Portals of Globalization as lieux de mémoire

Abstract

When looking at global lows scholars have increasingly put emphasis on nodes and the exercise regulatory power at certain places that are central to the organization of the mobility of people, goods, capital, and cultural patterns. Some authors have even developed a whole theory around the notion of global cities, which may not only become the hubs of globalized capitalism but also the hotspots of current class confrontation. Such approaches are rather loosely and sometimes even only rhetorically related to interpretations of global processes, where the local and the global are the only poles remaining in a borderless world. There is no doubt that global processes play out at local level, but there is ample evidence that other spatial formats (both scales of territoriality and non-territorial ones) remain important as well, or even gain weight in the organization and control of global lows. What interests me in particular in this context, is the role and function of places where global lows arrive and depart, are channelled through, and leave their stamp not only in warehouses but also in the mindset of people. It seems to me a functionalist reductionism to see them only as command centres of capitalism. Instead, I propose to look at them as growing in numbers and variety, and to focus on their histories, which has left a cultural legacy and may explain the unevenness of our mental maps, when it comes to the remembrance of globalization and its efect on current global processes.