Business networks, the Internet and a host of other linkages are breaking down traditional barriers- bringing cities and citizens together in ways that defy nationstates and regions.
There is little doubt that the North-South axis remains dominant for Latin America's geopolitical positioning. But new relations are emerging and deepening at subnational levels, in turn creating new intercity geographies and challenging that geopolitical notion.
These relations are a direct product of economic and cultural globalization. Some examples are the shiftof migration from Ecuador and Colombia toward Spain rather than the U.S., the growing economic relations between Chinese businesses and organizations and S�o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and the emergent relations between these cities and Johannesburg, South Africa.
The Internet has allowed a rapidly growing number of people to become a part of diverse networks that crisscross the world. And nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from various parts of the world are establishing active connections over social struggles in Latin America.
In other words, beneath the still-dominant NorthSouth geopolitics, transversal geographies are growing in bits and pieces.
One trend is the formation of intercity geographies as the number of global cities has expanded since the 1990s. These subnational circuits cut across the world in many directions. A second trend is the growth of civil society organizations and individuals who are connecting around the world in ways that, again, often do not follow the patterns of traditional geopolitics.
THE NEW, MULTIPLE CIRCUITS
T here is no such entity as the global economy. It is more correct to say there are global formations, such as electronic financial markets and firms that operate globally. But what defines the current era is the creation of numerous, highly particular, global circuits-some specialized and some not-interlacing across the world and connecting specific areas, most of which are cities.
While many of these global circuits have long existed, they began to proliferate and establish increasingly complex organizational and financial foundations in the 1980s. These emergent intercity geographies function as an infrastructure for globalization, and have led to the increased urbanization of global networks.
Different circuits contain different groups of countries and cities. For instance, Mumbai today is part of a global circuit for real estate development that includes investors from cities as diverse as London and Bogot�. Coffee is mostly produced in Brazil, Kenya and Indonesia, but the main place for trading its future is on Wall Street.
The specialized circuits in gold, coffee, oil and other commodities each involve particular countries and cities, which will vary depending on whether they are production, trading or financial circuits. If, for example, we track the global circuits of gold as a financial instrument, it is London, New York, Chicago, and Zurich that dominate. But the wholesale trade in the metal brings S�o Paulo, Johannesburg and Sydney into the circuit, while trade in the commodity, much of it aimed at the retail level, adds Mumbai and Dubai. And then there are the types of circuits a firm such as Wal-Mart needs to outsource the production of vast amounts of goods-circuits that include manufacturing, trading, and financial and insurance services.
The 250,000 multinationals in the world, together with their over 1 million affiliates and partnership arrangements worldwide, have created a new pattern of relations that combine global dispersal with the spatial concentration of certain functions often while retaining headquarters in their home countries.
The same is true of the 100 top global advanced-services firms that together have operations in 350 cities outside their home base. While financial services can be bought everywhere electronically, the headquarters of leading global financial services firms tend to be concentrated in a limited number of cities. Each of these fi- nancial centers specializes in specific segments of global finance, even as they engage in routine types of transactions executed by all financial centers.
It's not just global economic forces that feed this proliferation of circuits. Forces such as migration and cultural exchange, along with civil society struggles to protect human rights, preserve the environment and promote social justice, which also contribute to circuit formation and development.
NGOs fighting for the protection of the rainforest function in circuits that include Brazil and Indonesia as homes of the major rainforests, the global media centers of New York and London, and the places where the key forestry companies selling and buying wood are headquartered- notably Oslo, London and Tokyo. There are even music circuits that connect specific areas of India with London, New York, Chicago, and Johannesburg.
Adopting the perspective of one of these cities reveals the diversity and specificity of its location on some or many of these circuits, which is determined by its unique capabilities.
Ultimately, being a global firm or market means entering the specificities and particularities of national economies. This explains why global firms and markets need more and more global cities as they expand their operations across the world.
While there is competition among cities, there is far less of it than is usually assumed. A global firm does not want one global city, but many. Moreover, given the variable level of specialization of globalized firms, their preferred cities will vary.
Firms thrive on the specialized differences of cities, and it is those differences that give a city its particular advantage in the global economy. Thus, the economic history of a place matters for the type of knowledge economy that a city or city-region ends up developing. This goes against the common view that globalization homogenizes economies. Globalization homogenizes standards-for managing, accounting, building stateof- the-art office districts, and so on. But it needs diverse specialized economic capabilities.
LATIN AMERICA ON THE CIRCUIT
This allows many of Latin America's cities to become part of global circuits. Some, such as S�o Paulo and Buenos Aires, are located on hundreds of such circuits, others just on a few. Regardless of the case, these cities are not necessarily competing with one other. The growing number of global cities, each specialized, signals a shiftto a multipolar world.
Figure 1 gives a sense of some of the major cities and circuits. It is based on the intercity business networks of top firms in leading corporate services: law, finance, accounting, and advertising.
Clearly, the major Latin American cities have circuits that connect them directly to destinations across the world. What is perhaps most surprising is the intensity of connections with Asia and Europe. Traditional geopolitics would lead one to think that Latin America connects, above all, with North America.
There is a strong tendency for global money flows to generate partial geographies. This becomes clear, for example, when we consider foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America, a disproportionate share of which goes to a handful of countries. In 2008, for example (a relative peak of FDI), FDI flows into Latin America were topped by Brazil at $45.1 billion, followed at a distance by Mexico at $23.7 billion, Chile at $15.2 billion, and Argentina with $9.7 billion. On average, between 1991- 1996 and 2003-2008, FDI in Brazil increased more than five-fold while tripling in Chile and Mexico. Among the countries in the Latin American and Caribbean region receiving the lowest levels of foreign investment in 2008 were Haiti, at $30 million; Guyana, at $178 million; and Paraguay, at $109 million.
Globalization and the new information and communication technologies have enabled a variety of local activists and organizations to enter international arenas that were once the exclusive domain of national states. Going global has also been partly facilitated and conditioned by the infrastructure of the global economy.
The organizational side of the global economy materializes in a worldwide grid of strategic places, foremost of which are the global cities discussed above. This global grid has not only emerged as a transnational space for the formation of new claims by global capital; it is also perhaps the most strategic space for the formation of transnational identities and communities, which is to say that cities have become part of the infrastructure of global civil society.
An important question is whether this global grid is also a space for a new politics, one that goes beyond the politics of culture and identity.
The thickening transactions that bind cities across borders signal the possibility of a new politics of traditionally disadvantaged actors operating in a new transnational economic geography. These politics emerge from the disadvantages and lack of recognition experienced by workers in the global economy-whether they assemble goods for export in a factory or clean offices on Wall Street.
For such workers the new tools of communication have fostered the ascendance of sub- and transnational spaces and actors. With the cross-border network of global cities we are seeing a new global politics of place that contests, among other things, corporate globalization, environmental and human rights abuses. This is place-specific politics with a global span, where political work tied to actions and activities within a certain community is made possible partly by the existence of global digital linkages.
Such organizations operate mostly through networks of cities and involve informal political actors who are not necessarily engaging in citizen politics in its narrowest definition-for example, voting-but who are nonetheless engaging.
Among these informal political actors are women who participate in political struggles as mothers, antiglobalization activists and undocumented immigrants who undertake the same street politics as citizens. Iconic cases that illustrate each of these include the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of Argentina's "disappeared" who are now human rights activists; protesters at the major meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO); and undocumented immigrants joining citizens in demonstrations against acts of police brutality.
These practices constitute a specific type of global politics, one that runs through localities and does not depend on the existence of global institutions. The engagement can be with global institutions, such as the IMF or WTO, or with local institutions, such as a particular government or local police force charged with human rights abuses.
These politics illuminate the distinction between a global network and the actual, local transactions that constitute it. The local is shown to be multiscalar.
Computer-centered technologies have made all the difference in this type of politics. Public access to the Internet has created a platform for a broad range of open and closed networks. Simultaneous decentralized access can help local actors have a sense of participation in struggles that are not necessarily global but are, rather, globally distributed-recurring in locality after locality. The recent protests in the Middle East and North Africa, beginning in Tunisia and spreading to Egypt, Yemen and Libya, among others, are very strong examples.
But there are also weaker and less extensive examples. For instance, the Ecuadorian Plant Network, formed to fight against the copyrighting of plants by foreign pharmaceutical companies, is present in a number of indigenous communities within Ecuador, each of which may seek to protect a distinct plant or fight a particular company. At the same time, the network is establishing contacts with other parts of Latin America and the world where similar struggles occur, bypassing local governments and other established hierarchies.
Communications technologies can therefore facilitate the formation of cross-border public spheres for actors who no longer need to go through global institutions or rely on direct interaction on the ground. The implications are especially significant for resource-poor organizations, whose members may never be able to travel.
ENGAGING WOMEN AND DIVERSE COMMUNITIES
Women have become increasingly active in this world of cross-border activity, as a vast number of women's issues and struggles contribute to the proliferation of these networks, ranging from freedom of expression and environmental issues that affect homes and children to efforts to gain access to water and electricity and struggles for housing. Many of these local engagements started long before the Internet became an option. The intermediaries were often larger international NGOs operating locally, such as Oxfam.
Other intermediaries were, and continue to be, nonprofit or low-cost providers of Internet services. La Neta, a nonprofit organization created in 1991 to provide electronic communication services to NGOs, is one prominent organization in Latin America. There are also women's organizations that have created networks with little infrastructure, but enough communication to support the often very similar struggles of women in a larger region. Madre, a network of community-based women's organizations around the world initially developed in the 1980s, is one such example.
This type of engagement, centered in local specificities that are shared by women in many localities across a region, can often transform a wide range of "local" conditions or domestic institutional domains-spaces such as the household, community or neighborhood, where women are confined to domestic roles-into political spaces. Women can thus emerge as political and civic subjects without having to step out of these domestic worlds.
The city is a far more concrete space for politics than the nation. Nationally, politics must run through existing formal systems- for example, the electoral political system or the judiciary-and to participate, one usually needs to be a citizen. In this system, nonformal political actors can easily be rendered invisible.
The space of the city, in contrast, accommodates a broad range of political activities, such as squatting, demonstrating against police brutality and fighting for the rights of immigrants and the homeless. It also accommodates political issues, such as culture and identity and gay, lesbian and queer politics. Much of urban politics is concrete, enacted by people rather than dependent on massive media technologies. Street-level politics makes possible the formation of new types of political subjects who do not have to go through the formal political system.
It is in this sense that those who lack power and are "unauthorized" (i.e., women, immigrants, the disabled, outsiders, and minorities) can gain presence in global cities, vis-�-vis power and vis-�-vis each other.
The term "presence" is a somewhat elusive quality, not necessarily linked to empowerment. It describes the condition in between having and not having power, which in turn forms new hybrid bases for community and political organization and action.
A growing number of organizations are largely focused on a variety of grievances of powerless groups and individuals. Some are global and others national. While powerless, these individuals and groups are acquiring presence on a broader political-civic stage.
The case of the Federation of Michoac�n Clubs (FEDECMI) in the state of Illinois illustrates this mix of dynamics. FEDECMI is a nonprofit umbrella organization dedicated to promoting the well-being and development of Michoac�nos and Mexicans both in the Midwestern U.S. and in the Mexican state of Michoac�n, through educational, cultural and social programs in both countries.
FEDECMI and other organizations like it unite poor immigrants and engage them in cross-border development projects, mobilizing resources and accumulating political capital in their countries of origin as well as in their new homes.
POLITICS OF THE LOCAL
One of the key forms of politics that the Internet makes possible is a politics of the local, with the localities connected to one other across a region, a country or the world. The architecture of digital networks, primed to span the world, can actually serve to intensify transactions among residents of a city or region.
There are neighborhood organizations that do this, but larger entities such as Indymedia-a global participatory network of journalists providing grassroots coverage of political and social issues-also have local manifestations. They can reach the world, but often they are about thickening communications within localities or cities. This can raise residents' awareness of neighboring communities or help them understand local issues.
For example, Bolivian immigrants in Buenos Aires have developed active online networks that inform, support, and alert vulnerable workers well beyond the Bolivian population in the city. Needless to say, such networks also intensify transactions around the local issues of communities at opposite ends of the world.
These new means of communications, and the networks they spawned, have created a peculiar mix of intense engagement with the local, and an awareness of other local issues across the globe. Social activists are using digital networks for global or nonlocal transactions, strengthening local communications and transactions inside a city or rural community.
This is not the way we often thought about globalization in the past. Instead of a cosmopolitan network that breaks down local identities and communities, we are witnessing the multiplication of the local. Global circuits emerging from and across cities that encompass economic activity, business relationships, social struggles, and institution-building have transformed patterns of geopolitics and social change. And we are likely just at the beginning.
[Sidebar]
TOP DYADS 2010
Ben Derudder and Peter J. Taylor have developed a methodology and several data sets that allow them to measure intercity networks. They gathered data on the locational strategies of 175 advanced-producer services (APS) firms in 525 cities. For each of the 175 firms, they measured a city's importance as a location for the firm; the city's score can range from 0, when the firm has no office in that city, to 5, when it has the firm's global corporate headquarters.
The global grid is perhaps the most strategic space for the formation of transnational identities and communities.
Bolivian immigrants in Buenos Aires developed an active online network that informs, supports, and alerts vulnerable workers.
[Author Affiliation]
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and codirector of The Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. She is currently working on When Territory Exits Existing Frameworks (under contract with Harvard University Press).
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