Global Urban Politics

Informalization of the State

Julie-Anne Boudreau

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745685502, 9780745685496
• eBook ISBN: 9780745685533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State

In what ways has global urbanization affected the political process? This book offers a reflection on the transformations of urban politics worldwide in the past four decades, from interpersonal street-level politics to transnational governing institutions.

Organized thematically, the book examines urban social movements, diversity politics, environmental politics and security politics at a global level and argues that living in an urban world calls for a profound rethinking of how we act politically. Through ethnographic incursions into the worlds of youth activists, domestic workers, rioters, barrio bandits and peripheral villagers, among others, from Mexico City and Hanoi to Montreal and New York, the book makes a number of theoretical propositions to redefine the field of urban political studies.

Extending the view of urban politics beyond municipal and metropolitan institutions to the broader political process in cities, this book will be invaluable to advanced students and scholars interested in our urban future. For, as Boudreau convincingly suggests, global urban life is political life.

1
Where are the Global Urban Politics?

In Babel, González Iñárritu (2006) vividly illustrates global urban politics. The movie unfolds in three distinct locations: a desert village in Morocco, the Mexican–American border of Tijuana-San Diego and a Japanese town. The fates of a Moroccan farmer and his family, an American couple with marital problems on vacation in Morocco, their Mexican nanny in San Diego, and a depressive adolescent girl in Japan whose father gave a gun to the Moroccan farmer, are intimately entangled, crossing the frontiers of intimacy and indifference, proximity and distance, solidarity and domination. These interpersonal encounters unfold against the international geopolitical backdrop of the US war on terrorism.

‘Urban politics?’ you might ask, as a large part of the movie takes place in the deserts of Morocco and the US/Mexican border. Though the movie unfolds in a landscape that is rarely associated with urbanity, this book argues that urbanity is not about a specific settlement, namely the city, but rather about a specific worldview and its ensuing logic of action and interaction. The Moroccan farmer is influenced by the increasingly hegemonic urban worldview described in the introduction to this book. This is a worldview marked by specific relations to time, space and affect. His life as a goat herder is influenced by the unfolding war on terrorism, by increasing misunderstandings between his religion and that of the ‘West’. Glimpses of television news and daily conversations with his fellow villagers make this war, planned from the large cities of the United States, a daily reality for him. It influences the way he defines his world.

‘Global politics?’ you might ask doubtfully, as the movie presents very local, even micro-local daily events. But the Moroccan farmer is entangled in several webs of connection with cities elsewhere: the Japanese high-rise where the man who gave him the gun lives; the San Diego mansion where the American tourist he shot with the gun lives. The movie illustrates how the contemporary world is ‘strangely’ connected, bringing together the most ‘unconnected’ places (the Moroccan farm is not intensely connected to global circuits of capital, except through tourism) with the most densely ‘connected’ nodes of the global capitalist world: Washington, Tokyo, Southern California. Beyond spatial connections, González Iñárritu masterfully shows how local, daily relations are connected to the global geopolitical temporalities of post-cold war tensions.

‘What politics?’ you might ask, as the movie does not tell the story of powerful decision-makers, aside perhaps from when the American calls the US Embassy in Morocco for help and we sense the geopolitical tension at play in the background. We can also sense the Politics (with a capital P) when the Mexican nanny is deported home. However, the movie is replete with politics (with a lower-case p): power relations between the protagonists; informal deals for help; and various encounters with official authorities in non-conventional settings, such as the bedroom or through the village's only telephone.

We now see the elements necessary to ‘identify’ the global urban politics at play, highlighting elements of the political process other than the state. Following Rodgers, Cochrane and Barnett's (2014) suggestion, instead of proposing a stable definition of ‘what’ global urban politics might be, it seems more fruitful to seek ‘where’ we encounter it. In order to locate such politics, we need specific conceptual tools. This chapter is organized around the following three questions. Where is the ‘urban’ in urban politics located? Where are politics? Where is the ‘global’ in global urban politics?

Where are the Urban Politics? From Municipalism to a New Political Ontology

Urban politics has traditionally been studied with a strong municipalist bias. This may explain why it has remained the ‘less sexy’ field of political science (Magnusson, 2014), compared to researchers who study seemingly more important corridors of power in International Relations or Comparative Politics. In Anglo-American universities, urban politics has long been dominated by elite and pluralist theories. Hunter (1953) suggested that local communities are dominated by stable (business-minded) elites, and that this undermines the proper functioning of representative democracy, while pluralists such as Dahl (1961) would prefer to question elitism by asking ‘who [really] governs’ American cities. Pluralists posit that power is not always in the hands of the same elite. Because resources are diffuse, there is a strong competition between interests. People organize collectively to defend their interests and this competitive process is what produces urban governance and maintains healthy democracy.

The Anglo-American narrative of urban politics generally continues by showing how regime theorists, most notably Stone (1989), respond to both elitists and pluralists, saying that the division of labour between state and market renders the local state too weak to respond to urban demands. Therefore, local public officials enter into informal alliances with market actors to facilitate governance. These ‘urban regimes’ coalesce and remain relatively stable over time. Logan and Molotch (1987) offer a similar theory by suggesting that cities are governed by ‘growth machines’ that coalesce around the common objective of fostering economic growth. Urban politics, they posit, is driven by the politics of land development and the competition between ‘growth machines’ located in other cities. The informal influence of real-estate developers and other ‘place entrepreneurs’ is therefore key to understanding how a city is governed.

In these accounts, urban politics is largely conceived as ‘autonomous’ from other government levels and it remains focused on municipal jurisdictions: land use, housing, public infrastructure, waste, water and so on. These accounts are, in this sense, municipalist (focused on formal state institutions). Political scientists have recognized that municipal politics is perhaps more permeable to informal (non-state) actors than politics at other government levels. Urban regime theory is the most elaborate example of the intertwinement of the formal and the informal at the local level. Other theories have evolved in parallel, focusing on larger scales for the study of urban politics beyond the municipality. Neo-Marxist theories, developed in the 1970s, locate urban politics in the world capitalist system. Neo-Marxism has been prolific over the past four decades, influencing theories on various scales, from Amin's (1974) theory of uneven world development to Harvey's (1985) theorization of capitalist ‘spatial fixes’ in times of capitalist crisis; from Jessop's (1990) rereading of Poulantzas to theorize the local state to Brenner's (2004) rescaling theory; and from Sassen's (1991) study of global cities to Peck's (2010) account of urban neoliberalization.

While differing on some aspects, these theories of urban politics converge in providing explanatory weight to world capitalist processes. For instance, Amin (1974) understands urban politics through the lens of dependent relations between core and peripheral countries of the world economic system. In ‘underdeveloped’ peripheral countries, major cities exercise a form of ‘internal colonialism’ over their rural hinterland to ensure their economic growth. This is translated by the formation of bourgeois urban elites who dominate the rest of the country.

Similarly, for Harvey, urban politics is understood as the result of capitalism's recurring over-accumulation crises. To face these crises, new markets are opened, which temporarily resolves the economic crisis. These ‘spatial fixes’ are accompanied by a gradual shift from ‘urban managerialism’ to ‘urban entrepreneurialism’. As cities face more intense competition to retain and attract capital investment because of accelerating cycles of crises, urban political actors are increasingly at the service of capitalists and their business needs.

Through their rereading of Poulantzas and Lefebvre's state theories, Jessop and Brenner explain how the state consists of a field of various tensions and forces. Local state actors are entangled in a web of influence and coercion from state actors on various scales. Since the 1970s, however, the forces of global capitalism have become increasingly powerful and the city-regional scale is now a key locus of power. According to Brenner, it is on this scale that the state strategically and selectively devises spatial projects to respond to the crisis generated by global neoliberalism. In other words, urban politics (city-regional politics in particular) are the vector through which statehood is able to redefine itself after the demise of Keynesianism. In contrast to Keynesian policies, the contemporary state project relies on selecting winning urban regions and channelling resources to sustain their economic growth at the expense of redistributing resources across the country to ensure national equilibrium.

This understanding of urban politics is influenced by Sassen's suggestion that global capitalism rests on the high-density nodes, or mooring points, that she calls global cities. This is where resources, networks, creativity and growth concentrate. Politics, in global cities, is characterized by ‘denationalization’. These cities have acquired enough power to become disconnected (economically and politically) from their hinterlands. Politics in global cities is driven by global processes much more than by national debate. Moreover, given that the global function of capital (finances, law firms, star architects and so on) requires an ‘army’ of unqualified labour to clean office towers, cook meals, operate the subway and so on, global cities are marked by extreme polarization between the highly qualified rich and the unqualified poor. This polarization gives a specifically tense character to urban politics.

Sassen does not theorize about neoliberalism specifically, as she is primarily interested in understanding the workings of the global economy, not its ideological framework. However, many urban theorists equate global economic processes with neoliberalization. Peck and many others argue that urban politics is marked by the increasing weight of neoliberal ideology. Policy tools such as public-sector austerity measures, tax cuts, privatization and regulatory restraints emerge from the ideological belief that economic growth and democratic well-being can only be ensured by giving more weight to the market than to the bureaucratic state. The speed at which these policy tools and ideas travel is impressive (Peck, 2004). This has led to an interesting debate between structural neo-Marxist explanations, such as the one suggested by Peck, and post-structural critiques arguing that giving too much explanatory weight to global capitalist processes does not do justice to the variety of local contexts in which neoliberal ideas are adapted (Peck, 2013).

These neo-Marxist accounts of urban politics go beyond the municipalist view. They specifically insist on a scaled view of the political process whereby local power relations are explained by global capitalist forces. Another set of theories evolving in parallel to the municipalist account of urban politics involves theories of urban social movements. We will discuss these theories in chapter 2. Suffice it to say here that by focusing on civil society's actors and their claims for ‘collective consumption’ (Castells, 1983), these approaches have only timidly opened the field of urban politics beyond the municipalist view. I say ‘timidly’ because the focus on claims for collective consumption (housing, infrastructure and so on) remains within municipal competencies. In many ways, these approaches build on another st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Where are the Global Urban Politics?
• 2: Global Urban Social Movements
• 3: Global Diversity Politics
• 4: Global Environmental Politics
• 5: Global Urban Security Politics
• Global Urban Politics and the Informalization of the State
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement