Chapter 23 - Greatest Accelerations III: Pleasure Palaces and Sweatshops

Summary

Chapter 23 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet is the third in a four-part exploration of the Greatest Acceleration from 1945 to the present. Its focus is on spaces of consumption and production, the ocean hopping “value chains” that connect shops with factories, and the growing role of virtual spaces in the global spread of those environments. The proliferation of massive shopping malls, the attraction of urban land, and the global tourist industry are all pieces of this part of the Greatest Acceleration. To produce the goods and increasingly the “experiences” that elicit these desires, manufacturing spaces have exploded in size, notably in East Asia, even as they have declined in many of the “Global North” urban heartlands of the industrial revolution. The chapter visits the largest factory in the world in Shenzhen, China and smaller sweatshops. It also notes that a majority of workers in the global economy do unsung work such as urban transport, construction, and household good sales that makes the growth of cities (and tourist experiences) possible, and in care work in homes, essential to making all other work possible.