Beyond the Global City Concept and the Myth of ‘Command and Control’

The article argues that the lack of convincing empirical evidence for the global economy as being subject to ‘command and control’ results from that contention being a neo‐Marxist myth. First, imagining the global economy as being subject to ‘highly concentrated command’ through the function of some major cities as ‘strategic sites’ for the production of ‘command and control’ is traced back through several neo‐Marxist authors to narrate its genesis, and to argue that the lack of evidence for that proposition is a consequence of those antecedents envisioning capitalism as a totalizing structure, thus making the assumption that it is subject to control and coordination from a distance. Second, Taylor's interlocking world city network model is forensically examined to explain that it is fallacious because it is a structuralism that, bedevilled by a sorites paradox, contains the further problem of containing no credible evidence for the existence of ‘command centres’. Finally, the article moves beyond neo‐Marxism's key concepts by juxtaposing their assumptions with ethnographic results from social studies of finance, a manoeuvre which forges an understanding of cities as socio‐technical assemblages and eventful multiplicities, beyond, inter alia, the baseless assumption that the global economy is subject to ‘command and control’.     

Hip‐Hop as Urban and Regional Research: Encountering an Insider's Ethnography of City Life

This essay suggests that hip‐hop music may reasonably be thought of as a form of urban and regional research. The essay draws upon a recently published book by hip‐hop artist Jay‐Z, which provides biographical information alongside translations of the lyrical content of his works, to show that hip‐hop is full of insider ethnographic insights into urban life. This, it is argued, can be thought of as an answer to Daryl Martin's call for a more ‘poetic urbanism’, an urbanism that captures the material, sensory and emotional aspects of the city. The essay uses Jay‐Z's text to illustrate the type of insights and ideas that we might obtain from hip‐hop, giving some specific examples of these insights and concluding with some reflections upon this alternative insider account of city life — and how it might provide us with opportunities for expanding our repertoire.     

Urbanization and the City Image in Lowry at Tate Britain: Towards a Critique of Cultural Cityism

This article explores cultural cityism at a time when a more expansive, ‘planetary’ urbanization is argued to have superseded ‘the city’ as the dominant urban form. It takes an essentially Lefebvrian problematic and works this through an examination of one aspect of contemporary metropolitan culture, the L.S. Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain, held in the summer of 2013. The article scrutinizes the juxtaposition of Lowry's images of the industrial city with the image of ‘global’, corporate London provided by Tate Britain itself. The exhibition is presented as evidence of Lefebvre's argument that although the urban core has imploded and exploded, through images the city ‘can perpetuate itself, survive its conditions’. Taking stock also of the preponderance of city images in culture more widely, it is argued such images make a fetish of the city, producing also an ‘urban pastoral’ that obscures the defining characteristics of urban life today. Finally, Benjamin's concept of the ‘dialectical image’ and Rancière's notion of the ‘sentence image’ are invoked to capture the flashing together of past and present city images and the opportunities for critical reflection this constellation presents.     

What Role for Social Science in the ‘Urban Age'?

There is growing recognition of a new human ascendancy: ‘the urban age’. Rising interest in urbanism is evident in popular literature, the media and major global institutions. And yet, as with another great issue of the age, global warming, there is evidence that social science is being sidelined from a rapidly enlarging field of human concern. New urban knowledges are forwarded from the physical sciences and from popular commentary that are characterized by naturalism and its kindred tendencies, especially determinism. In this essay I consider why social scientific urbanism seems increasingly marginal to an ever broadening urban discussion. The regressive consequences for human knowledge and prospect are essayed. The essay's final part is prospectus: for a revivified social scientific urbanism that draws from Sayer's recent argument for renewal of critical human knowledge.     

‘Eco’ For Whom? Envisioning Eco‐urbanism in the Sino‐Singapore Tianjin Eco‐city,China

Eco‐cities have attracted international attention from governments, corporations, academics and other actors seeking to use sustainable urban planning to reduce urban environmental impacts. China has devoted significant political will and economic resources to the development of new‐build eco‐city projects, reflecting the Chinese government's goals to build a ‘harmonious society' in which environmental sustainability and social stability are mutually reinforcing. We critically analyse the case of the Sino‐Singapore Tianjin eco‐city to demonstrate that the eco‐city's ecologically modernizing visions of eco‐urbanism construct a protective environment for its residents that constrains broader consideration of social sustainability. Through analysis of the marketing and presentation of specific domestic and other spaces of the eco‐city, we examine the application of ecologically modernizing construction and technology to the design of the city. We argue that the eco‐city is discursively constructed as ecologically beneficial for its inhabitants rather than for the broader socio‐environmental landscape. Our analysis of residential spaces in Tianjin eco‐city introduces the question of what ‘eco’ means when considering the construction of eco‐urban environments for the city's residents.     

Making ‘Global Sydney’: Spatial Imaginaries,Worlding and Strategic Plans

This article critically examines the expression of global spatial imaginaries in urban policy and planning. Following recent calls to understand how the global is ‘made up' in and through cities, we argue for the usefulness of Roy and Ong's concept of ‘worlding’. By analysing how strategic spatial plans envisage ‘Global Sydney’, the article reveals a constitutive spatial imaginary informed by the articulation of three interrelated elements: global city standards, comparative techniques and extra‐local policy models. Unpacking how cities are selectively worlded through spatial imaginaries, the article advances an approach to urban globality as actively cultivated and differentially produced.     

Capturing the City

In this essay I use Surabaya as a case study to argue that today's data-based urbanism excludes people from the city. Data-based urbanism differs from the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary urbanisms of the past in Surabaya that included people: the revolutionary form enabled the low-income majority of the kampung neighbourhoods to capture the ‘city as a whole’ through infrastructure, while the counterrevolutionary form enabled that majority to capture the city in parts through their kampungs. To make the aforementioned points I give the concept of heterotopia a Southern context that brings the low-income majority to the foreground of urban studies.     

Florida in the Global South: How Eurocentrism Obscures Global Urban Challenges—and What We Can Do about It

According to Richard Florida, the world is in the grip of a ‘New Urban Crisis’. In his most recent book Florida recounts a visit to Medellín that provoked an epiphany in which he realized that the New Urban Crisis is global in scope. Unfortunately, Florida's discovery of the global South is informed by a deeply Eurocentric understanding of urbanization. This leads him to conclude that Southern cities should ‘unleash’ creativity, and he proposes that the United States should develop a global urban policy that would export a version of American urbanism. In this essay we deconstruct Florida's notion of the New Urban Crisis and show that its Eurocentric assumptions obscure the very real environmental, economic and political challenges facing cities in the global South and their residents.     

Comparative Urbanism and the ‘Asian City': Implications for Research and Theory

While voices in the comparative urbanism literature call for researchers to approach comparison with more experimental and critical methodologies, there remains no consensus on how to design and realize these studies. This essay examines the implications of comparative urbanism for researching the ‘Asian City'. Given the critique of existing modes of comparison embedded in recent calls for a new comparative urbanism, researchers are faced with a number of pressing questions: How do we approach this ‘regional' topic in a way that both resists categorizing the ‘Asian City' as an exotic ‘other', elevating it onto a mythical pedestal, yet appreciates its differences, localisms and unique ‘cosmopolitan vernacular' (Clifford, 1997; Werbner and Modood, 1997)? This essay thus highlights the multiple challenges of applying the comparative lens to the ‘Asian City', arguing that broader conceptualizations of the ‘Asian City' help to address the dangers in isolating Asian research into its own canon of parochial urban theory and offering a greater diversity of possibilities for justifying case selection in comparative approaches. In doing so, we hope that this essay responds to the comparative turn by illuminating to some extent its inherent complexity and methodological challenges.     

The Vortex of Rights: ‘Right to the City’ at a Crossroads

The right to the city concept has recently attracted a great deal of attention from radical theorists and grassroots activists of urban justice, who have embraced the notion as a means to analyze and challenge neoliberal urbanism. It has, moreover, drawn considerable attention from United Nations (UN) agencies, which have organized meetings and outlined policies to absorb the notion into their own political agendas. This wide‐ranging interest has created a conceptual vortex, pulling together discordant political projects behind the banner of the right to the city. This article analyzes such projects by reframing the right to the city concept to foreground its roots in Marxian labor theory of value. It argues that Lefebvre's formulation of the right to the city — based on the contradiction between use value and exchange value in capitalist urbanism — is invaluable for analyzing and delineating contradictory urban politics that are pulled into the vortex of the right to the city. Following Lefebvre's lead in such an analysis, however, reveals certain limitations of Lefebvre's own account. The article therefore concludes with a theoretical proposition that aims to open up space for further critical debate on the right to the city.     

Seeing Like a City‐State: Behavioural Planning and Governance in Egypt's First Affordable Gated Community

Haram City is Egypt's first ‘affordable’ gated community, hosting both aspirational middle‐class homeowners and resettled poor urban residents. Amidst legal ambiguity during Egypt's 2011–2013 revolutionary period, the management team of this public–private partnership was tasked with creating a ‘fully self‐sufficient’ city. While Haram City is the product of top‐down ‘seeing like a state’ master planning (Scott, 1998 ), the day‐to‐day resolution of class vulnerabilities and disputes over ‘reasonableness’ in city life requires forms of interpersonal adjudication otherwise addressed through local urban law—‘seeing like a city’ (Valverde, 2011 ). This article uses ethnography of management techniques aiming to ‘upgrade behaviour’ to theorize that a private entity, in a strategically indeterminate relationship with the state, reconciles future‐oriented planning and storied prejudices by merging two visions of governance. Imitating the repertoire of urban law, managers plan the very realm of bottom‐up decision making. They then adapt top‐down urban planning to bottom‐up dispute resolution to spatially consolidate the ‘consensual’ outcomes of a rigged game. Evoking both colonial Egyptian vagrancy laws and neoliberal paternalist welfare, ‘seeing like a city‐state’ governance amounts to authoritarianism that conceals itself within custom, appearing neutral so as to plan streets, codes and inner lives at once.     

A Small Entrepreneurial City in Action: Policy Mobility,Urban Entrepreneurialism,and Politics of Scale in Jiyuan,China

This research details the mundane practices of policy mobility and entrepreneurial endeavour in Jiyuan in relation to the city's changing administrative position, and is one of the first attempts at understanding how entrepreneurial policies are mobilized, mutated and diffused in a small inland Chinese city. We interpret Jiyuan's evolving development strategies and trajectory through two interrelated conceptual lenses—policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism—bridged by an analysis of the politics of scale. Over the past three decades, governance strategies in Jiyuan have evolved from policy imitation, during the germination of urban entrepreneurialism, to policy mutation and diffusion, under the amplification of entrepreneurialism, as the city has moved up the administrative levels and urban hierarchy. Policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism in Jiyuan, involving a multi‐scalar process, are being shaped by the interactions between the city, the region, the central state and global capital under the confluence of globalization and marketization. The ‘successful’ story of a small entrepreneurial city tells a new tale that can inform wider contexts by painting a fuller portrait of the evolution of an entrepreneurial city across different scales and time and bringing cities hitherto ‘off the map’ back into the picture of urban entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of globalization.     

Hamburg's Spaces of Danger: Race,Violence and Memory in a Contemporary Global City

Germany today is experiencing the strongest upsurge of right‐wing populism since the second world war, most notably with the rise of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland. Yet wealthy global cities like Hamburg continue to present themselves as the gatekeepers of liberal progress and cosmopolitan openness. This article argues that Hamburg's urban boosterism relies on, while simultaneously obscuring, the same structures of racial violence that embolden reactionary movements. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Allan Pred, we present an archaeology of Hamburg's landscape, uncovering some of its ‘spaces of danger’—sites layered with histories of violence, many of which lie buried and forgotten. We find that these spaces, when they become visible, threaten to undermine Hamburg's cosmopolitan narrative. They must, as a result, be continually erased or downplayed in order to secure the city as an attractive site for capital investment. To illustrate this argument, we give three historical examples: Hamburg's role in the Hanseatic League during the medieval and early modern period; the city under the Nazi regime; and the recent treatment of Black African refugees. The article's main contribution is to better situate issues of historical landscape, collective memory and racialized violence within the political economy of today's global city.     

Renaissance Revisited: Singapore as a ‘Global City for the Arts’

Singapore is renowned as a global business and financial centre, an international hub of air and sea transport, and Asia's leading convention city. In the new millennium, the government has envisioned a new role for the city‐state as a ‘Renaissance City’ and ‘Global City for the Arts’. This vision is premised on Singapore becoming an investment base for leading arts, cultural and entertainment enterprises in the region, the theatre hub of Southeast Asia, and an entertainment destination for tourists. This article examines the challenges and accomplishments in Singapore's quest to be a Renaissance City. Drawing on literature on ‘global cities’ and concepts relating to ‘globalization’ and ‘localization’, it argues that the key challenge facing Singapore is how best to ‘go global’ and ‘stay local’ at the same time. Developing a Renaissance City entails a balancing act between globalizing local sensibilities on the one hand, while localizing global best‐practices on the other. This global‐local nexus can be approached in three ways: (1) by striking a balance between the economic and humanistic objectives of the arts; (2) by importing world‐class arts talents and exporting home‐grown skills; and (3) by globalizing local peculiarities in line with best practices from around the world. The need to balance global standards with local interests is not easily achieved, however, making Singapore's ‘Global City for the Arts’ vision one of its most ambitious goals to date. Singapour est célèbre en tant que centre mondial de la finance et des affaires, pivot du transport aéro‐maritime international, site de premier plan pour les salons en Asie. Avec le millénaire naissant, le gouvernement a envisagé une nouvelle fonction pour la cité‐État, celle de ‘Ville de la Renaissance’ et ‘Ville mondiale des Arts‘. Préalablement, Singapour doit devenir non seulement une base d'investissement pour les grands projets artistiques, culturels et de divertissement dans cette partie du monde, mais aussi le nud théâtral de l'Asie du Sud‐Est et une destination touristique de loisirs. L'article étudie les défis et réalisations qui jalonnent cette entreprise. Exploitant les documents traitant des ‘villes mondiales’ et des concepts liés à la ‘mondialisation’ et à la ‘localisation‘, il démontre que le grand problème auquel Singapour se heurte est de concilier simultanément les deux démarches ‘agir mondial‘ et ‘rester local‘. Développer une Ville de la Renaissance implique un équilibrage entre la mondialisation de sensibilités locales d'un côté, et la localisation des meilleures méthodes internationales de l'autre. On peut aborder ce lien mondial‐local de trois manières différentes: trouver un juste milieu entre les objectifs économiques et humanistes des arts; importer des talents artistiques de dimension mondiale et exporter les compétences nationales; mondialiser les particularités locales cohérentes avec les meilleures méthodes internationales existantes. Atteindre l'équilibre nécessaire entre normes mondiales et intérêts locaux est loin d'être aisé, ce qui fait de la vision de Singapour en ‘Ville mondiale des Arts‘ l'un des buts nationaux les plus ambitieux à ce jour.     

Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities

In the conspicuously geographical debate between ‘North’ and ‘South’ urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the ‘North’ but embody ‘South‐like’ colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from ‘any city’, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property—as object, as redress and as land—and use case vignettes from Israel/Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.     

The ‘Global’ in the City Economy: Multicultural Economic Development in Birmingham

This article draws on critiques of ‘global cities’ to conceptualize Birmingham, the UK's second largest metropole, as a ‘global’ city by highlighting forms of economic globalization that draw on the city's residents, their histories and their social and cultural networks. The article illustrates some of the diversity and significance of minority ethnic economic activity within Birmingham and the potential this holds for its future economic development, focusing on examples from three transnational networks (Chinese business networks, ethnic food manufacturing and the Bhangra music industry). The article signals a rather different understanding of ‘global’ as it relates to economic advantage, transnationalism and ethnic diversity within cities in general, and Birmingham in particular. We suggest that this different understanding of the global has important policy implications, not simply in terms of economic representations of the city, but also in terms of developing the possibilities of such transnational networks and engaging with the constraints facing them. We argue that encouraging a more relational way of thinking about cities like Birmingham has the potential for advancing social wellbeing by influencing socio‐economic policy and practice. We use the example of Birmingham, therefore, to engage broader debates about alternative paths of ‘global’ economic, social and cultural investment for UK (and other) cities. A partir de critiques des ‘villes planétaires’, cet article conceptualise Birmingham (deuxième métropole britannique) en tant que ville ‘planétaire’ en soulignant les formes de mondialisation économique qui s’appuient sur les citadins, leurs histoires et leurs réseaux sociaux et culturels. Pour illustrer en partie la diversité et la place de l’activitééconomique ethnique des minorités à Birmingham, ainsi que le potentiel afférent pour son essor économique futur, ce travail s’intéresse à des exemples issus de trois réseaux transnationaux (réseaux d’affaires chinois, fabrication d’alimentation ethnique et secteur de la musique indienne Bhangra). Il repère une compréhension assez différente de ‘planétaire’, selon que le terme est liéà un avantage économique, au transnationalisme et à la diversité ethnique au sein des grandes villes, et de Birmingham en particulier. Cette perception multiple a d’importantes implications politiques, à la fois au plan des représentations économiques de la ville et en termes de création de possibilités pour ces réseaux transnationaux et de prise en compte des contraintes à affronter. Encourager un mode de réflexion plus relationnelà l’égard de villes comme Birmingham permettrait de promouvoir le bien‐être social en influant sur la pratique et la politique socio‐économique. Le cas de Birmingham sert donc à lancer des débats plus larges sur les options d’acheminement de l’investissement économique, social et culturel ‘planétaire’ pour les grandes villes britanniques (et étrangères).     

Understanding Urban Processes in Flint,Michigan: Approaching ‘Subaltern Urbanism’ Inductively

Ananya Roy introduces the concept ‘subaltern urbanism’ in her 2011 article ‘Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism’. She challenges researchers to move beyond existing epistemological and methodological limits, and offers four concepts which, taken together, serve as a useful starting point for understanding and representing subaltern urban space. In this article I argue that instead of a deductive approach that begins with an a priori identification of slums as subaltern urban space, an inductive approach of identifying subaltern urban space would expand the concept and show that subaltern urbanism exists in the global North. I present original research to show that Flint, Michigan, can be considered subaltern urban space. In the final section of the article I argue that this inductive approach to subaltern urbanism can foster comparative research across the North‐South divide, and generate the transfer of knowledge from South to North.     

Cities within the City: Do‐It‐Yourself Urbanism and the Right to the City

In many cities around the world we are presently witnessing the growth of, and interest in, a range of micro‐spatial urban practices that are reshaping urban spaces. These practices include actions such as: guerrilla and community gardening; housing and retail cooperatives; flash mobbing and other shock tactics; social economies and bartering schemes; ‘empty spaces’ movements to occupy abandoned buildings for a range of purposes; subcultural practices like graffiti/street art, skateboarding and parkour; and more. This article asks: to what extent do such practices constitute a new form of urban politics that might give birth to a more just and democratic city? In answering this question, the article considers these so‐called ‘do‐it‐yourself urbanisms’ from the perspective of the ‘right to the city’. After critically assessing that concept, the article argues that in order for do‐it‐yourself urbanist practices to generate a wider politics of the city through the appropriation of urban space, they also need to assert new forms of authority in the city based on the equality of urban inhabitants. This claim is illustrated through an analysis of the do‐it‐yourself practices of Sydney‐based activist collective BUGA UP and the New York and Madrid Street Advertising Takeovers.     

Spaces of Difference: Reflections from Toronto on Multiculturalism,Bourgeois Urbanism and the Possibility of Radical Urban Politics

What explains the lack of what Mike Davis famously called ‘magical urbanism’— referring to the increasingly influential and potentially radical role played by Latino immigrants in US politics — in such diverse Canadian cities as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver? This article points out how the Canadian legacy of multiculturalism constitutes one key cause of the failure of left urban politics in Canada to produce yet anything approaching the promise of ‘magical urbanism’ south of the border, especially by underlining how this bulwark of liberal ideology lends itself so readily to some resilient variations of bourgeois urbanism — including the commodification of difference, most recently under the auspices of Richard Florida's ‘creative class’. Against the pluralism of the food court and the shopping mall, both in its official multicultural and seemingly oppositional ‘hybrid’ forms, are radical approaches to difference in the city still possible — in Canada or elsewhere? The authors argue that the concepts of ‘maximal’ and ‘produced’ (vis‐à‐vis ‘minimal’ and ‘induced’) difference and the politics of ‘the right to the city’ elaborated by Henri Lefebvre — in conjunction with the reflections on subaltern experiences of difference by critics such as Himani Bannerji and Ambalavanar Sivanandan — indeed provide a starting point for radical urban politics. Comment expliquer, dans des villes canadiennes aussi différentes que Toronto, Montréal ou Vancouver, l’absence de ce que Mike Davis a appelé‘l’urbanisme magique’ en parlant du rôle de plus en plus influent, voire radical, des immigrants latinoaméricain dans la politique des États‐unis? L’héritage canadien du multiculturalisme explique d’abord pourquoi la politique urbaine de gauche n’a encore rien pu produire au Canada qui s’approcherait de la promesse d’un ‘urbanisme magique’ comme au sud de la frontière. L’article souligne notamment comment ce rempart d’idéologie libérale se prête si facilement à quelques variantes résistantes d’urbanisme bourgeois, dont la banalisation de la différence, tout récemment sous les auspices de la ‘classe créative’ de Richard Florida. Face au pluralisme de l’aire de restauration et du centre commercial, tous deux sous des formes ‘hybrides’ multiculturelles et aparemment contradictoires, des approches radicales de la différence dans la ville sont‐elles encore possibles, au Canada ou ailleurs? Les concepts de différence ‘maximale’ et ‘produite’ (par opposition à‘minimale’ et ‘induite’) et la politique du ‘droit à la ville’ conçue par Henri Lefebvre — alliés aux réflexions sur des expériences de différence subalternes émanant de critiques tels que Himani Bannerji et Ambalavanar Sivanandan — offrent indubitablement un point de départ pour une politique urbaine radicale.