What if the global city was postcolonial?

Abstract

Michiel van Meeteren, Ben Derudder and David Bassens’ essay asks whether the alleged ‘straw man’ of ‘global cities research’ (GCR) can speak in response to its postcolonial critics. Their intervention takes aim at the style of critique that postcolonial urban scholarship has employed and in particular the ways in which GCR has been framed as homogeneous, normatively charged and entangled in the neoliberalization of urban life. My response centres on two key issues that emerge from this intervention. Firstly, I reflect on their troubling account of routinized or rehearsed critique and suggest that this may be indicative of wider trends as academic work is increasingly accelerated, intensified and made measurable. Secondly, I invert the authors’ invitation to join the putative ‘invisible college’ and explore what postcolonial GCR might look like, its heuristic capacity to develop new meaning and the comparative potential of starting elsewhere. Together, the response addresses not just the practical problems of critique but also the ethics of different scholarly manoeuvres to assemble and deploy knowledge.