Why sassen is wrong a response to burgers

Friedmann, J. Hamnett, C. Hill, R. Kovacs, Z. Logan, J. Mollenkopf, J. Preteceille, E. Sassen, S. Stedman Jones, G. Szelenyi, I. Tai, P. Vaattovaara, M. Wang, C. Warf, B. Wessel, T. Wills, J. Datta, Y. Evans, J. Herbert, J. May, J. Wolff, E. Wu, F. Chris Hamnett There are no affiliations available. Personalised recommendations. Cite chapter How to cite? ENW EndNote. Buy options. If Sassen is correct and the nature of immigration is related to just another round in the urbanization of global capitalist accumulation, what can or should be done about it?

These include immigration policy, so-called 'integration' policy, and employment policy. Rather than discuss the contours of appropriate policy, which would require a much longer and different paper, let me add that since global cities are not isolated entities, urban governments might impose these together and uniformly through a network of global cities.

A salient example is the 'Urban League' with its headquarters in New York, and which is concerned with the problems and possibilities of African-Americans. Comparative national-level data on migration is too incongruent and lacks sufficient disaggregation to draw a relationship between a growth in the labor supply and the expansion of global cities.

And this in turn must be combined with sensitivity to the timing of these migrations. In other words, one must be attentive to the relationship between changes in immigration policy and the growth of global cities. By its very nature, informal employment is exceedingly difficult to capture in a quantitative sense, not least because businesses and employment are so ephemeral.

And here we need a more precise notion of what constitutes informal economic activity is it the 'drug economy', prostitution, domestic labor, or simply the illegal production of textiles? Samers, For example, it may be female prostitution and domestic work in the EU, rather than an illegal garment industry that marks the informal character of economic activity in European global cities at the beginning of the 21 st century Kofman, ; Anderson, Nonetheless, if there is a strong relationship between mega-cities, immigration, and the growth of informal employment, then this must be demonstrated rather than simply asserted.

And it must be shown why informal economic activity is relatively unique to these cities. Otherwise, informal economic activity as a defining characteristic of global cities cannot be assumed.

Thus, anecdotal qualitative evidence and not quantitative estimations is likely to provide valuable insights into the processes at work, and therefore help to sustain dynamic and appropriate urban policies with respect to potential employment regulations, job training, language training, and housing.

Yet, again, qualitative case studies may offer a useful service in terms of public policy. They will not, on the other hand, help to assess whether these kinds of employment units are growing or declining, unless such studies are carried out en masse. And as suggested in the previous proposition, there has been a tendency to focus disproportionately on garment manufacturing surprising given the diminished fortunes of this industry in the advanced economies of Europe Iskander, , and this may obscure the importance of other kinds of down-graded manufacturing.

There is a need to construct a sustained synthesis between processes of economic globalization what I referred to earlier as exogenous processes and the way in which these processes both provide the space for and constrain the economic activity of immigrants in urban labor markets so-called endogenous processes. Perhaps a combination of Kloosterman, Rath, and Van der Leun's concept of mixed embeddedness 15 , an alternative conception of entrepreneurship based on day laborers as low-skilled entrepreneurs Valenzuela, , and a sophisticated labor segmentation theory for understanding wage labor see e.

Peck, might prove to be one valuable path for research? Yet the point is not to substitute one discourse for another i. In other words, how do the disproportionately large numbers of immigrants help to shape the urban labor markets of these largest cities, and what implications does this have for urban policy.

I have argued that the polarisation debate suffers from a number of conceptual and empirical weaknesses that have significant implications for both the GCH debate and urban policy. These include the 'fuzziness' of the terms polarisation and inequality, the national bias of statistics, the inattention to undocumented immigration, and the lack of temporal specificity.

Thus, with regard to addressing these issues simultaneously, a starting point is an estimation of undocumented immigration. Yet this assumes that social scientists become more creative and look elsewhere for the relevant statistical sources. Benbouzid, Finally, this would have to be analysed through the lens of changes in immigration policy over at least a census period i.

In sum, I have pointed to 5 ways in which we can 'renew' the GCH and parallel studies. These propositions together represent a considerable challenge to social scientists working in this vein, but it is my argument that if these are not addressed, then future studies into global cities are likely to be inadequate assessments of urban inequalities in the world's largest cities.

There is something distinctively victimising about the global city literature with respect to immigrants, and there will be those who see such studies as empiricist, and the inequality of cities as an ineluctable feature of capitalist urbanization without any possible remedy.

Perhaps the most ardent supporter of this view is Gibson I argue in this section that for the more skeptical observers, abandoning the GCH need not be a necessary consequence of this reasoning.

In my move therefore from 'renewal' to 'reformulation', I shift roughly from a critical discussion of largely economistic assumptions within the GCH to thinking about how we might nurture the political implications of the GCH. This is less of a giant step than one might think, if, for example, we imagine that the enormous sums of money that migrants remit to their countries of origin from employment in global cities, allows for the development of what has been called political transnationalism.

In other words, it would make more sense to view global cities not so much as the transnational loci of inequality which they seem to be , as in looking at global cities as offering a different set of networks that are envisioned by the GaWC research project in the UK for which Sassen herself is a regular contributor.

These alternative 'networks' may contribute to 'new' forms of democratic participation in the countries of destination, as well as in the countries of origin. How might this be conceptualised? This is an idea which grew out of his research on the movement of the entire inhabitants of villages in Mexico to their localised re-grouping in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, but also in many other smaller Californian suburbs and agricultural towns. Thus, we can speak of a network of global cities in two senses, one in the types of networks that we associate with transnational communities largely south-north, but also intra-national and intra-European networks and the kinds of networks which global cities afford through the concentration of NGOs and other political organisations.

True, research on immigrant communities in European cities has revealed that formal political representation remains the domain of migrant elites rather than strictly 'grassroots political mobilisation' e. Bousetta, And more generally, there is little certainty as to whether such 'transnationalism' reconfigures or reaffirms existing class, racial, and gender power relations Mahler, , or that it does not also bring with it 'less progressive' processes to migrant communities both in the 'North' and in the 'South' Mattei and Smith, In the end, 'transnationalism from below' may only be a very crude metaphor that begs the question as to what other kinds of 'spatialities' will be necessary for building a progressive immigrant transnational politics.

I leave this as a potential question for research. Such rights are extended to those migrants living outside global cities, but further research might seek to reveal how the largest metropolitan regions form the epicenter of the definition and delivery of migrant and ethnic minority rights.

This is especially the case in Paris where the nature of the relatively centralised political system allows Paris-based Moroccan and other Maghrebin associations to wield considerable power over other non-Paris based organisations Poinset, In contrast to the 'network-driven' research of GaWC, such research may then also reveal how hierarchies still matter. Thus, the specificity of the global city in other words a new 'global city hypothesis' might involve thinking of global cities as the locus of trans-national political mobilisation and its effects on the welfare of migrants.

The GCH debate and particularly the research agenda of GaWC have been pre-occupied recently with the technological dimensions of so-called 'global cities'. This paper has sought to recover the role of immigration in large urban economies.

Using mainly observations from European metropolises, I argued first that the GCH requires significant revision insofar as it can be used as a tool for addressing issues of inequality, and offered five propositions for a renewal of the existing contours of the GCH. Second, beyond these revisions, I suggested a complete reformulation of the debate, and sought to link it with ideas emanating from the literature on transnationalism.

Despite the move by researchers such as the GaWC to transcend the emphasis on 'hierarchies' and explore the question of global city networks, I argue that this emphasis is at best incomplete, at worst misplaced. Instead, I have a very different idea of the possibilities of a 'network paradigm' for global cities - one that focuses instead on cities as the locus for a 'transnational political mobilisation from below' rather than above.

However, the possibilities for increased political mobilisation within a single global city, or indeed a network of such cities should not blind us to falling into the trap of what Drainville calls the 'feteshism of 'global civil society', nor what Mahler identifies as the weaknesses of the 'transnationalism from below' idea. Nonetheless, such a theoretical move seems a necessary task, lest our understanding of 'global cities' be confined to simply ranking them, outlining business networks, or categorising their characteristics.

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