Michael Peter Smith: Transnational Urbanism and Global Cities

Transnational urbanism is the concept with which the American sociologist Michael Peter Smith, a professor at the University of California, Davis, proposed understanding contemporary cities as places where the networks that migrants, firms, movements and states weave across borders intersect. He developed it in Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (2001) as a response to two dominant readings of globalisation: Saskia Sassen's global city, centred on finance, and Manuel Castells's space of flows, which seemed to dissolve places into networks. Smith argues that globalisation happens in concrete places and is made by concrete people, and that cities are where it is best seen.

Against the global city: transnationalism from below

His critique of the global city is methodological. Sassen and the world cities school explain the urban hierarchy from above, through the location of headquarters and financial markets, and reduce migrants to the low-wage labour force that economy needs. Smith reverses the gaze: migrants are not merely effects of globalisation but agents who produce it from below, with remittances, businesses, hometown associations, political networks and cultural practices that connect neighbourhoods of Los Angeles with municipalities in Michoacán or Guangdong. With Luis Guarnizo he called this transnationalism from below (1998), as against that of corporations and states.

Against the space of flows: locating globalisation

Against Castells's space of flows, Smith holds that transnational networks always land in places. Migrants live in neighbourhoods with a history, organise in churches and sports clubs, negotiate with city councils and police, and their global connections rest on that local life. That is why he proposes studying globalisation by locating it: following people and their practices between the places they link, instead of describing abstract flows. His ethnographic, multi-sited method has influenced a whole generation of studies on migration and the city.

Transnational politics and migrants' practical citizenship

Smith pays special attention to transnational politics. Governments of origin, Mexico is his main case, court their emigrants with collective remittance programmes, external voting and active consulates, while destination governments treat them as a problem of integration or security. Between the two, migrants themselves build a practical citizenship that fits neither state: they take part in the politics of their hometowns and of their neighbourhoods of residence, and in that double belonging Smith sees the seed of an urban citizenship not tied to nationality.

Critiques and relevance of transnational urbanism

His earlier work, The City and Social Theory (1979), already criticised theories that explained the city through abstract variables, density, size, heterogeneity, without attending to the agency of its inhabitants, and that concern runs through all his work. His critics object that the emphasis on migrants' agency underestimates the weight of the global economy and of the border regimes that constrain it, and that transnationalism, celebrated in the 1990s, has since been curtailed by walls, deportations and controls. Smith has replied that this is precisely why one must study how transnational practices persist and adapt under those limits.

For urban studies, Smith's transnationalism leaves a rule: a city of immigration, Los Angeles, New York, Madrid, Barcelona, cannot be understood by looking only within its boundaries, because part of its social, economic and political life takes place in other places to which its residents remain connected. And a consequence for local politics: recognising migrants as citizens of the city, with rights and voice, is recognising the transnational reality in which the city already lives.