8.2 Global Cities and Speculative Urbanism The tension between territorial fixity and geographical expansion at the heart of uneven development also operates at subnational spatial scales to create other unstable entanglements of growth and decline. Geoeconomic plans for global inte gration here take the form of more localized efforts by the governments of cities, regions, and economic development zones to reach beyond national territory and fix global nancial flows in local space. Most notably, the phenomenal growth of global cities or globally integrated megaurban areas in the last three decades is a signicant form of such postnational reterritorialization. Driving the growth of these cities across the planet are a series of processes that we will introduce and examine here under the title of \"speculative urbanism.\" The processes of global city formation are speculative in part because they are organized directly by the financial speculation of investors seeking to secure and build their investments through urban development. But they are also speculative in the broader sense that they involve bets by wider communities of planners, governments, and privileged transnational consumers and realestate buyers about the future shape of city regions, too. As we will see in Section 8.3, these spectacular bets and visions also involve signicant revisions to the tradi tionally universal social and political rights of national citizenship. Even as the growth of global cities revitalizes ancient ideas about cities being the basis of citizen ship and sovereignty, then, their uneven development and attendant forms of exclu sion and marginalization create new kinds of social splintering and political division. To begin with, though, we must first review the big picture of urban development across the planet: a picture that makes the territorial scope of citizenship and sover eignty in the cities of the ancient Greece, Egypt, and Babylonia seem tiny. Over half of humanity now inhabits cities, and in the Global South, densely populated urban areas are gaining an average of 5 million residents every month.12 Not all such urban areas are always addressed in traditional accounts of global cities, and even some of the most graphic illustrations of global urbanization can sometimes obscure such city growth. Take, for example, a NASA image of the Earth's city lights that is frequently used to illustrate patterns of urban development across the world (Figure 8.3). The rst things you notice about this image are the amazing clusters of bright lights across North America, Europe, and East Asia, and perhaps most revealingly of all, across the rapidly urbanizing areas of the Gulf States and coastal Arabia. Next, you see the lattice lights of transportation corridors linking urban nodes around the world, including the Nile river in north Africa and the lap anese bullet train network, as well as the US inter state system, the glittering maze of European networks, and the rather fainter trace of the TransSiberian railroad. All of these bright spots, however, contrast with the rela tive darkness depicted in much of Africa as well as in several areas of India and 298 Space Figure 8.3 NASA image of the earth's city lights. Source: http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/ images/imagerecords/55000/55167/land_ocean_ice_lights_8192.tif (accessed 31/05/2012). Southeast Asia: areas that are highly populated and increasingly urbanized but not yet burning energy through the night to light their cities. Given the history of imperial racism that represented Africa as a "Heart of Darkness" - a phrase used by Joseph Conrad as a title for a book about European fears and fantasies about "Darkest Africa" - we need to be careful not to assume that the lack of big city lights implies a lack of urban life or an absence of globally net- worked civilization. For the same reason, we need to approach the challenge of understanding global cities with an awareness of their global variety as well as their growing similarities. Some of the fastest-growing cities in Africa such as Nairobi, Lagos, and Kinshasa may not be mentioned in traditional accounts of global cities. But with their mobile and often globally traveled populations, their innovations in hybrid world music, their recycling of western electronics and second-hand cloth- ing, their consumption of foreign food and medicines, and their expatriate NGO communities, they are every bit as "global" as London, New York, and Tokyo. Lighted or not, then, global cities represent diverse kinds of urban cosmopolitanism as well as linked patterns of capitalist integration, and our approach to understanding their uneven development therefore needs to be attentive to both the varieties and simi- larities at the same time. In terms of the similarities, global cities of all kinds teach us useful lessons about the impact of global economic integration on territory, space, and place. Of course, there have been many historical examples of cities defined in earlier periods by their long-distance ties to other peoples and places. Imperial Rome, Caliphate Baghdad, and Ch'ing Peking illustrated the pattern in ancient times, and London, Lisbon, and Paris all grew rapidly as capital cities at the controlling centers of modern empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But today's global cities are distinct in their scale, global proliferation, and trans-territorial ties. In 1950, there were 83 cities onSpace 299 1 Tokyo 34.2 Canada 34.0 Guangzhou 24.5 W N Seoul 24.5 Ghana 24.2 4 Delhi 23.9 5 Mumbai 23.3 Taiwan 23.0 6 Mexico City 22.8 New York 22.2 Australia 21.2 8 Sao Paulo 20.8 Manila 20.1 Cameroon 19.7 10 Shanghai 18.8 11 Jakarta 18.7 12 Los Angeles 17.9 13 Osaka 16.8 Chile 16.8 14 Karachi 16.7 15 Kolkata 16.6 16 Cairo 15.3 Ecuador 15.0 17 Buenos Aires 14.9 18 Moscow 14.8 Cambodia 14.7 19 Dhaka 14.0 20 Beijing 13.9 Zambia 13.8 21 Tehran 13.1 22 Istanbul 13.0 Senegal 12.9 23 London 12.6 24 Rio de Janeiro 12.5 25 Lagos 12.1 Portugal 10.8 26 Paris 10.5 Israel 7.4 Figure 8.4 Ranked list of world's biggest cities with comparative examples of selected national populations. Source: data from 2011 CIA factbook at https://www.cia.gov/library/ publications/the-world-factbook/fields/21 19.html?countryName=World&countryCode=x x®ionCode=ocx, and from Peter Taylor, 2011, Mega-Cities in Theoretical Perspective, at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb373.html. the planet with a population of over one million; by 2007, this number had risen to 468, including 26 "mega-cities" with populations over 10 million. The UN estimates that the world's current urban population of 3.2 billion will rise to 5 billion by 2030, and global cities lead this urbanization trend. They are historically unprecedented concentrations of population that produce remarkable juxtapositions of wealth and poverty in landscapes that rise above - both literally and figuratively - the nation- states, regions, and provinces in which they are located. Ranked lists of the world's biggest urban populations further indicate their remarkable significance vis-a-vis the comparative size of significant national populations (Figure 8.4). But as well as having populations on a par with whole countries, it is the global networking of300 Space global cities and their internal extremes of wealth and poverty that stand out. Better linked to other global cities than to the rural hinterlands that supply them with land, utilities, food, and migrant workers, and often important as command and control nodes of globalspanning networks, global cities are also places that increasingly evidence parallel patterns of urban inequality with slums and zones of abandonment located right next to gentrified neighborhoods, private malls, gated communities, and some of the richest real estate on the planet. The underlying processes of uneven development that produce global cities are themselves revealed by the telltale juxtapositions of afuence and extreme poverty. It is as if A Tale of Two Cities told by Charles Dickens about wealthy excess and hell ish squalor in eighteenthcentury London and Paris suddenly had new relevance, giving us a way of reading both the landscapes of global cities for the stories they tell about worldchanging politicaleconomic developments. \"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,\" began Dickens. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the seas on of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.13 The noisiest authorities today must surely be the endless eye~catching online rankings of best and worst cities. Google \"Best Cities\" and you will quickly enter this ranked world of placenames and placepromoting lists that are themselves competing with one another to grab your attention at the same time as perpetuating a competitive way of looking at how cities relate to one another globally We are invited thus to click lists of the most livable cities, or most miserable cities, best nedining cities, or most dan- gerous cities, most green cities, or most polluted cities, most sexy cities or most haunted cities, or, in a remarkable ranked list of US cities promoted in 2010 by a prom inent pesticide manufacturer, most bedbuginfested cities! International rankings are run all the time too, of course, and whether it is best cities for tourists or best cities for business, or worst cities for corruption or pollution or health or violence, it is always the extremes that are used by the listmakers to attract interest. Foreign Policy maga zine's famous annual indexing of the world's most global cities (as measured by the magazine's own metrics of transterritorial influence) is just one of many examples.\"1 Rather than take all the rankings at face value, it is useful now to consider the ways in which they reect wider global tendencies towards a new kind of speculative urbanism. Based on widely replicated entrepreneurial schemes of place promotion, tourism marketing, and investment incentivization, speculative urbanism has led to a familiar kind of global city boosterism right around the world. The most obvious and supercial signs of this boosterism are all the city rankings that have been driven by marketeers promoting particular cities or particular sorts of products. But beyond Space 301 the promotion schemes, there is clearly a wider and deeper link between such rank- ing regimes and the individualistic forms of neoliberal governmentality we reviewed in Chapter 7. It is this disciplinary linkage that in turn explains the wider popularity and everyday acceptance of speculative urbanism. If we choose to visit or move to a city based on where it falls on one of these ranked lists, our decisions are linked in part to the ways in which we are individually enlisted and guided by the competitive logic of the list. Likewise, if urban leaders make policy in order to move their city up one of these lists, there is a direct governmental effect created by the ranking. Thus, if we examine the extremes and superlatives more closely, we can begin to investi- gate how speculative urbanism spawns neoliberal urban government and, with it, a suite of competition-induced commonalities. On the one side, the wealth represented by all the expensive commercial and private properties in global cities monumentalizes the results of the relentless global competition for investment under neoliberal forms of globalization. Speculative urbanism in this sense introduces what is often called \"spectacular urbanism.\" The palatial clubs and compounds, the luxury penthouse condominiums, and the massive sky-scrapers that provide an almost orbital world-view all serve thus as stunning illustrations of the material consequences that follow from competing for investment. Based on borrowed money it may have been, and empty though many of its ofces remained after the global nancial crisis in 20082009, the world's tall- est building the 828-meter-high Burj Dubai stands as an especially spectacular testament to what the global competition for investment can achieve. And looking down from the Burj at Dubai's sinking attempt to create \"The World\" (a failed luxury resort made of artificial islands in the shape of the world map) one can also see how precarious and eeting the attempts to x global capital in local space can be (Figure 8.5). Nevertheless. it is the global competition to do precisely this to reter- ritorialize deterritorialized nancial flows - that has driven the endless promotion, branding, and ranking of global cities everywhere as great places to invest and visit. More than this, the global competition for capital has also been the big background inuence shaping global city governance and networking, along with the ways global cities have thereby come to stand apart from the nationstates in which they are located (except, as happened in Dubai, when the property developers needed to turn to fellow UAE nationals to bail them out of the bankrupting effects of global nan cial failure). And as the governance of global cities has become increasingly disci plined by global market forces, so to in turn have their landscapes come to share similar landmarks. Neoliberal global cities therefore all tend to exhibit at least three out of the following four features of spectacular urbanism: (1) highend megamalls; (2) \"gentried\" and \"beautified\" downtown cores; (3) bigbudget megaprojects such as museums, concert halls, and sports stadiums; and (4) luxury apartment towers, gated communities, and other securitized domestic spaces. On the other side, the devastating poverty of global city slums, shacks, and decayed public housing makes manifest processes of dispossession. Speculative urbanism in this way leads to another sort of spectacle altogether: shattered and shuttered land scapes of loss, division, and violent crime that have sometimes been called \"splintered 302 Space Figure 8.5 World in Dubai from NASA. Source: httpeoimagesgsfc.nasagoviimagesl imagerecordsMZ000f42477l'188022-E-024940_lrg.jpg. urbanisrn.\" Four main features of such splintering are: (1) informal squatter settle ments and slums; (2) neighborhood gang violence; (3) police violence; and (4), in response, urban struggles by the marginalized for rights to the city. From rural land confiscations in countries such as India and Indonesia, to the chronic unemployment and welfare rollbacks that have helped foster innercity drug dependency in countries such as the United States and United Kingdom, the processes producing splintered urbanism create fractured spaces that are often viewed as dead (or just deadly) when compared to the highrend residences, gated enclaves, and ofces of global city afur ence. For the same reasons, the landscapes of the dispossessed are generally seen as a world apart or as totally different kinds of \"world cities\" from the global cities that regularly make it to the top of all the ranked lists. Yet such tales of two types of cities glittering global cities that have apparently won the global competition for invest ment on the one side, and poor world cities that are left behind like losers on the other are deeply misleading. They hide the ways in which these divergent spaces of accumulation and dispossession are connected: that the wealth of one is tied to the poverty of the other. So instead, we need to trace the linkages. Following the way Dickens depicted the ties between London and Paris, and told a single tale linking the two cities, it is equally possible to trace ties between the vast variety of today's global cities, and to do this, we need to examine how they have evolved historically. When global cities first began to be discussed in the 19805 and 19905, their novelty as world cities was seen in terms of how they served as entrepreneurial command and control hubs for global capitalism in a period of postFordist economic Space 303 restructuring. Their post-national or "denationalized" development was explained thus as the outcome of both, on the one side, national government cutbacks and, on the other, transnational networking by financial businesses (banking, insurance, and investment services) and other high-profit service industries (real estate, mar- keting, and media). As a result of the mega-profits and rents available at these pin- nacles of global economic influence, global cities also experienced growth in low-pay service work catering to the consumption needs of the high-income earners (work in restaurants, hotels, cleaning, and chauffeur services, for example). And whether it was is in the high-paying jobs in finance or, as was more common, in the low-paying menial jobs, immigrant labor played a key role in making these cities more multi- lingual and cosmopolitan as well as more connected. London, New York, and Tokyo were the "big three" archetypal examples of this global city growth through services, and their dual track mix of concentrated development in financial and managerial services combined with low-income service work remains a common denominator (albeit with immigrant labor playing a much bigger role in London and New York than in Tokyo). As primary or "primate" cities in their respective national contexts, and as places with long histories of international importance, the global networking of London, New York, and Tokyo is by no means new. Indeed, their growth as global cities is another reminder that the networks and nodes of contemporary globalization fre- quently build on historical forms of global interconnection, including the networks going out from older centers of colonial calculation. Yet, the ability of the big three to capture command and control roles in an increasingly liberalized global economy, and their rising stature in relation to older industrial centers such as Birmingham, Manchester, Detroit, Cleveland, and Nagoya, meant that they also enjoyed a newly global form of urban primacy. Like a number of other wealthy financial, media, and business service hubs - most notably, Brussels, Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Montreal, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, and Toronto - they also saw increasing social inequalities among their inhabitants as the differences in pay between high-income and low-income service work expanded. And it was precisely this primacy-plus-inequality that the term global city came to capture. More recently, other global cities have emerged out of the shadow of the wealthy- world financial, business services, and media hubs. Bangalore, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Cape Town, Dubai, Istanbul, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Karachi, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos, Mexico City, Manila, Mumbai, Nairobi, Shanghai, Seoul, and Sao Paolo have to varying degrees also become global hubs in their own right (although Beijing, Shanghai, and Mumbai obviously have much more influence as important new centers of global finance and global media control than cities such as Jakarta, Karachi, and Lagos). More than just places of population growth with their own home-grown patterns of inequality, they have become cities shaped by similar pat- terns. This does not mean that they are all witnessing the same sorts of post-Fordist service-sector-led restructuring seen in London, New York, and Tokyo. Nor have they become command and control hubs of transnational corporations. Indeed, recent attempts to map the interlocking directorates of the world's biggest firms304 Space show that London and western European cities remain dominant, with only New York and Montreal showing up as major hubs in North America, while Tokyo has become less linked as a result of Japan's decade of economic decline.15 Rather than becoming hubs of corporate control, the commonalities shared by the new global cities have more to do with the competitive interreferencing and internationally familiar forms of inequality that the global competition for investment now entails. The disciplinary neoliberal inuence on urban governance of global competition and competitive rankings is an especially consequential common denominator in this respect, as too are associated increases in privatization and the role played in city government by publicprivate partnerships. These tendencies have in turn cre- ated the global convergence around newly entrepreneurial and investmentoriented approaches to managing cities. Urban boosterism is therefore no longer just about oneoff attempts to attract investors or tourists or sports teams or big global events like the Olympics and World Cup. It is about doing all of this all the time in a newly intensied nonstop 24!? global competition of speculative urbanism: a sustained, if not sustainable, multisectoral speculative exploration, speculative visioning, and speculative development of city spaces as if they were stockmarket listings. If speculative urbanism is what all the ranked lists of cities are representing and reproducing at the same time, how exactly does the process of speculation come to create common effects in global cities despite all the differentiation and comparison highlighted by the competitive lists themselves? Key to understanding these com monalities in global cities are three main mediating inuences that shape specula tive urbanism and make it so powerful: (1) the controlling role of global investors and associated investor ratings; (2) the steering role of consultants, meetings, and institutes offering expert advice on how to remake cities to attract global interest and investment; and (3) the governmental role of city leaders and new parastate agen cies seeking to remake urban governance to attract speculative capital. Let us now consider each of these three inuences in turn. 1. Look at the property news and advertisements in a business newspaper like the Financial Times, or go to the website of an online urban investment company, and you will quickly see how urban speculation and spectacle are linked. For the wealthy, global cities are not just places in which to store, secure, and show off wealth. They are also places that promise to make investors more money. This, for example, is how Citiesinvest.com explains the underlying opportunity to individual investors on a fairly typical, albeit verbose, website. We believe that to make the very most from a property investment, a would-be buyer should look to the world's urban centres. . . . Cities are expanding at a faster rate than ever before . . . [I]f it's prot you're after . . . the ourishing and rapidly expanding cities of the world are the logical choice for the modern investor.\" The underlying investment interest in global cities, then, lies in the way that they offer the prospect of making profits through property speculation, and this applies just as much in the brutal land grabs going on in Global South cities such as Bangalore Space 305 as it does in the discrete sales of ofces and apartments in historically rich cities such as Paris. Indeed, the beautiful boulevards and vistas of Paris were themselves once produced by brutal forms of dispossession in the midnineteenth century, and the way French nanciers and the state conspired thus to takeover and makeover the streets of Paris has provided the model ever since. It showed that remaking city space can remove obstacles to city management and the policing of protest while also offering elites a way of soaking up surplus prots and putting them to protable use. Particularly in periods of overproduction and overcapacity, this \"urban spatial fix\" strategy has gone on to be reproduced the world over. lNhen there have been too many goods chasing too few consumers, the geographical displacement of the asso ciated surpluses of capital and labor from commodity production into property development has thereby provided a provisional fix, allowing for the reinvestment of the money and redirection of the labor to develop new spaces. Global cities have simply taken this enduring capitalist need for spatial xing to a new and gigantic global scale. Thus, the particular forms of architectural gigantism exemplied today by Burj Dubai and the megabuildings of East Asia's fastgrowing megacities can be explained in part as spatial xes for the especially enormous financial surpluses being created by oil exporters and lowwage commodity producers. Organized by diverse developers and propertymanagement firms, the actual global speculation on city space serves the interests of a huge global investment industry that is constantly chasing better returns by moving money between differ ent areas of the global economy. It should not be surprising therefore that the result ing processes of spatial selectivity mirror stock market selectivity, too. Just as stock pickers are constantly measuring risk versus return for particular stocks and funds, so, too, does the property investment industry look at the world map of global cities as a kind of stock market listing of opportunity and danger. In some cases, there are even formal nancial market metrics and assessment mechanisms involved, too. In the United States, for example, investors consult the risk ratings for particular cities produced by the big three bond ratings rms: Moody's, Standard and Poor's, and Fitch. Ranging from the top AAA \"investment grade\" scores down to the Bbs and Ccs of socalled \"speculative\" and \"junk bond\" categories, the primary purpose of these ratings is to provide investors with a tool for pricing the risks associated with the bonds sold by cities. Just as with the similar credit scores issued by the ratings firms for corporate debt and national debt, municipal bonds that receive higher rat ings are considered less risky and therefore benefit from higher investor demand, which in turn means higher bond prices and lower interest rates. By contrast, cities issuing bonds that receive only low ratings attract less investor demand (in part because some pension funds are forbidden from investing in any bonds below \"investment grade\"), and therefore have to offer higher interest rates to attract buy ers. This, then, is the primary reason why so many cities strive to win high ratings. The closer they are to AAA, the lower the interest rate they have to pay on their debt. In narrow accounting terms, what cities have to do to win high ratings is demonstrate a good financial history free from defaults, a reliable administrative structure, predictable cash flow and a promising fiscal outlook. Yet, as the impacts 306 Space and implications of ratings have increased, city governments have gone to increas ingly strenuous and sometimes desperate efforts to make the case for high scores. Such desperation reects in turn the way a high rating effects more than just the costs of nancing municipal debt. In addition, it also communicates greater secu- rity and promise to investors who are buying land and other assets in a city. Thus, receiving a high rating can also boost all sorts of private equity and venture capital inows as well as reduce nancing costs on municipal bonds. This, combined with the fact that US cities have continued to lose Federal government nancial support from the 19805 onwards, explains why the ratings rms have so much leverage over American city government. Even though they are private companies focused prin cipally on rating very specic nancial instruments, they serve at the same time as gatekeepers of investment inows more generally. And even after the 2008 sub prime mortgage asco in which Moody's, Standard and Poor's, and Fitch were widely castigated for their misleadingly high ratings for \"troubled\" and \"toxic\" mortgagebacked securities, US cities have still had to knuckle down and do what ever it takes to win their high ratings. The discipline of debt dependency and ratings forces cities to focus more and more on creating a socalled favorable investment climate. Promoting themselves with ritzy downtown development schemes, highend shopping malls, and subsidies for attention grabbing buildings and entertainment facilities, the constant mantra is that city government must do everything possible to win approval from potential investors. To be sure, the need to nance municipal debt does not always translate directly into crass Donald Trumpstyle urban boosterism. Parks and urban beauti cation projects can sometimes benet from the efforts, as can plans for public trans portation, or even efforts to introduce nonpunitive \"harm-reduction\" drug policies in which addicts are given clean needles and safe places to inject in ways that are meant to reduce street violence and deaths. But even if the effects sometimes improve public health, the general direction in urban governance enforced by a preoccupa tion with investor confidence tends ultimately to be focused more on market well being than on the wellbeing of all urban citizens. A plan for more social housing advanced by one city leader, for example, may be vetoed by others who argue that the shortterm drain on the budget will lower the city's bond rating and reduce the attractiveness of the city to investors more generally. Speculative urbanism in this way represents another version of the disciplinary neoliberalism we examined in Chapter 7. It enables the invisible hands of the market to rule city governments in much the same way as they rule indebted national governments. While urban bond markets are growing elsewhere in the world, including in emerging economies such as South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia, the main corol- lary of American municipal bond market ratings in other cOuntries are the sover eign ratings of national debt that, as we have already seen, enforce neoliberal norms at a national scale. Parallel privatesector risk assessments carried out by manage ment consultants and accounting firms also generate powerful pressures over where speculative capital is invested at the scale of urban realrestate markets. Moreover, thanks to national neoliberal reforms that have deregulated capital Space 307 mobility, the world's realestate markets have effectively been globalized, which in turn increases the influence of these urban assessments. As city leaders around the world feel and see the resulting pressure from transnational investors, they also respond with more intense efforts at selfpromotion and marketfriendly self regulation. Land clearances for big eyecatching infrastructure projects often get a goahead from officials this way, as do all sorts of mallbuilding, hotelbuilding, and luxuryapartmentbuilding property developments, too. The resulting speculative landscapes do not always succeed in winning investor confidence, of course. Anxieties about speculative bubbles or overly ambitious and unsustainable development plans can even sometimes dampen confidence. Equally investors might be put off by other worries about the political stability of the country or region in which a city is located, or the long~term prospects for the national currency. But, despite these many complicating factors, speculative urbanism does have consequences globally as well as in the United States. It is not just an \"American\" or \"western\" way of looking at cities in terms of competitive rankings, promotional hype, and fancy realestate advertisements. And it is more than a discourse or mindset. It is also a very practical way of organizing cities that creates real urban transformations wherever it goes, including the widespread tendenCy towards the privatization of public space, the building of malls and gated communities, and the more generalized depoliticization of civic life through the marketmediated management of development. To explore how and why this pattern is repeated the world over, it is necessary now to explore in more detail the role of expert urban consultants. 2. The urban expertise industry that has developed to advise city leaders on how best to attract and retain investment is now something of a protmaking business in its own right. Aided by multilateral agencies such as the World Bank Cities Alliance and UN HABITAT, cosponsored by big banks and TNCs such as HSBC and Siemens, and coorganized by global management consultants such as McKinsey and PricewaterhouseCoopers, there are now multitudinous meetings, forums, and summits on the subject of how best to promote and manage globally \"successful cities.\" Events such as the World Cities Summit, the Global City Forum, the Global Cities Dialogue, and the C40 Cities Mayors Summit thereby provide a steady stream of work for a wide range of expert institutions, consultants, and urban gurus. It is important to note, though, that not all these experts speak with one voice or hold to a single political orientation. Let us consider, therefore, some examples of the variety. One of the most wellorganized and omnipresent of the institutions offering advice on urban governance is the World Bank. The bank's promarket vision of the economic geography of global cities has led it to offer predictably neoliberal nos trums on how best to work with market forces in order to expand the reach of spec ulative urbanism. \"Many policy makers perceive cities as constructs of the state to be managed and manipulated to serve some social objective,\" warned an inuential 2009 world development report from the bank. Against such social objectives, the report's authors instead advised that cities should be serving market objectives. 308 Space In reality, cities and towns, just like rms and farms, are creatures of the market. Just as rms and farms deliver nal and intermediate goods and services, towns and cities deliver agglomeration economies to producers and workers. So city administrators are better advised to learn what their city does, and to help it do this well, rather than try to abruptly change the course of their city's destiny. Planners and policy makers should see their role as prudent managers of a portfolio of places, to get the most from agglomeration economies. '7 This is speculative urbanism in its purest form. City government is reduced to prudently managing a portfolio of places as if they comprise a stock fund, and the idea of having social objectives for cities is seen simply as an error. Other expert discourses diverge, however, frequently making very clear social recommendations for global cities. Neoconservative neoliberals, for example, Giuliani Partners and The Bratton Group L.L.C., advocate for an aggressive law enforcement approach to city government. Their argument, based in part on Rudi Giuliani's record as mayor of New York City, is that \"zerotolerance\" for crime and the punitive policing of the poor and homeless is vital for \"securing\" the city, making it feel safe for investors, and thereby ensuring the successful financial \"securitiza tion\" of urban investment. The \"[k]ey to attracting capital, tourists, and residents with disposable income,\" argues Giulani, \"is the promotion of the city as a safe place to live, work, travel, and shop.\" And thanks to the consulting work of Giuliani and others, his \"broken windows policing\" approach has been taken up elsewhere in urban areas as different as Mexico City and USoccupied Baghdad. Yet another approach to securing investment in cities is offered by the Stanford economist Paul Romer. Proposed as a solution to governmental corruption and inefficiency rather than as a way for city governments to take over the streets, Romer recommends creating wholly new global cities as enclaves of technocratic rationality located on uninhabited sites with their own city charters. \"Charter Cities,\" argues Romer, would be therefore run like charter schools, providing new freedoms for innovations in urban governance.19 Instead of needing foreign aid, Romer thinks charter cities will develop like Hong Kong did historically, attracting private capital because of their freedoms and marketfriendly rules. And having started out with radical plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a Hong Kong for Cuba an enclave in which to nurture freemarket capitalism with clearcut trading rules he has more recently promoted efforts by the Honduran government to create a model charter city for Latin America in Honduras. Instead of thinking in terms of building model global cities on uninhabited land, there are yet others who maintain that it is the quality of the inhabitants in already existing cities that matters. Richard Florida, an American planner now based in Toronto, argues thus that the best way for cities to build investor condence is by attracting the \"creative class.\" He advises that cities should do all they can to make themselves into pleasant places for welleducated uppermiddleclass residents to live, work, and play.20 They should be clean, green, culturally diverse, and as open to gay and immigrant communities as they are to business. Florida presents himself Space 309 thus as a scally conservative social liberal: annoying rightwing homophobes and antiimmigration activists, on the one side, and leftwing supporters of social wel fare, on the other.21 Advocating for gentrication in the name of creativity, he says cities should deliberately foster funky and hip downtown neighborhoods using their tax dollars to build bike lanes and other amenities for the afuent. Replacing the traditional business inducements of tax abatements and transport infrastructure, he argues the new \"Ts\" of global city government should instead be: tolerance, technol ogy, and talent. And, as testament to his own talent for spreading these \"Ts\" transna tionally, Florida's faith in the creative class has recently been heralded by the British prime minister, David Cameron, as a guide for redeveloping what was once the workingclass east end of London. From \"creativity\" to \"sustainability,\" yet another set of urban experts talk about the need to fashion global cities as \"ecocities.\" There are traces of these ideas in Florida's enthusiasm for recreational amenities, and in Romer's suggestions that cit ies are the most efficient way of accommodating the world's burgeoning population, but other advocates for sustainable cities take the arguments much further. From the Australian \"ecocity\" architect, Paul Downton, to the American biophilic planner, Timothy Beatley, to Canadian bioregionalist, William Rees, who argues directly for measuring and reducing urban carbon footprints, these experts offer more criticism of unsustainable urbanism than city elites usually want to hear.22 But this has not stopped \"sustainable city\" ideas and other related appeals to \"green cities\" and \"healthy cities\" from attracting the interest of both urban governments and corpo rate investors. Thus, coordinated by multilateral agencies such as the United Nations Global Compact Cities program, we are now seeing global cities attempting to attract new rounds of interest and investment with highprole efforts at ecocity planning. And ranging from relatively radical proposals such as the City of Melbourne's \"zero net emissions\" plan to more entrepreneurial initiatives such as San Francisco's Business Council on Climate Change, these efforts are in turn attracting buyin (to use the appropriate business metaphor) from corporations themselves. There are many more schools of thought about how best to attract and retain investor condence in urban areas. For the same reason, it would be mistaken to ignore the differences distinguishing all the experts advising global cities on how to be more \"successful.\" Indeed, amidst the cacophony, more nuanced studies have even discerned the voices of critics asking the all important question: success for whom?23 However, it is just as important to acknowledge the degree to which the whole urban expertise industry still buys into an underlying competitive idea that success is pos sible and that there are therefore necessarily market winners and losers. This explains in turn why so much of the global discourse over global cities resonates with market- ing assumptions about branding, rebranding, and place promotion. Take, for exam ple, a \"global city blog\" posting from the 2011 Abu Dhabi Global City Forum. In it, \"global advisor\" Greg Clark offers tips on \"The Seven habits of highly successful cities,\" suggesting that cities should hire experts like himselfto create a unifying pro motional story that speaks to multiple competitive markets simultaneously. 31 0 Space It is not enough for a city to have a brand that attracts tourists, cities must have an identity that reaches across different markets and customers and tell a unifying story about the value the city can add to the activity that is looking for a home. We cannot tell one story to the students and another to the business people, for example, because the students may become business people, and the business people sometimes also study. We need an organising story across many markets, not just a sales campaign within one of them.\" Ultimately it seems that what global city leaders are being told by experts such as Clark is that they need to be able to fashion authentic and coherent stories about their cities. Not surprisingly, the experts are ready in turn to provide many hours of high-paid contract work to craft just such stories. What is surprising, though, is that investors or anyone else can be persuaded by such globally outsourced and globally circulated storytelling. Still more surprising is that city leaders themselves buy in to the stories themselves. And yet, as we shall now see, this is what is happening with signicant effects on urban governance. 3. Picking up ideas from all the global city meetings and consultation sessions, urban leaders start to look at their own cities in new ways. \"Thanks to these types of meetings and experiences and conversations," explained a city commissioner from Iaipur in the Northwest of India, \"I have begun to see my home city differently.\"25 Following the lead of ethnographers of speculative urbanism, such comments are worth exploring further for what they reveal about the reinvention of the city through global city story-telling. The reinvention, it seems, occurs through a two- step re-vision process. First comes the moment when the old city is reappraised as traditional, inefcient, unchanging and, thus, unproductive. When I look out from Iaipur's main railway station, I can see makeshift huts with women cleaning dishes and children playing and grazing their animals, the dhobis washing clothing, the small food carts setting up for the day, people meeting the call of nature. I have always seen this as a typical city scene in India, the way it has been and will always be. Then comes the second moment when this deadened landscape is reimagined anew as exciting, productive and, thus, potentially protable, too. But why couldn't we build right along the station a line of nice hotels, corporate centers, and shopping malls? Now, I can imagine that Jaipur, too, can become a world city that can generate jobs and money and bring in tourists and make the city and its people much more productive. From this view, our cities are full of untapped value and potential, making them a very exciting place to be. Such processes of urban reimagination are being repeated the world over. As this happens, they also repeatedly reference one another, with the globally mobile city experts and leaders picking up \"success stories\" from one meeting and taking them to the next. This interreferencing is in turn further encouraged and enabled by the circulation of reports about particular pilot programs and demonstration projects by global governance institutions that celebrate the successful makeover of one city or neighborhood in order to demonstrate the salience of a particular approach to Space 31 1 others. The World Bank, for example, is especially keen to push aspiring global cities to develop land reforms that involve the privatization and titling of land. To do this, they not only promote titling programs directly through the World Bank Cities Alliance but have made use of a supposed success story of titling in Lima, Peru.\" Here, in a few chosen neighborhoods, a pilot project designed to secure property title for the poor was strongly correlated with increased employment outside the home by adults and decreased employment outside the home by children (i.e. decreased child labor). The World Bank concluded that this showed how creating property rights for the urban poor generated positive social outcomes. Even though the study was biased by the fact that the neighborhoods that showed the positive correlation had easier access to employment opportunities, and even though the project failed to deliver on its original promise, which was to enable the poor to bor row more easily by using their newly titled property as collateral (instead they had to work longer hours), the story was taken out of context and circulated by World Bankafliated economists to justify titling elsewhere. The flaws in the Lima study have subsequently been highlighted by Columbia University political scientist, Timothy Mitchell.\" But what Mitchell has also shown is that it is precisely the pro cess of taking the demonstration project out of context that actually makes it more compelling. A oneoff placespecific correlation thereby becomes a projectproven rule, and by becoming a rule, it is then used to help make rules for other places, too. Whether or not the World Bank is involved in the reporting and associated neoliberal rulemaking, global city interreferencing conducted by city mayors and other leaders tends to work in exactly the same way. The resulting form of govern ance through demonstration projects is therefore very common in global cities eve rywhere. It is for this reason that we constantly hear such familiar refrains as the following: \"Singapore benefited from recruiting creative capitalists from elsewhere, 1) \" so can we ; Bangalore benefited from becoming an IT and outsourcing center, so can we\"; \"Dubai beneted from making itself into a major global airline hub, so can we\"; \"Macao benefited from becoming a giant gambling center, so can we\"; \"Sydney benefited from hosting an Olympics, so can we\"; and, perhaps most commonly, \"Boston, Baltimore, and San Francisco all beneted from the gentrication of water front markets and neighborhoods, so can we.\" Reciting such \"success\" stories, urban leaders try to resite them too, and, however speculative the attempts at replication might be, the resulting general trend is towards more speculative urbanism. To be sure, not all of this interreferencing leads inevitably towards the neoliberal com mon denominators of spectacular urbanism. For example, many leftleaning city governments have sought to turn the success story of Porto Alegre's collective budgetmaking process in scuthern Brazil into a model for participatory budget making in their own cities. Likewise, livingwage campaigns by workers, unions, and religious groups in big global cities reference one another for support, too.28 But the more general trend is towards much less inclusive initiatives that are aimed first and foremost at winning investor approval. These market-friendly outcomes are explained by more than just the direct influence of market imperatives such as bond ratings, and the steering role of experts from institutions such as the World Bank. 31 2 Space In addition, a further transformation in the political organization and political geography of urban governance has also helped to expand and entrench the neolib eral norms. This is the development of publicprivate parastatal agencies of urban governance which are either unelected or otherwise disconnected from traditional institutions of city government. Just as New York City emerged early on as paradigmatic example of a global city, so, too, has it illustrated how publicprivate parastatal agencies can takeover author ity from city hall. In 1975, after New York endured its worst ever scal crisis and began to default on its bond payments, the big Wall Street banks that underwrote the city's debts grew frustrated with the unwillingness of the city government to lay off workers and enforce massive spending cuts. In response, they orchestrated the crea tion of a new parastatal agency sponsored by the state of New York called the Municipal Assistance Corporation or MAC. MAC simultaneously took over the city's outstanding debts and implemented the austerity the banks had been demand ing. The resulting layoffs and fee increases, including big tuition increases at CUNY, led to a summer of labor unrest. Nevertheless, the transition in governing authority over the city's nance remained in force. As a result, MAC was subsequently able to promote a new investorfriendly set of development initiatives in the city, encourag ing more gentrication in SoHo and Greenwich Village, but also broader and more ambitious megaprojects that included the redevelopment of Battery Park City, Times Square, South Street Seaport, and the Upper West Side. Over three decades later, having sold almost $10 billion in bonds, MAC settled its accounts in 2008 and shut down. Its work was done, and New York City was completely remade as a neoliberal city famous for its gentried neighborhoods and spectacular cityscape. During this same time, and partiCularly in the last 10 years, many other aspiring global cities have meanwhile seen similar methods used to sideline traditional gov ernment agencies. Sometimes supported by neoliberal national governments, at other times introduced by the World Bank, new urban governance principles founded on treating citizens of cities as consumers have simultaneously led to the creation of new publicprivate partnerships and agencies to serve the customers who can pay. As a result, parastatals have developed across the cities of the Global South to man age everything from garbage collection and telephone services to electricity and water supply. And just as in New York, this neoliberalization of city government has in turn enabled investorfriendly development initiatives and spectacular mega projects. In Bangalore, for example, a whole suite of parastatals have basically taken over urban governance, ying over the old rules and ofces of city ofcials in much the same way as a new monorail to the airport has been designed to provide for swift passage of the city's creative classes over the resentful populations, public health dangers, pollution, and slowmoving traffic jams on the ground. Speculative urbanism in this sense is not just creating the spectacular urbanism of the monorail and other associated office parks and megaprojects. It is also very clearly related to splintered urbanism in which the rich and the poor of the global city live apart and move in radically different ways through space. It is to this process of spatial splintering, including all the ways enclaving emerges as a Space 31 3 reterritorializing response to the inequalities and instabilities of speculative uneven development, that we now turn in more detail. 8.3 Enclaves, Slums, and Citizenship As soon as you start to notice the spatial enclaves that are emerging in the context of contemporary globalization, they seem to be everywhere. Along with the private malls, gentried neighborhoods, enclosed entertainment complexes, and high security highrises of spectacular urbanism, enclaving is also happening in a wide variety of other venues, too. The projects and landscapes involved range in spatial scale from large transnational regions and special economic zones, to subnational resource-extraction enclaves, to business improvement districts within cities and towns, to selfcontained tourism resorts Such as Disneyland and cruise ships, to per sonal strategies of selfsecuritization that range from buying weapons and fortied deadbolts to investment in such mobile enclaves as SUVs, yachts, and, for the most mobile yet enclaved of all, private executive jets. Some of the original US enclaves the suburbs of southern California, for example are now so splintered by foreclo sures and inequality that internal enclaving is also all the rage: elaborate security camera systems can be bought at Costco and WalMart, the oldfashioned American mailbox can be replaced by a Secure Mail Vault (\"the perfect curb side solution to mail box theft and vandalism\"), and, for the extraanxious there are always \"antibio logical invasion technologies.\" You can even tour the resulting landscape of division, defense, and decay in an SUV that has been branded and sold by General Motors as the Buick Enclave! Meanwhile, urban scholars such as Mike Davis (who is famous for his work on the enclaving of LA) report that the southern California pattern has now gone global, with elites around the world seeking to disembed their lives from surrounding cities and slums.29 Davis sees a fundamental reorganization of global space going on in this way with elites creating a transnational archipelago of guarded spaces that are joined together through fortied global networks while also simulta neously delinking from the local poor. Enclaving, then, is another way in which the deterritorializing ties and upheavals of globalization have simultaneously led to reterritorialization, too. Global network ing, whether in the global city, in global commodity chains or in global movements of people, is coupled thus with local spacemaking. Even if it's the spaceshrinking spacemaking of an expedited airport security line or EZPASS toll lane on a high way, it still involves the creation of a special purpose territorial control system in order to speed up the movements of elites and other customers who can afford to pay for acceleration. To explain these reciprocal ties between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, we need to recognize from the start the ways in which they reflect the broader neoliberalization of citizenship. In this broader process, transna tional capitalist imperatives are increasingly undermining forms of national citizen ship that used to provide after much struggle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries social, political, and economic rights for large majorities of national