Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History

By A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Nancy H. Kwak and Thomas J. Sugrue

In recent decades, hundreds of millions of people across the world have moved from rural areas to metropolitan regions, some of them crossing national borders on the way. While urbanization and globalization are proceeding with an intensity that seems unprecedented, these are only the most recent iterations of long-term transformations—cities have for centuries served as vital points of contact between different peoples, economies, and cultures. Making Cities Global explores the intertwined development of urbanization and globalization using a historical approach that demonstrates the many forms transnationalism has taken, each shaped by the circumstances of a particular time and place. It also emphasizes that globalization has not been persistent or automatic—many people have been as likely to resist or reject outside connections as to establish or embrace them.

The essays in the collection revolve around three foundational themes. The first is an emphasis on connections among the United States, East and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and South Asia. Second, contributors ground their studies of globalization in the built environments and everyday interactions of the city, because even world-spanning practices must be understood as people experience them in their neighborhoods, workplaces, stores, and streets. Last is a fundamental concern with the role powerful empires and nation-states play in the emergence of globalizing and urbanizing processes.

Making Cities Global argues that combining urban history with a transnational approach leads to a richer understanding of our increasingly interconnected world. In order to achieve prosperity, peace, and sustainability in metropolitan areas in the present and into the future, we must understand their historical origins and development.

Contributors: Erica Allen-Kim, Leandro Benmergui, Matt Garcia, Richard Harris, Carola Hein, Nancy Kwak, Carl Nightingale, Amy C. Offner, Margaret O'Mara, Nikhil Rao, A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Arijit Sen, Thomas J. Sugrue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9780812294408

Book preview

MAKING CITIES GLOBAL

MAKING CITIES GLOBAL

THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN IN URBAN HISTORY

EDITED BY

A. K. SANDOVAL-STRAUSZ AND NANCY H. KWAK

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

This volume was published with the support of the Princeton University–Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities and the University of California–San Diego.

Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sandoval-Strausz, A. K., editor. | Kwak, Nancy, 1973– editor.

Title: Making cities global : the transnational turn in urban history / edited by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017012497 | ISBN 9780812249545 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Transnationalism—History—20th century—Case studies. | Urbanization—America—History—20th century—Case studies. | Urbanization—India—History—20th century—Case studies. | Cities and towns—America—History—20th century—Case studies. | Cities and towns—India—History—20th century—Case studies. | Globalization—Political aspects—Case studies.

Classification: LCC JZ1320 .M35 2017 | DDC 303.48/270091732—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012497

CONTENTS

Foreword

Thomas J. Sugrue

Introduction. Why Transnationalize Urban History?

A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and Nancy H. Kwak

PART I. GLOBALIZATION AND GOVERNANCE

Chapter 1. Silicon Dreams: States, Markets, and the Transnational High-Tech Suburb

Margaret O’Mara

Chapter 2. Homeownership and Social Welfare in the Americas: Ciudad Kennedy as a Midcentury Crossroads

Amy C. Offner

Chapter 3. Building the Alliance for Progress: Local and Transnational Encounters in a Low-Income Housing Program in Rio de Janeiro, 1962–67

Leandro Benmergui

Chapter 4. Slum Clearance as a Transnational Process in Globalizing Manila

Nancy H. Kwak

Chapter 5. Crossing Boundaries: The Global Exchange of Planning Ideas

Carola Hein

PART II. PLACE, CULTURE, AND POWER

Chapter 6. Condos in the Mall: Suburban Transnational Typological Transformations in Markham, Ontario

Erica Allen-Kim

Chapter 7. Requiem for a Barrio: Race, Space, and Gentrification in Southern California

Matt Garcia

Chapter 8. Transnational Performances in Chicago’s Independence Day Parade

Arijit Sen

Chapter 9. Transnational Urban Meanings: The Passage of Suburb to India and Its Rough Reception

Richard Harris

Chapter 10. Suburbanization and Urban Practice in India

Nikhil Rao

Chapter 11. Will the Transnational City Be Digitized? The Dialectics of Diversified Spatial Media and Expanded Spatial Scopes

Carl H. Nightingale

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

FOREWORD

THOMAS J. SUGRUE

It has been nearly two decades since the Organization of American Historians released its La Pietra Report, an influential call for the creation of a transnational or global approach to the nation’s history. The report, drafted by distinguished intellectual and urban historian Thomas Bender in consultation with nearly one hundred major scholars, offered this exhortation: The lived and experienced connections in transnational space need to be explored—both the channels that facilitate movement and the ruptures, discontinuities, and disarticulations that structure inequalities and constitute the basis for national and other forms of differentiation. Coming after years of scholarship dominated by place-based case studies in social and cultural history, La Pietra issued a radical historiographical challenge, calling on Americanists to rethink the scales, temporalities, and networks of historical transformation.¹

La Pietra marked a watershed in the field. In recent years, major history departments have conducted searches for faculty specializing in the United States and the world. Graduate programs regularly offer transnational or global history tracks, reflecting a reorientation of the profession. Intellectual historians, following Daniel Rodgers, traced Atlantic crossings of ideas of social reform. Scholars of region, immigration, and ethnicity, fields that enjoyed a revival in the early twenty-first century, turned their attention to borderlands and diasporas, rejecting old notions of assimilation and Americanization. Questions of imperialism, colonization, and decolonization moved to the cutting edge of cultural studies. But, with a handful of noteworthy exceptions, urban historians came late to the transnational wave.

Urban history as a field has long been concerned with scales, temporalities, and networks, three keywords in the La Pietra Report. But for the majority of American urbanists, the scale was intensely local. For good reasons, many of the most influential books in urban history have been place-based case studies, a tradition in American urbanism across the social sciences. Sam Bass Warner wrote about the public and private in Philadelphia, Sean Wilentz about working-class New York, Lizabeth Cohen on consumerism and working-class life in New Deal–era Chicago, and George Sánchez on Mexican American politics and culture in Los Angeles.² It was not hard to make a case for the case study: an intense focus on a single city or, more broadly, a whole metropolis, allowed for a close observation of social processes, political movements, and economic dynamics that were invisible at larger scales. In 2003, it was still pathbreaking for Robert Self to argue that race and political economy in Oakland could not be understood without putting the suburban East Bay in the picture, in the process leading newer scholars to call for a new suburban history or a metropolitan history that breached the political boundaries between city and suburb.³ Meanwhile, innovative historians, following the lead of environmental historian William Cronon, pushed further outward, linking urbanization to regional economic development, bridging the artificial divide between rural and urban. Ellen Stroud showed how urbanization went hand in hand with the reforestation of the Northeast; Andrew Needham tied the rise of metropolitan Phoenix to the exploitation of resources in Navajo country.⁴ They made it impossible to think about urbanism simply at the local level.

But despite calls for a transnational turn, only a handful of urbanists stepped outside the boundaries of the nation-state altogether to lay the groundwork for a new, expansive global urban history. Pioneers like Sven Beckert considered the networks of capital and commodities that connected cities as diverse as Liverpool, Mumbai, and New Orleans; Christopher Klemek followed the flow of ideas about urban renewal and city planning that traveled from Paris to New York, from Berlin to Toronto to Boston; and Carl Nightingale traced the segregation mania that linked the histories of places as far-flung as New Delhi, Cape Town, and Baltimore.⁵

The authors in this volume represent cutting-edge work in urban history throughout the Americas and across the Pacific. Some, like Nightingale (who was part of the La Pietra working group) have been involved in transnational, multiarchival, multilingual research for decades. Others, like its coeditors, have just recently published field-defining books and articles that explode the scales and temporalities that have long shaped urban historiography.⁶ Each of these essays builds on the best of urban historiography, deeply researching places, attentive to the built environment, spatialized public policies, and local politics. But each also opens up new avenues for interrogating the local, whether tracing economic planning in Colombia and the Philippines or showing how immigrants and ideas reshaped American and Asian cities and suburbs, their storefronts and sidewalks and dwellings, into something that reflected the architecture and aesthetics of their places of origin. The authors offer a powerful reminder that cities are often shaped by economic decisions made thousands of miles away, through networks that transcend single places, by people whose identities and politics defy simple categorization. The result is an extraordinary collection of essays, one that brings the promise of La Pietra to fruition and sets a new direction for the next generation of American historians who think, research, and write globally and locally and at every scale in between.

Introduction

Why Transnationalize Urban History?

A. K. SANDOVAL-STRAUSZ AND NANCY H. KWAK

Cities today are growing faster and in more places than ever before, and the future looks to be unprecedentedly urban. In 1900, only about 13 percent of the world’s population lived in cities; in 1950, that proportion had grown to 30 percent. The number of people in urban areas reached parity with the number in rural areas in 2007, and the most recent figures suggest that humanity is now 54 percent urbanized. The regions that are most urban at present are Northern America, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe, but the fastest rates of urbanization are now seen in Asia and Africa, which together account for more than half of the planet’s urban population. Current estimates indicate that by 2050, two-thirds of the global population will be city dwellers.¹

This process of urbanization has critical transnational dimensions. Human migration has accelerated over recent decades, and as individuals and groups relocate from rural areas to cities, many of them cross national boundaries. According to the latest estimates, the number of people on the move has increased by nearly 60 percent since 1990, and the world’s migrant population is now approximately a quarter billion people. Cities are also shaped by the flow of investments and other forms of money, which move with unprecedented speed and volume, changing markets for food, services, and especially housing—and in the process generating greater inequalities from person to person and place to place. Environmental effects, meanwhile, are indifferent to national borders. Human activity is altering climates and impacting ecosystems around the world, in turn potentially setting off further movements of people and capital and leaving some populations more vulnerable than others.²

Making Cities Global explores the connections between urbanization and globalization by focusing on their intertwined historical development. Cities have long served as critical transnational spaces, functioning as key points of articulation between and among different peoples, economies, and cultures. As urbanists, the contributors to this volume locate transnationalism in specific places, grounding the study of globalization in the built environments and everyday interactions of the city. We also show how flows of people, information, and goods can tie metropolitan areas together into circuits that span great distances. Equally important to our approach is the methodology of history. While urbanization and globalization are proceeding with an intensity that seems unprecedented, these are only the most recent iterations of long-standing transformations. Historians recognize transnational processes as highly contingent and plural, with multiple variants shaped by their creators’ time and place. Furthermore, we understand that globalization has not involved persistent flows and exchanges; it has coexisted with profoundly local, embedded tendencies, with many people as likely to resist or reject outside connections as to establish or embrace them. For these reasons, we believe that the combination of urban history and transnational studies will open up new and generative lines of inquiry into a subject matter that has moved to the center of both public and scholarly debate throughout the world.

The dramatic transformations of recent decades have generated tremendous scholarly interest. In a number of academic disciplines, researchers took up the banner of transnationalism a quarter century ago, investigating a tremendous variety of subjects—including the changing fortunes of the nationstate, the globalization of capitalism, the diasporic condition, the proliferation of nonstate actors and activities, everyday practices of cross-border work and family relations, the pursuit of politics across borders, the transformation of personal and community identities, the discursive meanings of nationalism, and the many new forms of culture that result from an age of rapid mobility. Anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and literary scholars raised questions that often transcended the boundaries of their fields, and were joined by political scientists, ethnic studies scholars, historians, and others, some of whom had been studying transnational phenomena for quite some time under different intellectual rubrics.³

Cities and metropolitan processes have been central to the literature on transnationalism and globalization. Some of the most influential lines of research have involved conceptualizations and theories—particularly those formulated by sociologists, geographers, and economists—in which urban areas play a leading role. There are varying emphases among these frameworks: some proceed from cities’ function as nodes of command and coordination in the global economy; others define metropolitan spaces by their flows of people and goods; still others approach urbanized areas as sites of cultural exchange, conflict, and hybridity. But whatever their methodological or interpretive differences, these frameworks all share a foundational assumption that cities are at the forefront of transnationalism.⁴

Where does the discipline of history fit into these debates? Historians’ sense of deep time has put us in an excellent position to fully contextualize transnationalism. We can offer reminders that most of recorded history transpired before the rise of nation-states, and point out many border-crossing processes that have operated during the two centuries since the rise of nationalism. Historical inquiry is fundamentally concerned with the intricacies of change over time, and its practitioners recognize transnational processes as socially produced and subject to constant revision—especially given history’s close focus on human agency and the contexts that structured people’s choices. Historians have emphasized the existence of many transnationalisms, each with its own time-bound features: for example, the kinds of connections forged during the age of empire were not necessarily continuous with the modernization-driven networks of the mid-twentieth century, which in turn displayed significant disjunctures with the neoliberal transnationalism of recent decades. This approach has allowed practitioners of history to address some of the intellectual problems of globalization theory. Historians have urged scholars in other fields to avoid discussing transnationalism as if it were completely new and unprecedented, and have cautioned against oversimplified narratives centered only on state building, economic development, or European expansion. Many have also warned against the tendency to read the present backward into the past in a way that yields teleological accounts of globalization. After all, the transnational present is rooted in some transnational pasts and disconnected from others. Networks and flows are omnipresent in history, but they are also uneven, and the global aspect may not always be the most relevant or important framework in a specific moment or for a set of historical questions. Historians can contextualize transnationalism in a macronarrative that does not presuppose a world in which connections are established and strengthened without interruption; we can properly present past transnationalisms not as all-encompassing, but as competing with local imperatives that must be considered on their own terms. Simply put, the long view of history can show where, when, and how transnationalism has mattered.⁵

Urban historians have been of two minds in their engagement with transnationalism. Those studying areas shaped by long-term processes of European colonization as it extended across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans have been connecting urbanism with globalization for some time. Imperialism has served as the key point of articulation between the two: after all, empires were very clearly transnational formations, and cities played important economic, administrative, military, political, and symbolic roles in European overseas expansion. Some of the earliest overtly global studies of urbanism were Anthony King’s architectural history The Bungalow and his synthetic work Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy; since then, architectural and urban historians from Gwendolyn Wright to Zeynep Çelik to Swati Chattopadhyay have elaborated an extensive literature on colonial urbanism. Planning history has been another source of border-crossing urban scholarship: Peter Hall’s Cities of Tomorrow involved urban networks and comparative models that stretched across Europe, the Americas, Asia, Latin America, and, briefly, Africa, and was followed by numerous other influential works in the field. These efforts have continued into the very recent past in the form of edited volumes explicitly built around the notion of urbanism and transnationalism.⁶

U.S. urban historians have been more hesitant to engage with transnationalism. Research in the field has mostly been bounded by the nationstate, and has given primary explanatory power to factors operating within national borders, such as federal urban, transportation, and housing policy; automobile production and adoption; and the structural legacy of racism. Likewise, interventions in other historical fields have mainly involved the role of metropolitan areas in national politics, the economy, and other spheres that stop at national borders. More recently, urban historians have produced monographs based on case studies in multiple nations and the interactions among them—an important contribution to the literature and a promising portent for a more transnational history of cities—but these have appeared only in the past several years. Making Cities Global is to our knowledge the first volume of essays on transnational urban history published in the United States.⁷

This relatively slow pace of engagement is surprising, considering that the foundations of U.S. urban history, one of its best-developed subfields, and some of its most influential books were all framed in terms that reached beyond the nation. The Chicago school of urban sociology was consistently focused on immigration, which served as its theoretical model for the arrival of all newcomers to urban areas, including domestic migrants. And its most renowned concept, the concentric model of urban development, was predicated on the ongoing arrival of people from overseas as a basic feature of its morphology, with the classic diagram mentioning immigrant settlement, Chinatown, Kleindeutschland, and Little Italy. The historical literature on immigration history similarly emphasized the arrival and incorporation of the foreign-born in the urban areas to which they mostly flowed. As its specialists developed concepts like ethnicization and return migration, they moved toward explicitly transnational formulations; for example, Donna Gabaccia, who as early as 1984 had studied the coevolution of urban households in the United States and Sicily, has been particularly active in the framing of transnational history. And even in urban historiographies not directly concerned with transnationalism, scholars have used global comparisons to set up their claims and track influences across borders: Kenneth T. Jackson, for example, framed U.S. suburbia as internationally distinctive, and Robert Fishman emphasized English landscape ideas as helping determine the form of peripheral development.⁸

But these tendencies have been overwhelmed by other factors favoring a predominantly domestic orientation in the field. The histories of imperialism that formed the leading edge of interest in transnational formations elsewhere were far less important to U.S. historiography. This owed in large part to Americans’ willful effort to avoid seeing their nation as a colonial power. Perhaps more important, though, was methodology: the field’s national boundedness was a product of urban historians’ close focus on localities. Urban history’s subject matter has first and foremost been place, and the basic unit of research has been the community study, whether at the level of neighborhood, city, metropolitan area, or region.⁹

The contributions in this collection are intended to show how urban history can think beyond the nation-state, especially by continuing to modify its methodological traditions to encompass a broader, transnational framework. One of the long-standing strengths of urban historians has been their close attention to the relationships between physical space and the construction of social, political, and economic meaning. The research presented in this volume involves detailed analysis of localities, and is undergirded by the sense that local conditions build and shape transnationalism—that, in fact, local imperatives influence cross-border movements even as transnational flows transform the local. Connective tissues bind metropolis with metropolis, city with region, and urban with suburban; but these networks also reach beyond nations, and demand explicit investigation as cross-border formations. The historical study of transnational urbanism thus acknowledges the experiences of each node in a network while also emphasizing connections and flows; it moves readily between local and translocal registers, paying attention to place-specific iterations of transnationalism—for example, immigrant neighborhoods, imported theories of city planning, or émigré politics—and, for that matter, rejections of such transnationalisms.

We also believe that an urban-historical perspective can improve the literature on transnationalism by revealing just how complex and varied metropolitan processes have been across time, and how much further we can go in scrutinizing transnationalism before the most recent era of globalization. Whether in the premodern, colonial, or postcolonial era, the process of urbanization has revealed complex connections among cultures, empires, religions, and ideologies. Moreover, the development of cities has exemplified how multiple scales—from the domestic and local to the regional and global—can operate in overlapping and simultaneous ways. Urbanites established connections to each other and to their expanding hinterlands by an increasing number of linkages over longer distances and with greater frequency; as a result, people, money, goods, information, politics, culture, military force, energy, and other factors influenced places and people thousands of miles away. Understanding the historical development of urban networks is thus highly relevant to analyzing city spaces that are constituted both in particular localities and in social fields that encompass or move among multiple places; other examples involve organizations, identities, and imperatives that neither originate nor identify with any nation-state or territorially defined entity. These intellectual commitments are a useful corrective to some of the potential pitfalls of the study of globalization: a tendency to make claims about chronology and causality that are based on the exigencies of model building or theory rather than empirical inquiry, teleological thinking that emplots events into a predetermined grand narrative, and ahistorical or schematic frameworks that posit relationships (between capital and governance or technology and culture, for example) as being automatic or inherent rather than conditional and transitory.¹⁰ This globalization studies approach to worldwide urbanization has great potential, but it must not be the only response to the question of how to write a history of cities that transcends national borders. Rather, transnational urban histories add critical dimensions to allied approaches: global histories that pursue the origins of planetary interconnectedness, world histories that narrate processes on the largest geographic scale, and international histories that scrutinize relationships among nations. At its best, transnational urban history should sharpen understandings of cause and effect and help scholars better interrogate the relationships between local and global.¹¹

Defining Our Approach

This collection of essays explores transnational urbanism from a range of perspectives. The contributors represent various scholarly approaches, including urban history, architectural history, historical geography, planning history, and architectural studies. Our intention is not to offer a comprehensive or representative collection of historically oriented scholarship on transnational urbanism. Rather, we focus on particular places and times, and have done so for strategic and intellectual reasons.

One of the intended contributions of this volume is to continue reorienting the field of transnational history toward a truly global context by emphasizing the broader geography of places that engaged with the United States. While the Atlantic world has generated vibrant debates and garnered much scholarly attention, we argue that other worlds—including the Pacific Rim, the Americas, and the Indian Ocean—deserve equally widespread interest. Transnational histories that are built too firmly on the foundations of expansion and domination by commercial and industrial nation-states may simply reiterate long-standing grand narratives that place Western Europe and the United States at the center of both conceptualization and causation. Some aspects of this approach are understandable. The eventual dominance of these areas has long invited historical explanation (sometimes yielding insight, at other points defensive self-congratulation). At key historical moments, there was indeed a very high level of economic, environmental, interimperial, and, later, transnational interaction among these nations, which certainly developed within symbiotic or parasitic relationships.¹²

But rethinking history for a more global age necessarily means looking at different geographies and chronologies. The urbanizations of East Asia, South Asia, and the Americas have been distinct processes while also being interwoven with global affairs. Focusing on these regions means exploring multiple transnationalisms, considering how they interacted with each other, and scrutinizing the inequalities of power and wealth that shaped metropolitan areas. City building in Latin America and Asia took place under the influence of formal imperialism, decolonization, and expansive capitalism, and our contributors are attentive to the varieties of coercion and suasion exercised by powerful nations and international institutions. At the same time, however, they take seriously the limits placed on this kind of power by people acting at the regional, municipal, and neighborhood levels.

In a very real sense, our goal involves provincializing the United States by contextualizing its metropolitan areas within—and not always at the center of—global processes of urbanization and suburbanization. We hope to provoke new ways of thinking by reconsidering places like Manila, Bangalore, Rio de Janeiro, and Bogotá, and asking different kinds of questions. For instance, how did city builders in Latin America draw U.S. experts and resources into local struggles over the built environment? In what ways did the needs and aspirations of people in and from India produce transnational urban spaces? And how should we understand the role of migrants and immigrants in the transformation of social spaces? Our subjects also reflect the fact that so many of us are based in North America, where it has become easy to see the intensive interaction with the people and economies of Latin America, East Asia, and South Asia. This has also helped determine the chronology of our essays, which tend toward the twentieth century, and especially the postwar period, precisely because of the heightened transnational interaction among these regions.¹³

The second defining feature of our approach is a close focus on the built environment. The individual chapters of Making Cities Global are organized more than anything by specific categories of geographic and architectural space: cities, suburbs, neighborhoods, development projects, dwellings, workplaces, stores, streets, and sidewalks. These spaces are in one sense a manifestation of the kinds of economic, political, social, and cultural processes at work in the societies in which cities exist, and some of our research emphasizes this aspect. But in even more cases, we focus on deliberate efforts to make, remake, or demolish particular spaces and places; in some instances, the built environment becomes the subject of politics and statecraft; in others, that material environment is the independent variable—it actually engenders particular kinds of political and economic activity. On a related note, the enacted environment—the way people behave in space—is an aspect of urban life that also clearly reveals the distinctiveness of urban settings. We therefore attend in our work to the way that the city milieu shapes identities, fosters certain kinds of politics, and exhibits the myriad cultural influences carried by its inhabitants; and it is here that we see clearly the human agency that is so essential to the idea of the production of space that has so profoundly influenced urban theory.¹⁴

This focus on the materiality of the city is essential to our analysis because it identifies transnationalism in physical space, at the level of the street, the neighborhood, and the community—thereby placing human-scale mobility and flow at the conceptual center. Transnational processes cannot be properly understood solely through abstraction and generalization; they involve great distances, but are necessarily instantiated in specific locations. Our essays demonstrate how transnationalism has been constituted in particular geographies, how it has varied from place to place, and how it has tied places together in complex and contradictory ways. Instead of arguing for a transnationalism that floats above the nation-state, or limiting ourselves to the intricacies of local negotiation, we underscore the mutually constitutive character of macro-, meso-, and microprocesses that unfold over time, as well as attending to the imperfectly overlapping scales of time and space.¹⁵

Making Cities Global is clearly focused on urbanism, but given the capaciousness of signifiers like urban and city, it makes sense to define our terms. Inhabited areas are developing in very different ways and in many different places, and indeed, perhaps we should emphasize the process of urbanization as the true commonality among all our research agendas. As we look around the world, we can see great diversity in the experiences of urban residents and the evolving structures of cities themselves. After all, urban can mean heavily built-up, high-rise cities with densities of over twenty thousand people per square mile; it can also indicate low-rise, sprawling metropolitan areas or even microcities. Thus, when we use terms like city, urban, and suburb, we do so with a full awareness of the processes involved in defining them.¹⁶

Even as we dwell on the specifics of place, we must also attend to the way that places and place-making practices are embedded in transnational circuits. If transnational history emphasizes flows and movement, then it is equally important to observe how circulations define a space of their own, to borrow Pierre-Yves Saunier’s phrase. Circuits do not necessarily occur in straightforwardly empirical, measurable, and objective spaces; rather, our contributors demonstrate that places are continually remade by the kinds of flows and performances that bring the city to life. Urban centers fundamentally involve circuits—whether of information, goods, money, or people—that form new contexts, challenging urbanists to more carefully examine processes of de-and reterritorialization. This space of flows can be understood as a complex web of urban and rural, often defying hierarchical spatial relations. Expanding the field of urban history means accounting for these complexities, and the essays in this collection are attentive to these intellectual currents. Accordingly, their authors move nimbly between the local, metropolitan, national, regional, and global scales, ever mindful of the process by which meaning is created by real people in real spaces. For them, transnational urbanism is as much about circuits of human beings, knowledge, culture, and memory as about goods or capital.¹⁷

The third commonality among the articles in this collection is a fundamental concern with the role of governance and politics within transnationalism. Although the field of transnational history was initially defined by an effort to displace the nation-state or nation as the automatic subject and container for scholarly inquiry into the past, it has become increasingly apparent that we cannot study transnationalism without considering government action. Some scholars have emphasized the gradual weakening of state power, while others have underscored the ongoing relevance of governance in shaping cross-border activity, whether by way of facilitating it or restricting it. Whatever the approach to the instrumentalities of empires and nations, it seems undeniable that these have been constitutive of many forms of transnationalism. Indeed, even the most recent variant of transnationalism—often characterized as the uninhibited global pursuit of profit—emerged out of the mid-twentieth century, the heyday of the most powerful and active nation-states the world has ever seen; and, according to some theorists, this transnationalism remains heavily dependent on state support.¹⁸

Turning our attention to the specifically urban aspects of governance in transnationalism, we identify various ways that states have influenced cross-border activity. At the most general level, they have shaped the flows that have come to define cities and metropolitan areas by attempting to control migration, wooing international capital, manipulating the availability of goods, and commodifying local cultures for consumers worldwide. Governments at various levels have also directly shaped urban landscapes: they have instituted policies of racial segregation, arranged for the operation of public marketplaces and tourist attractions, instituted zoning codes that define what may or may not be built on the landscape, distributed or withheld funding for development-oriented construction, and established special zones for commerce, manufacturing, and banking. In these and many other ways, state action has conditioned the way that travelers, investments, and ideas have shaped the urban.

Political activity is indivisible from the ways that transnationalism is governed. Because state power is important in shaping how forces operating on a broad geographic scale are iterated in localities, our analyses must incorporate electoral outcomes, popular movements, and other forms of mobilization. Accounts of transnationalism that neglect politics tend to mistake contingent processes for inevitable trends: in some forms, this involves libertarian perspectives that promote neoliberal ideologies in much the same way that metaphors of nature and naturalness served as justifications for laissez-faire economics in the past; in others, it entails a form of historical materialism that is critical of globalization but offers little or no hope that we can influence its path and its impact on people’s lives.¹⁹ But the fact is that transnational processes have almost invariably led to political responses such as popular movements against allegedly encroaching immigrants or infidels, or initiatives to remove political oversight from cross-border economic activities through trade pacts or deregulation. In addition, transnational flows have sometimes become sources of political authority, as when government officials seek public favor by bringing in foreign investment, capturing international aid, or facilitating participation by members of national diasporas. Notably, this has happened at multiple and overlapping levels, including, for example, the transnational cultural politics of religion, the national electoral politics of tariffs, and the local politics of how to respond to immigrants. These and other kinds of political contests have strongly shaped both the terms of cross-border exchange and the human experience of being part of a guest community or a host culture.

While the contributors to this volume share these and other intellectual commitments, our approach is avowedly ecumenical. Our vision is broad and, we hope, generative. Histories of transnational urbanism should not comprise a single narrative, nor should they be smoothly wrought with a clear roster of participants, actions, and consequences. We therefore expect and even welcome narrative and analytical roughness—the breaks, fissures, erasures, and exclusions that must exist within transnational urban history. This emphasis on breaks is, on the one hand, a broader statement about the contingency and unevenness of exchange and flow; on the other hand, it inevitably emerges from grassroots, local approaches. If analytical concepts only find precise meaning in historically specific settings, then these fissures should likewise inform our understanding of transnational urbanism more broadly. This collection suggests that individuals, communities, and even states can behave in ways that are unpredictable, at odds with their own long-term interests, and productive of unexpected results for all involved. Transnational exchanges might facilitate movement across borders, but the detailed, local histories of these movements reveal just how challenging it is to extract broad principles or generalizable models. After all, historical fissures, cracks, and exceptions are more than mere anomalies—they can reveal significant countercurrents that challenge us to rethink our very premises about the broad character and impact of globalization and the experience of actually existing examples of transnational urbanism.²⁰

This Collection

Making Cities Global is divided into two parts, each of which addresses specific themes within transnational urban history. The essays in Part I consider how cities have been shaped by the interaction among parties with geopolitical influence, economic power, and local governance, showing what happens at the point of contact between economic advisers, development specialists, political figures, and local residents. The contributors in this section demonstrate the importance of local politics in transnational processes, thereby complicating narratives of globalization that overstate the autonomy of capital and underplay the ongoing relevance of state actors at a variety of levels. These essays also examine the diffusion of ideas about the built environment, focusing on how people and texts work together to propagate notions of what kinds of spaces are pleasant, profitable, strategic, or otherwise desirable.

In Part II, we focus more closely on space, culture, and power. The section begins with contributions about the transnational movement of people and ideas and the kinds of spaces they create, with an emphasis on the connections between personal and collective identity and the built environment. Looking at immigrants and migrants from East Asia, Latin America, South Asia, and Europe, the scholars in this section show how identity and place are mutually and transnationally constitutive. Our contributors also deal with the exercise of cultural power across borders and within cities. As transnational communities grow, their members engage in an elaborate negotiation: migrants emphasize both local and transnational belonging, drawing on various vocabularies and histories to make claims to urban space; their hosts, meanwhile, leverage newly arrived people and ideas as a way to foster urban revitalization, preserve spatial privilege, draw tourists to the city, and gain electoral advantage. But as these scholars show, claims on power and prestige often involve contestation, erasure, and sometimes even rejection by the host country.

Transnational urban history is essential to understanding the worlds of both past and present. We hope that the essays in this collection will help foster a deeper scholarly effort to juxtapose instantiations of city life as they have developed over time so that our thinking about present-day urbanization is informed by the history of long-established trade networks; so that our research on human migration considers more profoundly global histories of displacement and diaspora; so that our attention to transnational corporations and nongovernmental organizations incorporates a knowledge of colonial administrations and religious orders; and so that our ideas about the relevance of urban areas within nation-states accounts for the many processes by which cities have become parts of nations. For if we are to find success in managing the cities of the present and future, we will need to understand every aspect of their historical origins and evolution.

PART I

Globalization and Governance

CHAPTER 1

Silicon Dreams

States, Markets, and the Transnational High-Tech Suburb

MARGARET O’MARA

Introduction: A World in a Park

The International Technology Park Bangalore (ITPB) sits about twenty kilometers east of the center of the southern Indian city of Bangalore, inhabiting seventy well-appointed acres filled with modern, glass-clad buildings emblazoned with names like Discoverer, Innovator, and Inventor. Connecting these structures are grounds so meticulously tended that they won the Best Ornamental Garden Award from the Mysore Horticultural Society two years in a row. The park boasts amenities like a cricket ground, badminton, and table tennis. Special shuttle buses transport its workers between home and office, and a private security force and a battalion of closed-circuit cameras and alarms provide protection and safety from the world outside. In a city where electrical outages are common, the power stays on in the park throughout the day and night thanks to its private electrical grid and backup generators.

The park management sponsors regular social events, outdoor concerts, and even an American Idol–style singing contest. Life at ITPB, notes one of its promotional brochures, is a unique lifestyle statement. About thirty thousand people work in the park, mostly for multinational firms in the business of computer software and support services, a sector that has grown exponentially in the city since the 1980s. While most faces in the park are Indian, many of the workers are not natives of Bangalore, but hail from larger cities like Delhi and Mumbai. A good portion of them spent chunks of their lives outside India in other technology hubs like Silicon Valley, Seattle, or Boston. As its marketing tagline proclaims, the facility is A World in a Park.¹