Conventionally partial critique

Michiel van Meeteren, Ben Derudder and David Bassens are concerned with the way in which critiques of ‘global cities research’ (GCR) have been made by scholars advancing alternative, postcolonial research agendas. Significantly, their concern is not so much with the original basis of postcolonial critiques – indeed, they write that three key strands of critique of GCR in Jennifer Robinson’s postcolonial urban scholarship are ‘well taken’ (van Meeteren et al., 2016: 4) – but with the way in which these have been reiterated in subsequent publications. In particular, van Meeteren and colleagues argue that some such (re)iterations make GCR into a something of a ‘straw man’, misrepresenting the field, ignoring its internal diversity and dynamism. I do not doubt that some of the cases that they cite provide legitimate grounds for their concerns but clearly the limited word space of a commentary does not allow for forensic examination of many of them. In what follows, I limit my commentary mainly to consideration of aspects of the essay by van Meeteren et al. in which my own work is implicated, while also seeking to place those specific aspects in a wider context of academic citation and representational practices.

Most of the works identified by van Meeteren et al. as evidence of a ‘straw man rising’ in (mis) representations of GCR literature(s) are not directly concerned with critiquing GCR but rather with seeking to advance strands of urban research outside/beyond GCR. To the extent that some of these diverse works sought to contribute explicitly to a postcolonial urban studies agenda formulated by Jennifer Robinson, one may argue that they did not need to make any direct reference to GCR publications, but merely to cite Robinson (2002 and/or 2006). After all, Robinson had already done the foundational work of identifying aspects of GCR literature(s) that a postcolonial urban studies agenda opposed – aspects that not only do van Meeteren et al. now acknowledge as having been valid but which, as they also note, GCR scholars did not speak back to at the time – such that it seems entirely reasonable that postcolonial urban scholars would build from Robinson’s critical foundations rather than reexcavate them through further in-depth engagement with GCR. The question is thus perhaps not so much why work following Robinson reiterated her critique – why not reiterate ‘legitimate concerns’ (van Meeteren et al., 2016: 4) and cite the person who raised and elaborated them as shorthand for having to rehearse her argument in full? – but why the authors who did so felt the need to cite any GCR work at all.

Specific pieces of GCR work have been cited by the so-called postcolonial urban scholars seeking to make contributions that relate to particular strands of critique of GCR. For example, as part of a short essay intended to suggest ways of extending attention to cities that remained ‘off the map’ of urban studies, Anant Maringanti and I cited globalization and world cities (GaWC) work that presented inventories of global cities based on a certain level of producer services capability. van Meeteren et al. acknowledge that pursuit of such a GaWC project ‘would have led GCR to act as a catalyst in the production of uneven geographies of urban studies’ (p. 5). Anant Maringanti and I made reference to the two most widely cited such GaWC outputs (Beaverstock et al., 1999, 2000) to exemplify influential global city research that, in our view, served to (re)produce geographical hierarchies of attention and value in urban studies (Bunnell and Maringanti, 2010). I believe that our contribution was in line with prevailing conventions of academic writing and citation, but I do also acknowledge that more care should have been taken to specify that GaWC – or even a particular project within GaWC – was a subset of ‘research on global or world cities’ (p. 417). van Meeteren et al. are right to flag potential problems with how particular projects or even specific publications are made to stand for whole fields and can serve representationally to freeze the fields concerned in time. Meanwhile, I believe that there remains a need to extend the range of cities that we study and to diversify the range of ways in which we study them – to practice urban and regional studies in less metrocentric ways.

van Meeteren et al. contend that in another coauthored piece of writing, I ‘single[d] out a very particular project within GCR to address the literature at large’ (p. 7; referring to Bunnell and Sidaway, 2012). Again, highly cited GaWC work was referred to, this time to exemplify scholarship that classifies world cities into hierarchical layers or levels. What van Meeteren et al. fail to note, however, is that James Sidaway and I explicitly cast such work as emerging from ‘researchers connected to GaWC’ (not as somehow representing all GCR, unless GaWC is understood to encompass GCR), and that we did so alongside mention of other, rather different, strands of scholarship on the city-globalization nexus (e.g. Sassen, 2002 and Huyssen, 2008 are cited in the opening paragraph, where GaWC is also first mentioned). We also made mention of the fact the GaWC network had helped to expand the range of cities incorporated into global city analysis, rather than implying that GCR had been content to deal with the same old small subset of cities around the world. I do not doubt that van Meeteren and colleagues could pick out other phrases from what James Sidaway and I wrote in order to counterargue their case, especially given that the piece concerned was a preface of only around 1000 words in which engagement with any literature(s) was necessarily abbreviated. Much of what is being quibbled over here has to do with the fine grain of writing and nomenclature. While that is clearly something that we all must take seriously as part of our professional lives, there is a danger that associated dialogues draw attention and energies away from other pressing urban issues and human geographies – not least issues of uneven development that van Meeteren et al cast as a core concern of GCR or the more-than-discursive violence experienced by countless urbanites, especially in the Global South, whose capacity to exercise ‘voice’ really is limited. Turning back inwards, I take the essay by van Meeteren et al. as raising legitimate concerns with citation and academic writing practices in general rather than as revealing anything particularly problematic about postcolonial urban scholars’ limited engagement with or willful misrepresentation of diverse GCR contributions.

It is clear from their essay that van Meeteren et al. appreciate that all representations are situated, selective and partial. They demonstrate that this applies to the partial representations of GCR made by ‘postcolonial’ urban scholars. But the same, of course, may be said to apply to van Meeteren and colleagues’ own presentation of GCR, and of postcolonial urban scholarship. Their coverage of global cities research deploys ‘GCR’ to denote wider literature (or literatures). As they put it, ‘for the sake of our argument…we stick to “global cities” as a common signifier for the literature(s) at large, even if certain authors refer to “world cities” (note 1). At the very least, this implies acknowledgement of other scholars who – perhaps for the sake of other arguments – may wish seek to distinguish between ‘world’ and ‘global’ cities. Other scholars may, accordingly, have different conceptions of what is, or should be, among the core objectives or tenets of GCR, if they recognize that abbreviation at all among the myriad of signifiers used to (re)present diverse literature(s) in different ways! As for the ‘postcolonial critiques’ that van Meeteren et al. take issue with, the defining feature of the publications that they have selected seems to be simply that they make some kind of (often passing) criticism of global or world cities research, irrespective of whether the authors concerned profess any allegiance to or identification with a postcolonial urban agenda. There is nothing to be gained from trying to turn the tables on van Meeteren and his colleagues here – to find them guilty of the very practices that they critique. My point here is one of emphasizing the inevitable selectivity and simplification involved in attempts to represent any flourishing field, the boundaries of which are never clear, agreed upon or static.

Rather than focusing on the partiality of representation, what is more important, it seems to me, is the underlying motivation for and effects of partial engagement. Among the powerful urban players to have made enthusiastic use of a very small subset of GCR works are policymakers and business interests concerned with how to make cities globally competitive. In a recent publication which touched upon this topic, I noted that this was not the intention of the authors of the GaWC texts (or associated tables and visualizations) concerned (Bunnell, 2015). I also agree with Meeteren et al. that policymakers and global firms would have appropriated or devised other legitimation tools for global city making even if they had not been able to extract them from GaWC/GCR. I revisit this topic here as a reminder of how an approving (and, admittedly, extra-academic) partial engagement with GCR has led to neoliberal urbanism-reinforcing outcomes that van Meeteren et al. clearly would not welcome. This contrasts sharply with postcolonial urban scholars’ engagement with much of the same emblematic GaWC/GRC output. Here the partial engagement has been critical and distancing rather than one of enthusiastic embrace. Significantly, however, for van Meeteren et al., postcolonial scholars’ critical partial engagement has had largely positive outcomes in the form of ‘generally good quality scholarship’. Of course, I realize that van Meeteren et al. are irritated by the often casual and cursory means and rhetorical devices through which GCR has been critiqued in such contributions, but how important is that if the scholarly end products have ‘obvious merits’ (p. 7)?

Much of this commentary has been taken up with detailed examination of selected fragments of the wide-ranging contribution made by van Meeteren and his GCR colleagues. This is mainly because I have sought to respond to the authors’ coverage of my own previous work – defending some aspects while acknowledging well-taken points of critique – but the selectivity or partiality of my response is also diagnostic of the wider academic conventions and practices that I have considered in the preceding paragraphs. When reading van Meeteren and colleagues’ piece, I found myself nodding in agreement with many of their arguments, but eventually focused down mostly on selected points of counter-critique. Similarly, in relation to published work – in many disciplines and transdisciplinary fields appearing more quickly than anyone could possibly hope to read in toto – it is commonplace to focus on selected aspects that one finds unsatisfactory as starting points for building alternatives. Sometimes such alternatives may take shape within existing (sub)fields, sometimes they may involve initiation of, or contributions to, new ones. The subset of the vast and expanding ‘GCR’ literature(s) that I have read includes much that I value even as there have been instances where I have focused on points of critique in seeking to contribute to other agendas. I have contributed to world/global city research in the past (Bunnell et al., 2006) and my recent book is about a world city of the past (Bunnell, 2016), engaging scholarship on historical antecedents to world/global cities of the late 20th century (e.g. King, 1990; Wilks-Heeg, 2003). I have a foot – or at least a toe or two – in GCR, and was even coauthor of a piece that appeared on the GaWC website (Sparke et al., 2004, originally published as GaWC Research Bulletin 135), but I also value the fact that other toes are planted elsewhere. Engagement with aspects of GCR as part of a wider transdisciplinary field of urban studies does not, in my view, mean having to position oneself or (all of) one’s work within the ‘invisible college’, any more than being identified as an insider precludes ‘polemical pluralism’. I value van Meeteren et al.’s essay, above all, as a reminder that the boundaries between (sub)fields should be seen as porous and provisional. The selected constitutive outside for one set of contributions may be a collaborative resource for others in the future as part of the ongoing remapping of a plurality of legitimate interests.