Urban Space, Politics Of

The politics of restructuring and destructuring urban space, its scale and changing power relations, is a response to and expression of globalization. The politics of urban implosion and explosion derive their dynamics from changing state, capitalist, and supraurban connectivities. Under global-local process, the power relations of urban spaces are mediated and mitigated by processes of capital accumulation, transnational regulation, and social struggles.

The complicated intermingling of globalized capital, entrepreneurial states, and growth-oriented policy actors produce variations in the politics of global cities. In some cities, globalization is mobilized locally to create regimes of exclusionary urban politics and to secure the economic rights and power of global capital.

Urban planning practices are increasingly privatized. The proliferation of public-private partnership arrangements in cities reflects the strengthening power of business in urban policy making. Policies in cities are being changed to reconcile political and business sectors through an array of public-private partnerships. Private consultants hired by public-private coalitions institute inclusionary planning processes. For instance, “visioning” is a technique used for developing urban renewal plans through consensus-seeking meetings open to all parties. The integration of collaborative techniques into public-private planning procedures has produced new sites of political struggle over the production of urban space. But policy making by visioning urban spatial futures is such that elites retain effective control. By making dissent even more difficult, this [Page 1423]process produces visions that parallel standard urban development models.

Urban entrepreneurialism is producing ever more contradictions as well as a growing move toward a postneoliberal political repertoire. Investments in entrepreneurial ideas see cities sharpening inequalities and socioeconomic exclusions. For instance, the global political economy of the car has long driven the shape of urban space as well as contributed to global environmental change. The politics of cars are integral to the routine degrading of urban space. Globally, the car industry produces capital accumulation and so is promoted by states over alternatives. Likewise, gentrification was once an occasional occurrence. Now it is integral to urban housing markets, being connected to the circuits of global capital and cultural flows.

The relationship between urbanism and globalization is changing. Neoliberal states are agents for promoting the market-based regulation of cities. Urban policies in advanced capitalist cities are being replaced by a focus on capital production rather than social reproduction. The politics of urban space has been recast and rescaled around the global. In the rapidly growing metropolitan economies of Asia, Latin America, and, to a lesser extent, Africa, global cities have emerged to compete with the command centers of Europe, North America, and Japan.

The governing of China's changing urban space is connected with its transition to a market economy. Forces inside and outside China are affecting its restructuring of urban governance. Marketization has created forces, imaginings, and desires beyond the reach of the state's hierarchical controls. The party-state, the work-unit system, and household registration—the pillars of the China's governing structure—have been shaken by these forces. The changes in the organization of people, capital, production, materials, and infrastructure have brought about new forms of urban governance. Municipalities, urban districts, street offices, and residents' committees have been reinvented to consolidate to China's governability. The politics of reinventing urban space reflects the state's attempt to reconsolidate its power and to cope with providing assistance to poor and aged residents, laid-off workers, and floating immigrants.

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