1938
"The degree to which the contemporary world may be said to be 'urban' is not fully or accurately measured by the proportion of the total population living in cities. The influences which cities exert upon the social life of man are greater than the ratio of the urban population would indicate, for the city is not only in ever larger degrees the dwelling-place and workshop of modern man, but it is the initiating and controlling center of economic, political, and cultural life that has drawn the most remote parts of the world into its orbit and woven diverse areas, peoples, and activities into a cosmos." - Wirth 1937: 2
1991
"The capitalism of Karl Marx or Fernand Braudel is not the total capitalism of the Marxists (Braudel, 1985). It is a skein of somewhat longer networks that rather inadequately embrace a world on the basis of points that become centres of profit and calculation. In following it step by step, one never crosses the mysterious limes that should divide the local from the global. The organization of American big business ... is a braid of networks materialized in order slips and flow charts, local procedures and special arrangements, which permit it to spread to an entire continent so long as it does not cover that continent. One can follow the growth of an organization in its entirety without ever changing levels and without ever discovering 'decontextualized' rationality. The very size of a totalitarian State is obtained only by the construction of a network of statistics and calculations, of offices and inquiries, which in no way corresponds to the fantastic topography of the total State ... . Yet these 'networks of power' and these 'lines of force' do extend across the entire world. The markets described by the Economy of conventions are indeed regulated and global, even though none of the causes of that regulation and that aggregation is itself either global or total. The aggregates are not made from some substance different from what they are aggregating ... . No visible or invisible hand suddenly descends to bring order to dispersed and chaotic individual atoms. The two extremes, local and global, are much less interesting than the intermediary arrangements that we are calling networks." - Latour 1993 [1991]: 121-2
1998
"Global city formation cannot be adequately understood without an examination of the matrices of state territorial organization within and through which it occurs. The globalization of urbanization and the glocalization of state territorial power are two deeply intertwined moments of a single process of global restructuring through which the scales of capitalist sociospatial organization have been reconfigured since the early 1970s." - Brenner 1998: 27
2004
"'Glocalisation' refers to the twin process whereby, firstly, institutional/regulatory arrangements shift from the national scale both upwards to supra-national or global scales and downwards to the scale of the individual body or to local, urban or regional configurations and, secondly, economic activities and inter-firm networks are becoming simultaneously more localised/regionalised and transnational." - Swyngedouw 2004: 25
2004
"From his earliest works Heidegger refused the separation of mind and matter, and analysed what he called being-in-the-world. Lefebvre notes the importance of Heidegger's analysis of world — as image, symbol, myth and place. For Heidegger, in a way similar to our dealings with equipment, we encounter space geometrically only when we pause to think about it, when we conceptualize it." - Elden 2004b: 188
2005
"The historical moment we call globalisation demonstrates that the calculable understanding of space has been extended to the globe, which means that even as the state becomes less the focus of attention territory remains of paramount importance. Territory therefore is a political way of conceiving of calculable space (see Elden, 2005b)." - Elden 2005a: 823
2009
"[U]nder contemporary circumstances, the urban can no longer be viewed as a distinct, relatively bounded site; it has instead become a generalized, planetary condition in and through which the accumulation of capital, the regulation of political-economic life, the reproduction of everyday social relations and the contestation of the earth and humanity’s possible futures are simultaneously organized and fought out. In light of this, it is increasingly untenable to view urban questions as merely one among many specialized subtopics to which a critical theoretical approach may be applied ... [but, on the contrary, each of its key methodological and political orientations] requires sustained engagement with contemporary worldwide patterns of capitalist urbanization and their far-reaching consequences for social, political, economic and human/nature relations." - Brenner 2009: 206
2012
"Both Nancy and Lefebvre understand globalization as a fundamentally violent and unequal process that unfolds through the uneven expansion of a particular sort of urban space. They both strive to articulate a critical stance towards this process by opposing globalization to the idea of mondialisation or world forming. While their respective approaches differ in important ways, they both provide indispensable critical tools for conceptualizing the urban planet and its political possibilities. [772] ...
"Globalization ... has something threatening and overwhelming about it. The qualities of enclosure, finality, and totalistic lack of differentiation are central to it. Mondialisation, in contrast, stands for incompleteness, becoming, openness, natality. The term refers to becoming-worldwide, or 'worldwide becoming', 'world forming', or the 'creation of the world'. [775]" - Madden 2012, see also Nancy 2007: 33-4
"Globalization ... has something threatening and overwhelming about it. The qualities of enclosure, finality, and totalistic lack of differentiation are central to it. Mondialisation, in contrast, stands for incompleteness, becoming, openness, natality. The term refers to becoming-worldwide, or 'worldwide becoming', 'world forming', or the 'creation of the world'. [775]" - Madden 2012, see also Nancy 2007: 33-4
