Global Cities, International Relations and the Fabrication of the World

Abstract

The global city presents one available model for understanding urbanisation and associated hierarchies of power. In International Relations (IR), the global city is treated as a unit in a new type of international system, an increasingly important actor in world politics, or a site through which global processes operate. This article forwards an alternative perspective. It treats the global city as a dispositif of power. While the global city captures the fact that power and wealth are spatially concentrated in today’s urbanising world politics, the concept also has a world-making capacity. The article analyses this capacity in two contexts. Firstly, it presents a genealogy of the voyage of the global cities concept from critical academic scholarship to a buzzword of city elites and business consultants. Secondly, it performs a governmental analysis of global city reports and indexes. Finally, the article suggests that conceptualising the global city as a dispositif enables the important task of imagining alternative ways of framing the meaning of urbanisation in world politics.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the Author

Anni Kangas is University Lecturer in International Relations and Academic Director of the Master’s Programme in Leadership for Change in the School of Management, University of Tampere (Finland). Her research interests are in the impact of urbanisation on world politics, the role of art and popular culture in international relations, and Finnish–Russian relations. Her work has previously been published in Geopolitics, Global Networks, Journal of International Relations and Development and Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

Notes

1. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014), p. 15.

2. See, e.g., Michele Acuto, “Global Cities: Gorillas in Our Midst”, Alternatives, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2010), pp. 425–448; Michele Acuto, Global Cities, Governance and Diplomacy (London: Routledge, 2013); Mark Amen, Noah J. Toly, Patricia L. McCarney and Klaus Segbers (eds.), Cities and Global Governance: New Sites for International Relations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 1923–1947; Simon Curtis, “Global Cities and the Transformation of the International System”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2011); Simon Curtis (ed.), The Power of Cities in International Relations (London: Routledge, 2014); Simon Curtis, Global Cities and Global Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

3. On the notion of fabrication of the world, see also Sandro Mezzarda and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, Or, the Multiplication of Labour (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 30. See also Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 104–107, 111.

4. On the one hand, the criticism has targeted the empirical basis of claims according to which global cities are significantly different from other major centres in terms of their composition of economic activity or social conditions. On the other hand, it has been argued that the notion opens a fundamentally limited window into global urbanisation processes. See, e.g., Jennifer Robinson, “Global and World Cities: A View from off the Map”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2002), pp. 97, 112.

5. A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index 2010, available: <https://www.atkearney.com/documents/10192/178350/urban_elite-gci_2010.pdf/30bebf01-9591-46ef-8d06-a44b4e5ab364> (accessed 30 January 2017), p. 1.

6. Robinson, “Global and World Cities”, op. cit., p. 545.

7. Neil Brenner and Roger Keil, “From Global Cities to Globalized Urbanization”, Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation, Vol. 3 (2014), p. 16.

8. Acuto, Global Cities, Governance and Diplomacy, op. cit.; Kristin Ljungkvist, “The Common Sense of Global City ‘Actorness’ in Contemporary World Politics”, in Curtis, The Power of Cities in International Relations, op. cit., pp. 32–55.

9. Acuto, Global Cities, Governance and Diplomacy, op. cit., pp. 2–3.

10. Kristin Ljungkvist, The Global City 2.0: From Strategic Site to Global Actor (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 1–3.

11. Sofie Bouteligier, Cities, Networks, and Global Environmental Governance: Spaces of Innovation, Places of Leadership (London: Routledge, 2012).

12. Acuto, “Global Cities: Gorillas in Our Midst”, op. cit., p. 426; Acuto, Global Cities, Governance and Diplomacy, op. cit., p. 2.

13. Acuto, “Global Cities: Gorillas in Our Midst”, op. cit., p. 427; emphasis added.

14. See esp. Acuto, Global Cities, Governance and Diplomacy, op. cit .

15. Ibid.

16. Acuto, “Global Cities: Gorillas in Our Midst”, op. cit., p. 430.

17. Ibid., p. 438.

18. Peter Marcuse, “‘The City’ as Perverse Metaphor”, City, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2005), pp. 247–254.

19. On the synecdochal usage of the concept of a global city, see also Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 41; and Ash Amin and Stephen Graham “The Ordinary City”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 22, No. 4 (1997), pp. 411–429; Marcuse, op. cit., p. 252.

20. Marcuse, op. cit., pp. 248, 252. See also David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism”, Georgrafiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 71, No. 1 (1989), p. 5.

21. Curtis, “Global Cities and the Transformation”, op. cit., p. 1935.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., p. 1945.

24. Curtis’s reference here is to Henri Lefebvre’s discussion of spatial codes in The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

25. Curtis, Global Cities and Global Order, op. cit., p. 5.

26. Acuto, Global Cities, Governance and Diplomacy, op. cit., p. 11.

27. Ibid., p. 23.

28. Curtis, “Global Cities and the Transformation”, op. cit., p. 1937.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., p. 1938.

31. Michele Acuto, “Dubai in the ‘Middle’”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 38, No. 5 (2014), p. 1733.

32. Cf. Acuto, Global Cities, Governance and Diplomacy, op. cit., p. 3.

33. Paul Rabinow, Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 56; William Walters, Governmentality: Critical Encounters (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 77.

34. Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh”, in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 184.

35. Walters, Governmentality, op. cit., pp. 76–77.

36. Ivan Manokha, “Foucault’s Concept of Power and the Global Discourse of Human Rights”, Global Society, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2009), pp. 429–452.

37. E.g. Richard G. Smith, “The Ordinary City Trap”, Environment and Planning A, Vol. 45, No. 10 (2013), pp. 2290–2304.

38. Saskia Sassen, “Beyond State to State Geopolitics”, in A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook 2012, available: <https://www.atkearney.com/documents/10192/dfedfc4c-8a62-4162-90e5-2a3f14f0da3a> (accessed 30 January 2017), p. 8; Peter Taylor, “Relational City Thinking”, in A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index 2012, op. cit., p. 4; Saskia Sassen, “Urban Legends”, Fresh Perspectives from Dubai, Vol. 15 (2014), pp. 22–25, available: <http://vision.ae/focus/global_cities> (accessed 16 June 2015). See also Scott Leff and Brittany Petersen, Beyond the Scorecard: Understanding Global City Rankings (Chicago: Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 2015), p. 3.

39. Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh”, op. cit., p. 194.

40. Morgan Brigg, “Empowering NGOs: The Microcredit Movement through Foucault’s Notion of Dispositif”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2001), p. 237.

41. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, “Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems”, in Stephen J. Collier and Aihwa Ong (eds.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), p. 15.

42. Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh”, op. cit., p. 195.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.; Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop, Towards a Cultural Political Economy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013), pp. 51–52.

45. E.g. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality”, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 87–104.

46. Walters, Governmentality, op. cit., p. 45.

47. See, e.g., Mark Bevir, “Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance”, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2010), pp. 423–441.

48. Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1938), p. 1.

49. Ibid., p. 2.

50. Peter Hall, The World Cities (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966).

51. Neil Brenner and Roger Keil, The Global City Reader (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 20.

52. John Friedman, “The World City Hypothesis”, Development and Change, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1986), pp. 320–321.

53. John Friedman, “Where We Stand: A Decade of World City Research”, in Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Tayor (eds.) World Cities in a World-system (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 23.

54. E.g. Paul L. Knox, “Globalization and World City Formation”, in S.G.E. Gravesteijn, S. van Griensven and M.C. de Smidt (eds.), Timing Global Cities (Utrecht: Netherlands Geographical Studies, 1998), pp. 26–27. Peter Taylor, “On City Cooperation and City Competition”, in Ben Derudder, Michael Hoyler, Peter J. Taylor and Frank Witlox (eds.), International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011), pp. 64–72. Literature on global cities is also being criticised for the reason that the hierarchies of global cities are difficult to test empirically. The available data are mostly derived from the measures of city attributes, and do not reveal much of the interdependencies that are supposed to go to the heart of the assumption that global cities are a basing point for the operations of transnational capitalism (see, e.g., John Short, Yeong-Hiyun Kim, Merje Kuus and H. Wells, “The Dirty Little Secret of World Cities Research”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 20, No. 4 [1996], pp. 697–717). Another common point of criticism concerns the fact that the global cities scholarship offers a narrow—ethnocentric and economistic—window into contemporary urbanisation processes. Scholars pointing out that the global cities literature is ethnocentric argue that its understanding of global citydom rests on the experiences of a small group of mostly Western cities (e.g. Robinson, “Global and World Cities”, op. cit.). Finally, as the economism critique, the global city discourse is said to follow the strategy of the synecdoche—it highlights only a part of the urban economy, i.e. finance and associated industries, thus obscuring other vital elements of their economies and societies (e.g. Massey, op. cit., p. 41; see also Acuto, Global Cities, Governance and Diplomacy, op. cit., p. 41).

55. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

56. Ljungkvist, The Global City 2.0, op. cit., p. 19. See also Smith, op. cit.

57. Sassen, The Global City, op. cit., pp. 9–10.

58. E.g. Friedman, “The World City Hypothesis”, op. cit.

59. Smith, op. cit., p. 2297.

60. E.g. Friedman, “The World City Hypothesis”, op. cit.

61. E.g. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I, 2nd edition with a new preface (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 2, 410.

62. Neil Brenner and David Wachsmuth, “Territorial Competitiveness: Lineages, Practices, Ideologies”, in Neil Brenner (ed.), Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2017), pp. 85–111; Smith, op. cit., p. 2296.

63. Paul Krugman, “Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession”, Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994, p. 31; Brenner and Wachsmuth, op. cit., pp. 99–104.

64. Peter Taylor, “On City Cooperation and City Competition”, op. cit.

65. Eugene McCann, Ananya Roy and Kevin Ward, “Assembling/Worlding Cities”, Urban Geography, Vol. 34, No. 5 (2013), p. 581.

66. John Hartley, Jason Potts and Trent McDonald, “Creative City Index”, Cultural Science, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2012), p. 33; McCann, Roy and Ward, op. cit., p. 582.

67. Leff and Petersen, op. cit., p. 3.

68. Aikalainen, “Eurooppa jää jälkeen Aasiasta”, 24 January 2014.

69. Japan Times, “Can Tokyo Move Up to the Top Spot of the Global Power City Index?”, 17 September 2013.

70. Tverskaya13, “V klub mirovyh gorodov”, 22 September 2011.

71. While it is not possible to fully explore this aspect in this article, I traced the life of a specific report, PwC’s Cities of Opportunity in the Integrum database, which contains thousands of documents from the Russian press, TV and radio, documents produced by governmental and commercial organisations. This showed that the report had found its way to various contexts in the world of policymaking, and it was treated as a source of reliable information.

72. Harriet Bulkeley and Heike Schroeder, “Beyond State/Non-state Divides: Global Cities and the Governing of Climate Change”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2012), pp. 743–766. See also Andrew E.G. Jonas and Sami Moisio, “City Regionalism as Geopolitical Processes: A New Framework for Analysis”, Progress in Human Geography, (2016), doi:10.1177/0309132516679897.

73. Dale Spender, Man Made Language (London: Pandora, 1987), p. 163.

74. E.g. A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook 2012, op. cit.

75. Cf. Marcuse, op. cit., p. 248.

76. E.g. PwC, From Moscow to Sao Paulo: Emerging 7 Cities Report 2013, available: <https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/psrc/publications/assets/pwc-from-moscow-to-sao-paulo-emerging-7-cities-report-2014.pdf>, p. 13.

77. Spender, op. cit.; Margaret McLaren, Feminism, Foucault and Embodied Subjectivity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 136.

78. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 200.

79. Sum and Jessop, op. cit., p. 309.

80. Foucault, Discipline & Punish, op. cit., p. 184.

81. PwC, Explore the Data, Make it Your Own (2014) available: <https://www.pwc.com/us/en/cities-of-opportunity-6/2014/explore-the-data.html> (accessed 30 January 2017).

82. Foucault, Discipline & Punish, op. cit., p. 220.

83. Economist Intelligence Unit, Hot Spots 2025: Benchmarking the Future Competitiveness of Cities, available: <http://www.citigroup.com/citi/citiforcities/pdfs/hotspots2025.pdf> (accessed 30 January 2017), Appendix 1.

84. PwC, Cities of Opportunity 2012, available: <http://www.pwc.com/us/en/cities-of-opportunity/assets/cities-opp-2012.pdf> (accessed 30 January 2017), p. 11.

85. Economist Intelligence Unit, op. cit., p. 2.

86. See, e.g., Habitat III, “The Transformative Power of Urbanization”, available: <https://www2.habitat3.org/the-new-urban-agenda/?i=1> (accessed 30 January 2017).

87. PwC, From Moscow to Sao Paulo, op. cit., p. 14.

88. A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook 2014, available: <https://www.atkearney.com/documents/10192/4461492/Global+Cities+Present+and+Future-GCI+2014.pdf/3628fd7d-70be-41bf-99d6-4c8eaf984cd5> (accessed 30 January 2017), p. 13.

89. A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook 2012, op. cit., p. 6. See also Leff and Brittany Petersen, op. cit.

90. PwC, Cities of Opportunity 2010, available: <https://www.pwc.com/us/en/cities-of-opportunity/assets/pwc-citiesofopportunity-2009.pdf> (accessed 30 January 2017), p. 13.

91. A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook 2014, op. cit., p. 13.

92. Wendy Larner and Richard Le Heron, “Global Benchmarking: Participating at a Distance in the Global Economy”, in Wendy Larner and William Walters (eds.), Global Governmentality: New Perspectives on International Rule (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 215.

93. Economist Intelligence Unit, op. cit., p. 5.

94. Foucault, Discipline & Punish, op. cit., p. 181.

95. A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index 2010, op. cit., p. 1.

96. PwC, Cities of Opportunities 2012, op. cit., p. 7.

97. A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index 2010, op. cit., p. 5.

98. Economist Intelligence Unit, op. cit., p. 6.

99. United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: 2014 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2014), p. 1.

100. Ibid., p. 17.

101. Marcuse, op. cit., p. 252.

102. E.g. Knox, op. cit., p. 28; Frank Witlox, “The World According to GaWC”, Mobilität 2013 Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 28 May 2013, available: <http://www.faz-forum.com/mobilitaet-2013/2013_FAZ_UND_HOLM_F_WITLOX.pdf> (accessed 10 April 2016).

103. E.g. PwC, Cities of Opportunity 2010, op. cit., p. 15.

104. Knight Frank, Global Cities: The 2015 Report, available: <http://www.knightfrank.com/resources/global-cities/knight-frank-global-cities.pdf> (accessed 30 January 2017), p. 20.

105. Ibid.

106. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3 (New York: The New Press, 2000), p. 341.

107. E.g. A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook 2014, op. cit., p. 13.

108. Economist Intelligence Unit, op. cit., p. 22.

109. E.g. Knight Frank, op. cit., p. 8.

110. A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook 2012, op. cit., p. 9.

111. PwC, From Moscow to Sao Paulo, op. cit., pp. 14–15.

112. Knight Frank, op. cit., p. 11.

113. A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook 2014, op. cit., p. 3.

114. PwC, From Moscow to Sao Paulo, op. cit., p. 21.

115. A.T. Kearney, Global Cities Index 2010, op. cit., p. 9.

116. E.g. Brenda S.A. Yeoh, “Global/Globalizing Cities”, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 23, No. 4 (1999), p. 611; J.A. Mbembé and Sarah Nuttall, “Writing the World from an African Metropolis”, Public Culture, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2004), pp. 347–372. Cf. also Jamie Peck, “Cities beyond Compare?”, Urban Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2015), pp. 160–182.

117. Mark Purcell, “Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Reimagining the Capitalist World Order”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2006), pp. 564–590.

118. The United Nations, Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly 71/256. New Urban Agenda, 23 December 2016.

119. E.g. Robinson, Ordinary Cities, op. cit.; Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (eds.), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011).