First and foremost, we would like to respond to the theoretical issue posed by both Angotti and Boyer: Does the North/South construct adequately address the new realities of globalization?

This is a very important point. Indeed, I have spent fifteen years doing research on how these processes are configuring new geographies of centrality and marginality that cut across the old North/South divide.

Globally oriented financial elites are evident in the less developed world and in the highly developed countries, as well. Furthermore, it is now clear that sectors, activities, and actors that appear unconnected and anachronistic to the new leading sectors of the economy are, in fact, part of the economy.
Garment sweatshops in New York, Paris, and Tokyo may look like 19th century operations, but they are an integral part of the current phase of advanced economies.

The current phase in the world economy is characterized by global dispersal of economic activities and increasing levels of global integration -- under conditions of continued concentration of economic ownership and control.
Telematics and globalization are fundamental forces shaping the organization and function of these emerging economic spaces.

The global economy is a grid of linkages and nodes that cuts across the North/South and includes cities such as Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, and Mexico City. The intensity of transactions among these cities, particularly through financial markets, flows of services, and investment has increased significantly over the past few years.
Moreover, an important consequence is the increasing inequality in the concentration of strategic resources and activities between each of thes cities and others in the same country.
For example, in the Brazilian case, Sao Paulo has gained immense strength as a business and financial center over Rio de Janeiro -- once the political capital and the most important city in the country -- and over the once powerful axis represented by Rio and Brasilia, the current capital. Spatial shifts in power, such as these, are consequences of the formation of a globally integrated system.

The flip side to the new geography of centrality is the new geography of marginality, which also cuts across the old North/South divide.
One instance that captures it, besides the sweatshops in the North, is the fact that Manhattan -- from 59th Street to Wall Street -- has over 700 buildings served by fiber optic cable, while Harlem has only one (and South Central L.A. none).

Moreover, the development of new growth sectors, new organizational capacities, and new technologies are producing new sites and forms of marginality.
The new marginality has several components: the "creative destruction" that is part and parcel of growth; losses due to international and national competition; redundancy in factors of production; new employment patterns; and increasingly skewed income distribution.

Both North and South America are sites for these processes.

The dominant discourse on globalization and the emergence of new growth centers tends to discount the central role(s) played by the new forms of marginality.
In other words, the analysis and general commentary on the new global economy tends to privilege only certain sectors and activities.This is a narrative of eviction -- a narrative that suggests, in part, thatr the only type of worker that matters is the highly educated professional, and that the only firm of import is the advanced globally oriented firm. This optic devalorizes workers, firms, and sectors that don't fit this image. In cities such as New York or Los Angeles it contributes to the devalorization of immigrants. This substratum of immigrant workers provide a bundle of services, to the newly emerging sectors and their professional workers, via the informal economy -- an increasingly important element of the globalization process.

The new geographies of centrality and marginality are also sites for contestation. The new information technologies are to some extent constituting this geography of marginality as a space of power -- a power of resistance, of contestation -- because they are connecting the dispersed points that Boyer speaks about in her respone.

The process of marginality and contestation is increasingly being played out in the city.

In this context, a key question emerges: Whose city is it?
Among the new major actors making claims on the city are foreign firms and international business people. These new city users have reconstituted strategic spaces in the city in their own image.
On the other hand, there are those marginalized individuals and groups who use political violence to make their claims on the city, claims that lack the de facto legitimacy enjoyed by the new city users.

These contestations and claims are being made in the cities of both the developed and non-developed countries.

The uprisings, over the last decade, in major cities of the world are perhaps an indication of the sharpened inequalities. The gaps and fissures are growing in their order of magnitude. We can see this in the social and economic distance between downtown LA and South Central LA, or in the increasing disparity between the glamour zones of Sao Paulo and the mushrooming favelas.

The newly constituted spaces and places of globalization are highly variable. The new information technologies through the combination of innovation, deregulation, and privatization are creating a new space akin to a "wild west" -- a space that is no longer mappable, easy to control by major political and economic actors.

The variability in the rate and direction of technological innovations; the changing nature of strategic business alliances; the rapid restructuring of geo-political configurations; and the increasing contingency of the state's power and authority has give us a deck of cards filled with proverbial "wild cards."

Moreover, by enabling the dispersed sites of marginality and reconstituting them into cyber-networks, the new information technologies open hemisphere-wide possibilities for contesting dominant forms.

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