Presentation 3 Authors: Sabrina Iommi and Patrizia Lattarulo, IRPET (Italy)Title: Moving from the central city: features, destinations, reasons and consequences of people leaving Florence Abstract: Cities have recently been affected by important changes both as regards their role in general economic growth and their spatial structure. As for the first issue, market globalisation has heightened territorial competition and cities, as places with a concentration of innovative economic activities, have found a new leading role in determining the future development of the regions and nations they belong to; as for the second issue, improvements in transportation and communication systems have reduced the necessity for proximity, thus leading to a new urban form which has been given many labels, as low-density city, scattered city, dispersed city, exploded city, urban sprawl, etc. The paper analyses the population movements that affected the chief regional city of Tuscany over a ten-year period (1998-2008), in order to deduce their related causes and effects. The main push factors are two at least and affect different types of family: high urban house prices drive out of town young and low-income families, while low urban quality (urban environment, building features, facilities provision) throws out upper classes. The consequences are social, economic and environmental and they assume the form of residential segregation, increasing commuting and congestion, social and economic weakening of urban poles. As for policy recommendations, if causes of city flight are multiple, public responses too have to be different. Presentation 4 Authors: Libera D’Alessandro, “L’Orientale” University of Naples (Italy), Martinez Rigol Sergi, University of Barcelona (Spain) Title: New urban economic geographies in Southern Europe: young people’s retail and consumption geographies in Barcelona and Naples Abstract: The paper aims at analysing some changes that characterize the contemporary city in Southern Europe through the interpretative key of young peoples’ retail and consumption geographies. As a special issue of the journal Urban Studies (2013, vol. 50, n. 3) has recently pointed out, young people are important actors in the city, although their presence has been generally ignored or neglected. According to the call for papers of the session – expected to “explain the complex system of forces that link economy, space, territory at the intra-urban scale” – the paper focus on young people as crucial actors in retailing and consumption spaces, key places of the inner-city. The paper stresses the role played by young in creating, appropriating, changing, negotiating, transgressing and contesting the new geographies of retailing and consumption. The main goal is to explain why young people as retailers (both as sellers and as workforce) and as consumers (both of commodities and places) are nowadays so significant in the production and reproduction of the city and how this can lead to a re-theorization of the urban research agenda on this issues. After having framed the topic at the scale of Southern Europe, the paper will focus on two inner quarters of Barcelona and Naples in order to support the theoretical remarks, highlighting the new space-time geographies (especially of the night and week-end) which characterize the youthful urban playscapes. Presentation 5 Author(s): Xin Lu, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) Title: The Disconnectedness and Autonomy Level of Global Cities in Emerging Economies Abstract: Global cities in emerging economies (Mumbai/Bombay, India; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Shanghai, China) enjoy sharply different levels of autonomy vis-a-vis their central government. This paper examines, among all relevant factors, the disconnectedness of the global city from its national economy, and whether this disconnectedness plays a role in the varying levels of autonomy of the global cities. The disconnectedness of the global city from its national economy is a widely recognized, yet insufficiently addressed topic in GCN research. This paper argues that such disconnectedness is typically reflected in different policy preferences of the nation and of the city itself. Such difference leads to a “global city”—“nation state” interplay of give-and-take, ending in temporary balance of central power devolved and local capacity submitted. The temporary balance is manifested by various levels of autonomy of the global city. With due operationalization, the paper tries to find out whether there is, if any, a positive or negative correlation between the “global city”—“nation state” disconnectedness and the global city’s level of autonomy. The paper compares cases of the three largest emerging economies (Brazil, China, India), where the unevenness of development and the consequential disconnectedness is assumingly more striking and changeable than cases in developed economies. Meanwhile, the paper serves as an attempt to counter the much discussed insufficient coverage of non-OECD cases in the global city research.
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