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COPYRIGHT 2006 The Institute Inc.
Cities Ascendant
An article published by the BBC asks a series of provocative questions: "Are cities the new countries? Is the nation state under threat from the rise of the super-city?" (Rohrer 2006). Its author, Finlo Rohrer, notes that cities like Shanghai, Mumbai, and Mexico City have become more populous than many industrialized nations (see also Davis 2004: 5). And it is not only people that cities are absorbing, but capital as well, though the dire consequences of the mismatch between those cities absorbing the one and those absorbing the other are daily evident in the streets of Third World mega-cities like Kinshasa, Karachi, and Lagos. Economically, Rohrer (2006) writes, "many of the world's greatest cities are already divorced from their nation-states, with their main stream of investment coming from other great cities." Moreover, cities (and city-centered regions) have become centers of production as well as finance. Neil Smith (2000) argues the "novelty of globalization lies not so much in globalized trade or financial relations so much as in new global networks of production" constituted by both "supranational regional complexes" and, more to the point here, metropolitan areas: "Cities have been rescaled as production centers," he writes (2000: 6-8).
Associated with both the intensified urbanization of people and of economic activity, as well as with increased interurban competition for capital investment, desirable residents, and inter-governmental transfers (Harvey 2001; Peck and Tickell 2002) is a tendency for cities to assert themselves as autonomous, or at least more autonomous, political units. This is often evidenced by de jure or de facto appropriations of state functions long associated with broader units of governance, or by the development of novel governmental capacities at the local level (most notably in the realm of economic development). (1)
Furthermore, Ulf Hannerz (1996: 127-139) has identified a handful of cities as privileged sites for the production of culture. New York, Paris, and London, but also Los Angeles, Miami, Tokyo, Sydney, and Madrid, are places where mobile populations (transnational corporate elites, immigrants, tourists, and "expressive specialists") mix together, and in doing so create new cultural forms that diffuse more broadly. Here Hannerz is speaking of culture both in terms of everyday sensibilities and practices as well as commodified cultural productions. World cities disproportionately shape culture (in both senses of the term) as people, ideas, practices, and cultural forms are absorbed, repackaged, hybridized, intensified, and transmitted from the center outwards. This does not imply a homogenization or colonization of the periphery by the center, but it does make it clear that cities are perhaps taking on some of the cultural functions that once resided at the scale of the nation-state.
Ironically, it was a geographer who pointed out the possible rescaling of one cultural subject of particular interest to anthropologists. In a 1995 essay that beat Rohrer to the punch by over a decade, the political geographer Peter Taylor argued that the post-1970 decline of economic and political hegemony of the U.S. along with related processes of economic globalization, had resulted in a "world city hierarchy" forming "a global network that transcends states" (1995: 56-57). As a result, "we can no longer assume a general mutuality of interests between state and city" (1995: 60), as in policy areas from immigration to free trade, the interests of world cities and their states seemed to diverge.
Taylor (1995) argued that this divergence was not just economic or political in nature, but also cultural, related to processes of identity formation. He noted (1995: 57-58) that while "states might continue to struggle to control immigration...it is cities not countries that are becoming the prime migration goal. And within the city new identities are being formed that further erode the nation-state. Cities are no longer melting pots." After citing Western's (1992) observation that Barbadian immigrants in London were far more likely to think of themselves as "Londoners" than as "English" or "British," Taylor made a bold claim: "Cities," he wrote, "are replacing states in the construction of social identities" (1995: 58).
Spatialized Commitment Beyond the Nation
None of this is to say, as Rohrer does suggest, that cities are superseding nation-states as the most powerful geographically delimited social formations. The nation-state's continuing control over economic and social relations, and of course over the means of violence (legitimate or not), insures its predominance. Nevertheless, broad political-economic transformations that have occurred since the 1970s have resulted in a dramatic reshuffling of the scales at which different political, economic, social, and cultural processes take place. This rescaling process has, in varied and fundamental if uneven ways, enhanced the importance of the urban scale.
A number of anthropologists have discussed this process of rescaling (Appadurai 1996: especially 178-200; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Gupta 1997; Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 1997; Tsing 2000a, 2000b). Most relevantly here, Akhil Gupta has explored the implications that "changing global configurations of postcoloniality and late capitalism ... have for the imagining of national homelands and for the discursive construction of nationalism" (1997: 177). He argues that such large scale shifts have altered the relationship between space and identity, resulting in new forms of spatialized commitment. Gupta maintains that "nonnational" spatial collectivities, such as the Nonaligned Movement and the European Community, force us to question the "naturalness" of the nation as the sole, or even the predominant, source of spatialized commitment: "We need to pay attention to the structures of feeling that bind people to geographical units larger or smaller than nations ..." (Gupta 1997: 181, emphasis added).
Not unusually, Gupta emphasizes transnational rather than subnational movements. When he does (briefly) touch on "subnationalism," he focuses solely on ethnicity (1997: 194). Like many others, Gupta overlooks the possibility, raised by Taylor, that cities might be an emergent site of spatialized commitment. Despite this oversight, the urbanization of identity is clearly relevant to Gupta's discussion of forms of spatialized identity that exist at scales besides that of the nation.
Since Taylor made the claim that "cities are replacing states in the construction of social identities," the formation of a specifically urban form of spatialized identity has been subject to some theoretical comment (Bender 2002: 316; Smith 2000: 11) but little empirical exploration (for exceptions see Gregory 1998; Rutheiser 1996; and Yeoh 2005). This article seeks to further such an exploration by asking how a specifically urban process of identity formation might work, and how it might be explained. In answering such questions, I will hew closely to Gupta's approach to studying nonnational forms of spatialized commitment:
To understand these phenomena, we need to pay bifocalized attention to two processes. On one hand, we need to study structures of feeling that bind space, time, and memory in the production of locality ... On the other hand, we need to pay attention to those processes that redivide, reterritorialize, and reinscribe space in the global political economy (Gupta 1997: 197).
Following this guidance, I first discuss the efforts of members of the administration of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to mobilize urban identity, or more specifically, what I will call "urban patriotism," in support of the administration's plans for a stadium on the far west side of Manhattan. (2) To do so, I briefly discuss the context of this effort, give several examples of this mobilization of urban patriotism, and address the response on the part of some New Yorkers. Second, I argue that ethnographic evidence warrants the language of patriotism and identity formation rather than that of boosterism, as typically defined and used in urban studies. Third, I discuss the structural conditions that make the mobilization of urban patriotism possible, if not necessarily effective, specifically the enhancement of intraurban competition and the neoliberalization of urban policy in New York City and elsewhere. I conclude by discussing the implications of this article for cities beyond New York.
Post-Fiscal Crisis New York City and the New Corporate Elite
Since New York City's 1970s fiscal crisis, its political economy has undergone a profound transformation. The city's fall into technical bankruptcy in 1975 and the subsequent bailout of the municipal government by an elite group of real estate developers, government officials, bankers and other corporate executives provided an opportunity to remake the social democratic political economy of post-World War II New York. Using their control over capital and the local and state governments, such elites imposed a neoliberal regime of fiscal austerity and local welfare state retrenchment. Furthermore, it was not just a generic "good business climate" that was the goal here, but rather a good climate for the postindustrial, office-based, "global" sectors, and perhaps more important, for the construction of the office towers that would house those sectors and the luxury residences that would house their well-paid professional employees and executives (Alcaly and Mermelstein 1977; Brash 2003, 2004; Freeman 2000; Lichten 1986; Newfield and DuBrul 1981; Sanjek 1998; Susser 1982; Tabb 1982).
In the past three decades, the economic, social, cultural, and physical transformation of New York City envisioned by these elites has proceeded apace. With significant state support, the financial and business service industries have come to dominate the city's economy, resulting in increased income inequality, rampant gentrification, decreased housing affordability and so on (see Brash 2004 and Sites 2003 for summaries of this multidimensional process).
While this neoliberal transformation can be seen in the city's economic structure, its physical landscape, and its cultural economy, it can also be seen in its class structure. David Harvey (2005) and Jamie Peck (2004) have linked neoliberalization at a global scale with a restoration of the class power of economic elites. This process, Peck writes, "encompasses a wide range of proactive state strategies designed to refashion state-economy relations around a new constellation of elite, managerial, and financial interests" (2004: 396). However, as Harvey notes, "while neoliberalization may have been about the restoration of class power, it has not necessarily meant the restoration of power to the same people" (2005: 31, emphasis added). In recent decades, something similar has been underway in New York City. Post-fiscal crisis neoliberalization has resulted in the restoration of class power, yet it is a new economic elite that has been the greatest beneficiary of this process. While the members of the city's traditional, real-estate and banking-centered elite profited greatly from these policies, it has been the city's new corporate elite (most notably the city's CEOs and other high-level executives) who have appropriated the lion's share of the wealth generated in New York's booming financial, media, and information technology sectors during the decades following the fiscal crisis (Bram and Orr 1999; Drennan 1991; McCall 1998; Sassen 1991: 197-244)
These corporate elites have profound effects on the city's consumption markets, particularly for land and housing (Sassen 1991: 186-187) but also for food, clothing, art, and other commodities (Zukin 1995). The result has been the generalization and intensification of the process of gentrification, earlier limited to housing markets: the gentrification of the multidimensional urbanism of the city itself, the transformation of "whole areas into new landscape complexes that pioneer a comprehensive class-inflected urban remake" (Smith 2002a: 443; see also Hackworth 2002 and Lees 2003). Chris Hamnett, describing London in words that apply equally to New York, argues that "gentrification is the social and spatial manifestation of the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial urban economy" (2003: 2402).
The impact of the new corporate elite on politics and policy, at least until the late 1990s, was less direct. Real estate developers, retailers, and many others in the private sector busied themselves figuring out ways to tap into the enormous amounts of disposable income held by the new corporate elite. At the same time, politicians and policymakers developed and implemented policies aimed at attracting and retaining the new corporate elite, or more accurately, at attracting and retaining the companies for which they worked and which they ran. This was often done through the use of tax incentives intended to attract and retain corporations or to stimulate the construction of office space (Bowles 2001; Brash 2004). There has also been a series of urban and economic development interventions aimed at creating an environment in keeping with the perceived needs and desires of corporate elites: for example, the construction of Battery Park City, the redevelopment of Times Square as a sanitized consumption and entertainment space, and the efforts of Mayor Giuliani to impose a sense of law and order on the city through a series of well-publicized crime-fighting innovations. Yet even in these cases, post-fiscal crisis administrations often seemed out of synch with the new corporate elites' cultural sensibilities and practices. Times Square, for example, was a bit too gaudy and "Disney-fied" and Giuliani's attacks on "obscene" art displayed at the Brooklyn Museum must have struck corporate elites dedicated to the arts as small-minded and provincial. While New York City of the 1980s and 1990s was hospitable to the new corporate elite, it was only in 2001 that it found a true political champion.
The Political Rise of Michael Bloomberg
In 2001, for the first time a...
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