Global Cities and Ecological Contradictions in Historical Capitalism

John Welsh, Researcher, Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki

Paper presented to the Third annual conference of the World-Ecology Research Network 20-21 July, 2017 Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York

Cover: via https://www.oneearth.org/bioregions/chilean-mixed-forests-nt1/

Over 30 years of strategic reconfiguration, Global Cities have proven themselves productive of metropolitan oligarchies of various hues that dominate the territories of their respective states. Set against the ‘ecological contradictions’ of historical capitalism, the article presents the Global City formation as a historically particular post-disciplinary technique in the capitalist world-system bound into the ecological contradictions of that system entering into a period of chronic crisis in the twenty-first century. This idiomatic technique is conceptualised in geo-historical terms as a distinct ‘Geotechnic’ modulation of control, through which the Global City is constituted as a geo-machinic assemblage in the historical technics of capitalist civilisation. Through a critical human geography, marxist political economy, and post-structuralist governmetnality studies, the adequacy of the Global Cities research agenda is challenged, and the emerging role of the World-City Archipelago in historical capitalism explored. In a constructive critique of Wolfgang Streeck’s ‘end of capitalism’ thesis, the aim is to present the ‘geotechnic city’ as an emergent modality of global discipline in historical capitalism, whereby the latter’s strategic contradictions are contained, resolved, displaced, sublated through a particular genre of spatio-temporal fix, and the future of the capitalist totality is secured through a new political idiom of metropolitan oligarchy.

Welsh, J. (2017). Authoritarian governmentality through the global city: contradictions in the political ecology of historical capitalism. Contemporary Politics, 23(4), 446-468.