ABSTRACT

Globalization and the topography of the airborne world The first reference to “globalization” in the New York Times4 was in a 1974 article about multinational companies. The term did not reappear until 1981. For

the whole of the 1980s, there were 155 articles mentioning globalization. The total rose to 797 in the 1990s and 1,568 between 2000 and 2005 alone. And it was in 2005 that perhaps the most celebrated account of globalization, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, was first published. The book’s title refers to the fact that a host of new technologies, such as the Internet, the personal computer, wireless communications, and work flow software have “flattened” the world so that a person or company in India (or some other part of the developing world) can compete on a level playing field with a person or company in the US or Japan or Europe. While flattening the world, these same technologies have also shrunk the world, according to Friedman, from size “large” five centuries ago to size “tiny” today (Friedman 2006: 9-11). Oddly, transportation technologies play almost no role in Friedman’s account of the flat world; yet air transportation in particular has never been more important as this book has tried to make clear. Air transportation especially is a crucial means of reconciling the apparent contradiction (Schoenberger 1994) between production systems fragmented on a global basis (e.g., in the case of a Dell laptop sold worldwide and assembled from dozens of widely sourced components) and the new urgency of time-based competition. And the global collaboration among individuals and businesses that Friedman celebrates as the signal feature of the flat world has stimulated a huge expansion in business traffic. Friedman himself doubtless piled up a lot of frequent flyer miles jetting around the world visiting the corporate chieftains whose insights and exploits are integral to The World Is Flat. One reviewer (Ikenberry 2005: 167) of Friedman’s book caustically quipped that the world is not flat; it just looked that way from a business class seat. At ground level, the world is much more “spiky” (Florida 2005). A relative handful of city-regions are overwhelmingly important, particularly with respect to the geography of innovation. They are the “peaks” that tower over the “valleys” of languishing areas struggling to attract and retain jobs, talent, and investment. The world may seem flatter because the dynamic hotbeds of creativity are more dispersed (with the addition of cities such as Shanghai and Mumbai) and better connected than in the past. And space has been warped in a fashion as the peaks are often better connected to one another than to nearby, less dynamic hinterlands. So the world may have shrunk but not in an even fashion. Hubs, such as New York and Tokyo, move towards one another faster in terms of time-space than less important places. In this regard, there is an important difference between the new communications technologies Friedman highlights and the older, but still critically important, transportation technologies he largely ignores. Cell phone service, for instance, is widely available across vast swaths of the developing world that lie far from any airport, much less one that is well-connected to global airline networks. The places that are well-connected tend to rank high in the hierarchy of world cities, the command and control centers from which the global economy is run. World cities are home to corporate headquarters and to specialized producer

services in fields such as advertising, banking and finance, law, and accounting. Although world cities are fixed in space, their importance derives primarily from movement – that is, from their advantageous position in the networks over which flow people, goods, ideas, information, and money. Airline networks mediate those flows, and, therefore, geographers, sociologists, and other social scientists have used the flows of airline passengers (Smith and Timberlake 1995; Shin and Timberlake 2000; Smith and Timberlake 2001; Matsumoto 2004), air cargo (Matsumoto 2004), scheduled flights (Bowen 2002), and air travel times and costs (Zook and Brunn 2006) to gauge the stature of cities in the world. A handful of favored places consistently emerge near the top of the hierarchy of cities, especially London. The results of the Zook and Brunn (2006) study are especially interesting because they demonstrate that cities with advantageous positions in airline networks enjoy enormous accessibility advantages. They are easy to get to both in terms of time and money. The two geographers used an Internet-based airline reservations system to find flights from 25 hubs to each of over 200 hundred cities across to the world. London scored well in both the average time (18 hours and 25 minutes) and average cost ($673) from the other 24 hubs. Conversely, Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau suffered daunting disadvantages in both dimensions with an average time (54 hours and 30 minutes) and average cost ($5,701). The disparity in these measures attest to the unevenness of time-space (and cost-space) convergence and show that, in terms of air travel, the world is not yet flat. Because air transportation is so important, uneven access within the world’s airline networks has far-reaching implications. Friedman’s Dell laptop (described in greater detail in Chapter 9) is no more a flat earth computer than the Boeing 787 is a flat earth airplane. Both companies have established global production networks whose architecture reflects the advantages of particular places across the world and among those advantages is accessibility in the airborne world. The enduring importance of physical transportation makes the world larger than Friedman allows. And that means that inequality between places persists and may even deepen, and that the uneven topography of the air transportation accessibility helps to make it so. In Southeast Asia, for instance, Singapore’s gross national product per capita was 4 times higher than that of Malaysia and 15 times higher than that of Indonesia in 1984; by 2006, the corresponding figures were 5 times and 20 times. Singapore has moved further ahead for many reasons, but among these is the superior accessibility of Changi Airport. The world is, after all, not flat; nor is it tiny. Although we are no longer trapped within the visible horizon, most of everyday life and certainly most of the economy, which is Friedman’s focus, is confined to a horizon defined by a few hours flying. It is worth noting that in 2008 more than 70 percent of jetoperated scheduled flights were domestic (author’s analysis of data in OAG 2008). The persistent importance of short connections (and of localized economic activity) gives an enduring advantage to places that are in or near affluent regions and sustains the disadvantage of places that are not.