'What can replace the 'civic' of times past, of bourgeois city?'
Cities as Frontier Spaces; Where Governance Crises becomes Concrete and Urgent.
Lecture by Saskia Sassen on 18th March 2009 at the WZB at the 10th Roundtable on Transnationality and the 40th anniversary of the Social Research Center BerlinReport by Helmer van der Heide
Honouring the 40th anniversary of the WZB, Research Centre of Social Sciences in Berlin, the 10th Roundtable on Transnationality was opened by Ingo Richter, founder of the organizing Irmgard Coninx Foundation and Jutta Allmendinger, president of the WZB. The opening lecture was held by Saskia Sassen, professor of Sociology and member of the Committee on Global Thought at the Columbia University. She puts cities in the centre of her speech. An increasing part of the worlds population is living in urban agglomerations. Cities are the social structure that gain more and more a central place in national and global politics. This can be understood in the sense that politics are predominantly focused on cities and that cities, beyond their national state, become international actors. Cities are in many ways the frontiers of society. They build the cross-road that is globally connected.
Sassen mentioned on the one hand the reason why urbanity becomes more important as actor but also as stage for any development within global society. The state is still the most powerful institution, but looses in these modern time many of the instruments it previously had to govern and steer political decisions. And cities, or metropolises as urban agglomeration of an incredible density, are as the local government confronted with the concrete consequences and experience at the same time growing fragmentations and the building of new circuits. These circuits Sassen describes as visible or invisible connections of fragments crossing borders globally. A very visible example can be found in modern architecture, within commerce and elites, but also, as Sassen emphasized among the 'immobile', the ghettoized unprivileged. Modern means of communication contributes just as much as migration to local effects of events that happen on a global stage as well as, cross-bordering, links places to any place in the world.
What takes place in urban areas cannot any more properly be understood from the conception of the national state in which the cities are located. Cities are part of an other space. Unexpected, events somewhere on the globe can have a bigger impact on a city then anything happing in the near vicinity. Alarming that is for Sassen, as the nation state is not designed to deal with this and to respond to it in an adequate way. Huge challenges loom for governing states and cities, as Sassen describes, as an example, just two 'extreme urban zones'; the direct, very physical impact of the highly globalised world of financing on urban populations. And, once being the instrument of transforming conflict into innovative structures, resulting in the concept of polis and democracy, the asymmetry of wars might bring conflicts into the cities, thereby urbanizing conflicts.
With this Sassen left the public with many question to ponder on. Cities are breaking up in fragments, some fragments build circuits that cross the globe. Some of these circuits nurture an inclusive solidarity and contribute in a positive sense, but similarly there are circuits who are build from an exclusive identity, foster intolerance and wrath. The nation state seems to be unsuitable as a decisive actor within this field. But if cities, as generator of the civic, are in transformation and loosing their function as a polis, then how can a civil society be maintained? These are some of the question Sassen presented as the modern day issues that need to be discussed and to which people have to find an answer.
'How to govern failed cities?'
Failed States and Public Security.
Lecture by Folke Schuppert on 19th March 2009 at the WZB at the 10th Roundtable on Transnationality and the 40th anniversary of the Social Research Center BerlinReport by Helmer van der Heide
This years Roundtable on Transnationality has the title 'Urban Governance: Innovation, Security and the Power of Religion'. Part of the Roundtable that took place between 18th and 23rd of March are three public lectures at the Research Centre of Social Sciences in Berlin. The lectures reflect these central themes debated in a four-day workshop by an international group of young academics. The second lecture was held by Folke Schuppert, Research Professor Rule and Law Centre of the WZB and Professor Administrative Law at the Humboldt University Berlin and Hertie School of Governance. Beginning his lecture on 'failed states and public security', he points out he would rather speak of fragile states in stead of failed states. Many institutions make an attempt to index the quality of governance in order to rate states and their development. OECD speaks of good governance and literature has risen around the notion of 'sustainable governance'. Categories have been made up to measure success and help to give guidelines for international aid; in this process 'bad governance' is not defined and, moreover as Schuppert criticizes, the causes of its inefficiency are not identified, therefore it lacks a proper definition of the 'failed state'.
In an attempt to clear this debate, Schuppert illustrates the close connection between the quality of governance and the sources of state finances. States that are financed by natural resources rather than profit taxes are concerned about territorial control over those resources rather then about accountability towards their citizens. And accountability is essential as safeguard for good, or 'efficient' governance. In this context other actors then the state contest territorial control and tend, over time, to develop state-like structures. In cases of weak of fragile states, these hybrid actors, state- or war-entrepreneurs, establish their own more or less efficient governing over territory. The relationship between these 'hybrid' state-like actors and the official state can take many different forms. Schuppert is concerned with a progressing development of blurring borders between those actors and the state.
These borders are sometime partially territorial, like with war-entrepreneurs or with organized crime. But borders seem to dissolve completely when for example public police is privately contracted or interests of a single commercial enterprise overtakes state interests. Particularly in urban areas parallel, complementary or substituting relationships that express the fragility of state power and authority exist in many forms. A particular form of 'cooperation' or 'coexistence' that Schuppert brought forward and demands special attention when analysing causes of constellations of different state-like and hybrid actors, would be that of 'intended' weakness. Schuppert describes this as a strategy of government elites to intentionally outsource statehood to other actors, who are not seldom active outside of the states own legal framework. The reasons and motivations behind intentionally compromising good governance raises many questions of concern about motivations of governing arrangements, in the developing and the developed world alike.
'Global religious denominations, competing cosmopolitanisms are essential'
Immigrant religious communities and governance from below in global cities.
Lecture by José Casanova on 20th March 2009 at the WZB at the 10th Roundtable on Transnationality and the 40th anniversary of the Social Research Center BerlinReport by Helmer van der Heide
The third and last lecture in the series of the 10th Roundtable on Transnationality was dedicated to the the power of religion in the context of urban governance. Religion is often contested in a secular world and it seems easy to ignore or underestimate the political role it plays in global metropolises. This lecture was presented by José Casanova, professor of Sociology and director of the Berkley Center's Program on Globalization at the Georgetown University. To illustrate his lecture Casanova draws from two projects in which he was involved as researcher. He gives a few examples of minorities in New York, one of them a relative small group of Mexican Indian immigrants. Their performative collective acts, procession and festivities, did not only help them to integrate, but also to claim civil rights. Casanova observed a similar mechanism in Johannesburg, for example among the Somali refugees in the township Alexandria.
Religious movements, particularly those that are transnational, are often associated with exclusion from the society in which the group members live. 'Global denominations' as the Muslim 'Umma' are, as a consequence, generally regarded as promoting segregation and hampering the integration of its members into the 'host society'. In many cities, where the secular dominates, struggle to deal with religious immigrant groups. Even though secular transnational imagined communities are regarded as a strong indication of the globalism of a metropolis, Casanova points out that similarly religious transnational communities can contribute fundamentally to integration of its members.
A shared cultural and religious background gives newcomers an important social network. And even more, religion can help people to organize themselves from the grass roots thus contributing substantially to governing a city bottom up. Casanova stresses that, empowered and supported by an border-crossing notion of a community religious immigrant, communities are an essential part of global cities. If we assume that the only genuine global community is a secular community, we ignoring the power that religion has in a globalised world. In other words, if we understand cosmopolitanism as exclusively secular, we are moving towards a world with absolutism, excluding a wide range of the worlds populations. Casanova is convinced that for a cosmopolitan, border-crossing community one needs a strong frame of identification. One universal frame is not capable of achieving this and therefore Casanova makes a strong plea for competing cosmopolitanisms, where the power of religion cannot be ignored. Moreover, in metropolises typically home to a fast diversity of social, geographic, ethnic and religious backgrounds, transnational religious communities should be encouraged to be actively engaged in urban governance. Particularly in western, deeply secularized metropolises this notion would cause serious considerations.
