Why Dublin isn't big enough anymore

While Dubliners may complain about problems such as traffic congestion, urban sprawl and house prices, the capital city is actually "too small". If it wants to be a player in the global economy, it needs to double its population.

That's the view of policy analyst Paddy Walley of P. Walley Consultants, who has organised a conference on the city with Dublin Employment Pact, a broad partnership of interests established to examine labour market and development issues in the Dublin region.

Says Walley, "There's a conventional view that Dublin, with its population of 1.2 million, is too big. Dublin is actually 34th in size among European cities. The world has 41 cities of more than five million, and these are the cities that compete internationally for jobs, investment and knowledge workers. Parochial, ruralist politicians want to move services out of Dublin to places like Athlone. They're not treating Dublin as a global city. There's no point saying 'stop the growth of Dublin', it will happen anyhow.

"Eighty per cent of Europeans live in cities. Urbanisation is the new dynamic; it's not some terrifying aberration. We've got to get Dublin up to speed to connect to the global network of dynamic cities," he says.

To drive home the message, Walley is bringing to the conference one of the world's most influential thinkers on the subject of city economies, Saskia Sassen, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics.

A leading analyst, writer and lecturer on globalisation, global cities and information society, Sassen's books include The Global City, Cities in a World Economy, Losing Control and Sovereignty in an Age of Globalisation.

When interviewed by The Irish Times, Sassen had spent the previous 48 hours in three cities on two continents, flitting from teaching to media appearances to dinner parties with friends. For a few hours she managed to see her husband in New York. She hadn't slept for two nights and was about to take a flight to Buenos Aires, which she would use as an opportunity to take a sleeping pill and get a full nine hours' slumber. "I love flying. It gives me a chance to sleep," she says. Born in the Netherlands, she has "lost count" of the number of countries she's lived in.

Her intellectual, passionate belief is that the powerful cities - places such as London, Paris and New York - are about connecting global labour flows with global capital flows. The global city has a top elite of foreign professionals who circulate all over the world and control the capital. The bottom layer consists of the foreign service providers - "the nannies, nurses and maids" as Sassen puts it - who enable the foreign professionals to do their work. Nurses rightly will not like to be put in that category, but we are now importing nurses just as New York once imported them from Ireland.

Dublin is a microcosm of this phenomenon, with its luxury houses designed for rental by foreign companies and its influx of Filipino nannies, maids and - yes - nurses. During the boom, property developers specialised in refurbishing old houses for this market. Large numbers of Irish professionals - who were the "foreign professionals" in other countries - have returned to live in the city and its suburbs, even if it means they're on flights every second week to London and New York.

And like those great cities, we're importing people to work in our "service" economy. We've got the restaurants, the designer shops and the luxury services to cater for an elite with high expectations, as well as the accountants, lawyers and IT experts they need to keep things ticking smoothly.

In the middle of the upper and lower layers is the great Irish middle class, the meat in the sandwich. The middle class is what gives a city its stability, says Sassen. But when the middle classes and the working classes move country, they emigrate. Professionals don't emigrate - they circulate.

At the heart of Sassen's theory is the assumption that a global city is not merely a geographical space but a digital space connecting its capital and expertise.

But a city cannot exist purely in electronic cyber-space. It needs a location, the interaction of people and conveniently located services to make it work. No matter how highly technological, large corporations still need a headquarters. One of the organising themes in much of Sassen's work on globalisation is that "place is central to the multiple circuits through which economic globalisation is constituted".

The consequence of this is that a global city belongs neither to its nation nor to any one national economy. As we in Ireland have seen so dramatically since September 11th, our fortunes are tied to something far greater than what we view as "our place" - our society and culture.

National economies are declining in significance. The real power base is how a global city connects with other global cities. This can bring "economic dynamism" - sharp ups and downs in economic growth which demand quick responses. This "dynamism" is what our economy is currently experiencing, and it's a phenomenon that not one person predicted - "either in public discourse or at dinner parties" - before September 11th, says Sassen.

Why should the devastation of a square mile of Manhattan touch the global economy - and the Irish one - so severely? Because its people, interacting with and within their location, have a far greater global effect than we formerly realised.

"The language of globalisation suggests it all happens at some global scale, in electronic markets, far away from specific places. Yet a closer examination shows to what extent much of what we call the global economy takes place in a network of cities, which account for most of the financial transactions and assets under management.

"Twenty-five cities in the world account for about 80 per cent of assets under management. New York, London, Tokyo and four other cities account for 85 per cent of the foreign currency market - the most globalised of all markets.

"A small number of cities account for the export of most specialised services, such as accounting, legal, advertising, telecommunications and other services used by firms and markets to service their global operations. New York, along with London, ranks at the top of most of these activities."

"Major centres have massive concentrations of state-of-the-art resources that allow them to maximise the benefits of telecommunications and to govern the new conditions for operating globally. Even electronic markets rely on traders and banks which are located somewhere; for instance, Frankfurt's electronic futures market is actually embedded in a global network of financial centres, each of which concentrates resources that are necessary for Frankfurt's market to thrive," writes Sassen in the new, revised edition of her book, The Global City (Princeton University Press).

We've already recognised the importance of connectivity in the Republic by nurturing information technology. As the IT industry has slowed down, it has become obvious we need more than technology to ensure economic stability. To be a strong power-base, a city needs a variety of enterprises.

To succeed, she believes, Dublin needs to develop manufacturing industries, not just virtual space products such as IT and financial services. The city also needs well-planned high-density housing and state-of-the-art public transportation, so that industries and services can move quickly. Dublin is ideally placed to be a potential "global city", she believes, but it won't be one until it has the infrastructure to attract the headquarters of more international businesses.

The conference Doubling Dublin - Dublin in the Global Economy: A New Vision runs on Thursday, November 8th at City West Conference Centre, fee £120. Contact Sandra Moran, Dublin Employment Pact, 8 North Great George's Street, Dublin 1. Phone 01-8788900; Fax 01-8788711