Abstract
The recent rise of cities in global environmental politics has stimulated remarkable debates about sustainable urban development and the geopolitics of a changing world order no longer defined by tightly bordered national regimes. This book explores this major theme by drawing on approaches that document the diverse histories and emergent geographies of “internationalism.” It is no longer possible, the book argues, to analyze the global politics of the environment without considering its various urbanization(s), wherein multiple actors are reforming, reassembling, and adapting to nascent threats posed by global ecological decay. The ongoing imposition and abrasion of different world orders—Westphalian and post-Westphalian—further suggests we need a wider frame to capture what the critical theorist of internationalism, Josep Antentas (Antipode, 47: 1101–1120, 2015), drawing on Daniel Bensaȉd, calls the “sliding scale of spaces.” The book will therefore appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in global sustainability, urban development, planning, politics, and international affairs. Case studies and grounded examples of green internationalism in urban action presented later in the discussion ultimately explore how select city-regions are trying to negotiate and actually work through this postulated dilemma.
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Notes
- 1.
The Delian League, led by Athens, united about 300 Greek city-states in the fifth century BCE against the imperial threat of Persian rule. Similarly, the Lombard League was a military alliance of Northern Italian city-states —or merchant republics—in the Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance that protected members against the Italian kingdom and Holy Roman Empire. Finally, from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, the Hanseatic League of cities fielded its own militaries, constructed an effective exchange mechanism and tariff system, and sometimes met as a Parliament, known as the Hansetage, albeit infrequently. Each are examples of alternative ways of organizing supra-local geopolitical space-economies, which arguably today are also in considerable flux.
- 2.
While Harvey’s own interpretation of dialects emphasizes the importance of class relations, ecologists also insist on flow and the hybrid nature of “things” (Barash, 2001). For their part too, post-structuralists highlight the dialectics of multiple forces, notably race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in the constitution or “thingification” of the material-ideational world.
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Dierwechter, Y. (2019). Introduction: Cities, States, Global Environmental Politics. In: The Urbanization of Green Internationalism. Cities and the Global Politics of the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01015-7_1
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