Imagine There’s No Countries

Abstract

World City. By Doreen Massey. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. 272 pp., $24.95 (ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4060-0). It is exciting to receive a new book from Doreen Massey, 1998 winner of the Prix Vautrin Lud (aka the “Nobel Prize for Geography”) and one of the most prominent radical geographers writing today. Her latest monograph, World City , is an important intervention into the rich literature on globalization and cities, a dimension of global social relations to which International Relations scholars would do well to pay much greater attention. Although Massey has authored several important books on economic geography, her most recent work takes economic relations as mere starting points for expansive discussions of politics, discourse and ethics. World City stands firmly in Massey's contemporary line of thought. It builds upon her recent theoretical work, For Space (Massey 2005), flowing as an extended essay rather than a rigorous academic argument which effectively carries the reader through a host of observations and examples to culminate in an argument centered on the contributions of “geographical imagination” to contemporary politics. Despite the title World City without caption or modifier, Massey is less interested in the category as such than in one particular world city, her own home of London. In the process she draws upon a rich academic literature (including her own published works) as well as her own political experiences traversing four decades. Massey is not simply a student of world city politics; she is a long-active participant in them, from the days of the left-wing Greater London Council famously dissolved by Margaret Thatcher in 1986 to grassroots public art campaigns today. Yet, despite this focus on a single metropolis, World City still offers generous insights for those keen to think through the spatial dimensions and implications of globalization. Massey herself argues (p. 12) that the book is not so much “about London” as it “arises from London.” In …