ABSTRACT
NOTES 1 In my early research on the global city I began to understand some of these
questions of reified scales. Much of the literature on global and world cities
has a critical appraisal of questions of scaling, but with important exceptions (Taylor, 1994; Brenner, 1998) this appraisal tends to be in embryo, undertheorized and not quite explicated. On the other hand, the scholarship on 'glocalization' recognizes and theorizes questions of scale but often remains attached to a notion of nested scalings (e.g. Swyngedouw, 1997). I find that among the literatures in geography that come closest in their conceptualization, albeit focused on very different issues, to what I develop in this lecture are those on first-nation peoples rights-claiming (e.g. Howitt, 1993; Silvern, 1999; Notzke, 1995). Clearly, there is a particularly illuminating positioning of the issues in this case because from the outset there is a) the co-existence of two exclusive claims over a single territory and b) the endogeneity of both types of claims - that of the modern sovereign and that of the indigenous nation. In my case here in this lecture, it is the coexistence of the claim of the historical sovereign and the claim of the global as endogenized in the reconstituted sovereign. (For a full development of this somewhat abstract statement, please see Sassen, 2003). This is a very particular usage of scale, one where the analytics of scale are drenched, so to speak, in specific and thick conditions and struggles (see Amin, 2002 for a critique of scale along these lines).
