Explorations in Urban Theory by Michael Peter Smith

Author:Michael Peter Smith [Smith, Michael Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138509962
Google: yGM0tAEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2017-08-09T03:26:32+00:00

Toward a Transnational Urban Studies

Clearly, there is a need to expand the study of transnational urbanism to encompass the scope of transnational processes as well as to focus future urban research on the local and translocal specificities of various transnational sociospatial practices. Traditional methods for studying people in cities— ethnography, life histories, and historical case studies— must be rethought. The challenge is to develop an optic and a language capable of representing the complexity of transnational connections and the shifting spatial scales at which agency takes place.

Given this complexity, a fruitful approach for research on transnational urbanism would start with an analysis of networks situated in the social space of the city and with an awareness that the social space being analyzed might best be understood as a translocality, a place where institutions interact with structural and instrumental processes in the formation of power, meaning, and identities. By contrast, starting from the global level and deducing urban outcomes from global developments, as in the global cities framework, often leads to overgeneralization and produces the self-fulfilling grand theories that have been the postmodern object of derision. This is particularly problematic when scholars (Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1990; Jameson, 1984) become so wrapped up in the theoretical elegance of their formulations (e.g., late capitalism and time-space distantiation or compression) that they ignore questions of how the world “out there” is imagined, socially constructed, and lived.

An equally problematic pitfall would be to begin and end analysis of transnational urbanism at a purely local level. In privileging local knowledge (Geertz, 1983), researchers might develop a solipsistic tunnel vision that altogether fails to connect human intentions to social networks and historical change. Situating the study of transnational urbanism at the level of particular cities viewed as translocalities avoids this pitfall. Specifically, we need to ask how transnational networks operate and how principles of trust and solidarity are constructed across national territories as compared to those that are entirely locally based and maintained.

What place-making discourses and practices hold transnational networks together? How are social connectedness and control organized across borders to guarantee commitment? How do transnational relations interact with local power structures including class, gender, and racial hierarchies? With what effects? How does translocality affect the sociocultural basis supporting transnational relations and ties?

The task of reconfiguring urban research for studying translocalities presents serious challenges and offers new opportunities for creative scholarship. Most of the current research on transnational networks has been required by the scope of transnational relations to pursue a multilocational research strategy that crisscrosses urban, national, cultural, and institutional boundaries (see the studies in Ong & Nonini, 1997; Smith & Guarnizo, 1998). For example, Schein’s (1998) inventive deployment of unorthodox ethnographic methods moves back and forth between text and context, observation and participation, and localities in the United States and in China, acting out her self-described role as an ethnographic nomad. As Clifford (1992) suggests, the study of “traveling cultures” requires traveling researchers. As increasing numbers of formerly locality-based social networks, grassroots movements, and entrepreneurial

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