The disappearance of world cities and the globalization of local politics

Abstract

Global space is a space of flows. The global cities literature differs in its analysis of the financial, informational, migratory, and cultural circuits that are necessary and sufficient to constitute a ‘world city’. The various representations of ‘world cities’ none the less share a common strategy for conceptualizing global cities as relocalized points of intersection of these global networks, circuits, and flows within the jurisdictional boundaries of cities like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, or Los Angeles, operating within the clearly demarcated borders of single nation-states. This relocalizing strategy, recentres highly decentred and differentially mediated global processes of capital investment, manufacturing, commodity circulation, labour migration, refugee generation, and cultural production by sharply demarcating between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, and then refocusing political—economic and socio-cultural analysis on what goes on ‘inside’ world cities and their respective states and societies. This chapter seeks to question the relocalizing move implicit in the world cities problematic by examining some of the ways that the networks and circuits in which transnational migrants and refugees are implicated constitute fluidly bounded transnational or globalized social spaces, in which new, transnational forms of political organization, mobilization, and practice are coming into being. These new forms of what I will term ‘transnational grassroots politics’, have thus far been given scant attention in discussions of political life in world cities, because they transcend both the ‘urban’ level of analysis and the nation-state bounded discursive practices in which citizenship, civil society, political representation, national and urban politics are ordinarily cast.