The Power of Cities in International Relations

Simon Curtis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317915850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

Cities have become increasingly important to global politics, but have largely occupied a peripheral place in the academic study of International Relations (IR). This is a notable oversight for the discipline, although one which may be explained by IR's traditional state centrism, the subjugation of the city to the demands of the territorial state in the modern period, and a lack of conceptual and analytical frameworks that can allow scholars to include the impact of cities within their work.

Presenting case-specific scholarship from leading experts in the field, each contribution guides the reader through the changing nature of cities in the international system and their increasing prominence in global governance outcomes. The book features case studies on the financial power of cities, city action in the security domain, collaboration of cities in coping with environmental problems, transnational urban regions, and mayors as international actors to illustrate if the relationship between the city and the state has changed in profound ways, and how cities are empowered by structural changes in world politics.

The multidisciplinary and global focus in The Power of Cities in International Relations sheds much needed light on the significance of the reemergence of cities from the long shadow of the nation-state. Only by examining the mechanisms that have empowered cities in the last few decades can we understand their new functions and capabilities in global politics.

1 The Meaning of Global Cities Rethinking the Relationship between Cities, States, and International Order

Simon Curtis

DOI: 10.4324/9781315851495-3

For much of its development, the global cities literature was largely confined to fields outside of International Relations (IR), such as urban studies or political geography. It made little impression on scholars of IR, who had ceased to see cities as relevant objects of analysis after their long embedding within the territory of the modern state. And, of course, for much of the modern period this assumption held true: Cities had been dominated by states, which hobbled their political independence, internalised them within the national space, and harnessed them as economic growth engines.

However, an extensive global cities literature emerged with the increasing realization that profound changes have occurred to many cities around the world over the past four decades, altering their relationships with the states in which they are embedded, allowing them to play a more visible role on the international stage, and leading to their increasingly frequent appearance in media discourses. Much has been done to analyse the meaning of the reversal in city fortunes since the dark days of the 1970s, which had seen urban poverty and inner-city crime reach combustible levels, with debt crises and race riots flaring against the backdrop of postindustrial decline. The bankruptcy of the city of New York in 1975, London's urban unrest of the early 1980s and the subsequent swing to the hard left in its municipal council, Hong Kong's stock market crash of 1982, may all be read as signals of an exhaustion of the logics of the old system. Yet, in the intervening decades the fortunes of these cities have been transformed, and any decline seemingly reversed, as people and wealth were drawn into them from around the globe. London and New York have been reborn as gleaming nodes in a worldwide network of cities that some have argued is the harbinger of a nascent form of global governance that challenges the very core logics of the international society of states. All this has occurred against the backdrop of an urban demographic explosion. We should note also that this urban transformation has not been confined to the developed world—over the last four decades, waves of migration have swelled cities to sizes unprecedented in the historical record. Vast numbers have moved internationally, while in the developing world there has been an immense transfer from the countryside to the ‘mega-cities’ that have also begun to attract the media's attention. These developments are not unconnected: The same dynamics that have resurrected New York and London also operate on the cities of the developing world, albeit in different ways. The glass and steel verticality and global connectivity of the central business district is not unrelated to the global production of an endless vista of slums and shanties (Davis 2006).

Much has been done to analyse the nature of this transformation in urban morphology and function, but this is a large and difficult task and much more analysis is necessary if we are to understand the meaning of the rise of what has come to be known as the ‘global city’. Much of the literature has focused upon the economic function of cities in the global economy and, crucial although this work has been, the next stage must be to draw out the political implications of both the emergence of global cities and their potentialities. In particular, a fuller investigation into the changing relationship between cities and states seems particularly pressing. This is where the IR community can add real value: a perspective on the key structures and mechanisms of the international system that is often lacking in this literature. But just as importantly, the emergence of a new urban form related to changes to the nature of capitalism in the 1970s and penetrating a variety of scales, from the local to the global, can tell IR scholars much about the nature of the contemporary state, and thus the state-system, in the contemporary moment.

In this opening chapter, I contribute to placing cities squarely on the IR agenda by offering an interpretation of the global city debate that runs slightly counter to some of the dominant themes in the literature. Although some of the contributions of urban theorists, political geographers, and world-systems theorists have been crucial in getting to grips with city transformation and its meaning, there is an excessive focus on economic and market-driven imperatives and explanations at the expense of broader considerations of the nature of contemporary international order. It is this perspective that I wish to recover here. While accepting that global cities derive their historically unique form from a mutation in the economy under late-capitalism, I foreground the role that political praxis, the state, and the state-system play in underpinning the possibility of such a transformation. Without this missing perspective, the global cities literature is doomed to float freely, untethered to the forms of international or global order that are the very conditions of its possibility.

In this sense, any analysis of the significance of global cities must rest not only on their standing in relation to circuits of production and exchange within the global economy, but also must penetrate to deeper currents, such as the problematisation of the nature of sovereignty at the contemporary conjuncture, the continuing dialectical tension between a capitalist trans-national logic and the logic of a territorial state-system, and the nature of international transformation. It is only by placing the global cities debates in the context of these issues that we can see that they represent a symptom of a profound shift in the nature of global politics.

In this chapter, I pursue this intuition along a number of interconnected avenues. First, I examine the ways in which the origins and historiography of the formation of the global city concept and subsequent evolution of the debate has predisposed scholarship in this area towards economistic theoretical frameworks. This has had the result of making the global city discourse a primarily market-driven one (Amen et al. 2006:3). And indeed, historically, cities have often been viewed as entities that are symbiotically attached to markets and the generative force of exchange (Jacobs 1984). However, what often gets lost here is that this way of viewing cities must always be accompanied by an ideological move that pushes from view the need for markets to be undergirded by power and coercive force (Polanyi 1957). We must recognise, in the case of a network of global cities, spanning the globe with a fragile web of material infrastructure, lacking the capacity of the medieval city to defend itself in our world of states, that the power that sustains such a possibility resides in the state and the state-system (and a state-system with historically particular characteristics at that). It is here that we must bring the state back in and recognise the folly of trying to understand the meaning of global cities in isolation from their conditions of possibility.

Second, in this respect we might then begin to link the emergence of global cities to the crisis of statism (by which I mean political systems where the state has significant centralised control over social and economic life) in the late 20th century, which led to a variety of responses, the dominant strand of which has been the rollback of embedded liberalism and welfare capitalism and the rise to power of neoliberal social and economic philosophy in a number of key states in the international system. Concomitant to the capture of the state apparatus by the neoliberal project has been a fragmentation, commodification, and parcelisation of the national space, in ways that mirror the nature and morphology of global cities (Graham and Marvin 2001). Global cities are at one with the mutation in capitalism wrought by neoliberalism in this period and exist only in relation to the emergence of the competition or market state that emerged from the ruins of the old welfare or Keynesian model. We must recognise that it is state policy that has reshaped declining and crisis-wracked industrial metropolises such as London, New York, and Chicago, and has provided them the means and space to emerge as beacons of networked postindustrial might. We must link transformation in urban form and function to transformation in the state and the international system.

Finally, this restructuring of state space, and related redefinition of city form and function, is beginning to have significant, quite possibly unforeseen and emergent, outcomes (although we might suggest that these outcomes derive logically from a neoliberal philosophy that stresses decentralisation and bottom-up dynamics, even as it underwrites them with state power). For global cities, in the last few years, have started to realize their potential as networked and multiscalar entities, to participate in, even lead, nascent forms of global governance. The C40 initiative on climate change, for example, covered in detail in later chapters of this volume, aims to confront a critical global issue at a speed and at scales that the state and state-system have proven themselves unable to match. Such global governance initiatives by cities must pose a profound set of questions about global order and authority today.

The Origins and Shape of the Global Cities Discourse

In this section, I argue that the particular origins of the global cities literature and its disciplinary history has given it a slant that has worked to obscure the very conditions that underpin both changes in urban form and the discourse surrounding it. Rather than focus purely on the role that global cities undoubtedly play in articulating localities into global markets, it is important to take a longer systemic view, which will ultimately lead us to discover the dynamics of global cities in the 20th-century crisis of statism. This is a problem, of course, that is very much still with us, as attempts to grapple with the problem of the correct configuration of states and markets continues to dominate the political agenda in the wake of the ongoing financial crisis.

Although there has long been an appreciation of the vital role of certain cities in world civilisation, the contemporary variant of the literature on global cities has its origins in an argument made by John Friedmann in 1986, where he put forward his ‘world city hypothesis’. This was the first real linkage of a new type of city morphology to the restructuring of the global economy in the wake of the collapse of the Bretton Woods settlement in the previous decade. This economic restructuring brought with it a set of emerging processes: the formation of global financial markets, the emergence of offshore banking and export processing zones, the rise of the multinational corporation as an organizational form, and the emergence of a new international division of labour, with manufacturing jobs moving from the developed core into the developing world.

At its heart, the research programme developed by Friedmann (and pursued by others in the ‘invisible college’ of global city scholars; see Acuto 2011) is about the changing nature of capitalism in the late-modern period and the reconstitution of the relationship between national states, cities, and the global economy. Friedmann argued that it was no longer adequate to seek to understand cities as simply being part of national urban systems, as urban studies had previously sought to do in a period in which the nation-state was at its zenith. Instead, cities have become the places of articulation that underpin globalisation, where people and products link themselves to the wider world and its markets. The originality of Friedmann's contribution lies in his description of how the form that a city takes under globalisation, its morphology, its built environment, is shaped by the functions that it fulfils within the world economy. Rather than cities responding to their own internal dynamics, or to the smaller national systems of which they are also a part, they adapt to, and are shaped by, external economic forces. Friedmann's approach viewed the world economy as a globally integrated market, and it refused to recognise the national economies of single states as distinct economic units. Here, the global city becomes the spatial expression of a fundamentally new form of global capitalism.

Friedmann added the insight that global economic processes are organized through cities and, for Friedmann, such cities still formed a spatial hierarchy. He had retained from his urban school roots the hierarchical elements of national urban studies, transposing it to the larger canvas of the world economic system. From these building blocks, a number of key insights and refinements developed, including research on urban specialisation (Rodriguez and Feagin 1986), the crucial command and control functions cities play in the paradoxical dispersal and fragmentation inherent to the integration of global markets (Sassen 1996), and the empirical mapping of specific global city networks and hierarchies of global connectivity (Taylor 2004). These research projects have been essential to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon that Friedmann grappled with, but they have also replicated many of the limiting theoretical biases of Friedmann's approach. This was a discernable trend as the global cities literature multiplied with the globalisation discourses of the 1990s, where cities were seen as the key sites through which global processes flowed.

Friedmann's argument was the hybrid creation of an urban studies hierarchical thesis linked to a world systems framework. Drawing upon the work of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) gave it a very different lineage to much IR scholarship on international systems. Friedmann's work was indeed a seminal insight, but it has also had the effects of skewing the literature in a certain economistic direction and of directing our focus to the symbiosis between global cities and the global economy, at the expense of the prior question of what type of international order generates such global economic conditions. Its reliance on world systems theory, with all the problems of its rigid and rather monocausal framework, has also not been conducive to marrying IR with the cities literature. In this way, the genealogy of the global cities concept has been an impediment to the creation of a research programme that allows IR scholars to apply their insights to these very important questions—and has maintained an undesirable academic divide between the scholarship on cities and the scholarship on states and state-systems (Curtis 2011).

This is not to say that it is not now being recognised that the global city concept is itself problematic. The literature has come in for criticism for its preoccupation with the economic construction and function of global cities at the expense of other global flows and networks, be they demographic, cultural, epidemiological, or ecological (Massey 2007). Here I take a broad view of the global city phenomenon, encompassing the wider set of effects accompanying the new urban form. This would also include the dark side of an often sanitised discourse, such as the unprecedented growth of global slum production (Davis 2006), which is as much a part of the production of the new social spaces as are the networked business districts of glass and steel that control and direct the vast financial flows of the global economy.

Indeed, there is uncertainty over the very nature of global cities: Should we view them as sites or locales, as actors or as structures, as networks or nodes? Is the global city a real object or a conceptual device? There is a clear danger in reifying cities as bounded entities and giving them a coherence that is ontologically unsustainable. There has also been a hijacking of the term by cities looking to boost their competiveness in global circuits of capital and labour. The ‘global city’ works very nicely as a media buzzword—witness the work of the many newspapers and magazines, consultants and think tanks that are perpetually ranking cities in terms of quality of life or business environment. These tell us nothing very profound about the deeper meaning of global cities. Michael Smith (2001:49) has argued that it is unlikely that any such entity as the global city can be identified empirically to any satisfactory degree: ‘There is no solid object known as the “global city”, but an interplay of networks, practices and power relations’. Such a perspective would view all cities as globalising to some extent, for the processes altering the urban fabric are uneven, lifting some areas and districts from their local context and plugging them into global networks, while neighbourhoods that may be physically contiguous to these valued spaces get disconnected. And yet, many attempts have been made to develop hierarchies of global cities, suggesting an exclusive set to which nonglobal cities might aspire. In the view adopted here, it is perhaps better to understand the global city as a conceptual tool or heuristic device that has been specially designed to shed light on important processes that are redrawing urban form in the wake of globalisation and postfordist capitalism. It is also better to understand all cities as globalising in some sense, although this is a necessarily uneven and noncitywide process, as Sassen (2007) has repeatedly stressed in her later work.

A further noteworthy strand of the global cities literature is the move to conceptualise cities and their networks as combining material and ideational elements. Global cities and their associated transnational spaces are seen as intrinsically bound up with the creation of the technological infrastructure that underpins what Manuel Castells (1996) has termed a ‘space of flows’.¹ Global cities are seen as crucial nodal points that form part of the material infrastructure of this space of flows. They are the physical sites and locations that link the space of flows to the material world. They provide the place-specific and nonsubstitutable enabling socio-technological infrastructure that forms the backbone for globalisation. The association of global cities with informational capitalism, as command and control centres and as the location of advanced producer service firms, is necessarily founded upon the material infrastructure that facilitates an economy where value is increasingly derived from information. This type of infrastructural paradigm is, furthermore, intrinsically bound up with the social context in which it developed. In this case, it has become imbued with a particular set of political ideas that contrast strikingly with the model of integrated national infrastructure that characterised modernity and its territorial national states. This interaction of social context and technological development is referred to by historians and sociologists of technology as the ‘social shaping of technology’, and consideration of the particular interplay of social context and technology informs an important part of the discussion here. This technological paradigm, first emerging in the early 1970s, was shaped by the rise of neoliberal ideas and values. The subsequent emergen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor Foreword
• Introduction Empowering Cities
• 1 The Meaning of Global Cities Rethinking the Relationship between Cities, States, and International Order
• 2 The Global City From Strategic Site to Global Actor
• 3 A Networked Urban World Empowering Cities to Tackle Environmental Challenges
• 4 An Urban Affair How Mayors Shape Cities for World Politics
• 5 Globalization, Governance, and Renaturing the Industrial City Chicago, IL, and Seattle, WA
• 6 The International Activities of Canadian Cities Are Canadian Cities Challenging the Gatekeeper Position of the Federal Executive in International Affairs?
• 7 Municipal Bonds and Global Power Theorizing the Role of Norms
• 8 Johannesburg Financial ‘Gateway’ to Africa
• References and Further Reading
• List of Contributors
• Index