The City as a Geopolitical Actor: Conceptualising Cities’ Political Agency in the Planetary Geographies of Urbanisation

Abstract

This article develops the concept of cities as geopolitical actors by proposing a new conceptual framework that foregrounds their space-making strategies. This intervention seeks to address the gap between research on cities as international actors and the growing interest in cities’ external geographies stimulated, among others, by the planetary urbanisation thesis. Drawing together recent discussions in urban governance with critical geopolitical scholarship and socio-spatial theory, the article makes two specific contributions: first, it defines the narrative that is usually mobilised to explain the rise of cities as international actors as a contested and ongoing spatialisation of world politics, in which city governments play an active role. Second, it proposes an analytical scheme to examine how cities contribute to processes of territorialisation, place-making, rescaling, and networking. Ultimately, this conceptual framework introduces a more spatially sensitive approach to the idea of cities as geopolitical actors by developing a toolbox to examine how they participate in the struggles for the production, control, and management of space.

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