Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place

Ash Amin
2004 Geografiska Annaler. Series B. Human Geography  
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more » ... full DRO policy for further details. Introduction The mainstream view of cities and regions is one that continues to conceptualise them as territorial entities: local economic systems, regimes of regulation, a place called home. As Doreen Massey muses in her opening essay, the local continues to be seen as the space of the intimate, the familiar, the near, the embodied, that is, as a space constitutively separate and different from a global space seen as the space of the afar, the abstract, the virtual, the encroaching, the hegemonic. The result is a world of nested or jostling territorial configurations, of territorial attack and defense, of scalar differences, of container spaces. The continuing grip of this imaginary is odd because it has been challenged by two significant developments in recent years. The first challenge is the rise of compositional forces that are transforming cities and regions into sites immersed in global networks of organization and routinely implicated in distant connections and influences. These are changes we have come to associate with globalization, which includes the everyday transnational flow of ideas, information, knowledge, money, people, and cultural influences; the growth of translocal networks of organization and influence, such as transnational corporations, global financial institutions, international governance regimes, and transnational cultural networks; and the ripples of distant developments such as stock market swings, environmental disasters, global trade agreements, and policy decisions in powerful nations. There is a large body of literature highlighting the variegated processes of spatial stretching and territorial perforation associated with globalization, which add up to the displacement of a world order of nested territorial formations composed of a discernible 1 inside and outside, by a world of heterogeneous spatial arrangements in terms of geographical shape, reach, influence and duration. In this emerging new order, spatial configurations and spatial boundaries are no longer necessarily or purposively territorial or scalar, since the social, economic, political, and cultural inside and outside are constituted through the topologies of actor networks which are becoming increasingly dynamic and varied in spatial constitution (Amin, 2002) . The resulting excess of spatial composition is truly staggering. It includes radiations of telecommunications and transport networks around (and also under and above) the world, which in some places, fail to even link up proximate neighbours (Graham, 2002) . It includes faith communities, dreamworlds and cultural domains that cut across lines of longitude and latitude and in such complex ways that any attempt to trace the connections from a given location would look like a mess of squiggles across a map (Nederveen Pieterse, 2003) . It includes supply chains and corporate networks that tie producers, intermediaries and consumers in the most unexpected places in highly structured and close patterns of mutuality and dependence (Dicken, 2003; Hughes and Reimmer, 2004). It includes well-trodden but not always visible tracks of transnational escape, migration, tourism, business travel, asylum, and organized terror which dissect through, and lock, established communities into new circuits of belonging and attachment, resentment and fear (Castles and Miller, 1998; Coleman and Crang, 2002, Gray, 2003). It includes all the transhuman networks of sacred, viroid, digital, animal and plant life that summon meaning and attachment at microcosmic, bodily, aerial, epidemiological, planetary and cosmological scales, and which thoroughly infuse life at any given site (Whatmore, 2002) . It includes spaces of emotional attachment whose geographies are almost as varied as life on earth, ranging from the workings of home, family and the playground, to the long cultural networks that feed the screen and the musical arrangements etched on CDs (as Nigel Thrift reveals in his essay here). It includes political registers that now far exceed the traditional sites of community, town hall, parliament, state and nation, spilling over into the machinery of virtual public spheres, international organizations, global social movements, diaspora politics, and planetary or cosmopolitan projects (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Connolly, 2002) . The list could continue, but the point can be made. These
doi:10.1111/j.0435-3684.2004.00152.x fatcat:2v5ow4dryjfttb423epd6cxduy