The Global City After the Global City
On seeing the cityness of politics like Magnusson
Michele Acuto (University of Bristol)
A stern but collegial de-anonymized peer reviewer, a gentle thesis assessor, a kind panelist and all-around champion of all things urban among young political scientists, Warren Magnusson’s insight has touched many of us aiming to make a place for ourselves as urbanists in politics in the early 2000s. Re-reading Warren’s work for this special series has not just been a much-needed treat but a return to the principles of how we make the encounter of urban and political work as the deeply destabilizing geopolitical moves that are shaking up the international order put in question the centers of gravity of the world system, global city included.
As the models of globalism that built much of the contemporary international order are deeply challenged by geopolitical tensions, rampant inequalities, retreats into inward nationalisms, and rife uncertainties, we could be tempted by more radical moves. Should we ditch once and for all the “global city” trope and the idealistic aspirations of the politics of global urbanism, and run back to the seemingly unbeatable nation state? Warren’s scholarship shouts at us to run in precisely the opposite direction. For that, Warren’s scholarship remains timeless and timely.
Warren’s theoretical moves in the late 1990s were already prescient of today’s needed rethink. They prompted us to move from the ”Global City” proper, capitalized as it was hotly debated in the nineties, to a ”global city” viewpoint, as it shaped many encounters with more planetary sciences of the noughties, on to, like Warren put it in a later classic, a (global) politics of (global) urbanism all the better. In that, Warren’s work lends us a hand as a critical viewpoint for dialogue, not just a simple conceptual fix to uneasy matches like that of Westphalian sovereignty and the polis of the city. It does so by reminding us to continually problematize the relationship between the politics of states and the politics of cities. Warren does not shy away from the political scientists’ Hippocratic oath of embracing power and the dynamics of unveiling who gets what, how, and when. It asks us, political and urban scientists alike, to politicize the global city (Magnusson 2001) and in doing so, remembering that means embracing fundamental questions for students of politics: power, sovereignty, order, to name but a few. It stresses an inherent “symbiosis of the urban and the political” (Magnusson 2014). Like all symbiotic relationships, the Westphalian and then the modern political system have benefited from their association with the city as a temporary stabilization of the visceral planetary force of urbanization. Re-reading Warren’s struggle with the global city pushes us, as he did all too recently in a commentary on the grim futures of democracy at an age of populism rampant even across our cities (Magnusson 2024), to wonder if the contemporary political, that of retreating nations and crumbling multilateralism, is still in symbiosis with the present urban.
In that, Warren’s plea is for a simpler and less totalizing conceptual shift. His work speaks of a softer use of the “global city” as a city that is globally oriented and as a global political orientation to the political foundations of the city. It reminds us of how the urban presents a condition of possibility for the political, one that, through connections and relentless encounters, opens up opportunities for a cosmopolitan ethos of (world) politics that is all too crucial in an age of populism and nationalism.
Amidst this mission, Warren’s work is a critical reminder of the need to engage and collaborate across disciplinary divides rather than cave into niche specialism. A controversial 2010s piece was central in my own positionality and came as a fitting critique of the “self-defeating attempt” to distinguish urban politics as its own domain: “not a low politics” (Magnusson 2014) but a “generative one” that sustained states and empires. Not an alcove of specialist urban insight for urbanists, but a planetary science still very much fit for a time that needs sustained international bridges. Even the earlier pieces of Warren’s work are presciently extended in their grasp of urbanization. They do so as constitutive of a “global urban” form of theorizing accessible to the scholarship of global politics. They offer a multidimensional way of thinking beyond the hold of a specific dominant dimension of the city or politics. They require a quick skim through my earlier Magnusson notes in pre-doctoral work, which tells me to have patience with the unsettled and the mutable. Investigations of what space(s) a multiplicity of social movements take place in the global city reveal a “chaotic and fluid order” (Magnusson 1994). Sovereignty is either briefly sustained with a grasp of this mutable complexity of urbanization or fast overwhelmed by urban dynamism that does not stop at the border. Criticism of the state stripping the city of its fundamental capacities to control the agglomeration needed to sustain itself is fitting, as it was in Warren’s early-2000s pieces, as it is at the turn of 2025.
Yet this is not a scholarship of blind urban adoration. Speaking of “municipal foreign policy” as early as three decades ago, at a point when few would have even conceded the success “city diplomacy” has had today, Warren’s work also reminds us that in most cases the municipality is essentially stuck with “observer status in its own affairs” (Magnusson 2013), pillaged by the state, and powerless to most all-too-big international political economic flows. A scribbled tongue-in cheek note on the side margin of a bound thesis (yes we still printed and sent them back then) in a way too long of a literature review chapter summarizing the “global city” scholarship, echoes now more clearly in my little adventure in rediscovering all things Warren: “well done, you found the ‘global city’: now go back and search for the global urban.” And so we do, again and afresh, but conscious of that tradition of nuance in grasping politics in an urban age through an attention to the multiplicity of different authorities at different registers at various scales. Warren reminds us to embrace complexity and fluidity as a politics of urbanism. And in doing so, it stresses we can embrace the possibility of the "open city” to distance ourselves from parallels between the urban political and the nation state.
That reminder sets up some homework for the contemporary political scientists and urbanists to do together, in search of what the “cityness” of the current geopolitical order is. He fittingly speaks of the global city as an “integrative order that brings the world in and lets the people out” (Magnusson 2011). It reminds us of its fragile but all too critical achievement of the city as a “community of communities” (Magnusson 2011). This is a critical normative task: to leverage the open and generative nature of planetary urbanization as a sustained cosmopolitan political project to be taught, researched and practiced even more convincingly, against the grain of those aiming to prey on the municipality’s limited powers to do away with the politics of urbanism. It is a grave task, but one that could do with reading some old-fashioned Magnusson inquisitiveness. Across the pages of Warren’s books and articles, there is a comforting sense of optimism in an age of trouble and negativity. It is placing a hope in the politics of the global city: not in the vain prospect of a global state, or mayors ruling the world through municipal foreign policy, but in the celebration of multiplicity and its generative possibilities, where city diplomacy is constitutive of the fundamentals of 21st century political institutions.
Perhaps, the “Global City” as its 1990s aspiration might have had its time as neoliberal global order slowly implodes. Yet there is still much that we can embrace in the “global city” as a site of possibility where the planetary and the urban congeal, if for a moment, in place, and in a very political way. There, what happens might be uniquely generative of the politics of urbanism that will underpin humanity long after the disruptions of contemporary geopolitics have settled. And there in the global-ness of the global city, small caps, is where we might search for the urban that is building the political of the next age, after the turmoil of the 2020s has given way to a new epoch. After all, as Warren reminds us time and time again, cities were never really contained by states.
References
Magnusson, Warren. 1994. “Social movements and the global city.” Millennium, 23(3): 621–645.
Magnusson, Warren 1996. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Magnusson, Warren. 2001. “Politicising the global city.” In Engin Isin, ed., Democracy, Citizenship and the Global city, pp. 289–306. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. New York: Routledge.
Magnusson, Warren. 2014. "The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1561–1575. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12144.
Magnusson, Warren. 2024. "Seeing the city and democracy: A commentary." Dialogues in Urban Research 2 (2): 181–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258241233497.
Michael Acuto is Professor of Urban Resilience in the School of Geographical Sciences and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement at the University of Bristol.