Symposium: How Should the Left Respond to Globalization?
Sassen, Saskia
CITIES, OR RATHER networks of cities, are becoming a key site for engaging global corporate power. Global cities are particularly important because they are where the core elements of the global...
...This signals, for me, the possibility of a new type of politics centered in new types of political actors...
...Through the Internet, local initiatives become part of a global network without losing focus on their specific local struggles...
...We can see the potential for developing a placespecific politics with a global span...
...Those who lack power, those who are disadvantaged, outsiders, discriminated minorities, can gain presence there, presence visàvis power and presence vis-à-vis each other...
...A fully updated version of her book The Global City is forthcoming from Princeton University Press...
...The global city emerges as a strategic site where new claims by informal political actors materialize and assume concrete forms...
...Recognizing these possibilities requires understanding something about the global economy that is usually left out of the picture...
...It would construct a countergeography of globalization...
...This cracked casing opens up possibilities for a political geography that links subnational spaces and allows non-formal political actors to engage strategic components of global capital...
...In short, I think something enormously important can be built that would go beyond using cities for demonstrations...
...It is not simply a matter of having or not having power...
...I argue elsewhere (in The Global City) that the emphasis on hypermobility, global communications, and the neutralization of place and distance in the mainstream account of globalization needs to be balanced with a focus on the work behind command functions, on the actual work process in the leading information industries (finance and specialized services), and on global marketplaces...
...A network may be global, but that does not mean that everything happens at the global level...
...Non-formal political actors can be part of politics there in a way that is much more difficult at the national level...
...In this case, the practical idea the editors ask for can be found in the fact that such city-based netDISSENT / Winter 2001 n 13 SYMPOSIUM works enable a cross-border politics of non-formal, political actors...
...Further, because other participants in this symposium address the challenges to agencies such as the IMF, the World Bank, and WTO, I focus on a less noted type of effect in political and institution-building...
...Because globalization is a complex, multiscalar and multi-sited politico-economic system, developing an alternative politics will take a variety of efforts and institutions...
...Street-level politics give rise to new types of political subjects/actors...
...We can think of these as denationalized citizenship practices...
...These give rise to a politics of the local with a big difference—the localities are connected with each other across a region, a country, or the world...
...It runs through places yet engages the global...
...The loss of power at the national level produces the possibility for new forms of power and politics at the subnational level...
...Looking at it this way, we recover the material conditions, production sites, and place-boundedness that are also part of globalization and the information economy...
...The capabilities for global operation, coordination, and control resulting from the new information technologies and from the power of transnational corporations need to be produced, managed, and serviced...
...By using the term presence I try to capture some of this...
...The national level as container of social process and power is cracked...
...City space accommodates a broad range of activities—squatting, demonstrations against police brutality, fighting for the rights of immigrants and the homeless, the politics of culture and identity, and gay and lesbian and queer politics...
...This urban political project could be an important building block of the politics for global justice and for demanding accountability from global corporate power without necessarily going through some sort of world state or the supranational level...
...This type of work is centered in cities, networks of cities, and non-formal political actors...
...This network of global cities constitutes a strategic space for politics precisely because it is a strategic space for the global economy...
...Nationally politics needs to run through existing formal systems, whether the electoral political system or the judiciary (taking state agencies to court...
...THE SPACE of the city is a far more concrete space for politics than that of the nation...
...There are new hybrid bases from which to act...
...Non-formal political actors are rendered invisible in national politics...
...Much of this becomes visible on the street, enacted by people rather than dependent on massive media technologies...
...The global city is also a sort of new frontier zone where an enormous mix of people converges...
...Unlike the mainstream account, it does not take the existence of a global economic system as a given, a function of the power of transnational corporations and global communications...
...Global cities are places where we can engage global corporate power, and go beyond demonstrating against it, because these cities are where much of the global economy is actually being organized and managed...
...The demonstrations by the anti-globalization network have signaled some of this, but we now need to build on what they have "demonstrated''— that global corporate power can be engaged directly in certain types of places...
...14 • DISSENT / Winter 2001...
...We see an instance of this also in the fact that citizens from many countries feel entitled and enabled to engage in demonstrations in cities that emerge as sites for global corporate capital no matter in what country these cities are located...
...SASKIA SASSEN is the author of Globalization and its Discontents...
...What I am describing is, then, just one element in a broad range of initiatives...
...This understanding incorporates the material facilities underlying globalization and the massive concentrations of place-bound resources that are part of the story...
...Global cities are particularly important because they are where the core elements of the global economy are located, in strategic concentrations of resources, infrastructures, structures, human talent, and the specialized know-how that is crucial for the management, coordination, and servicing of the global economic system...
Vol. 48 • January 2001 • No. 1
