Photo Credit: Wendy Harman, CC BY 2.0
I was down in Washington a couple weeks ago and was reminded of the difference between global and non-global cities in terms of how they operate.
I was talking with someone there and he mentioned that he’d discovered that the real opposition to food trucks these days was not coming from bricks and mortar restaurants (which are often cash poor and not especially politically powerful), but from commercial real estate interests (who are both wealthy and have massive political clout at the local level).
This was a perspective on the food truck business I hadn’t heard before. And it wasn’t based on a DC local perspective, but a derived from a national one.
A lot has been made about the coastal “bubble” such as the one along the Acela corridor. But as I’ve noted before, people in these cities actually know a lot about what’s going on in the country and the world.
The intellectual classes in NYC are a lot more knowledgable about the interior of the country than most people living in the interior are. People in interior cities might know a ton about the place they personal live, but often know next to nothing about the city just 100 miles down the interstate.
The bubble effect in coastal cities comes not from a lack of information, but a lack of imagination. There are some things they just don’t want to be true, so they refuse to believe them.
Though hardly perfect in their analyses, these global cities are key hubs in national and international information flows. When I found out what was going on in food truck regulation around the country, I didn’t travel around myself, I went to Washington and found it out there.
New York, Washington – and others cities like Boston and San Francisco – are what I like to call “on the grid.” When you are there you are plugged into global information flows. When you want to find out what’s going on – head to the global city.
Other cities don’t give off that vibe. I love Nashville and it’s booming, but when I visit there I don’t get the sense that I’m plugged into the grid. I’m sure for some specific things – music, health care – the city functions that way, but on the whole that feeling of being connected to global information flows is not something I have felt or heard people talk about with regards to that city.
I pick Nashville because it’s a prosperous city. I want to be clear that being on the grid isn’t necessary to be very successful. It just seems to me that there is a qualitative difference in functioning and feel between these global cities and others.
Hi Aaron
I think I understand what you are saying but I think your analysis is biased to what you like and what you think is important. For example in music Nashville is a place that feeds the global grid. Talk to a musician in New York and they will defer to whats going on in Nashville, particularly certain music genres. But overall, if you talk to any young musician in any genre, even your Opera, Nashville is considered equal or superior to New York for many of the necessities of the music business.
Lets look at recreation and take take winter skiing. I’m sure there are lots of great skiers in New York but I bet there are more in raw number and percent in Salt Lake or Vancouver because winter skiing is more important in these cities than new York. Yes New York is a trading hub and you can find down hill skiers and blue grass bands but that does nor mean New York even comes close to defining trends in Music or trends in Sports.
At this point in time finance is overgrown relative tot he economy and financial centres rule. But remember these things come and go. If you look at New York’s relationship with the rest of the world as parasitical you can see how fragile it is and see a time when finance will not be king and New York will not be so wealthy.
How does a disconnected metro find ways to connect? What steps do they take? What examples do we have of metros doing that in some way in the last 20 years? Austin? Indy? Charlotte?
So Aaron, interesting. As much as I agree these cities are on the grid, there is a certain lack of vision, or maybe acceptance, of the forces that elected Trump. I was with folks from Boston the night he was elected, and they were like “WHAT IS GOING ON?” Living in OH, I was a bit stunned, but not very surprised, if that makes sense. I half expected it. So there is an international awareness, but not any awareness of the “off the grid” places. I think the world is actually getting split into these two categories, and there is a bit more than just a desire to not acknowledge some things.
Trump is a perfect example of what I was talking about. There was no lack of information in NYC and DC about the Trump phenomenon. Like me, many folks living in these communities have personal ties to working class areas of the country and understood full well that Trump was huge there. They simply didn’t want to believe it.