Ananya Roy’s “The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory” (2009) and Saskia Sassen’s “The Global City: Introducing a Concept” (2005) take up the issues of globalization and the production of space while arguing for an “area-based” (Roy, abstract) approach that, through the process of “recapturing the geography” (Sassen, p. 32), allows urban theorists to see globalization and global urban processes as critically and strategically grounded in place. Through this approach, we not only gain a more complete understanding of the systems that drive globalization, participants in these systems also gain new claims to place that exceed traditional forms of citizenship or belonging.
Roy begins by critiquing the ways in which western cities have come to dominate the body of urban theory, both as subjects and as sites of production. Cities in the global south not only need to occupy the attention of urban researchers, they must also be “center(s) of theory making” that can be “appropriated, borrowed, and remapped,” (Roy, p. 820). Roy approaches this task by demonstrating how “located urban theory” can, through a process she calls “strategic essentialism,” simultaneously produce geographically, historically specific knowledge and theoretical, widely generalizable information (p. 822). Thus, producing theory from the global south allows researchers to rise to the task of grappling with the extraterritorial, transnational processes of globalization because it is simultaneously “located and dislocated” (p. 827).
The totally dis-located conceptualization of globalization troubles Sassen, who illustrates the ways in which globalizing processes are strategically located in cities. The complex networks of specialized services and work processes that link transnational commercial and financial entities in global centers of trade have resulted in the formation of important relationships between places that are not geographically linked. Sassen resists the hyper-mobile characterization of globalization processes, arguing instead that recognizing the deeply grounded nature of many necessary resources in the global economy helps researchers “recapture people, workers, communities, and more specifically, the many different work cultures, besides the corporate culture, involved in the work of globalization,” (p. 32). This recapturing offers inhabitants and participants in these global centers of production a new claim on the right to the city and the production of urban space. It resists the mindset of total domination by global capital and instead offers “strategic sites” for political engagement at the “sub-national” spaces that are connected across borders (p. 39).
I think Roy’s discussion of informality can help us think more concretely about Sassen’s hopeful assessment of global cities as places of reclamation for the dispossessed. Roy argues that bringing the discussion of the production of urban space into the realm of the global south allows researchers to think concretely about informality as a mode of production of space—one that is largely ignored in the global north. Strategically essential literature on the global south reveals “tactics through which urban ‘informals’ appropriate and claim space” (p. 826). So, the scholarship that Roy is advocating for and the case studies from the global south that she invokes both factor into Sassen’s hypothesis on the global city as new terrain for subaltern power.
Roy and Sassen’s scholarship makes it clear that the global city is not only an important theoretical concern, but also a crucial site of production of and struggle over space by various actors such as the state, capital, and inhabitants. Many avenues for further research are opened up through their contribution. I want to continue to think about the insights strategic studies from the global south could offer my work at Cooperation Jackson, a city in the global north with global connections, but with complicated ties to historic processes of racial capitalism.