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Author(s): Neil Brenner
Source: Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 1-37
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Reviewof International
PoliticalEconomy5:1 Spring1998:1-37
ABSTRACT
This article examines the changing relationshipbetween global cities and
territorialstates in contemporaryEurope, and outlines some of its implications for the geographyof world capitalismin the late twentiethcentury.
Most accounts of global cities are based upon a 'zero-sum'conception of
spatial scale that leads to an emphasis on the declining power of the territorial state: as the global scale expands, the state scale is said to contract.
By contrast,I view globalizationas a highly contradictoryreconfiguration
of superimposed spatial scales, including those on which the territorial
state is organized. The state scale is not being eroded, but rearticulated
and reterritorializedin relation to both sub- and supra-statescales. The
resultant,re-scaled configurationof state territorialorganizationis provisionally labeled a 'glocal' state. As nodes of accumulation,global cities
are sites of post-Fordistforms of global industrialization;as coordinates
of state territorialpower, global cities are local-regional levels within
a larger, reterritorializedmatrix of increasingly 'glocalized' state institutions. State re-scaling is a major accumulation strategy through which
these transformed'glocal' territorialstates attempt to promote the global
competitiveadvantageof their majorurbanregions. Global city formation
and state re-scaling are thereforedialecticallyintertwined moments of a
single dynamic of global capitalist restructuring.These arguments are
illustratedthrough a discussion of the interfacebetween global cities and
territorialstates in contemporaryEurope.A concludingsection argues that
new theories and representationsof spatial scale and its social production
are needed to grasp the rapidly changing political geography of late
twentieth-centurycapitalism.
KEYWORDS
Global cities; glocal states; globalization;spatial scale; reterritorialization;
post-Fordism.
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INTRODUCTION
In recentdecades urbanresearchershave identifiedvarious 'globalcities'
as key spatial nodes of the world economy, the localized basing points
for capital accumulationin an age of intensified globalization.Since the
initial formulation of the 'world city hypothesis' in the early 1980s by
Cohen (1981) and Friedmann and Wolff (1982), world city theory has
been consolidated as a majorframeworkfor criticalresearchon contemporary cities and, more generally, on the changing spatial organization
of the world economy (Knox and Taylor, 1995;Hitz et al., 1995).On the
one hand, by linking urban studies directly to international political
economy (IPE)and world-systems analysis, world city theory has challenged urbanresearchersto analyze the trans-urbanscales in which cities
are embedded. On the other hand, by analyzing the currentconfiguration of the world economy in terms of its predominanturban nodes and
inter-urbannetworks,world city theory has also challenged IPEscholars
and world-system theorists to analyze the sub- and supra-stategeographies of capitalism that are embodied in urbanization processes. By
integratingthe differentialspatial scales upon which each of these fields
of research has been premised within a single analytical framework,
world city theory has also contributed to the broader project of transcending state-centricapproaches to the social sciences that has been
rapidly gaining momentum in recent years (Agnew, 1994;Taylor, 1996;
Wallerstein,1996).
The sustained attentionto the 'impassabledialecticof local and global'
(Lipietz, 1993: 16) among world cities researchers has generated an
extraordinaryoutpouring of research on cities throughout the world
economy, from Tokyo, New York and London to Los Angeles, Detroit,
Houston, Miami, Toronto, Paris, Frankfurt,Amsterdam, Zurich, Hong
Kong, Singapore,Mexico City and Sao Paulo. One of the major contributions of world cities research has been to relate the dominant
socioeconomic trends within these cities - e.g. deindustrialization,the
geography of capital flows, the expansion and spatial concentrationof
financial and producer services industries, labor-marketsegmentation,
class and ethnic conflict, sociospatial polarization - to the emergent
world urban hierarchyand the global economic forces that underlie it
(see, e.g., Keil, 1993; Knox and Taylor, 1995; Ross and Trachte, 1990;
Sassen, 1993;Feagin and Smith, 1989;Soja, 1989).1
Yet this analytical privileging of the global/local dualism in global
cities researchhas also deflected attention away from the crucialrole of
the state scale in the currentlyunfolding transformationof world capitalism. Despite their concern to analyze the changing interconnections
between urban-scale and world-scale processes, most world cities
researchershave neglected the role of state-scaletransformationsin the
2
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hypothesis that flexible production systems are among the new 'leading
edges' of contemporary capitalist development. The propulsive growth
industries of global cities are, above all, the producer and financial
services sectors that serve the command and control requirements of
transnational capital - e.g. banking, accounting, advertising, financial
management and consulting, business law, insurance and the like
(Sassen, 1991; Thrift, 1987). It is in this sense that capital's attempt to
enhance its command and control over space on a global scale hinges
upon the place-specific production complexes, technological-institutional
systems, agglomeration economies and other externalities that are localized within global cities.
These arguments have provided world cities researchers with a
methodological basis for analyzing the role of major urban regions in
the currently unfolding geographical transformation of world capitalism.
World cities are simultaneously: (1) basing points for the global operations of TNCs; (2) production sites and markets for producer and
financial services; and (3) articulating nodes within a broader hierarchy
of cities stratified according to their differential roles in the world
economy. But as Friedmann (1995: 41-3) indicates, this emergent geography of urban nodes and inter-urban networks is only one dimension
of capitalism's changing geographical organization. The consolidation of
a world urban hierarchy dominated by an archipelago of upper-tier
global cities has also produced new geographies of exclusion stretching
from the economic 'deadlands' of the older industrial core states into
the marginalized zones of the global periphery that contain almost
seven-eighths of world population (see also Agnew and Corbridge, 1995:
164-207; Amin, 1997). As world city-regions supersede the territorial
economies of states as the basic geographical building blocks of world
capitalism, new forms of uneven geographical development are proliferating on global, national and regional scales.
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of state territoriality.On the one hand, Sassen (ibid.: 4, 13) implies that
global cities are new sites of 'extraterritoriality',paradoxicallysituated
'beyond' the state's territorialitywhile simultaneously being enclosed
within its borders. However, the metaphor of 'extraterritoriality'is
derived from medieval European debates on the right of embassy and
presupposes a conception of states as static backgroundstructures:just
as foreign embassies are self-enclosed sites in which the host state's
exclusive sovereignty is locally 'punctured',the economic activities of
global cities are assumed to circumventstate territorialboundarieswhile
leaving them essentially intact. On the other hand, one of Sassen's most
central arguments in her recent work is that 'the state itself has been
transformedby its participationin the implementationof globalization
and by the pressures of globalization'(ibid.:23). Sassen (1996:28) introduces the notion of 'denationalization' to describe this ongoing
transformation. Financial deregulation and the construction of new
transnationallegal regimes are interpretedas strategies through which
many of the core states are reconfiguring the institutional-regulatory
framework of corporate practices and, in so doing, transformingtheir
own relationshipto global capital flows in ways that have significantly
decentered the national scale of regulation.
In my view, this alternativetheorizationof globalizationas a process
of denationalization provides a useful methodological starting point
for overcoming both state-demise arguments and zero-sum conceptions
of spatial scale. Global cities are not to be conceived as uniquely globalized urban nodes within unchanged national systems of cities and
state power, but rather as sites of both socioeconomic and institutional
restructuringin and through which a broader, multi-scalar transformation in the geography of capitalism is unfolding. The notion of
denationalization begins to map this transformationby emphasizing
simultaneously the key role of the state in the globalizationprocess and
the ways in which this role is triggering a re-scaling of the state itself.
Fromthis point of view, the globalizationof urbanizationand the reconfiguration of the territorial state (both as an institutional-regulatory
structureand as a city system) are intrinsicallyrelated moments within
a single process of global capitalistrestructuring.In the following section
I elaboratethis thesis through an analysis of contemporaryprocesses of
state re-scaling in the context of changing forms of territorialorganization under capitalism.
TERRITORIALIZING
RE-SCALING
GLOBALIZATION:
THE STATE
Following Mann (1993),I view the essential feature of the modern state
as its territoriallycentralized organizationalform, characterizedby the
12
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immobile assets' (Amin and Thrift, 1995: 10). It is above all through their
role in the mobilization of urban-regional territorial organization for
purposes of accelerated global capital circulation that local and regional
states, in particular, are acquiring increasing structural significance
within each territorial state's internal administrative-organizational hierarchy. Following directly in the wake of the Reagan-Thatcher
counter-revolutions of the 1980s, this dynamic of state re-scaling can be
viewed as an accumulation strategy through which contemporary
neoliberal states are attempting to promote their cities and regions as
favorable territorial locations for transnational capital investment.
The form of state territorial organization that has been constructed
through these accumulation strategies is at once polymorphic and multitiered, simultaneously turned inside-out and outside-in - inside-out
insofar as its primary goal is to enhance and promote the global competitiveness of its cities and regions; and outside-ininsofar as supra-national
agencies such as the EU, the IMF and the World Bank have come to
play direct roles in the regulation and restructuring of each state's
internal territorial space.8 In this sense, the spatial form of territorial
states in the age of global capitalism is being 'glocalized'. The term
'glocal' - derived from Swyngedouw (1996, 1992b) and Peck and Tickell
(1994) among others - is intended to describe this increasingly dense
CITIES,
ARTICLES
Global
Fordist
mass production
GLOBAL
CITIES
(e.g. London,Paris,Frankfurt)
1lb
la
European
PeripheraDzed
URBANREGIONS(e.g. Zurich,
EUROPEAN
Amsterdam,Brussels,Hamburg,Milan)
2a
2b
SPATIAL
SCALE.
OF
NationalCONTROL regional
CAPACITY
NATIONAL
URBANCENTERS
(e.g. Lyon,Madrid,Barcelona,Rome,Dortmund,
Dusseldorf, Oslo, Copenhagen,Birmingham)
3a
I
POST-FORDIST
Lack of
control
capacity
3b
,,
FORDIST
MARGINALIZED
CITIES
CITIES
CITIES
(citiesspecializedin I (citiesspecializedin Fordist i(citieslackingany
post-Fordist
mass productionsystems, ' competitive
infraindustrial
production
systems,
e.g. Manchester,Turin,
I
e.g. Stuttgart, '
Duisburg,Liverpool)
structure,e.g.
Toulouse,Prato)
Naples,Palermo)
6
5
4<
<
,
ARTICLES
'
National-developmentalism:
cityas a transmissionbelt l
fornationaleconomicpolicy;
Keynesian'managerial'
city X
(1 950s-1 970s)
CITYAS
NODE OF
ACCUMULATION
URBANIZATION
I
Cityas engine of
nationaleconomicgrowth:
i
Fordistindustrialcity;
cityas a 'growthmachine' '
INTERNATIONAL
ECONOMY
'GLOCAL'
TERRITORIALSTATE
'Glocalization'
of state power:
citypoliticsorientedtoward
the promotionof endogenous
accumulationstrategies;
re-scalingof state power
towardsupra-national
and
local-regionalinstitutions
(post-1 970s)
Globalcityformation:
uncouplingof urbangrowth
fromthe growthof national
economies;intensified
interspatialcompetition
amongcities and regions
on a worldscale
GLOBAL
I
ECONOMY
SPATIALORGANIZATION
OF THEWORLDECONOMY
Figure2 Urbanization,state forms and the world economy: Fordist and postFordist configurations
postwar period. The state's efforts to restructure itself by devolving tasks
and responsibilities downwards to its regional and local levels have
actually magnified the territorial non-coincidence between the scales of
state territorial organization and those of capital accumulation. The
promotion of supra-national institutions such as the EU can be interpreted in part as a contravening effort to reduce this territorial
non-coincidence by creating supra-national scales of state regulation
(Leyshon and Thrift, 1995; Tommel, 1996). Under these circumstances,
the scales of state territorial organization have become central mediators of capital's attempt to maximize its command and control over
space, territory and scale. As Swyngedouw (1992b: 61) notes:
The geographical scale of the codification and implementation of
institutional-regulatory systems ... simultaneously defines and
circumscribes the power of capital to command space.... A reduction in the scale of regulatory-institutional organisation increases
the power of capital over space and constrains the command of
21
ARTICLES
ARTICLES
planned and organized by an ensemble of local and regional institutions that must compete with other Landerfor centralstate resources.In
contrast to the UK, even the most globalized cities of the FRGoperate
as major articulation points for nationally and regionally dependent
industries, and thus remain tightly interwoven into the industrialfabric
of Germany's territorialeconomy.
During the 1980s, under the Kohl regime, state territorialorganization in the FRG was substantially decentralized and regionalized
(Herrigel,1996:275-86). This devolution of state power has enabled 'all
Land governments ... [to] behave like the management of a business,
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ARTICLES
7
8
9
10
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