ancient cities

576 Other Global Cities
“third worlds,” “North” and “South,” or “core”
and “periphery,” simply as if they belonged to
separate geographical spaces. Rather, they now
resided together as part of the same space. As an
analytical concept, then, global cities provided a
site of analysis into how global power relations
were being reconfigured.
Yet, the concept was criticized for generalizing
the city as a universal form, operating identically
between the global South and global North. As
well, characterization often relied on modernist
assumptions about the development of advanced
capitalist societies, with global cities likened to
isolated containers of space, operating hierarchically
within a network of global power. Against
such critiques, interest emerged in studying alternative
urban spaces through which to rethink the
global city and the notion of the global. Recognizing
that urbanization takes multiple forms, theorizing
turned to the variety of new urban spaces arising
with globalization alongside this network of global
cities. These other global cities arise in the forms of
cities of the South and other urban forms such as
the favela, the slum, the detention center, the refugee
camp, the zones d’attentes, and the exportprocessing
zone. These are the spaces of Woomera,
Sangatte, Guantánamo, and Dharavi (Mumbai), in
which increasing numbers of people now find
themselves living. Often designed as temporary
and exceptional spaces to the city, they have
become permanent features of settlement in the
global system and a permanent way of life for millions.
These other spaces are like global cities in
that, first, they take on many of the features typically
associated with city spaces. For example,
urban planning of refugee camps resembles the
planning of cities with similar requisites for food
storage and distribution, hospitals, meeting places,
schools, markets, and cemeteries. Second, like
global cities, these other spaces are points of concentration
operating in relation to one another as
a network of spaces, albeit one of abjection, poverty,
and exclusion rather than of wealth and
power. Yet, the study of these spaces also interrogates
the way in which global cities are more conventionally
understood, for such spaces do not just
exist alongside global cities. Rather these other
spaces of marginalization make possible—and are
constitutive of—global cities as sites of power
and wealth.
The Global City as Site of Exclusion
Giorgio Agamben’s theorizing of the camp has
been particularly influential in research on alternative
spaces of exclusion. Agamben argues that the
power of the sovereign lies in the “ban” or the exceptional
power to shun a person from the political
community. Through the ban, a person is forced to
live the life of homo sacer (i.e., one who can be
killed but not sacrificed). Excluding the individual
from the political community forces one into a
condition of what Agamben calls “bare life,” a
way of living based on the simple biological existence
shared with other living species. This way of
living differs from the more desirable, qualified life
a person lives in political community as a political
subject with rights. Agamben argues that those
banned from the political community or polis (the
city or city-state) find themselves living in a “state
of exception” but one that becomes permanent
through the spatial organization of the state of
exception in the form of the camp. Here the camp
refers not just to the concentration camps of the
past but to an ideal form that materializes in such
arrangements as the zones d’attentes of French
international airports or “guest houses” for asylum
seekers. For, as spaces of exception, these
camps are not just exceptional spaces but part of
the normal order in that they are constitutive of
the political community (the “city of men”). They
are, in other words, the unacknowledged foundation
upon which the global system rests.
Agamben’s ideas about the centrality of the
camp in relation to the city have been influential in
spawning social theory investigating the camp and
camp-like spaces as proper objects of analysis in
their own right. These sites emerge not just incidentally
alongside global cities but are integral to
their continued existence as centers of knowledge
and command, infrastructure, production and
capital. These “other global cities” are, however,
spaces of marginality and exclusion, where those
lacking status, rights, and recognition find themselves
servicing the global economy of the global
cities network, not just as cheap labor but as expendable
labor. Thus one strand of theorizing, most predominant
in politics and sociology, investigates
alternative spaces in the forms of refugee camps,
immigration detention centers, and borderlands.
Here investigation tends to center on exploring the