The Socio-Political Transformation of the Urban and Global Scales in the Global City: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Social Justice of Geo-politics

Abstract

ion’s practical [social] use” (Lefebvre, 1991, 289). With this in mind, the second assumption would argue that there must be recognition of the intimate praxis of global social space in the local-urban structures of the Global City. We have seen the intimate relationship between social relations in society and the social spaces they express, as well as that the RTTC stresses the need to restructure these power relations that underline the production of urban space in order to fundamentally shift control away from capital and state and toward urban inhabitants. The production of urban space entails much more than just planning the material space of the city: it involves producing and reproducing all aspects of urban life. With respect to this framework, how can our understanding of the urban-global praxis in the Global City help us to better recover the social spaces and produce social justice? How can urbanization, as a dialectical process between form and content, enable us to produce social justice on both local and global scales? As we move forward with our framework, we will see how the ‘Urbanization of Justice’ in the Global City will lead us to expand the social relations conceived in terms of citizenship in order to foster local-global appropriation and participation in social transformation. Lefebvre would argue that the local scale should always take priority, as it is the scale that has an immediate impact on the everyday life. However, Purcell warns us not to assume anything a priori about the characteristics of a particular scale or scalar arrangement. It is clear that issue domains are complex, manifold and compounded, and Lefebvre’s concept urges us to examine social justice issues from the perspective of everyday lives in order to enable them to take a central role in decision-making. In the Global City, everyday life now transgresses the propinquity of locality, 40 Purcell refers to the ‘local trap’ in order to warn against the automatic assumption that local scales are inherently democratic (Purcell, 2006).