Urban Capabilities: An Essay on Our Challenges and Differences

Abstract

Drawing on extensive research about global cities and citizens, this essay examines whether the proliferation of conflicts in cities across the world can overwhelm the capabilities that have historically enabled cities to triage conflict via commerce and civic engagement. Critical in this examination is recovering some of the differences between being powerless and being invisible or impotent. Under certain conditions the powerless make history without getting empowered in the process. There are two types of acute challenges facing cities that pertain to this question. One is asymmetric war and the urbanizing of war that it entails. My research finds that cities are a type of weak regime that can obstruct but not destroy superior military force; this weak regime rests on the civic character of cities. The second type of challenge concerns anti-immigrant hatred and violence. In an exploration of the hard work of making open cities, particular histories show us that it is possible to reposition the immigrant and the citizen as, above all, similar subjects, rather than essentially different. Cities are one of the key sites where new norms and identities are made. This is a particularly fluid process in our global era, when cities emerge once again as strategic economic, political and cultural sites. Urban capabilities have often been crafted out of the struggles to go beyond the conflicts and racisms that mark an epoch. Out of this type of dialectic came the open urbanity that historically made European cities spaces for expanded citizenship. One factor feeding these positives was that both the modest middle classes and the powerful found in the city a space for their diverse life projects. (1) Less familiar to this author are the non-European trajectories of strategic spaces for the powerful and the powerless. As it is impossible to do full justice to all the aspects of this process in a short essay, I limit myself here to the basic building blocks of the argument. I focus on two types of acute challenges facing cities to explore how capabilities can alter what originates as hatred and conflict. One is asymmetric war and the urbanizing of war that it entails. The other is the hard work of making open cities--urban societies open to diverse groups with flexible mechanisms in place to resolve differences--and repositioning the immigrant and the citizen as coequal subjects rather than essentially different subjects, as much of the anti-immigrant and racist commentary does. MAKING THE CIVIC The large, complex city is a new frontier zone. (2) This is especially true if it is a global city, defined by its important function within a network of others. Actors from different worlds meet there, but without clear rules of engagement. Whereas the historic frontier lay in the far stretches of colonial empires, today it lies in our large cities. The efforts of global firms to force deregulation, privatization and new fiscal and monetary policies on host governments have to do with creating the formal instruments to construct the equivalent of a military fort on the historic frontier: the regulatory environment they need in cities worldwide to ensure a global space of operations. (3) But the city is a strategic frontier zone not just for the powerful but also for the conventionally powerless: dis-advantaged outsiders or minorities facing discrimination. Those who are traditionally excluded can gain presence in global cities--presence vis-a-vis both power and each other. This signals the possibility of a new type of politics centered around new types of political actors. Access to the city is no longer simply a matter of having or not having power. Urban spaces have become hybrid bases from which to act via an increasingly legitimized informal politics. This is an example of what I seek to capture with the concept of urban capabilities. The work of making the public and the political in spaces becomes critical at a time of growing velocities in global life. …

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