The Local and the Global in the New Urban Politics: A Critical View

Abstract

Recent US literature on urban politics has been characterized by significant convergence. There has been a marked focus on the politics of local economic development, and there has also been an attempt to situate that politics with respect to processes of globalization. In particular, the globalization of the economy and correlative hypermobility of capital arc seen as exerting strong redistributive pressures on urban communities. This is the ‘new urban polities’. Evaluation of this thesis proceeds first by a critical interrogation of the related concepts of hypermobility of capital, and immobility of urban communities. This results in a respecification of the question as one of local dependence and the scale at which agents arc locally dependent. This, in turn, allows the new urban politics to be critically linked to arguments about the territorial organization of the state. From this standpoint it also appears that claims for a secular tendency towards the hypermobility of capital lack coherence.