An important question is whether it is also a space for a new politics, one going beyond the politics of culture and identity while likely to remain at least partly embedded in it. The space constituted by the worldwide grid of global cities, a space with new economic and political potentialities, is perhaps the most strategic, though not the only space for the formation of transnational identities and communities (e.g., Bonilla et al., 1999 Glasius et al., 2002). It has emerged as a transnational space for the formation of new claims by global capital but also by other types of actors, one way in which cities can become part of the live infrastructure of global civil society. We can think of this global grid as constituting a new economic geography of centrality, one that cuts across national boundaries and increasingly across the old North-South divide. The organisational side of the global economy materialises in a worldwide grid of strategic places, uppermost among which are major international business and financial centres-global cities. Further, going global has been partly facilitated and conditioned by the infrastructure of the global economy, even as the latter is often the object of those oppositional politics. Multiple types of claim-making and oppositional politics articulate these developments. Globalisation and the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have enabled a variety of local activists and organisations to enter international arenas once exclusive to national states.
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