Space:
Study Guide for Chapter 8 of Introducing Globalization
Prepared by Matthew Sparke for students using
Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions, and Uneven Integration, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Learning objectives:
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
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2)
3)
4)
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6)
describe how globalization generates uneven geographical development;
understand the ties of geopolitical and geoeconomic discourses;
explain the implications of speculative urbanism for global city promotion;
explain the implications of splintered urbanism for global city citizenship;
analyze the ways in which slums and cities are shaped by neoliberal plans;
evaluate the degree to which your own life is enclaved amidst globalization.
Main arguments:
Globalization has not led to the end of geography. Instead, it has led to uneven
development and diverse forms of territorial transformation. Deterritorializing
developments, such as global commodity chains, integrated financial markets, intercontinental jet travel, the Internet, and the sale of public land, have in this way also
created patterns of reterritorialization, including digital divides, resource wars, trade
blocs, global cities, cross-border regions, export-processing zones, gated communities,
shopping malls, and privatized prisons. Thus, while globalization has overcome many
older spatial patterns and barriers, it has simultaneously created new geographies
that are just as powerful when it comes to territorializing and, in some cases,
terrorizing human lives.
To explain the doubled-up dynamic of “deterritorialization +
reterritorialization” and the resulting spatial consequences of globalization, Chapter
8 begins by introducing the fundamental underlying geographical tension at the
heart of capitalism. Rather than some sort of steady-state regime based on
stationary equilibrium, our world’s economic system is instead based on the
ongoing expansion of profit-making production and consumption. It is this need to
expand capital that in turn leads capitalists to go beyond fixed geographic
constraints. To find cheaper inputs, to locate new markets, and to speed-up the
turnover time between producing goods and selling them, businesses are constantly
working to overcome spatial barriers and reduce the frictions of distance. At the
same time, though, they are always also having to make investments in particular
places – including in farms, factories, offices, and retail outlets. These sorts of
investments in place-based production, management, and marketing also in turn
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have to be augmented with further investments in the wider political-economic
contexts that ensure ongoing profit-making. Whether these investments are
designed to secure direct government subsidies and tax concessions for business, or
the more indirect support represented by educational, health, and social services for
workers, there is always a complex political-economic cost–benefit calculus at work
that leads corporations to make investments in particular polities. The big challenge
for business, therefore, is to balance the benefits that accrue from these place-bound
investments with an ability to pursue opportunities in new external places. Clearly,
some businesses tend to be more place-bound than others (farming conglomerates
and ship builders in contrast to shoe- and toy makers, for instance). But, averaged
out across an entire economy, the basic balancing act remains in force. On the one
hand, there is the need to commit to place-bound investments, and, on the other
hand, there is the constant competitive pressure to pursue new opportunities
beyond the borders of the places in which business has invested already. It is this
essential tension between the territorial fix of place-investment and the
geographical expansion of place-transcendence that drives uneven geographical
development.
When politicians, diplomats, and geostrategic visionaries involved in
statecraft try to come to terms with uneven development, they often use spatial
terms and mental maps that replace attention to the underlying capitalist tensions
with divergent discourses about geography itself explaining tensions and/or their
peaceful resolution. These geostrategic discourses are described in Chapter 8 in the
terms of “geopolitics” and “geoeconomics.” When they are used without care and
reflection, space goes from being something that needs to be explained to something
that is used to explain, and, as a result, the historical-geographical processes
through which unevenness evolves tend to be obscured. Instead, the terms and
images of geopolitics and geoeconomic abstract particular territorial problems or
ideals out of the processes of uneven historical-geographical development that
produce them. As a result, an “arc of instability” or “disputed border” might thereby
be blamed for causing geopolitical unrest, while a “free trade region” or “free zone”
may be idealized as bringing geoeconomic peace and prosperity. In reality,
geopolitics and geoeconomics are better understood as discourses that reflect and
refract the underlying tensions of uneven development. As a result, they are actually
entangled with one another in the form of a “double vision”: a double vision that
maps the divergent economic imperatives towards territorial fixing and
geographical expansion in a distortive way that repeatedly divides the world into
distinct zones – zones of geopolitical conflict on the one side and spaces of
geoeconomic peace on the other – rather than coming to terms with the global ties
between the two. By tracing how territorial struggles reflect historical-geographical
processes of uneven development, Chapter 8 seeks to correct for the distortion and
better understand the connections.
Another scale at which uneven geographical development takes and shapes
place is that of cities. The phenomenal growth of globally integrated mega-urban
areas or “global cities” in the last three decades is a significant form of
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contemporary capitalist reterritorialization. Driving the growth of global cities
across the planet are a series of processes that can be most easily summarized in the
terms of “speculative urbanism.” The processes of global city formation are
speculative in part because they are organized directly by the financial speculation
of investors seeking to secure and build their investments through urban
development. But they are also speculative in the broader sense that they involve
bets by wider communities of planners, governments and privileged transnational
consumers and real-estate buyers about the future shape of city regions, too. All of
these speculative forces have come together over the last two decades to subject
cities more and more to market forces. As a result, their local landscapes have also
come to share similar “spectacular” city landmarks. Such spectacular global cities
therefore all tend to exhibit at least three out of the following four features of
neoliberal urbanism: 1) high-end mega-malls; 2) “gentrified” and “beautified”
downtown cores; 3) big-budget mega-projects such as museums, concert halls, and
sports stadiums; and 4) luxury apartment towers, gated communities, and other
securitized domestic spaces.
All the new investments in gated communities and securitized domestic
spaces reflect in turn the flip side of speculative urbanism: namely, splintered
urbanism. Four main features of such splintering are: 1) informal squatter
settlements and slums; 2) neighborhood gang violence; 3) police violence; and 4), in
response, urban struggles by the marginalized for rights to the city. From rural land
confiscations in countries such as India and Indonesia, to the chronic unemployment
and welfare roll-backs that have helped foster inner-city drug dependency in
countries such as the US and UK, the processes producing splintered urbanism
create fractured spaces that are often viewed as dead (or just deadly) when
compared to the high-end residences, gated enclaves and offices of global city
affluence. For the same reasons, the landscapes of the dispossessed are generally
seen as a world apart or as totally different kinds of “world cities” from the global
cities that regularly make it to the top of all the ranked lists. Yet such tales of two
types of cities – glittering global cities that have apparently won the global
competition for investment on the one side, and poor world cities that are left
behind like losers on the other – are deeply misleading. They hide the ways in which
these divergent spaces of accumulation and dispossession are connected: that the
wealth of one is tied to the poverty of the other. So, instead, Chapter 8 also aims at
tracing the linkages, focusing in particular on the ways in which new forms of urban
enclaving create privileged neoliberal citizenship rights and security for some while
simultaneously excluding and subjecting others to increased danger and
vulnerability.
When it comes to slums, four main sets of dangers in turn stand out as the
most common threats facing their inhabitants globally. 1) Slums are first and
foremost places of extreme poverty, poor employment options, and hyperexploitation. 2) They are also places where the inhabitants face constant dangers
because of the lack of durable and sufficiently sized living quarters. 3) The
inadequacy of slum housing is in turn closely connected to threats to slum dwellers’
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health and well-being that stem from unreliable utilities, including bad water,
sanitation, and electricity supply in slums. 4) Slum dwellers are also threatened by
their lack of tenure and associated urban citizenship rights, a form of legal and
political insecurity that makes them especially vulnerable to evictions, land grabs
and gang violence.
Key conclusions:
1)
Globalization has shrunk distances but led to uneven geographical
development.
2)
Uneven development is refracted in the divergent geostrategic discourses of
geopolitics with geoeconomics.
3)
Speculative urbanism in global cities reflects and reinforces uneven
development.
4)
Global city competition creates both spatial spectacle and splintering.
5)
Spectacular city developments create a spatial fix for global investment.
6)
Splintered development involves enclaving alongside slums.
7)
Enclaves and slums make manifest the neoliberalization of citizenship.
Further reading:
i) Uneven development, geopolitics and geoeconomics
David Harvey (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven
Geographical Development. New York: Verso.
Haim Yacobi (2012) “God, Globalization, and Geopolitics: On West Jerusalem’s
Gated Communities,” Environment and Planning A 44: 2705–2720.
Jamey Essex (2013) “Idle Hands Are The Devil’s Tools: The Geopolitics and
Geoeconomics of Hunger,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers
102: 191–207.
John Morrissey (2011) “Closing the Neoliberal Gap: Risk and Regulation in the
Long War of Securitization,” Antipode 43: 874–900.
Matthew Sparke (2007) “Geopolitical Fear, Geoeconomic Hope and the
Responsibilities of Geography,” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 97: 338–349.
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Mona Domosh (2012) “Geoeconomic Imaginations and Economic Geography in
the Early Twentieth Century,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers.
DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2011.653740.
Neil Smith (2010) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of
Space. New York: Verso.
Sanjay Chaturvedi (1998) “Common Security? Geopolitics, Development, South
Asia and the Indian Ocean,” Third World Quarterly 19: 701–724.
ii) Speculative and splintered urbanism
Ananya Roy, and Aihwa Ong, eds. (2011) Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and
the Art of Being Global. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ananya Roy (2003) City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Evan McKenzie (1994) Privatopia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Isin, Engin and Rygiel, Kim (2007) “Of Other Global Cities: Frontiers, Zones,
Camps.” In: Barbara Drieskens et al. eds. Cities of the South: Citizenship and
Exclusion in the 21st Century. London: Saqi, pp. 170–209.
James Sidaway (2007) “Enclave Space: A New Metageography of Development?,”
Area 39: 331–339.
Jamie Peck (2012) “Austerity Urbanism: American Cities under Extreme
Economy,” City 16: 621–650.
Jason Hackworth (2007) The Neoliberal City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Katharyne Mitchell and Katherine Beckett (2008) “Securing the Global City:
Crime, Consulting, Risk, and Ratings in the Production of Urban Space,” Indiana
Journal of Global Legal Studies 15: 75–99.
Matthew Sparke (2011) “Global Geographies,” in Michael Brown and Richard
Morrill, eds. Seattle Geographies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 48–
70.
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