Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850-2000

253 Pages·2008·1.14 MB·English

by  Pierre-Yves Saunier

Another Global City
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Another Global City
Historical Explorations into the Transnational
Municipal Moment, 1850–2000
Edited by Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen
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another global city
Copyright © Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen, 2008.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2008 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS.
Companies and representatives throughout the world.
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom
and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European
Union and other countries.
ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60663-0
ISBN-10: 0-230-60663-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Another global city : historical explorations into the transnational municipal
moment, 1850–2000 / edited by Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-230-60663-6
1. Municipal government—History—19th century. 2. Municipal
government—History—20th century. 3. Globalization—Political aspects.
4. International relations and culture. I. Saunier, Pierre-Yves. II. Ewen, Shane.
JS66.A66 2008
307.76072ʼ2—dc22 2007050074
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: August 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
Preface vii
Notes on the Contributors ix
1 Introduction: Global City, Take 2: 1
A View from Urban History
Pierre-Yves Saunier
2 In the Precincts of the Global City: 19
The Transnational Network of Municipal Affairs
in Melbourne, Australia, at the End of the
Nineteenth Century
Andrew Brown-May
3 Mediterranean Connections: The Circulation of 35
Municipal Knowledge and Practices during the
Ottoman Reforms, c.1830–1910
Nora Lafi
4 Pacific Crossings? Urban Progressivism in Modern Japan 51
Jeffrey Hanes
5 A City in the World of Cities: Lyon, France; 69
Municipal Associations as Political Resources in the
Twentieth Century
Renaud Payre and Pierre-Yves Saunier
6 Selling the City-State: Planning and Housing in 85
Singapore, 1945–1990
Nancy H. Kwak
7 Transnational Municipalism in a Europe of Second 101
Cities: Rebuilding Birmingham with Municipal Networks
Shane Ewen
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vi ● Contents
8 Mayor Edward I. Koch and New York’s Municipal 119
Foreign Policy, 1977–1990
Jonathan Soffer
9 The Municipal Making of Transnational Networks: 135
A Case Study of Montreal’s Twinning with Shanghai
Yon Hsu
10 Latin American Municipalities in Transnational 153
Networks: Reforming Municipal Government in
Rosario, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay,
in the 1990s
Silvia Robin and Sébastien Velut
Conclusion Lost in Translation? Mapping, Molding, 173
and Managing the Transnational Municipal
Moment
Shane Ewen
Epilogue Cities, Competition, and Cooperation: 185
Prospect Meets Retrospect
Marjatta Hietala
Notes 195
Index 235
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Preface
Writing the history of cities has been an exercise in paradox: we historians,
from Henri Pirenne to Fernand Braudel, have viewed the generic city within
the long-term flows of social and economic forces, and stressed its nature as
being a “crossroad.” At the same time, the overwhelming number of the-
ses, articles, and books have dealt with the history of particular cities, often
through urban biographies. From here, we recognize a discrepancy and a gap:
a discrepancy between our claims and our endeavors, and a gap between the
riches of what we know about the idiosyncrasies of specific cities and the
scarce amount we understand about the contribution of these histories to
the history of the wider world. The time is ripe for mending the discrepancy
and bridging the gap. As historians begin to study the global history of our
world—ostensibly by historicizing globalization—urban historians have an
important part to play.
The historical study of cities as sites and actors for the flows that have con-
nected and disconnected the globe is clearly a promising field. Consider the
kind of flows identified by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai as creating major
disjunctures in our modern world: ethnoscapes (the flows of people and
their impact), mediascapes (for information), technoscapes (technologies),
financescapes (capital), and ideoscapes (ideas, ideals, and ideologies).1 We
think that urban historians can contribute here by explaining how cities—as
platforms, hubs, and sites for these different temporal and spatial flows—
have often been places where disjuncture was created. Taking ethnoscapes as
an example, urban historians can historicize Appadurai’s assertion that the
global movement of people is an essential feature of the world today, which
affects national policies and international relations “to a hitherto unprec-
edented degree.” They can point to thirteenth-century Venice, sixteenth-
century Mexico or Goa, early modern Constantinople, or late nineteenth-
century New York City and demonstrate how urban authorities and societies
have so often had to face the question of transcultural urban landscapes and
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viii ● Preface
polyglot societies. They did find some of their solutions in the observation of
cities across borders and oceans, as in the extreme case of racial segregation.2
Cities have also been sites for temporary migrations, such as those gen-
erated by pilgrims or tourists. There again, urban historians can trace the
historic nuances of these migrations by showing how much the impact and
responses to these momentous eruptions have transformed Mecca, Rome,
Benares, or cities on the European Riviera and the Southeast Asian seashore
over centuries. Similar suggestions could be made for each of Appadurai’s
“scapes.” Consider briefly how values such as freedom and identity have been
assembled and maintained in urban settings. Local newspapers and, more
recently, mass media have historically lived off a diet of city news, while a host
of technologies have emerged, spread, and organized for and between urban
sites: mediascapes have a long urban track record.
In all these fields, and others, there is room for urban historians to examine
how global forces have shaped cities’ evolutions well before the last decades
of the twentieth century as well as to explore the contribution of city life,
technologies, and actors in shaping these global forces. This exploration of
cities as sites and actors of globalization is the fundamental question facing
historians who want to prove that cities matter and chart their contribution
to world history. This book is only a glimpse in that direction, with its focus
on the connections and circulations among municipal urban governments
in the modern age. But there are clues that other historians are moving in a
similar direction.
Shane Ewen and Pierre-Yves Saunier
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Notes on the Contributors
Andrew Brown-May is a senior lecturer in Australian history at the Univer-
sity of Melbourne (Australia), and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Melbourne
(Cambridge University Press, 2005). [email protected]
Shane Ewen is a senior lecturer in social and cultural history at Leeds Met-
ropolitan University (Great Britain). He has written extensively on British
municipal history, especially in relation to fire services and urban networks.
[email protected]
Jeffrey Hanes is a professor of history and Director of the Center for Asian
and Pacific Studies at the University of Oregon (United States). A specialist
of modern urban Japan, he is now working on a manuscript that examines
the production and consumption of urban space in modern Osaka. hanes
@oregon.uoregon.edu
Yon Hsu is a research fellow at Centre for Broadcasting Studies, Concordia
University, Montreal (Canada). She completed her doctoral dissertation on
Montreal’s urban diplomacy. She is currently writing a manuscript on the
transnational networks of antagonism, affinity, ignorance, and cooperation
between Taipei and Shanghai. [email protected]
Nancy Kwak is an assistant professor of history at Polytechnic University,
New York (United States). She received her PhD from Columbia Univer-
sity in 2006 for her thesis on “A Citizen’s Right to Decent Shelter: Public
Housing in New York, London, and Singapore, 1945 to 1970.” kwak161
@gmail.com
Nora Lafi is a researcher at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin (Ger-
many). Her research deals with the dynamics of the Ottoman urban reforms.
She has recently edited Municipalités méditerranéennes: les réformes urbaines
ottomanes au miroir d’une histoire comparée (K. Schwarz, 2005). nora.lafi@rz
.hu-berlin.de
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