Urbanization, Work and Community: The Logic of City Life in the Contemporary World
Allen J. Scott – The paper offers an overall theoretical synthesis of the interrelationships between cognitive-cultural capitalism and processes of urbanization. It presents an argument to the effect that the specificity of the city resides in the manner in which the diverse social phenomena that it contains are brought into a composite pattern of spatial integration. With these preliminaries in mind, it examines the economic structure of the city in cognitive-cultural capitalism, with special reference to the emergence of a new division of labor and the changing configuration of intra-urban production space. This account leads directly to consideration of the restratification of urban society and its effects on neighborhood development and social life. The final section of the paper picks up on the notion of the Common in cognitive-cultural capitalism and offers some speculative remarks regarding the implications of this phenomenon for the economic and social order of cities.
Reading Development 