Global cities, global justice?

ABSTRACT

The global city is a contested site of economic innovation and cultural production, as well as profound inequalities of wealth and life chances. These cities, and large cities that aspire to ‘global’ status, are often the point of entry for new immigrants. Yet for political theorists (and indeed many scholars of global institutions), these critical sites of global influence and inequality have not been a significant focus of attention. This is curious. Theorists have wrestled with the nature and demands of global justice, but have for the most part supposed that the debate is between statist and cosmopolitan formulations. Questions of redistribution, immigration, humanitarian obligations, coercion at borders, and territorial rights have correspondingly been cast as either the domain of sovereign territorial states, or of the nascent web of supranational institutions that might bind those states and peoples, morally and legally. Examining some of these issues and arguments through the lens of the global city casts them in a new and informative light, and buttresses an associative turn in thinking about global justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Global cities
• global justice
• inequality
• immigration

Acknowledgements

This collaboration began after conversations at the Urban Affairs Association meetings in San Francisco (April 2013) and the EURA-UAA Joint Urban Futures Conference in Paris (June 2014). We are grateful to the editors and reviewers here, and to many colleagues for helpful exchanges, in particular: Roger Keil, Margaret Kohn, Warren Magnusson, Sharon Meagher, Julia Nevarez, Kim Rygiel, Patrick Turmel, and Daniel Weinstock.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Loren King http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9825-0750

Notes

1. But see Nordquist (2013), and also Cunningham (2010). On normative and critical themes in urban studies of the global city, see more generally Harvey (2012), Sassen (1998), Keil (2007), Fainstein (2010), Purcell (2003), and Magnusson (1994).

2. A complementary turn in international relations scholarship has attended to how sovereignty is increasingly disaggregated and variegated among states, transnational networks, and multilateral institutions (Slaughter 2004), and how legitimacy might be reconceptualized to better account for the distinctive features of emerging institutions of global governance (Buchanan and Keohane 2006).

3. On these processes, and emerging alternative sites of cultural production and exchange in film and other media, see, for example: Marston, Woodward, and Jones (2007); Lobato (2010); Miller (2012); and Thussu (2016).

4. Think here especially of the difficulties of maintaining traditions in the face of the dominant ‘property’ metaphor imposed, for instance, on matters of Indigenous heritage, e.g. Battiste and Youngblood (Sa’ke’j) Henderson (2000); and Brown (2005).

5. For example, see Purcell (2003) for a review and interpretation of some of this research in light of Henri Lefebvre's ‘right to the city’. See also, for instance, recent work by Baban and Rygiel (2017) on inclusionary everyday urban practices challenging exclusionary and assimilationist national narratives in northern European countries facing sudden immigration pressures in recent years.

6. The scholarly and activist literatures are vast on what the heterodox marxist urbanist, Henri Lefebvre, famously described as ‘a cry and a demand’. Among both advocates and sympathetic critics, all would likely agree that, whatever a right to the city is, it is best understood in terms of how we use urban spaces, not the market value of those spaces. To put the point another way: the right to the city stands opposed to property rights over urban space; see, e.g. Mitchell (2003); Purcell (2003); Harvey (2008); Attoh (2011); see also Kohn (2016).