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Doreen Massey
Doreen Massey
argues that we need to be more aware of the role of London in producing
corporate globalisation.
© Soundings 2007
In the numbed days
after the first bombs went off on London's public transport in July
2005, Ken Livingstone said: 'This city typifies what I believe is the
future of the human race and a future where we grow together and we
share and we learn from each other' (GLA press release, 8.7.05).
He set London in the wider context of the development of European cities generally, and of cities around the world:
If you go back a couple of hundred years to when the European
cities really started to grow and peasants left the land to seek their
future in the cities there was a saying that 'city air makes you free'
and the people who have come to London all races, creeds and colours
have come for that. This is a city (where?) you can be yourself as
long as you don't harm anyone else. You can live your life as you
choose to do rather than as somebody else tells you to do. It is a
city in which you can achieve your potential. It is our strength and
that is what the bombers seek to destroy … This year for the first
time in human history a majority of people live in cities. London
continues to grow and I say to those who planned this dreadful attack
whether they are still here in hiding or somewhere abroad, watch next
week as we bury our dead and mourn them, but see also in those same
days new people coming to this city to make it their home to call
themselves Londoners and doing it because of that freedom to be themselves
… (ibid).
Livingstone's passion had a basis on the streets. Surveys show Londoners consistently valuing the city's cultural and ethnic mix and seeing that as central to London's identity.1 The Guardian, earlier that year, had published a special supplement: 'London: the world in one city: a special celebration of the most cosmopolitan place on earth' (21.01.05). In the aftermath of the bombing the London Evening Standard ran a special edition with the title 'London United', and in Time Out ('London's weekly listings bible') the front cover said simply 'Our City'. At the gathering in Trafalgar Square Ben Okri read a poem he had re-titled 'A hymn to London': 'Here lives the great music of humanity' (Evening Standard, 15.7.05). The Olympic Bid had been built on claims of cultural and ethnic diversity; there are many campaigns against racism. Nor has this been only a simplistic version of multiculturalism, a claim to some happy harmony - Livingstone's stance since the bombing has been firm in its refusal to bow to pressures for exclusion and repression, and in its determination to continue with criticism where this is thought to be warranted politically. It recognises that this may be a negotiation about conflicts of place.
This positive attitude towards diversity is claimed to be central to London's identity (without ignoring the evident racisms and intolerances which abound); and is to some extent embedded in policy and often drawn upon and celebrated in the arts. It is one of the ways (and in the period around the bombing the dominant way) in which London thinks of itself as a 'world city'. Moreover it is politically interesting - and heartening - because it is a claim to place that is open rather than bounded, hospitable rather than excluding, ever-changing rather than eternal. And nothing that follows is meant to gainsay that.
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What I should like to explore about this imagination of place held by so many Londoners, however, is how it might be broadened out.
First of all this is an internal, indeed internalised, view of the city. It is about hospitality, about those who come to 'us', about the strangers within the gate. It evokes Derrida's notion of villes-franches.2 And that is excellent. However the geographies of places aren't only about what lies within them. A richer geography of place acknowledges also the connections that run out from 'here': the trade-routes, investments, political and cultural influences; power-relations of all sorts run out from here around the globe and link the fate of other places to what is done in London. This is the other geography - the 'external geography' of a place. It is a geography that attaches to any place, but it is especially important to a place like London.
In recent debates about identity we have moved away from notions of isolated individuals towards an understanding of identity as thoroughly relational, as constructed through rather than prior to our interactions with others. The same move has been made in relation to place-identity. And yet the way that this insight has been developed has often been to concentrate on the implications for the internal constructions of identity: the internal multiplicities and fragmentations. And so it has been with place-identity too: it is a commonplace now that every place is hybrid, that we must be critical of notions of coherent communities. Yet there is another geography, that geography of external relations on which identities, including the identities of places, depend. How do we bring that into our attitude to, and our politics of, place?
This tendency to inward-lookingness becomes even clearer when we turn to my second reservation about the characterisation of London as multicultural future of the world. For London is not only multicultural. It is also a heartland of the production, command and propagation of what we have come to call neoliberal globalisation. Indeed it was in London that many of its lineaments were first drawn. The City (capital C), and all the vast and intricate cultural and economic infrastructure that surrounds it, is crucial to neoliberalism. About 30 per cent of the daily global turnover of foreign exchange takes place in London; London has over 40 per cent of the global foreign equity market; 70 per cent of all eurobonds are traded in London … and so on. Meanwhile, the 2005 UN Report on Human Development produces 'the usual' statistics - the kind that are so bad it is difficult to know how to receive them. The world's richest 500 people own more wealth than the poorest 416,000,000. And it is not just a problem of the super-rich: Europeans spend more on perfume each year than the $7billion needed to provide 2.6 billion people with access to clean water. London is a crucial node in the production of an increasingly unequal world. When Ken Livingstone speaks of people coming to this city because of the freedom it offers 'to be themselves' he is right. But people find their way here for other reasons too. They come because of poverty and because their livelihoods have disappeared in the maelstrom of neoliberal globalisation (and millions more are left behind). And it has to be at least a question as to whether London is a seat of some of the causes of these things.
And that raises in turn the question of what is our responsibility for those wider geographies of place. Most theoretical formulations of the relation between 'local place' and globalisation imagine local places as products of globalisation ('the global production of the local'). It is a formulation that easily slides into a conceptualisation of the local as victim of globalisation. Here globalisation figures as an external agent that arrives to wreak havoc on local places. And often indeed it is so. The resulting politics often resolves into strategies for 'defending' local places against the global. Such strategies always tend to harbour a host of political ambiguities, but in the case of London (and of places like London - of which, to varying degrees, there are many) this simple story just cannot hold. For London is one of those places in which capitalist globalisation, with its deregulation, privatisation, 'liberalisation', is produced. Here we have also 'the local production of the global'.
And yet a celebration of multiculturalism and a politics of anti-racism exist alongside a persistent obliviousness on the part of the majority of Londoners to the external relations - the daily global raiding parties, the activities of London's financial sector and multinationals - upon which the very character and existence of London depend.
The current London Plan provides a case in point.3 Here, in consideration specifically of the city's economy, London's identity as a world city is understood in terms of its financial power. This global financial muscle is presented as a simple achievement. It is not reflected-upon in its intimate relation to imperialism and colonialism.4 The Plan presents no critical analysis of the global power-relations that sustain this world-citydom; it does not follow those relations out around the world and ask what they may be responsible for; it asks no questions about the connections between this economic power and the increasing inequalities around the world. Indeed, the Plan has as its central economic aim the expansion of London as a global financial power. In this the London Plan is not unusual. This is the norm. Thinking about places, including plans for places, nearly always in this sense remains 'within the place'. It is part of the tension between a territorialised politics and a world structured also by flows. But what it means is that, in this city which is indeed in so many ways progressive and even radical, we have, we nurture, the production of the beast itself.
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How might a politics of place beyond place be imagined? What follows are just a few thoughts, but they do draw on many campaigns and arguments already under way. Indeed, it should be said at the start that the overwhelming prioritisation of the financial City and its attendant sectors that characterised the initial version of the London Plan has already been muted in response to criticism at the Scrutiny Committee (set up by the Greater London Assembly to hear opinions on the Plan), from almost all parts of the political spectrum. As far as I know, however, there was no criticism of the priorities of the Plan that focused on the global effects of that global role. The concentration was on effects within the city itself.
There are some ways in which the London Plan recognizes that London is a cause of what happens in the wider world, as well as having to respond to its effects. This is the case in relation to climate change (and indeed environmental issues more generally and the Food Strategy which argues explicitly that responsibility be taken for the city's impacts - in terms of resources, food miles, waste disposal and so forth - and for promoting a wider consciousness of, and respect for, all elements in the global food-chain. In these ways, London's emerging strategies indicate what might be done.)
A strategy that acknowledges the global effects that emanate from London should not, anyway, be all down to the city government; rather, what is crucially at issue is what we make of our identities as 'Londoners' (or of any other place). There are, for instance, campaigns around particular parts of the economy and particular companies which are important to London, but with a focus on their global roles. Oil and gas for instance account in one way and another for about a quarter of London's stock exchange transactions; Shell and BP have headquarters in London; London is utterly dependent on oil. And a number of campaigns have focused on these facts, taking them as a starting point for wider arguments. There is, for instance, the project 'Unravelling the Carbon Web' organised by PLATFORM.6 This includes a range of different projects, and aims to examine the oil industry and the sectors that serve it from a host of different angles, but with a focus on the role of London. A linked project is 'Remember Saro-Wiwa: the Living Memorial'.7 This is a public art initiative launched in City Hall in Spring 2005 to mark the tenth anniversary of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. It aims to raise awareness of the global implications of this city's oil dependence and its position as the site of so much petroleum power. There are many such campaigns which look beyond the local place. Some link up with ecological campaigns, some link particular communities within London to other parts of the world - people from the Nigerian community to the Saro-Wiwa project, for example. A way of thinking multiculturalism outwards.
Or again, it might be possible for there to be, within the ambit of the London Social Forum perhaps, an emphasis on solidarity with struggles which link back to companies that are based in London. One obvious possibility, since London was the birthplace of so much in the way of ideas about deregulation, would be links with campaigns against the enforced privatisation of utilities in the South.
Perhaps, too, the Mayor and/or the London Assembly could themselves support alternative globalisations, help challenge the nature of the trade and financial arrangements through which the current form of globalisation operates. There is, for instance, the possibility of joining that growing alliance of city and regional authorities that refuse simply to go along with GATS regulations. 'GATS-free zones' are mushrooming in other countries in Europe. Or there is the issue of Fair Trade. There is, for instance, a Fair Trade Town and City campaign (Bristol is a member). But London is significant not only for drinking coffee but also as a place where coffee is traded. It was the radical GLC of the 1980s that established Twin Trading, a wholesaling organisation that took the city's fair-trade politics beyond the politics of consumption.8 That same GLC was also supportive in a number of ways of the 'counterglobalisation' of the trade union movement, aiding contact between workers in different parts of the world.
One final example, which encapsulates a number of the arguments I am trying to make. London finds it very difficult to reproduce itself, in part precisely because of the current way in which London is a world city. . Lower paid workers in the public and private sectors can barely survive, and a range of schemes has had to be devised to enable adequate recruitment. This makes London massively dependent on labour from abroad. Countries in Africa and Asia can ill-afford to lose to London the health workers they have paid to train. So India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, South Africa are subsidising the reproduction of London. It is a perverse subsidy.9 This is a difficult issue because it can so easily be turned around into a racist denial of immigration rights. The Medact Report (see footnote 13) suggests that the health workers from Ghana and Britain, including their trade unions, could be thought of as one system and that the UK could pay restitution to Ghana for its subsidy This would not be aid to Ghana, with all its connotations of conditionality and charity and the power relations but the fulfilment of an obligation.10 It expressly addresses the issue of unequal external geographies. It is also important because, through this, it forces a re-imagination of place: it looks from the inside out; it recognises not just the outside within but also the 'inside' that lies beyond.
All of the examples
described here are small but such things are needed to help promote
an outward-lookingness, a consciousness of the wider geographies and
responsibilities of place. Moreover, within the place, within London,
once such issues start to be raised, all of them would be disputed -
which could only enrich the internal politics of place, multiply the
lines of debate around which 'place' must be negotiated. It would challenge
the current exoneration of 'the local' within a critical global politics,
and begin to develop a local politics of place beyond place.
Doreen Massey is a founding editor of Soundings.
This is a shortened version of an article which appeared in Soundings 32. Read the full text.
Notes
1. See, for instance, MORI, 2004, What is a Londoner? 2 April 2004;
Research for the Commission on London Governance.
2. J. Derrida, On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, Routledge, London
2001.
3. Greater London Authority, The London Plan: Spatial Development Strategy
for Greater London, Greater London Authority, London 2004.
4. A. King, Global cities: post-imperialism and the internationalization
of London, Routledge, London 1990.
5. M. Davis, 'Planet of slums', New Left Review, No 26, 2004; UN-Habitat,
The challenge of the slums, London 2003; UN-Habitat, State of the world's
cities 2004/2005, World Urban Forum, Barcelona 2004.
6. www.carbonweb.org and www.platformlondon.org.
7. www.remembersarowiwa.com. Campaigns around oil extraction in Ogoniland
led to the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight colleagues. See Ken
Wiwa, 'The murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa', Soundings 2, 1996.
8. Although the Fairtrade Cities initiative of the Fairtrade Foundation
itself necessarily goes beyond individualised consumption (this indeed
is one of the points of organising at the level of place): see, for
one discussion, Jo Littler's interview with Clive Barnett and Kate Soper,
'Consumers: agents of change?' in Soundings 31, 2005.
9. K. Mensah, M. Mackintosh and L. Henry, 'The "skills drain" of health
professionals from the developing world: a framework for policy formulation',
Medact, London 2005, www.medact.org/content/Skills%20drain/Mensah%20et%20al.%202005.pdf.
10. M. Mackintosh, 'Aid, restitution and international fiscal redistribution
in health care: reflections in the context of rising health professional
migration', Paper presented at Development Studies Association annual
conference 7-9 September 2005.
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