Saskia Sassen University of Chicago Chicago, USA
 
THE GLOBAL CITY: STRATEGIC SITE/NEW FRONTIER (Page 6)
 

THE GLOBAL CITY: A NEXUS FOR NEW POLITICO-ECONOMIC ALIGNMENTS
What makes the localization of the above described processes strategic, even though they involve powerless and often invisible workers, and potentially constitutive of a new kind of transnational politics is that these same cities are also the strategic sites for the valorization of the new forms of global corporate capital as described in the first section of this article.
 
Typically the analysis about the globalization of the economy privileges the reconstitution of capital as an internationalized presence; it emphasizes the vanguard character of this reconstitution. At the same time it remains absolutely silent about another crucial element of this transnationalization, one that some, like myself, see as the counterpart of that of capital: this is the transnationalization of labor. We are still using the language of immigration to describe this process. Secondly, that analysis overlooks the transnationalization in the formation of identities and loyalties among various population segments that explicitly reject the imagined community of the nation. With this come new solidarities and notions of membership. Major cities have emerged as a strategic site for both the transnationalization of labor and the formation of transnational identities. In this regard they are a site for new types of political operations.
 
Cities are the terrain where people from many different countries are most likely to meet and a multiplicity of cultures come together. The international character of major cities lies not only in their telecommunication infrastructure and international firms: it lies also in the many different cultural environments in which these workers exist. One can no longer think of centers for international business and finance simply in terms of the corporate towers and corporate culture at its center. Today's global cities are in part the spaces of post-colonialism and indeed contain conditions for the formation of a postcolonialist discourse (See Hall, 1991; King, 1990).
 
The large Western city of today concentrates diversity. Its spaces are inscribed with the dominant corporate culture but also with a multiplicity of other cultures and identities. The slippage is evident: the dominant culture can encompass only part of the city. And while corporate power inscribes these cultures and identities with "otherness" thereby devaluing them, they are present everywhere. For instance, through immigration a proliferation of originally highly localized cultures now have become presences in many large cities, cities whose elites think of themselves as cosmopolitan, that is transcending any locality. An immense array of cultures from around the world, each rooted in a particular country or village, now are reterritorialized in a few single places, places such as New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and most recently Tokyo.
 
Immigration and ethnicity are too often constituted as "otherness." Understanding them as a set of processes whereby global elements are localized, international labor markets are constituted, and cultures from all over the world are deterritorialized, puts them right there at the center of the stage along with the internationalization of capital as a fundamental aspect of globalization today. Further, this way of narrating the migration events of the post war era captures the ongoing weight of colonialism and post-colonial forms of empire on major processes of globalization today, and specifically those binding emigration and immigration countries. While the specific genesis and contents of their responsibility will vary from case to case and period to period, none of the major immigration countries are innocent bystanders.
 
The centrality of place in a context of global processes engenders a transnational economic and political opening in the formation of new claims and hence in the constitution of entitlements, notably rights to place, and, at the limit, in the constitution of "citizenship." The city has indeed emerged as a site for new claims: by global capital which uses the city as an "organizational commodity", but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban population, frequently as internationalized a presence in large cities as capital.
 
I see this as a type of political opening that contains unifying capacities across national boundaries and sharpening conflicts within such boundaries. Global capital and the new immigrant workforce are two major instances of transnationalized categories that have unifying properties internally and find themselves in contestation with each other inside global cities. Global cities are the sites for the over-valorization of corporate capital and the devalorization of disadvantaged workers. The leading sectors of corporate capital are now global, in their organization and operations. And many of the disadvantaged workers in global cities are women, immigrants, people of color. Both find in the global city a strategic site for their economic and political operations.
 
The linkage of people to territory as consitutted in global cities is far less likely to be intermediated by the national state or "national culture." We are seeing a loosening of identities from what have been traditional sources of identity, such as the nation or the village (Yaeger 1996). This unmooring in the process of identity formation engenders new notions of community of membership and of entitlement.
 
Yet another way of thinking about the political implications of this strategic transnational space is the notion of the formation of new claims on that space. Has economic globalization at least partly shaped the formation of claims? There are indeed major new actors making claims on these cities, notably foreign firms who have been increasingly entitled to do business through progressive deregulation of national economies, and the large increase over the last decade in international businesspeople. These are among the new city users. They have profoundly marked the urban landscape. Perhaps at the other extreme are those who use urban political violence to make their claims on the city, claims that lack the de facto legitimacy enjoyed by the new "city users." These are claims made by actors struggling for recognition, entitlement, claiming their rights to the city.
 
There is something to be captured here -- a distinction between powerlessness and a condition of being an actor or political subject even though lacking power. I use the term presence to name this condition. In the context of a strategic space such as the global city, the types of disadvantaged people described here are not simply marginal; they acquire presence in a broader political process that escapes the boundaries of the formal polity. This presence signals the possibility of a politics. What this politics will be will depend on the specific projects and practices of various communities. Insofar as the sense of membership of these communities is not subsumed under the national, it may well signal the possibility of a transnational politics centered in concrete localities. 3