Europe and the globalized city : the case of London

This paper explores the nature of the contemporary political identity of the European Union through an engagement with the literature on globalized cities and relational geographies. Taking London as its centrepoint, the paper begins by considering the contradictory position of cities within European space, and examines what an urbanist, rather than nationalist, vision of Europe might entail. Engaging with spatio-temporal conceptualizations of European urbanism, the paper suggests that speed, mobility, or financial transactions (rather than citizenship, unity, and particularist cultural integration) are the fundamental tenets of contemporary European identity. These structures, embedded in the Single European Act and Maastricht Treaty, may have a more significant impact than idealizations of European identity such as the hotly debated European Constitution. The paper examines several aspects of London's entanglement with Europe: it considers the attitudes embedded in recent urban regeneration projects which link into a `fast' geography of integration with a European high-speed rail and air network, and the anxiety surrounding a deregulated financial landscape of currency trading and business services involving New York and Tokyo as much as Frankfurt and Paris. The two unstable spatial signifiers of `city' and `Europe' are thus unpacked and explored.