In several ways, this is a refreshing book to read. Scott does not spend any time trying to determine which new postpositivist, poststructural, or posttheoretical perspective might best explain new empirical realities and why. Nor does he concern himself much with possible criticisms of the theoretical framework he does put to use. Rather his narrative simply blazes on with what is really a relatively conventional, straightforward, empirically elaborated historical materialist take on the economic geography of contemporary capitalist accumulation and spatial agglomeration on a global (although, empirically, mostly U.S.) scale. Indeed, those more familiar with Allen's already quite copious published work on this topic will find very few novelties in this work other than perhaps that noted briefly later as well as the newish empirical data with which he illustrates his argument. In this, A World in Emergence simply serves to repeat, and continue to empirically illustrate, his well-rehearsed argument that to understand spatial agglomeration one needs to focus on historical changes in capitalist production processes and the modifications that these engender in institutions concerned with the spatial governance of social reproduction.
The presumed and more specific focus of this book is on the rapidly emerging world of city-breeding and city-led capitalist accumulation of what he calls the “third wave” of dominant capitalist production processes after the historically first, (broadly) “mercantile” and second, “industrial,” waves. This third wave, variously called post-Fordist, postindustrial, the knowledge or information economy, creative capitalism, and so on, Scott himself calls the emerging “cognitive-cultural economy.” This new capitalist wave primarily involves rapidly growing, knowledge- and technology-intensive economic sectors such as electronics, aerospace, communications and equipment, computer hardware and software, and biotechnology, as well as business and financial services. It also includes, according to Scott, rapidly digitizing, symbolic-intensive cultural industries like fashion, film, music, television production, and other media, which, combined with the former sectors, have created and continue to create a distinct spatial agglomeration pattern of networked global city-regions that increasingly act, in concert via relational network, as the main economic engines of contemporary world capitalism. The world, in other words, is by no means becoming more homogeneously “flat,” economically or culturally speaking, but rather continues to be spatially differentiated via the continuing, now third-wave, process of uneven capitalist accumulation and spatial agglomeration.
That, in a nutshell, is the main argument of the book, and it is one with which readers already familiar with Scott's work will be well-versed. Of interest to these readers of the book, however, will be his very careful attempt to successfully portray this new uneven spatial development of the third wave with several chapters of empirical illustration and discussion, particularly about how this new wave is playing itself out in the United States. This empirical work is helpful as a potential guide for further empirical illustration of the main theoretical argument on a more global scale, to my mind, and it is also an important example of how the relation between theory and empirical corroboration might be more successfully forged in general.
Also to his credit and most unlike other authors who suggest that there is something very new, third-wave-like, about the dominant space-economy of today, Scott maintains enough critical distance from its celebration to notice that such a wave not only is created by, as well as is creating, a growing professional “creative” class but also a new underclass of very low-paid service workers or, as he puts it more starkly, “perhaps a new servile class” (p. 43). It is as rapidly, if not more rapidly, growing as that of the “creative” gentry. Indeed, he emphasizes that this is essentially the main characteristic of the new, so-polarizing division of productive labor of the third wave of capitalist production and spatial agglomeration overall.
To set up this main argument, the first two chapters provide very brief surveys of the historical geography of capitalist accumulation and spatial agglomeration through the mercantile and industrial ages as well as the main urban theories put forth to explain such. Here the narrative is rather fast and in shorthand; as such, it assumes the reader is knowledgeable of, for example, the “keynesian [sic] welfare-statist policy apparatus” (no further elaboration) or “just-in-time production methods,” or the “so-called BRICs” or, indeed, “classical Chicago School ideas.” I assume that these chapters, along with a later one entitled “Cosmopolis” that presents a full rehearsal of Allen's already well-published thoughts on the “new regionalism” and global city-regions, are to round out the manuscript to full book length. This suggests a critical question for this essay, however: For what audience is this book intended?
My thought on first read was that the book was intended as more of a student textbook-like affair that would bring city and regional history and theory together with extensive, yet largely descriptive, empirical illustration. The historical and theoretical chapters, however, would be very difficult to follow for most students unfamiliar with many of the concepts and realities just mentioned that Scott simply asserts and then blows right past. On further read, it increasingly felt to me that these chapters were thrown together much too hastily for this purpose and they also would not do for those readers more familiar with the historical and theoretical territory thus surveyed. For these latter readers, there is simply not enough novelty in Allen's interpretative narrative to warrant much time spent in reading it.
Not having the necessary historical and theoretical background, students also probably would have some problems determining the precise import of Allen's many pages of empirical illustration of the economic and spatial trends of the so-called third wave. It was with regard to such illustration, however, that I began to think that maybe this book was, indeed, intended for the already scholarly initiated. That, along with the one new theoretical conceptualization that I could discern, or what Allen calls the emerging “interstitial geography” of the third wave involving a new relationship between the city and the countryside, seemed to suggest as much. According to this latter concept, the spread of the cognitive-cultural wave of capitalist accumulation is not, according to Allen, overflowing in a relatively even manner over wider and wider swaths of countryside as previous waves of accumulation eventually had done. Rather, the third wave is penetrating rural areas more selectively via such things as nature and cultural heritage tourism and entertainment, specialty agricultural tourism and local production promotion, and other types of boutique-y place economy restructuring and reimagineering in the interest and image of cognitive-cultural workers and their work process. In my reading of this, Allen seems to be suggesting that this new city–countryside relationship better preserves the rurality of the latter (he illustrates this interstitial accumulation process with a quick case-study of the English Lake District).
So, there does seem to be enough novelty in the book to hold the attention of more seasoned readers. For example, I would quibble much with whether this conception of interstitial accumulation is actually very meaningfully significant. The reality of the situation, it seems to me, is that such a newly invigorated “rural” or “countryside” spatial economy is merely another form of the capitalist urbanization of the countryside via gentrification. Put differently, traditional countryside production processes are not somehow being preserved in this process as much as they are being essentially changed to meet quite extralocal demands and desires. Indeed, in the rapidly evolving wine-production and tourist trade of the rural area in which I now exist, even “local” production is mostly undertaken by recent city-transplant, carpet-bagger gentrifiers. But then again, maybe I should be more literal in my interpretation of Allen's argument and agree that this actually is a spatially spotty, interstitial sort of country-place gentrification and not, in fact, a wholesale onslaught of spatially agglomerating, ultimately homogenizing economic change.
And so, there we have it. Allen's new book can elicit some debate and discussion among the more scholarly seasoned, both as a result of the extensive empirical illustration provided as well as for whatever theoretical novelty might be discerned. Yet, after several readings I can't help thinking that there was some mix-up between the writing and the editing or the author and the editors as to what market the book actually was aiming for. Allen has certainly earned the right to easily publish book-length manuscripts given his lengthy and prolific scholarly career, but a little bit more time spent actually writing and more carefully editing this book would have resulted in a much more appropriate representation of the author's better work to date.