Spatial Dimensions of Global Governance

Abstract

Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones, and Gordon Macleod, State/Space: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 355 pp. Saskia Sassen, ed., Global Networks, Linked Cities (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 368 pp. Allen J. Scott, ed., Global City-Regions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 467 pp. John Friedmann, The Prospect of Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 194 pp. Groupement Economie Mondiale, Tiers-Monde, Developpement (GEMDEV), under the direction of Annick Osmont and Charles Goldblum, Villes et citadins dans la mondialisation (Paris: Karthala, 2003), 300 pp. World Bank, World Development Report 2003: Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2003), 250 pp. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Territorial Outlook (Paris: OECD, 2001), 291 pp. Integrating Rural Development and Small Urban Centers: An Evolving Framework for Effective Regional and Local Economic Development, seminar summary from the Rural Development-Urban Development Joint Seminar, World Bank/IFC Headquarters, Washington, D.C., 18-19 March 2003. United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UN Habitat), Cities in a Globalizing World: Global Report on Human Settlements 2001 (London: Earthscan Publications, 2001). Spatial development focuses on geographical areas as opposed to sectors or issues. Spatial policy is important because it attempts to tackle global problems and to unite and motivate people. This review examines a number of books and reports that help to realistically relate trends to a norm-driven spatial vision or strategy. Two major problems need addressing. The first is that modernization is pushing the globe in directions that deny many of the ends of the good life for different (any bounded space) and put the environment of the planet at risk for future generations. New spatial visions may be a dialectic join of history and its current unfolding but ought not be dismissed out of hand as mere nostalgia or ideology. Economic growth is a means and not an end--and not the only means. In this review essay, the megacities with sharpening social fragmentation are given as the major examples with repercussions to all other problems. The second is part consequence of the first--that bonds of spatial and social order have broken down with increased interdependency and not been replaced by a new and acceptable global order. The form of spatial governance and government from village to global is taken as the major issue area, and the books are examined for problem trends, objectives, and pathways where the means of global norms and action can begin to move. Global dialogued norms can do three things: set the global spatial vision broad enough to reconcile urban dynamics with rural respect for nature everywhere; give the framework in which bounded communities can decide their own futures; and define transgression and grade intervention by a higher spatial level in the affairs of a lower level--including social justice between communities and the preservation of order. There are two conceptions of vision in the literature: interpretive vision devises strategies to address anticipated spatial development trends; norm-driven vision aims to control and to circumscribe these trends. The prospect of forty-two new megacities inhabited by more than 10 million people being created over the next fifty years, with only one in the developed world, is unsettling. In 2001, of seventeen megacities, four are in developed countries. (1) What is the strategic vision contained in the World Bank's World Development Report 2003 that encourages both global and in-country migration? The report claims that the demand for low-cost labor in developed countries and the supply in poor countries will grow. Neither megacity multiplication nor massive migration flows are victories but rather the defeat of spatial vision. …