ABSTRACT
Timothy Luke’s essay is a powerful statement for a political ecology of the urban instead of the city by emphasizing on the transnational political constitution of the environmental problematique in an era of globalizing cities. It also presents a utopian vision of a future world of cities linked together in sustainable and creative ways of production and consumption. Many researchers have investigated the peculiar qualities of urban life in these Global Cities, and they are, in many ways, the limit cases of global urbanism. Cities do have ecologies, and the ecological impact of all global cities as a system of biopolitics is building up into this wholly new built and unbuilt environment. The subpolis shapes, and then is itself shaped, in the global market’s imbrication of the polis for humans and the subpolis of things. Modernity becomes an inegalitarian mechanism whereby the few who know-how and own-how maintain domination over the many who do not know-how or own-how.
