Miami: A New Global City?

There is a considerable gap between popular images of Miami and the political and economic realities of a city that is unique on the U.S. landscape. Miami now has the fourth largest concentration of foreign bank offices in the United States, right behind New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and ahead of San Francisco, Boston, or Atlanta. Eastman Kodak moved its headquarters for Latin American operations from Rochester in New York to Miami, and Hewlett Packard made a similar move from Mexico City to Miami. Finns and banks from Germany, France, Italy, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, to name but a few, have all opened offices and brought in significant numbers of high-level personnel. Alongside these developments there has been sharp growth in financial and specialized services for business. Miami's media image is so strongly associated with immigration and drugs that the possibility we might be seeing the formation of a new international corporate sector has received less attention. The scale of these developments leads us to ask whether Miami may have emerged as a global city, if not necessarily one of the first rank. This raises a number of questions. What is the relationship between immigration and the emergence of global city functions? Is the Cuban enclave, with its many trading operations for the Caribbean and Latin America, the base on which those new global city functions developed? Or is that growth a somewhat autonomous process benefiting from the concentration of trading operations in Miami but responding to a different logic? Is it development that would have taken place in the Southern Atlantic region anyway, though, without the Cuban enclave, perhaps not in Miami? Will the development of global city functions make Miami into a worldwide business center? Or will it continue to be a regional center for Latin America and the Caribbean, only now not simply for Latin American firms but also for new European, Asian, and U.S. firms. If the latter, what precisely has fueled the growth of international operations over the last few years: Are there new processes under way in Latin America, and are they responsible for the new concentration of operations in Miami? Will this new form of internationalization, one that reaches beyond the Cuban enclave, create new work and prosperity for previously excluded and severely disadvantaged sectors of the labor force? Specifically, has it opened up job opportunities for African-American workers, thereby ending their long-term exclusion from the Cuban enclave's prosperity? These are the questions we seek to address very generally in this brief essay using our recent research (Sassen 1993; Portes and Stepick 1993). Some of the hypotheses in the research literature on global cities are of interest here, especially those that examine the spatial and organizational forms of economic globalization today and actual transnational economic operations (Sassen 1993). By asking these questions, we recover the centrality of place and work in economic globalization. A key proposition in this literature is that the basic combination of geographic dispersal of economic activities and system integration has contributed to a strategic role for major cities. Rather than become obsolete owing to the dispersal made possible by information technologies, cities have generated top-level management and coordination functions and the specialized services needed to run spatially dispersed economic operations. This dynamic can operate at several scales, from global to regional, both within and beyond nations. Do we see in Miami the beginning of this kind of change?