Race, re-spatialization and the struggle over the iconography of the global city

Drawing on the insights of Walter Benjamin, David Harvey and Aihwa Ong, I examine contemporary Chicago as a global city propelled by powerful logics of gentrification that are consequential to race, space and the struggle over the iconography of the present and the future. This struggle has a powerful material neoliberal dimension deeply imbricated in the new terms of race and society in the twenty-first century, an era of globalization. Analyzing key policy documents, I assess the city not as a fixed or bounded settlement or geographical location but as a powerful discursive field and mobilizing project of will formation integrating and disintegrating new resources, populations and identities in the contradictory and radically volatile environment of flexible and predatory capitalism. In this dynamic environment, race is deployed as a strategic multiculture for managing the rough edges of the transformation of the city from a localized, industrialized and administrative complex to a global formation foregrounding finance capital, tourism, gentrified construction and commercialized residential development. This mobilization of the city as a rejuvenated and revivified complex of desires and will formation—appropriating multiculture as a strategy of negotiating the powerful contradictions of its globalizing economies—is not only articulated to the bounded settlement of the city but is applied to the context of education in the reorganization of knowledge and the institutional restructuring of the urban university as it transforms itself into the new international “knowledge city.” The new knowledge city has its birthing in a time of fiscal woes and the rise of a narrow-minded, administrative instrumentalism that champions the universalization of the enterprise ethic as the salve to financial woes precipitated by state disinvestment in public education.