Analysis of Amin and Graham's (1997) The Ordinary City

As the centrality of cities to the world economy has become reasserted in the discourse on globalization, the world-scale flows, advanced telecommunications, and transportation networks only contribute to the dynamics where cities assume key positions in the design, management, and creativity functions that put urban centers into the structures of economic exchange, institutional policy-making, and individual and collective action (Amin and Graham 1997: 411). Cities have been attracting increasing amount of attention (Jencks 1996) from social scientists and policy makers adopting structuralist and post-structuralist approaches as urban crises and regeneration strategies have become addressed by national research programmes, international organizations, and interdisciplinary conferences oriented at the metropolitan dynamics (Amin and Graham 1997: 411). However, the emergence of the urban studies has not been connected to a central theory of contemporary cities, of their multiple structures, and of their changing functions as a number of economic, social, and cultural transitions occur that demand conceptual means to group cities into clusters with shared urban trends that integrate such elements as cultural, associational, political, and economic systems into the structure of collective action (Munch 1982: 94) that via media of institutional integration (Munch 1982: 617) would allow to determine the factors of urban regeneration or decline (Amin and Graham 1997: 411-412).

Despite the multiplication of global flows cities possess assets that contribute to reflexivity and facilitation of urban regeneration, to diversification of economic, social and cultural institutions, and to collective action oriented at implementation of entrepreneurial projects ranging from urban policy to social justice (Amin and Graham 1997: 412). While the spread of telecommunications in the 1960s gave rise to the expectations of eventual demise of cities no longer exclusively offering proximity (Boden and Molotch 1994) needed for connecting economic, social, and cultural systems into integrated structure, the spatial basis for structural functional integration was expected to be replaced with the communications infrastructure (Toffler 1980) making possible the dispersal of activities across space where the distinction among residential, industrial, and managerial districts would eventually blur (Amin and Graham 1997: 412; Pascal 1987: 602). As electronic networks increasingly mediate interpersonal communication the average size of cities was expected to fall since both personal and collective integration into the structure of modernity was decoupled from the constraints of space (Naisbitt and Aburdene 1991: 329) given the urban development trends predicted transition from cities to global villages (McLuhan 1964) as the place-based determinants of action became replaced by the communications-based flows (Amin and Graham 1997: 412; Virilio 1987: 18).

The processes of urban restructuring such as deindustrialization, inner-city unemployment, and urban crises have been mapped and measured by urban economics, geography, and planning (Martin and Rowthorn 1986; McKay and Cox 1979) that have contributed to urban policy making albeit not reaching interdisciplinary conclusions about the underlying causes, structures, or implications of the post-Fordist transformation (Amin and Graham 1997: 412). The growing relevance of urban space, policy, and economy to the understanding of representation and symbolization (Westwood and Williams 1996), identity politics (Keith and Pile 1993), collective memory (Boyer 1994), and consumption (Ellin 1995) has led to overcoming (Collins 1995; Shields 1992) the deterministic theorization of the urban dynamics (Sorkin 1992; Virilio 1987) in favor of conceiving of cities as sites of systemic interpenetration involving visual media (Robins 1996), situated individuals (Pile 1996), and social struggles (Zukin 1995) into reciprocally implicative relations (Amin and Graham 1997: 412-413). As the pressure for economic competitiveness under the conditions of flexible specialization (Amin 1994; Scott 1988) has reasserted the centrality of social networks to the post-Fordist economy, the importance of face-to-face interaction has reinforced the role of cities as nodal points in the geography of global flows (Amin and Graham 1997: 413; Thrift and Olds 1996: 314-314).

The growing urbanization of the world, regeneration of formerly industrial cities, and globally increasing proportion of urban population (Parkinson 1994) have spurred the reinterpretations of cities as structures of opportunity going beyond narrow definitions of the economic system (Amin Graham 1997: 413; Jencks 1996). The theoretical attention to cities has mainly stressed their centrality to the national economic development at the same time as increasing prominence of urban milieux in tapping economic potential of cultural, educational, and research institutions has started to redefine the conceptualization of the structure of relations in which cities participate (Amin and Graham 1997: 413). Consequently, metropolitan centers are affirmed in the importance that their location in the global structure of relations of command and control, financial operations, industrial production, corporate governance, business services, cultural institutions, international organizations, governmental agencies, and infrastructural development has in maintaining the asset base critical for urban, national, and regional competitiveness (Amin and Graham 1997: 413; Castells 1989; Freedman 1995; Parkinson 1997: 7; Sassen 1991, 1994).

In contrast to the territorial dispersal of the operation of the transnational corporations (TNCs) their headquarters have become concentrated in few urban centers where multiple inter-personal, inter-organizational, inter-urban, inter-national, and inter-regional networks converge (Fitzpatrick 1997: 9) explaining thereby the global prominence of London, New York, and Tokyo (Sassen 1991, 1994) that have risen in their urban hierarchies due to the polarizing influence of the spatial decentralization (Amin and Graham 1997: 413; Graham 1997). The post-Fordist reliance on the networks of "[t]rust, reciprocity, reflexivity, and minimization of risk" (Amin and Graham 1997: 414) steeply increases the centrality of global cities to the processes of management of the structures of both positive and negative opportunities (Mitchelson and Wheeler 1994: 88). Liberalized regulation of financial, industrial, labor, and consumption markets has made possible to apply economies of scale to management of investments, risks, services, infrastructures, and assets from global cities having positional advantage of offering high level of systemic interpenetration that distinguishes global economic institutions standing in relations of cumulative causation with each other (Amin and Graham 1997: 414).

International financial centers concentrate organizational, service, and communication infrastructures that bring macro environments of reflexive workforce, organization culture, and global management (Thrift 1994) into relations of positive feedback that amplify both the influence of networks into which global cities are embedded and the share of global flows that enter into relations of exchange, translation, and coordination (Thrift 1996b) that the struggles over the access to which via personal networks, up-to-date interpretations, and real-time information play out in such global cities as London (Amin and Graham 1997: 414). The transition to post-Fordist economic relations has also changed the perception that cities represent liability absorbing public spending on urban problems as the post-Fordist logic of accumulation has shifted its base from industrial production towards cities as media of investment, development, and accumulation (Amin and Graham 1997: 414; Jacobs 1984; Sclar 1992). Correspondingly, the post-Fordist policy-making groups involved in urban development have changed the frame of their discourse from that of regulation of industry to that of regulation of investment as cities are increasingly seen as conglomerates of labor force, profit opportunities, capital funds, circulating goods, service clusters, and organizational networks (Amin and Graham 1997: 414; Cisneros 1993: 21).

The global city becomes integrated into post-Fordist capitalist accumulation not via economic instrumentalization of the industrial system and relations but via mobilization of the capital that physical, social, and financial infrastructures can yield as investment, development, and speculation bases (Amin and Graham 1997: 414; Cisneros 1993: 21). Since the post-Fordist model of capitalism has formed in response to the profitability decreases caused by research and development costs, flexible specialization, and volatile demand, the valorization of cities as sites of agglomeration economies can be considered as part of the collective enterpreneurial strategy of cost minimization as knowledge, serivices, and information are sourced from the dense urban networks nurtured by a variety of institutional relations among the economic, societal, associational, and political systems (Knight 1995; Knight and Gappert 1989; Munch 1982: 94; Ryser 1994) that within the urban structure of their relations increase competitiveness, creativity, and connectivity of collective actors (Amin and Graham 1997: 414-415; Lash and Urry 1994). The reflexive accumulation of the post-Fordist capitalism envolves the structure of collective action in its entirety (Munch 1982) in that the institutional processes of interpenetration among its systems becomes the primary process compensating for the decline of industrial capitalism in early industrial countries by the structural functional integration among corporate, media, arts, educational, scientific, and municipal institutions (Amin and Graham 1997: 415; Knight 1995: 259).

The transition to post-Fordism in the 1980s has shifted the flexibly organized industrial production to few metropolitan areas where smaller firms form clusters of innovation, knowledge, and specialization environments (Scott 1988; Storper 1996) dependent on global transportation and communication networks that reduce economic risk and transaction costs by selecting from widely diverse information, labor, and supply-chain sources (Amin and Thrift 1992) the accelerated accumulation and circulation of which increasingly depends on the existence of spatial entrepreneurial agglomerations (Amin and Graham 1997: 415; Malmberg and Maskell 1996). The policy and planning discourse on urban renewal (Bianchini et al. 1988; Montgomery 1995) reasserts the importance of creative cities (Landry and Bianchini 1995) where urban culture, media, entertainment, sport, and education undergo institutional interpenetration of their respective social systems that meet the crises of post-Fordiasm with the strategies of experience society (Schulze 1991) organized around the practices of cultural consumption and production, information and communication networks, and night-time economies (Amin and Graham 1997: 415; Gritffith 1995; Lash and Urry 1994).

The deregulated dynamics of post-Fordism enlists the repudiation of the modernist city planning (Jacobs 1961) in favor of density, diversity, stimulation, and interaction (Montgomery 1995: 102) that promote shared spaces, public realms, mixed-use landscapes, and intercultural activities called to remedy the urban alienation, decay, polarization, and privatization (Bianchini and Schwengel 1991; Worpole 1992) that beset the cities that failing to be recognized as sites of systemic interpenetration (Munch 1991) reinforce the feedback cycle of disorganized capitalism via aesthetic critique of its effects (Amin and Graham 1997: 415-416). That the urban assets have drawn theoretical, political, and economic attention in the global context of the transition to post-Fordism that promises revitalization of the cities most affected by the decline of Fordism cannot but perpetuate the crises of the post-industrial capitalism that has inherited urban infrastructures only partially adaptible to the imperatives of the flexible accumulation (Amin and Graham 1997: 416) that overly focuses on advanced management, services, design, culture, and finance whose constitutive networks have to be seen in systemic perspective to allow comprehensive analytical approach to the urban change (Thrift and Olds 1996: 312).

The analysis of urban change that does not define its constitutive social systems, their systemic interrelationships, and the variation in the structure of the systems and their relations can hardly conceptualize the differences in how various cities respond to transformations in service industries, information infrastructures, locational policies, flows architectures, and finance instrumentalization (Amin and Graham 1997: 416; Storper 1995: 28). The methodological tendencies to overgeneralize from case studies and to overemphasize the relevance of ethnographic conclusions (Thrift 1996a) have to be controlled by a theoretical framework connecting "particular spaces, senses of time and partial representations" (Amin and Graham 1997: 416) into variable urban structures. The reasons for prominence of cities vis-a-vis global flows can only be formulated with the help of the theoretical reconstruction of the structure of global and local relations into which they are built in (Munch 1982, 1984, 1986) so that urban environments have to be approached as paradigmatic examples of their diverse interrelationships (Munch 1991) that allow only analytical rather than ethnographic reconstruction (Amin and Graham 1997: 416) of post-modern urban change (Soja 1989), global network centrality (Knox and Taylor 1995), national economic motors (Storper 1995), and creative cities (Griffiths 1995).

Since different cities can occupy dissimilar positions in the structures of inter-urban relations, the changes to urban assets, the appropriate policy recommendations, and the leading economic sectors (Amin and Graham 1997: 417) invariably have to be identified in accordance with structural and functional fit with the cities enjoying regional and global centrality, with the requirements of the translocal relations of specialization, and with networks where urban particularities can offer technological, institutional, or cultural advantage. While the methodological dangers of overgeneralization have been widely discussed in relation to research of cities (Amin and Graham 1997: 417; Jencks 1996: 26; Thrift 1996b; Shields 1995: 245), the city cannot be reconstructed in either descriptive or comparative terms as long as it is approached as an agglomeration of spaces, temporalities, and representations lacking in overarching structure, stable interrelationships, or systemic impact on action (Demattes 1988; Healey et al. 1995). The frame of reference of the ethnographic research of cities has to change from sampling of single paradigmatic sites to a multi-sited institutional ethnography which would combine the theoretical framework making possible conception of systems, interrelationships, and action structurally integrated with each other (Munch 1982; 1986) with the institutional ethnography (Smith 2005) following the methodology of the multi-sited anthropology (Marcus 1994) in, for instance, connecting global financial centers, technological and organizational innovation, and social and cultural institutions into a translocal structure of urban relations (Amin and Graham 1997: 417).

From the perspective of such a multi-sited institutional ethnography it becomes possible not only to derive the national variations (Munch 1984) of the structure of modernity (Munch 1986) but also the urban structures (Munch 1991: 232-244) of relations, systems, and entrepreneurial groups that form the spatially, historically, and relationally specific structure of interpenetration of the social systems that constitutively affect the collective action as its macro environments responsive to the structural functional differentiation according to their own scale as sites of strategic centrality, interrelated diversity, or mobile interconnection (Amin and Graham 1997: 417; Shilds 1995). Similar to how aesthetic critique of capitalism reinforces its deregulation, the post-structural critique of cities (Shields 1995: 245) adds to the "dominance of partial interpretations" (Amin and Graham 1997: 417) of the urban multiplicity precisely because of its stress on its methodological and theoretical instability that combined with the complexity of globalizing networks (Dematteis 1988) hardly makes the reconstruction of the structures of urban relations possible. The social systems composing the structure of modernity (Munch 1982, 1986) represent within the system of action an integration of its latent structures, adaptive closure of its strategies, and oriented selection of goals that reduce the urban multiplicity of individual and collective actions to a dynamic structure of systemic interpenetration where the economic (Engels 1985), societal (Amin and Graham 1997: 418), associational (LeGates and Stout 1996), and political (Mumford 1937) systems reflexively arise (Munch 1982: 94).

The contradictions of modernity (Munch 1991) find their parallels in the urban life (Amin and Graham 1997: 418; Davis 1990; Sennett 1970; Wilson 1991) as individualism irreconsilably implies both the freedom of anonymity and the subjection to anomie (Munch 1991: 31-32), as universalism irreconsilably results in both unhindered transparency and dinimished involvement (Munch 1991: 32-34), as rationalism irreconsilably produces both spectacular wealth and abject poverty (Munch 1991: 29-30), and as instrumental activism irreconsilably leads both to declining compassion and to expanding solidarity (Munch 1991: 34-37). Correspondingly, the systemic structure of urban relations (Amin and Graham 1997: 418) can be cast as an interpenetration of the social systems of economic, cultural, solidarity, and political accumulation that via respective investment of money, speech, reputation, and power give rise to a structure of dynamic, interwoven, and contingent relations (Munch 1991: 371). By the same token as the lengthening of the interdependence chains cannot explain systemic interpenetration (Munch 1982: 473), an unqualified assertion of the spatial properties of cities as the wellsrping of their special place in the structure of social, economic, cultural, and political relations (Adams 1995: 279; Amin and Graham 1997: 418; Boden and Molotch 1994: 259; Thrift 1996b) cannot explain the historical, technological, social, legal, or economic dynamics of modernization on either urban or global scale (Munch 1982).

The embedding of the city-based structure of relations into the global structure of modernity assumes growing importance in the urban theorization and policy making (Amin and Graham 1997: 418) as the circuits of financial, cultural, and economic exchange have developed from the systemic differentiation between the local and the global scale towards the structural functional integration of disembedded communication networks, trans-local social relations, global business cycles, technically mediated cultures, and communicationally displaced cities (Adams 1995; Giddens 1990). The process of systemic interpenetration has been largely neglected in the discourse on growing participation of cities in the global, regional, and national economies for the reason of which the reorganization of individual and collective action on existing and evolving spatial scales has escaped its theoretical attention that is yet to conceptualize urban creativity, innovation, and economy in terms of functional differentiation and systemic integration (Amin and Graham 1997: 418-419). With the international interpenetration of economies, cultures, and societies on the rise, cities provide increasingly more adequate analytical entry-points into the dynamics of interrelationships among urban clusters of innovation, specialization, and creativity that raise the importance of place-embedded factors emphasizing personal experience, reciprocity, and trust (Amin and Graham 1997: 419).

Likewise, the relations among dense urban nodes fall into the pattern of structural functional integration with each other within the same city and trans-locally as enclaves of creativity, innovation, and learning connect across disembedded areas to "inner-city industrial districts, cultural complexes or central business districts" (Amin and Graham 1997: 419) so that the pattern of their interrelationships resembles a network connecting a multiplicity of differentiated units (Wilson 1995) that amplify urban dynamics of global adaptability precisely via cross-currents of influences tying vast variety of needs, functions, and cimpatibilities together. As the relations of interpenetration among the social systems become increasingly more important for understanding the urban dynamics than any single social domain in isolation, the heterogeneity of rationalities, spatialities, identities, and temporalities becomes critically important catalyst of economic vitality, cultural novelty, urban governance, and institutional innovation (Amin and Graham 1997: 419). The systemic interpenetration as a process unfolding in space and time receives independent theoretical support from the analyses of heterogeneous urban integration of multiple processes undergoing real-time differentiation (Harvey 1996: 259-264) within the dynamic relational structures (Amin and Graham 1997: 419) that generate interdependent geographies of time and space (Thrift 1996a: 2; Thrift et al. 1978).

The actor-network theories (Callon 1986, 1991; Latour 1993) extend the micro corrective of the structural functionalism (Colomy and Roades 1994) to the embedding of configurations of technical artifacts (Bingham 1996; Hinchcliffe 1996) into structures of collective and individual action that rather than stressing the expanded possibilities of new technological environments (Negroponte 1995) draw attention to the relational, contingent, performative, and structural effects of agents' participation in the systemic interpenetration as social ordering (Amin and Graham 1997: 420; Bingham 1996: 647; Thrift 1996a) in the context of struggles, macro environments, and opportunities where diverse individual and collective concerns are at stake (Thrift 1996b). That the systemic interpenetration creates urban macro environments for the structurally entreprenerial strategies of "heterogenerous social groups, filieres of firms, governance agencies" (Amin and Graham 1997: 420) demands analyses of cities as sites where complex macro-micro connections put into relational perspective processes, networks, actors, things, and spaces entering into configurations of simultaneous integration and differentiation (Thirft 1996b: 1485).

Within the urban structure of systemic interpenetration the individual and collective agency assumes forms that reflect the processes constitutive of social groups, actor-networks, and time-spaces as entities reflexively participating in the reproduction of social structures on global, regional, urban, and individual scales (Amin and Graham 1997: 420; Dear 1995; Graham and Marvin 1996) that produce both highly concentrated environments of electronic securities traders (Thrift 1995) and disconnected areas outside of communications networks (Graham and Aurigi 1997). Under the influence of the momentum of the systemic interpenetration (Judge et al. 1995) the institutuional structures of cities change from hierarchical architectures to interrelated networks (Stoker 1995) that contribute to the institional differentiation creating specifically urban forms of interpenetration of public, private, non-governmental, and hybrid forms of governance (Amin and Graham 1997: 420) exhibiting greater degree of adaptability, complexity, and connectivity (Amin and Hausner 1997; Healey 1995; Mayer 1995). The research of interrelationships among the systems of economic, cultural, solidarity, and political accumulation (Munch 1991: 371) goes beyond partial perpectives and case studies generalizations towards preserving the urban complexity via systemic exploration of the dimensions of its diversity, contingency, interdependence, and structure that inform the analysis of urban dynamics, urban policy and planning, urban competitiveness, cultural institutions, and collective projects (Amin and Graham 1997: 420-421).

Across the economic, cultural, solidarity, and political systems the contingency of action stemming from hierarchies and conflicts and symbolic complexity stemming from heterogeneities and particularities (Munch 1991: 370) are reduced by the uniting force of the institutionally entrepreneurial projects that provide basis for social intergation, collective identity, and shared belonging (Amin and Graham 1997: 421). From the perspective of the systemic interpenetration of the social structure (Munch 1991: 371), the focus of the post-Fordist urban policy on the stimulation of consumption (Ritzer 1999; Zukin 1995) via promotion of spectacular architecture, cultural events, and commercial theme-parks (Gottdiener 1997) neglects the dependence of the structure of modernity on the solidarity accumulation by means of mobilization of cultural values and ideas, of economic legitimacy, and of political cooperation that cannot be based on spatial exclusion (Amin and Graham 1997: 421), social ghettoization (Wilson 1995: 158), and narrow coalitions (Judge et al. 1995). Though urban spaces have historically been integrated into the practices of "socio-spatial segregation, social control and surveillance" (Amin and Graham 1997: 421), in the structure of modernity the rational discourse on the universality of human and citizen rights affects the normative regulation of the economic exchange and the legal regulation of the social relations (Munch 1991: 367) so that urban spaces cannot be vehicles for social, racial, or gender discrimination (Boyer 1995: 82, 105, 1996; Gottdeiner 1997: 134) without corresponding deficiences of the citizenship institutions.

Critique of the rational discourse (Beauregard 1996) alone cannot account for the processes of differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration (Munch 1991: 367) that tie liberal, cultural, social, and political rights into the structure of their institutionalization (Lovering 1995: 119) that dependent on its historical, contextual, and spatial configuration can succeed or fail to lead to urban renewal and creativity. The utilitarian interpretation of the interpenetration of the social systems conceptually privileges the marketplaces of connectivity, power, money, and culture accomulation as the respective wellsprings of solidarity, polity, economy, and creativity (Amin and Graham 1997: 422; Zukin 1995: 42) that are supposed to evolve not within the social structure of the interrelationships among the respective institutional systems (Munch 1991: 370) but as a spontaneous result of the free exchange across public spaces (Zukin 1995: 260). Since the structure of action envelops the social institutions while not being restricted to them (Amin and Graham 1997: 422; Munch 1991: 369) the interaction between individuals and social systems cannot guide urban analyses, policy, and planning in isolation from the independently occurring dynamics between cultural institutions and social structure and between individual and collective strategies and the city as agglomeration of macro institutional environments for action.

From the perspective of the micro corrective to the structural functionalism (Colomy and Roades 1994) the urban innovation and creativity have to be conceptualized as institutional entrepreneurial projects that go beyond the evolutionary, economic, or organizational innovation in the form of post-Fordist networks based on reflexive rule-making, milieux of trust and reciprocity, and epistemic community-building (Amin and Graham 1997: 422) towards further differentiation of the social structure of cities rather than social homogeneity, cultural intermingling, and pleasurable consumption (Amin and Graham 1997: 422). However, the contradictions of modernity bring the pluralization of association, the universalization of moral norms, and the rule of law (Munch 1991: 367) to bear upon the citizen, urban, and, economic rights with the effect of rising "tolerance for difference, diffuse citizeship and hybrid shared spaces" (Amin and Graham 1997: 422) that binds rational capitalism, discourse, citizenry, and authority into the dynamics of interpenetration between capital mobility, discursive inflation, disciplinary state, and governance crises. Consequently, cities as macro environments for action have to stress not only the economic and solidarity accumulation via temporary and flexible employment, family and community networks, informal and industrial services, third sector employment, environmental recuperation projects, community and social assistance services, and community banks turning urban centers into hubs of productivity growth, nonmonetary exchange, skills development, and organizational innovation (Amin and Graham 1997: 423; Thrift 1996a), but also interrelated social, governmental, economic, technological, and cultural policy-making (Munch 1991: 370).

The differentiation of the cultural accumulation occurs through investment of discourse into diverse cultural goods and services, mobilization of power, and reputation building (Munch 1991: 371) that within the urban social structure contributes to its renewal, integration, and evolution in the possible direction of inclusive, hybrid, and creol (Hall 1995) development of society, economy, politics, and culture. However, the system of interrelations among the economic, cultural, solidarity, and political accumulation processes includes among its factors the legitimation of economic activity, collective action, and political agency (Munch 1991: 371) that constrain the potential for differentiation that the urban, national, and regional social structures can have (Amin and Graham 1997: 423) as multiple countervailing influences mutually bind social systems into particular configurations exhibiting varying degress of propensity for tolerance, innovation, and growth. Not only does modern citizenry has its liberal, cultural, social, and political rights institutionalized (Wilson 1991) under the universalizing impact of the rational discourse, under the legalizing effect of rational exercize of power on urban communities, and under the pluralizing influence of rational capitalism on social association (Munch 1991: 367), but also the process of modernization as growing systemic interpenetration has to bring the rational capitalism mutually to bear both on discourse via situative adaptation of cultural ideas and rational calculation and on legal authority via accountability of action and profit taxation (Munch 1991: 368) should extremes of utilitarian exploitation, income inequality, racial, ethnic or gender discrimination, and life-chances differences be avoided (Amin and Graham 1997: 423).

Rather than a site of celebration of unmanaged diversity (Robins 1991), the city should be embedded into policies promoting social justice, community empowerment, and non-hierarchical urban planning that can rely on the institutional interpenetration between the legally regulated authority of the state and the rational discourse on civic democracy (Munch 1991: 368) jointly participating in self-determination and vocal representation of communities via formalized channels of communication on civic governance (Amin and Graham 1997: 423-424). The state concentrates power by making economic, policy, social and political decisions that respectively exchanges political goods, services, and returns with the economic system and cooperation and reputation building with the solidarity system that in return for welfare payments and community goods and services engages in economic cooperation and mobilization (Munch 1991: 371) thereby creating dynamics of system-mediated links among social justice, community-building, and empowerment (Amin and Graham 1997: 424) putting political limits on the policy effects that fiscal crises or neo-liberal state can have (Mingione 1996) while increasingly involving non-governmental organizations.

In the city, as a site of institutional interpenetration of the social systems, the dynamics of differentiation of social policy, association market, public discourse, and social coalition-building (Munch 1991: 370) alters the social structure of the spatial and temporal distribution of labor, of the geography of economic exchange, of the social boundaries of market involvement, of the media of social mobilization, and of the relationships among public, private, and voluntary organizations and regulatory frameworks (Amin 1996; Amin and Graham 1997: 424; European Commission 1995). The functional integration building upon the further structural differentiation of the social system involves a change in the structure of relations among the solidarity, political, and economic systems (Munch 1991: 370) as economic goals become intedependent with social justice, as urban associations interpenetrate with market economy and welfare state, as decision-making and authority equally engage political, economic, and social actors, as urban governance embeds state and economic institutions into public discourse, and as discursively negotiated authority replaces the politics of institutional hierarchy (Amin and Graham 1997: 424; Judge et al. 1995; Lauria 1997).

Under the influence of the institutional interpenetration, interactive governance (Amin and Graham 1997: 424), dialogic democracy (Beck 1997; Giddens 1994), communicative action (Arendt 1958, 1972; Habermas 1978, 1981) and interactive reasoning (Healey 1997; Lake 1994; Patomaki 1995) connect economic, cultural, association, and political systems into a relational structure of collective action bringing businesses, organizations, government agencies, and individuals into a decentered network where multiple rationalities, institutions, and actors mesh (Amin and Hausner 1997). The effect on urban policy-making of the institutional interpenetration consists in growing discursive complexity of the relations between political institutions and interest groups (Munch 1991: 370) that via networking, partnerships, and negotiations contribute to consensus-building, conflict resolution, and innovative solutions (Amin and Graham 1997: 425) while preserving the latent structues of transparency, empowerment, deliberation, and communication (Leedbeater and Mulgan 1994) that contribute to the civic participation in the urban governance by steering urban, social, public, arbitrage, and media policy (Graham and Marvin 1996; Hill 1994).

The insitutional interpenetration among political, economic, cultural, and association systems fosters the distribution of authority and reflexivity across governmental, business, and civic organizations that develop network-based relations of equal representation, limited power, and diffuse authority that facilitate inclusive public discourse, decision-making, associational networks, and empowerment practices (Amin and Graham 1997: 425; Cohen and Rogers 1992; Hirst 1994). The dynamics of relations among the economic, solidarity, and political systems produces the self-reinforcing causal links among economic reputation-building, political benefits, and social mobilization (Munch 1991: 371) that produce polarizing effects on the processes of accumulation of money, reputation, and power having reinforcing influence on the structure of urban relations among local interests, associative networks, and urban politics (Amin and Graham 1997: 425). The position of the cultural system in the urban structure of social relations responds to the imperatives of the cultural accumulation (Munch 1991: 371) via expanding investment with discourse of civic autonomy, contestatory politics, urban authority, and civic consensus (Healey and Vigar 1996) that accumulate social capital (Putnam 1993) by economic mobilization of communication, claim urban solidarity (Mann 1986) by social mobilization of communication, and pursue universal justice (Amin and Graham 1997: 426) by political mobilization of communication.

The process of modernization as institutional interpenetration countervails the tendency to maintain the differentiation between the rational authority, capitalism and discourse in the direction of relations of mutual interdependence between goal-oriented ethical choices and rational appropriation of nature, society, and culture (Munch 1991: 367-368) as a concomitant of social, economic, political, and cultural struggles for and against collective projects of equality, welfare, inclusion, sustainability, and urbanity (Amin and Graham 1997: 426; Escobar 1992: 426-427; Walker 1994). The global generalization of the structure of modernity has raised the level of complexity of institutional relations of the urban structures around the world beyond the grasp of models of urban decentralization, pluralism, and governance (Amin and Graham 1997: 426) towards the condition of differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration that demands detailed mapping of the dynamics of mobilization, relations, and agency among diverse institutions, plural movements, representative groups, and formal organizations. Since the social structure of modernity is embedded into the structure of individual and collective action (Munch 1991: 369), its contextualization in particular cities has to employ the micro corrective of the structural functionalism (Colomy and Rhoades 1994) to account for how struggles among competing interest groups shape the economic, cultural, association, and political systems on the urban scale where claims for social justice, empowerment, and solidarity are made (Amin and Graham 1997: 426).

An institutional project promoting further differentiation of the social structure for the sake of solidarity, social justice, and social needs cannot abstain from the dynamics of rationalization and interpenetration as the institutionally entrepreneurial groups enter into binding interrelationships with the governmental institutions, intermediate organizations, and public discourses (Amin and Graham 1997: 426). An isolated approach to the conflicts occurring in the simultaneous and interdependent processes of political, economic, cultural, and social accumulation (Munch 1991: 371) can hardly address the political challenges of urban growth, the economic loss of city assets, the urban breakdown of civic culture, and communal powerlessness before social deregulation (Amin and Graham 1997: 427). Therefore, the interpenetration of the structures of investment of capital, discourse, reputation, and power ties the social, fiscal, economic, technological, and cultural policy-making into the waxing or waning fortunes of the urban markets of economic, social, political and cultural goods and services flowing across the social structure where circulation, distribution, and accumulation are just consequences of individual and collective actions (Munch 1991: 370-371).