"In the popular imagination, politics is at once removed from humane and responsible activity. It is parasitic on the social, the economic and the cultural. It is inherently uncreative and usually a source of corruption" (Isin 290). This describes politics in the old cities, but politics in the new global city is different. Politicizing the global city means recognizing a new social order. The old Aristotlian idea of a polis was a self-contained community, with active citizens. This is no longer true of the global city (Isin 292). The political side of the city was completely separate from the social side of the city in these types of communities, and this no longer works. The two cannot be separated, and people need to get involved in the politics of the global city.
"Aristotlean and later republican conception of political science was action oriented...the people who were for it had the responsibility of governing" (Isin 292). A political science of some kind is necessary if we are to take responsibility for ourselves. The problem is that the political science we have at present does not work because it focuses on the state, not the people (Isin 293). Democracy means that people who were once the innocent subjects of government are now agents of their own destiny.
The definition of the global city is not yet clear, and is often thought of in terms of the capital cities such as London, New York, or Tokyo, and at other times as the state or the nation, or the municipality (Isin 294-296). It has no clear definition which is accepted by all the disciplines as yet. There is question as to which discipline it really falls under - social, geographic, and political. There seems to have arisen a separate science of urbanism. If urbanism is used to denote the process used to create and maintain our environment - the place in the natural world where we live - then the politics of urbanism is the process by which we c...