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Saskia
Sassen University of Chicago Chicago, USA
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THE
GLOBAL CITY: STRATEGIC SITE/NEW FRONTIER (Page 7)
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| Large
cities around the world are the terrain where a multiplicity
of globalization processes assume concrete, localized forms.
These localized forms are, in good part, what globalization
is about. If we consider, further, that large cities also concentrate
a growing share of disadvantaged populations --immigrants in
Europe and the United States, African-Americans and Latinos
in the United States, masses of shanty dwellers in the megacities
of the developing world-- then we can see that cities have become
a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions. |
| We
can then think of cities also as one of the sites for the contradictions
of the globalization of capital. On one hand they concentrate
a disporportionate share of corporate power and are one of the
key sites for the overvalorization of the corporate economy;
on the other, they concentrate a disproportionate share of the
disadvantaged and are one of the key sites for their devalorization.
This joint presence happens in a context where (1) the transnationalization
of economies has grown sharply and cities have become increasingly
strategic for global capital; and (2) marginalized people have
found their voice and are making claims on the city as well.
This joint presence is further brought into focus by the sharpening
of the distance between the two. |
| These
joint presences have made cities a contested terrain. The global
city concentrates diversity. Its spaces are inscribed with the
dominant corporate culture but also with a multiplicity of other
cultures and identities, notably through immigration. The slippage
is evident: the dominant culture can encompass only part of
the city. And while corporate power inscribes noncorporate cultures
and identities with "otherness," thereby devaluing them, they
are present everywhere. The immigrant communities and informal
economy in cities such as New York and Los Angeles are only
two instances. |
| The
space constituted by the global grid of global cities, a space
with new economic and political potentialities, is perhpas one
of the most strategic spaces for the formation of new types,
including transnational, identities and communities. This is
a space that is both place-centered in that it is embedded in
particular and strategic sites; and it is transterritorial because
it connects sites that are not geographically proximate yet
intensely connected to each other. It is not only the transmigration
of capital that takes place in this global grid, but also that
of people, both rich, i.e. the new transnational professional
workforce, and poor, i.e. most migrant workers; and it is a
space for the transmigration of cultural forms, for the reterritorialization
of "local" subcultures. An important question is whether it
is also a space for a new politics, one going beyond the politics
of culture and identity, though at least partly likely to be
embedded in these. The analysis presented in this article suggests
that it is. |
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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 new forms of "citizenship" and a diversity of citizenship
practices. The global city has 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. The de-nationalizing of urban space and the formation
of new claims centered in transnational actors and involving
contestation constitute the global city as a frontier zone for
a new type of engagement. |
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