Global Cities, Governance and Diplomacy

The Urban Link

Michele Acuto

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135105228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book illustrates the importance of global cities for world politics and highlights the diplomatic connections between cities and global governance.

While there is a growing body of literature concerned with explaining the transformations of the international order, little theorisation has taken into account the key metropolises of our time as elements of these revolutions. The volume seeks to fill this gap by demonstrating how global cities have a pervasive agency in contemporary global governance.

The book argues that looking at global cities can bring about three fundamental advantages on traditional IR paradigms. First, it facilitates an eclectic turn towards more nuanced analyses of world politics. Second, it widens the horizon of the discipline through a multiscalar image of global governance. Third, it underscores how global cities have a strategic diplomatic positioning when it comes to core contemporary challenges such as climate change.

This book will be of much interest to students of urban studies, global governance, diplomacy and international relations in general.

1	Introduction
	Spotting the ‘gorillas in our midst’

OVERCOMING INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS

The problem

Students are asked to watch a game where two sets of players are moving irregularly around the screen and tossing a basketball to each other. They are instructed to count the number of passages between members of a team. After a little while, a researcher stops the tape and asks: ‘Did you see the gorilla?’ At this stage a conspicuously large percentage of them stares puzzled at the investigator: ‘Gorilla? What gorilla?’ Yet, the examiner replays the very same scene and there it is: a person dressed in a furry black gorilla costume walks right into the middle of the screen, thumps its chest, and calmly strolls out of sight. It is the same recording, and there is absolutely no trick. Only about eight per cent of the viewers notice the primate while watching the game.

The ‘invisible gorilla’ experiment was devised in 1998 by Harvard psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris in order to explain two common phenomena of conscious perception known as change and inattentional blindness (Chabris and Simons 2010). When entrusted with a specific undertaking, people are often incapable of noticing even very evident transformations to the background of the context they are looking at, remaining ‘change’ blinded by their attempt to achieve continuity across views and of sampling the key elements of the scene under scrutiny. Moreover, students were also affected by ‘inattentional’ biases: ‘when attention is diverted to another object or task, observers often fail to perceive an unexpected object, even if it appears at fixation’ (Simons and Chabris 1999: 1060). As these scientists proved, students asked to focus on the teams passing the ball failed to notice a very evident element of the scene they were staring at. Too busy concentrating on the players, spectators miss the gorilla as it meanders across the screen. In both cases, it is the focus on the task that hinders a complete visual experience: observers simply cannot perceive the entirety of the dynamic scene when focusing their attention exclusively on a specific feature of it.

Cities are the invisible gorillas of international studies. They are fundamental components of global governance in the twenty-first century, they influence the dynamics of our (global) political scenario and, yet, international analysts cannot see them because they are entrusted with looking at players the discipline has traditionally assumed crucial in order to explain some of the machinations of the game of world politics. Focusing too much on the presence of nation-states and inter-governmental relations on this scene, scholars have failed to perceive the relevance of other elements in world politics. International studies has become rooted in a chronic hyperopia that has largely dismissed the role of cities as subsumable under domestic matters. State-centric inattentional blindness hinders the discipline’s true capacity for eclecticism and a holistic appreciation of the complexity of world politics and, most importantly, of the epochal revolution in the basic parameters of politics in the twenty-first century from the dominance of government to that of governance.¹ Integrating cities in international theorizations can redress some of the blinding ‘embedded statism’ (Taylor 1996) bias in most political branches of the discipline such as international relations (henceforth ‘IR’) and diplomacy, and that is nowadays critically challenged by processes of globalization.

To redress this perceptual flaw, I here seek to introduce cities as elements of the architecture of world politics, what is commonly called ‘global governance’ (Dingwerth and Pattberg 2006), and illustrate how cities can produce political structures that influence the geography of its diplomatic relations.² In my book I illustrate how the key metropolises for globalization processes, those that Saskia Sassen (1991) labelled ‘global’ cities, interact with this worldwide set of power alignments defining the geography of world politics. Inquiring into the ‘influence’ of global cities for global governance, as I will note in Chapters 5 and 6, is not, however, just a matter of finding these cities’ agency. Rather, it is crucial to depict this influence in relation to the structures that define such geography not to present global cities and world politics in absolute dualism: metropolises are necessarily embedded in the wider architecture of global governance and, vice-versa, this latter inevitably is positioned on, as much as in, these cities. In this sense I believe it becomes legitimate to ask: What is the influence of global cities in the contemporary evolution of global governance and diplomacy?

Answering this query requires, in my view, the development of a more refined appreciation of the spatiality of world politics in which such connections unravel. This is an analytical consideration that will prompt me to develop a nuanced account of the global city’s agency pinpointed on both a theory for their diplomatic capacity to produce structures in the realms of global governance, and thus influence its geography, as well as on geographical parameters to make sense of how such mutual constitution is realized geopolitically. Structuration theory, from political sociology, and scalar analysis, from human geography, will respectively provide these twin instruments and, ultimately, converge in a ‘scalar structurationist’ (Brenner 2001) framework I will then apply to the empirical studies in Chapters 6–9.

Overall, I will argue, looking at global political dynamics emerging from global cities, and through the holistic lens of scalar structuration approaches, brings about three fundamental advantages on the traditional state-centric and IR-focused paradigms. First, it widens the horizon of the discipline by building a multi-scalar image of global governance rather than limiting it to a discrete selection of specific ‘layers’ of politics. Second, it facilitates a ‘structurationist’ turn in IR towards non-dyadic analyses of world politics that go beyond dichotomies such as continuity/change, structure/agency, or domestic/ international. Third, it underscores how global cities acquire strategic potential when it comes to non-traditional challenges such as those of global environmental governance.

Why now?

In 1951, Isaac Asimov, father of science fiction, opened his most famed book Foundation with a graphic portrayal of the planet that was leading an imaginary galaxy mastered by humankind in all its width. ‘Its urbanization, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All the land surface’ — he wrote — ‘was a single city’ (2004: 10). A few years later, J. G. Ballard, another of the columns of modern-day fiction, depicted a similar atmosphere in his dystopian novel The Concentration City, where the urban settlement in question encompasses everything known to its inhabitants, which cannot do anything more than accept the view ‘that the City stretches out in all directions without limits’ (2006: 49). No escape is offered to the impuissant protagonist, who travels endlessly along rail lines, only to get back to the point of origin without ever leaving a disturbing conurbation. Many are the examples in the contemporary arts that refer to such images, demonstrating that the interplay of a frail humanity with a muscular urbanism has a resonance deeper than mere whimsical attraction. Fictional parallels notwithstanding, these visions might not be too distant from reality: if at the outset of the twentieth century only one in ten used to live in cities, nowadays half of the human population is settled within metropolitan areas.³

If at the time of Asimov and Ballard some of these trends were only apparent, we are now at a stage of human history where the urbanization of the world’s population is unmistakably evident. Humankind, to use an elegant expression coined by architectural historian Joseph Rykwert (2000: 3), has been ‘seduced by a place’ it itself created. The symptomatic urban attachment more or less rationally developed by men and women throughout history has made of the metropolis a central symbol of civilization, to the extent that we might now live in what Henri Lefebvre (2003) called ‘urban society’. From a social, as much as from a technological viewpoint, humankind is now mirrored in the city more than in any other construct. If the ‘move to the city’ is not a novel characteristic of our existence, its contemporary ecumenical scale and staggering pace, its varied mobility and social complexity, as well as the unprecedented potential connectivity among people, are all traits that, ipso facto, specify the epoch we live in (Hall 1966: 18). Social and physical aspects of urbanization since the early twentieth century have not just brought about quantitative changes in the dislocation of humanity across the globe; cities have also become the hinges of our society as they influence both lifestyle and mobility of the world’s population. They have become the defining feature of humanity’s modes of aggregation, and a persistent backdrop for the vast majority of its social interactions (Mitchell 2005).

As American economist Robert Murray Haig highlighted at the outset of this ‘city boom’ in 1926: instead of explaining why so large a portion of the population is found in the urban areas, one must give reasons why that portion is not even greater. The question is changed from ‘Why live in the city?’ to ‘Why not live in the city?’ (1926: 188). The urbanization of the world’s population is not solely a physical process, but also an inherently social revolution that redefines the spaces of interaction amongst people, and thus conversely the contemporary practice of political relations. It is the rise of this ‘urban age’ that makes our task of redressing both the discipline’s blindness to cities a non-postponable necessity. Cities can no longer be sidelined as the sole domain of technical sciences such as architecture, or the ‘place’ of geographers and sociologists. Rather, they need to be appreciated for their rightful status in the organization of politics in the present age.

Why global cities?

A study of urbanization alone would, however, fail to convey the active political presence of cities in the dynamics of global governance and diplomacy, while most likely duplicating much of the developments of urban research. This view might redress some change blindness, but would do little to save international studies from its chronic inattentional bias. Even if coupled with analytical considerations of the interconnection between this trend and globalization, such research might risk getting lost in the growing worldwide webs criss-crossing the Earth at unimaginable speed. To avoid this methodological bewilderment, I propose here to ground such political study in the fulcra of such processes: global cities. Global cities such as New York, London or Tokyo stand as crucial elements of a defining feature of today’s worldwide change: they are the strategic hinges of globalization. They represent strategic loci where globalizing forces and flows are re-articulated, promoting the time/space compressions that are redesigning the human condition in the present millennium. Since I seek here to ‘translate’ this economic-centric idea into a concept that can effectively speak to the international studies public, I will to introduce more explicit (global) political considerations into this frame — a move towards which Sassen’s original orientation is particularly prone (Sassen 2005b). To this extent, I will refer to the ‘global city’ to highlight a status of global interconnectedness attained by some contemporary world cities that occupy a core positioning in the complex of the globalizing flows of our time. As I explain more in detail in Chapter 3, in an epoch dominated by global economic flows and growing societal interconnectedness, global cities represent the strategic hinges of globalization.

Thanks to their strategic positioning, these metropolises can allow for a dynamic understanding of the reconfigurations underpinning world politics, while striking a balance between the physical manifestation and ethereal socio-political bases of these epochal changes.⁴ This analytical move, as David Harvey noted in 1996, can prevent much of the disorienting ‘emptiness’ of many analyses that privilege process, as well as much of the oppressiveness of materialist understandings, thus considering politics from a dialectical consideration of ‘process–thing relations’ (Harvey 1996: 435). The macro-dynamics of globalization and urbanization can, in practice, be anchored to an entity such as the global city, which stands in the very midst of them as both their subject and their engine. These contemporary globalizing post-industrial metropolises, as pivots of today’s unprecedented transformations, are therefore the empirical ‘thing’ allowing a focus capable of presenting international scholars with a view that reconnects micro and macro ‘processes’ through its urban political texture.⁵ Thanks to this location at the crossroads of worldwide processes, global cities are playing an essential role in formulating a new human geography of the present age by adding to the complexity of the global landscape of political, economic and cultural interactions and connecting micro (local one would say) political processes with macro (or global) trends and relations. Yet, what exactly is the significance of global cities in these revolutionary transformations, and why does this matter for world politics? This study is geared towards unpacking the presence of these metropolises in those profound socio-political redefinitions of the human condition in the twenty-first century that are prompted by these processes.

I will focus here on politics specifically, and thus on the impact of these cities on the practice of power relations in an epoch of tumultuous transformations and evolutions. An appreciation of the key role played by these localities in the redefinition of the global political system can open up the horizons of the discipline, reconnecting macro levels of analysis with micro transformations at the urban level. Yet, bringing global cities in a policyprone academic field also represents an attempt towards a more inclusive practice of international politics that should consider global cities as participants in the dynamics of global governance rather than just subjects of ‘higher’ politics. The sporadic encounter between international theorists and global cities has been largely vexed by misleading state-centric assumptions that have depicted metropolises as mere places, overlooking the ‘active’ participation of cities in world affairs, and that have made little headway towards an effective theoretical advancement capable of including metropolises in the discussions of world politics. To correct this flaw I will concentrate on both the situated relevance of these cities as places for politics, as well as their more active capacity as actors in politics. The task here should not, however, be one of duplicating the significant headway made in this direction in urban studies. Rather, by bringing global cities into international studies, scholars will be able to contribute to the development of a new conceptual architecture that allows for more than a mere replication of this body of research.

The answer

The scholarship (and its limits)

Little interest has thus far been paid to the role of cities in either international relations theory or more broadly in the study of world politics. Overall, the international scholarship on this issue is relegated to a few rare theorizations that offer very limited accounts of the global political presence of the city. It is for instance symptomatic that the only call for a study of the international impact of cities dates back more than 20 years, and has thus far been widely ignored. In 1990, Chadwick Alger set out to compile an account of the research on the world relations of cities available at the time in order to ‘bridge a gap’ between macro social science paradigms and the multifaceted experience of everyday life as it unfolds in cities (Alger 1990; Magnusson 1994). Concluding that an inquiry into the city’s agency in world politics must necessarily reach out to fields of studies outside conventional IR circles and ‘ferreting out fragments of work’ nested within ‘often subject-specific theorizations’, the American political scientist issued a call towards a multi-disciplinary engagement that could prompt social scientists to rid themselves of the ‘tyranny of state system ideology over the mainstream of their disciplines’ (Alger 1990: 494, 513).

Two decades after that survey the theoretical panorama of the discipline seems far from improved. This is even more surprising when considering that one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the study of global governance, James Rosenau, had certainly hinted at the relevance of the city in his seminal 1995 piece Governance in the Twenty-first Century:

It seems clear that cities and microregions are likely to be major control mechanisms in the world politics of the twenty-first century. Even if the various expectations that they replace states as centers of power prove to be exaggerated, they seem destined to emerge as either partners or adversaries of states as their crucial role becomes more widely ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of recurrent acronyms
• 1 Introduction Spotting the ‘gorillas in our midst'
• Part I Agency
• Part II Structuration
• Part III A progressive urban agenda for IR
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index