ABSTRACT
In developing a research agenda for investigating transnational urbanism I tried to capture a sense of emergent social relations under globalizing conditions that are situated in specific places yet operate across geographical distance and are both embedded in and transgress processes of state power (Smith 2001, 2005a). I felt that this analytical optic usefully captured a sense of geographically distanced yet sociologically situated possibilities for constituting and reconstituting social relations. I viewed cities as key sites for emplacing communication circuits, organizational networks, economic linkages, and political projects that spanned national borders. Cities fostered a wide variety of such translocal linkages, I argued, because they concentrated the social, physical and human capital used to forge a multiplicity of socio-economic, cultural and political projects that linked localities across borders. For me, the best way to investigate transnational urbanism was to map these diverse translocal connections among the people, places and projects situated in cities at the crossroads of such ties. Put most simply, my take on transnationalism and the city focuses on the socio-spatial processes by which social actors and their networks forge translocal connections and create the linkages between and across places that I called translocality.
