“Global cities, ‘glocal’ states: global city formation and state territorial restructuring in contemporary Europe”

Neil Brenner’s intellectual starting point is the observation that most global city theorists have postulated, either implicitly or explicitly, a declining role for national states in the governance of economic life. World city theory has been deployed extensively in studies of the role of major cities such as New York, London and Tokyo as global financial centers and as headquarters locations for transnational corporations. The crisis of global Fordism was expressed in a specifically geographical form, above all through the contradiction between the national scale of state regulation and the globalizing thrust of postwar capital accumulation. Amidst the confusing and contradictory geographies of contemporary globalization, world cities represent a particularly complex “superimposition and inter-penetration” of social, political and economic spaces. Because urban regions occupy the contradictory interface between the world economy and the territorial state, they are embedded within a multiplicity of political-economic processes organized upon a range of superimposed geographical scales.