dualisms of class and race remain, but are now overlain and cross-cut with a much more complex and variegated set of polarizations, producing an urban landscape that is no longer describable as a simple mosaic but rather as a constantly shifting fractal geography.

Postfordist industrial restructuring has also had major effects on the urban landscape. For example, it has led to radical changes in the structure, composition, and spatial organization of urban labor markets, contributing to still further fragmentation, inequality, and polarization. Once describable as a pyramid with a bulging middle, the distributional pattern of incomes and occupations in most First World city-regions has been developing a new shape, with a small bulge at the top, reflecting the increasing number of high income jobs in the new economy, and an enormous bloating at the bottom, filled with a huge population that has been defined as the working poor. The once-bulging middle has been concurrently squeezed, as growing numbers of once middle class workers filter downward toward the poverty line. This markedly polarized new labor market, often filled with specialized ethnic niches, is most prominent in the U.S. but is also part of the new urban economy in most advanced industrial countries. In those cities without a significant middle class bulge in their labor markets, the polarization that was there to begin with has typically been intensified.

Rising immigrant populations, along with other causes of labor market polarization, have triggered the explosion of the working poor and increased the incidence of multi-job households and part-time or contingent labor. Simultaneously, increasing numbers have fallen entirely out of the labor market, swelling the ranks of the welfare dependent and homeless. Moreover, these populations have become so large that they can no longer be contained in tightly segregated urban spaces as easily as they were in the past. The increasing visibility of the poor, the newcomer, the "other," is another prominent feature of the postmetropolis, and has instigated a counter-movement of the rich into more defensible residential spaces, often protected by armed guards and other indications of a fortress mentality.

All these conditions have contributed to what Mike Davis (1990) has described as an "ecology of fear" in the postmetropolis, leading to what he calls the expansion of security-obsessed urbanism. Although he was specifically writing about Los Angeles, these conditions, to varying degrees, can be found in almost every major global city-region. In this volatile and fractal urban landscape, fear is in the air. It not only thickens urban tensions everywhere in the city, it also leads to major changes in the built environment, from the detailed patterning of streets and buildings to larger reconfigurations of the urban form. Housing developments as well as shopping malls are increasingly designed as fortresses, and are visually and aurally policed as such. In nearly every city, the extent of truly public space has been shrinking, as waves of deregulated privatization drench the public realm with intensified efforts at social control. The surveillance camera, for example, has become an accepted element of the everyday streetscape in many cities.

In the U.S. at least, the upper 10% of the income distribution now controls proportionately more wealth than at any other time except, perhaps, for the Great Depression. Even more insidious for the political and economic life of cities, larger numbers of the rich than ever before have been abandoning their civic responsibilities to dwell in secluded and vigorously protected privatized communities, what Evan Mackenzie (1994) calls privatopias. Seeking (and having the means) to escape from real and/or imagined urban tensions, the secluded wealthy contribute less and less of their wealth to the resolution of urban problems. Just how much these North American trends are being globalized into other major city-regions around the world is difficult to measure, but it would be surprising if they were confined only to their peak regions of development.

Intensifying urban tensions still further has been an extensive restructuring of urban form. Stated most simply, the postmetropolis has become increasingly characterized (as well as most directly defined) by what can be described as the urbanization of suburbia, as new cities have mushroomed outside established urban cores, in large part based on the formation of new industrial and commercial employment agglomerations such as Silicon Valley, Orange County, and other high-technology complexes around Boston as well as London, Paris, Tokyo, and Sao Paulo. Now known familiarly as Edge Cities, Outer Cities, or Postsuburbia, this more regionally defined urbanization process has blurred many of the conventional boundaries of the metropolis, especially that between the urban and the suburban. But they have also generated many other effects both inside and outside the more successful examples of Outer City development.

Most of the attention given to the problems arising from this restructuring of urban form has centered on the poor populations, mainly minorities and immigrants, that have become concentrated in inner city neighborhoods increasingly distant from better paying jobs, now clustered primarily in the Outer Cities. This condition of highly concentrated urban poverty has been described as a spatial mismatch and is reinforced by similar skills mismatches within the growing pool of the working poor, the welfare dependent, and the homeless. Here then is still another indication of how the new urbanization processed have worked to magnify social and economic inequalities and intensify urban tensions in the emergent postmetropolis.

Less well studied, however, are other problem areas arising from the restructuring of urban form and what can be called the geographically uneven urbanization of suburbia. To take an extreme case, there are several outer cities surrounding Los Angeles that have grown very rapidly as huge concentrations of relatively cheap housing. Although increased local employment opportunities were promised by the developers, inspired by successful nearby Outer Cities, the jobs did not materialize, forcing many workers to travel up to two and a half hours each way to their old job sites. These off-the-edge cities, as I have called them, despite their bright (post)suburban appearances, have become among the most psychologically and socially stressful places in the postmetropolis, with exceedingly high rates of suicide, spouse abuse, child abuse, divorce, delinquency, and other signs of family and community dysfunction.

As I noted at the start and hope has become clearer in the ensuing discussion, the package of problems associated with deepening poverty and the prolific urban tensions they generate are not in themselves inherently new, but they are now different enough in qualitative and quantitative terms to demand appropriately new ways of understanding, analysis, and public response. Long established approaches to these problems and attempts to resolve them should not be discarded, but they must be adapted to the new urban contexts that have taken shape over the past thirty years of what I have described as the postmetropolitan transition. Simply put, urban poverty (and practically everything else associated with it) is no longer exactly what it used to be, and this difference matters. Making theoretical and practical sense of the rising urban tensions of the 21^st century requires an effective understanding of the new urbanization processes generated by complex forces associated with globalization and economic restructuring. This understanding becomes even more urgent as there are signs that, after thirty years of crisis-generated restructuring affecting every scale of our lives, from the local to the global, we may have entered a new period of crisis formation, generated by those same restructuring processes.

Just as the continuing spread of financial meltdowns are indicative of the new stresses and strains of globalized capitalism, the growing evidence of urban social unrest around the world may be signaling a crisis of the postmetropolis in all its ramifications. In many ways, the violent uprising that took place in Los Angeles in 1992 was a vivid harbinger of this new kind of urban crisis. That this event took place in Los Angeles is not surprising, since it is here that the postmetropolitan transition has taken one of its most advanced and fulsome forms. It may be appropriate then to conclude this discussion, which has thus far focused on the negative side of contemporary urbanism, with some more positive and optimistic examples from Los Angeles.

In recent years, Los Angeles has become a major center of innovation in the national labor movement, especially with regard to the formation of new alliances aimed at achieving greater social and spatial justice for the largely immigrant working poor, which some estimates say now make up more than a third of the county population. Led for the most part by innovative Latinas, organizations such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) have become the focal points of pan-ethnic labor and community coalitions which are using their knowledge of the restructured and globalized geography and economy of Los Angeles to develop new spatially-conscious strategies to struggle for the rights of immigrants and the working poor. Increasingly, they view these rights as residential rights to the city and to the urban region: the rights to live in areas not threatened by nearby hazardous waste concentrations and other environmental dangers; the rights to a living wage and, as taxpayers, to full access to basic public services such as health, education, and public transport; and, even when not U.S. citizens, the right to vote in local elections.

In a recent court case brought by a new organization called the Bus Riders Union, these struggles for spatial justice and what might be called regional democracy, succeeded in redirecting the investment plans and priorities of the Metropolitan Transit Authority from a costly fixed rail transportation system that would primarily benefit white and relatively wealthy suburban residents and do little to resolve the spatial mismatch problem in the inner city, to a multi-billion dollar program to improve bus services and reduce the journeys to work and basic public services for the working poor. There are still continuing problems in implementing this court agreement, but new building of the metro-rail system has stopped and huge amounts of public funds have begun to shift to policies that benefit the poor more than the wealthy. Indicative of the optimism this victory induced, one of the leaders of the Bus Riders Union is writing a book with the tentative title Driving the Bus of History: The LA Bus Riders Union Models an New Theory of Urban Insurgency in the Age of Transnational Capitalism. This essay began with claims that the urban uprising of 1992 in Los Angeles was indicative of worldwide urban trends. It ends with the hope that some of the more recent developments taking place in the aftermath of 1992 will have a similarly global reach.