Global Cities and Local Communities: The Cases of New York and London

London and New York used their pre-eminence as the world's leading locations for securities and money markets to capture much of the growth in the financial and advanced services industries during the 1980s. In neither place, however, were the governing bodies confident that economic growth would proceed without public sector assistance. Consequently they introduced policies to stimulate large-scale production of office space. Their intervention reinforced speculative tendencies of the period, thereby heightening the intensity of the ensuring downturn and exacerbating the unevenness of what prosperity did occur. Instead they could have employed more progressive policies that would have relied on public-sector-dominated partnerships. Although such policies would involve the entrepreneurial approaches of present strategies, they could operate within the context of a value framework aimed more at the non-profit sector and directed at achieving greater equity.