In a statement that sets the tone for the rest of the book’s ‘relational’ agendafor the ‘global age’, Allan Cochrane’s foreword toMcCann and Ward’s (2011)Mobile Urbanism, argues that “traditional approaches to urban politics have tended to focus on the local” (ibid. ix). Likewise, in the chapter by Ward, he argues that “if it were ever enough to account for change in the nature of urban development on the basis of analysis generated solely from within cities and the countries of which they are part, then that time has surely passed” (ibid.73). Thought about in light of the rest of this chapter, I would argue such a moment passed a long time ago. Policy making questions for the vast majority of the urban world have always been narrated
97
through the prism of elsewhere, couched within frameworks of colonialism, development, structural adjustment, good governance and poverty alleviation. From colonial governance in the metropole, to the puppeteering of the Washington Consensus institutions, and contemporary United Nations agendas, all backed up by the critical microscope of the western academy, urban planning and policy making for the vast majority of the world’s cities has arguably been anything but‘local’ since, at the very latest, 1600. This is in stark contrast to the idea of “new” state forms comprised of institutional fabrics of governance that were “until recently…provided by the national or local state” (McCann and Ward 2011:180). Such a trajectory of local first, global later is, unfortunately, the reality for very few of the world’s cities and yet remains a domineering mode of thought in urban geography research into ‘neoliberalizaton’ (Brenner et al. 2010).
There exists here, an uncritical fetishisation of ‘the local’ context or of exploring the world ‘from below’ as we saw in the previous chapter, where the notion of ‘local’ and ‘below’ are pre-defined by researchers and theoretical paradigms as opposed to being the emerging materialisations of long histories of place making. As Goldman (2005) notes, “the outsider’s idea of empowering the community…sounds great, even radical, except that in most cases neither community nor nature exists as they are imagined by global experts – neither as collective nor resource” (ibid.649, see also Goldman 2007). Further complicating matters, recent scholarship on cities - as we have seen - is heavily influenced by perceptions as to the existence of a ‘world of cities’ in which it is urban spaces, rather than nation states, that act as the primary nodes for ‘globalisation’. But, again, such an approach is myopic in its rigid interpretation of history. Newly independent nation-states in the mid-twentieth century harboured particular interest in consolidating territorial sovereignty in order to “declare their autonomy from the colonial condition; their national histories and geographies stress self- development, not regional and transregional flow” (Tsing 2000: 333). Indeed, nationalism, and the multitude of forms that it takes in relation to independence struggles, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’, remains at the core of the fundamental problem facing Marxian theory in this new ‘global’ context (Ahluwalia 2001). We can extrapolate Tsing’s point even further in this regard to think about a difference in state building attitudes and ideological notions between Pan- Africanist desires and anti-British United States patriotism, for example.
98
Some of the most prominent defenders of Marxian political economy as an approach to understanding cities have sought to challenge this notion by asserting the primacy of ‘structures’. Brenner et al. (2011) argue that any notion of ‘context’ has its own underlying ‘context’. Faced with questions over the reality with which we engage as researchers, the suggestion here seems to be that we must add another layer of ‘structural’ context onto that which is, presumably then, believed to be a reified, actually existing, ontologically given truth about a location. A good example of this at work comes from the idea of urban ‘regime theory’ in which, according to Ravazzi and Belligni (2015), a particular concept is utilised in a way that provides “capacity to act and bring resources to bear on the identifying agenda” (ibid. 4). In their case study, these resources were drawn on by various actors who established a certain “power to” capacity through the channelling of a collective agenda construction, culminating in the 2001 strategic plan for the Italian city of Turin (ibid. 3). Temenos and McCann (2012) approach urban policy making in a similar way opting for the notion of a particular ‘fix’ rather than a regime, in their case relating to the concept of sustainability as a technique for local governments to draw resources together. But again, for both of these cases, there remain questions of how exactly ‘power to’ is facilitated by the relationship between different actors and by the overriding discourse in question. Regimes of governance have subjects as much as they do objects. This, I would argue, is all too easily written off as belonging to the ‘local’ context in some way from which external or outside forces such as ‘neoliberalism’ are tapped into by various actors.
‘Regimes’ of governance do not appear from nowhere, willingly bought into by a multitude of different actors. When the ‘context’ in question is institutional, actor orientated and shaped by the relations in which it works, the notion of ‘conduct of conduct’ put forward by Foucault is more useful, and more revealing, than the ‘context of context’ approach suggested by Brenner et al. above. This recognises the fact that the individual (or indeed the wider collective, institutional fabric of a place) is not a “pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power, but rather the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies,
multiplicities, movements, desires and forces” (Foucault 1980). While there is likely shared agreement over the suggestion that ‘context’ presents a troubling notion, adding more
‘context’ seems illogical. Where might one draw the line in this sense? The context of context that Brenner et al. speak of is, itself, contextually relative, making it very difficult to
99
understand what exactly they see “locally embedded social forces” (ibid.225) as being ‘embedded’ in. The ‘structures’ that underlie one particular place differ from those in another with never ending layers of historicised contingencies. It is onto the historical emergence of ‘contexts’, then, that I would argue research on globalisation and the practices of urban policy making, must cast its empirical net. The point here being that to speak in any sort of monolithic way about the notion of the ‘local’ as pertaining to either, i) a distinct geographical space, or b) ‘the state’ in some monolithic form relating to either the national, regional, or city level, is deeply problematic.
4.8 Conclusion
“It is easier to conquer than to administer - with enough leverage a finger could
overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules”
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Rousseau and Cole 2003).
Like their operationalisation in lieu of Rousseau’s famous quote above, when tied explicitly to a colonial power, the organisation of governance regimes - the institutional arrangements of city making - were considerably easier to operationalise at the time, and to theorise today. In his in-depth discussion of the colonial organisation of Cairo, Timothy Mitchell (1988) states that “the city, in this analysis, can be taken to exemplify a paradox at work in the maintenance of any modern political order, any modern self-identity” (ibid.165). Through the colonial project, this sovereign power was extended across great distances, allowing the various empires to reach in and govern that which was far away as if it was close to home (Allen 2008). The sovereign act of governance, the writing on the ground that Mbembe and others emphasised in this chapter was facilitated by the biopolitical arrangements of power that facilitated it. The question to ask, then, is what such a stabilised arrangement looks like today and how does it impact on overly comfortable notions of global-local contrasts so often invoked in geography literature on planning and policy making. Contemporary research into the governance of cities, if it wishes to speak in any universal sense about cities as governable spaces or indeed build ‘theory’ in relation to this, needs to step back and seek to understand at a much more fundamental level, what it is we mean when we refer to ‘local contexts’. This
100
is not about emphasising the unique differences betweendifferent ‘locals’, quite the contrary in fact, it is about a troubling paradigm of monolithic ‘localness’.
The concept of the ‘local’, therefore, tends to do precisely what Foucault described at the end of the previous chapter - “carry on in its empty sameness throughout the course of history” acting as either the anchor point for geographical theorising about the worlds ‘structures’, or as a tool for legitimising colonisation of others. Foucault is, of course, talking about the notion of the individual subject, but we can extrapolate this to encompass the notion of the ‘local’ subject as a subject in itself - the embodiment by a particular individual planner, practitioner, policy maker, researcher etc, of some form of ‘local’ identity. Superseding specific moments of both sovereign dominance and indeed explicit violence - even if such moments are as large as the colonisation of entire peoples and regions of the world - an apparatus conceptualisation of power offers us a means to situate sovereignty within a conceptualisation of biopower. More importantly, by thinking about power as ‘capturing’ and ‘orientating’ subjects in particular ways, it presents us with the possibility to think
geographically about how more specific power relations, over time, ‘become concrete’ (Agamben 2011: 6).
101