The local and the global in the new urban politics: a critical review, Environment and Planning C

Abstract. Recent US literature on urban politics has been characterized by significant convergence. There has been a marked focus on the politics of local economic development, and there has also been an attempt to situate that politics with respect to processes of globalization. In particular, the globalization of the economy and correlative hypermobiiity of capital arc seen as exerting strong ^distributive pressures on urban communities. This is the *ncw urban polities'. Evaluation of this thesis proceeds first by a critical interrogation of the related concepts of hypermobiiity of capital, and immobility of urban communities. This results in a ^specification of the question as one of local dependence and the scale at which agents arc locally dependent. This, in turn, allows the new urban politics to be critically linked to arguments about the territorial organization of the state. From this standpoint it also appears that claims for a secular tendency towards the hypermobiiity of capital lack coherence.