Globalisation as Reterritorialisation: The Re-scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union

Abstract

In the rapidly growing literatures on globalisation, many authors have emphasised the apparent disembedding of social relations from their local-territorial pre-conditions. However, such arguments neglect the relatively fixed and immobile forms of territorial organisation upon which the current round of globalisation is premised, such as urban-regional agglomerations and territorial states. This article argues that processes of reterritorialisation—the reconfiguration and re-scaling of forms of territorial organisation such as cities and states—constitute an intrinsic moment of the current round of globalisation. Globalisation is conceived here as a reterritorialisation of both socioeconomic and political-institutional spaces that unfolds simultaneously upon multiple, superimposed geographical scales. The territorial organisation of contemporary urban spaces and state institutions must be viewed at once as a presupposition, a medium and an outcome of this highly conflictual dynamic of global spatial restructuring. On this basis, various dimensions of urban governance in contemporary Europe are analysed as expressions of a politics of scale that is emerging at the geographical interface between processes of urban restructuring and state territorial restructuring.