Global Cities in Analog: Modernism and Intercity Relations, 1900-1940

This article reflects on modernism from 1900 to 1940 on globalist terms. The turn of the twentieth century was a period of rapid urbanization, pronounced intellectual foment, labor politics, and severe colonial relations. Its upheavals formed the context for modernist approaches to city building. It was also a period of unprecedented interconnectedness where modernisms coalesced under a series of transnational movements. The Werkbund, Bauhaus, and Congrés Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) gained international recognition, influencing the creation of whole cities. Global cities studies, the research program most responsible for conceptualizing urban networks, have oddly little to say about the modernist period that prefigured the global city. This article breaks this arbitrary barrier in global cities studies, which equate global cities with the advent of digital linkages. By doing so, it recognizes the international city as its immediate precursor, fostering remarkable political, economic, and social changes under the heading of modernism. The twenty-first century neoliberal city archetype looks politically limited by comparison, its ossified institutions in need of reinvigoration.

Sustaining Labor Politics in Hard Times: Race, Labor, and Coalition Building in Racine, Wisconsin

This article explores the shifting politics of the Racine, Wisconsin, working-class community from World War II to the 1980s. It looks at the ways Black workers’ activism influenced local politics and how their efforts played out in the 1970s and 1980s. Case studies show how an expansive view of the boundaries of the Racine labor community led to cross-sector labor solidarity and labor-community coalitions that expanded economic citizenship rights for more working people in the city. The broad-based working-class vision pursued by the Racine labor community influenced local elections, housing and education, increased the number of workers with the power of unions behind them, and improved Racine's economic and social conditions. By the 1980s, Racine's labor community included not only industrial workers but also members of welfare and immigrants’ rights groups, parents of inner-city students, social workers and other white-collar public employees, and local and state politicians willing to support a class-based agenda in the political arena. Worker activists’ ability to maintain and adapt their notion of a broad-based labor community into the late twentieth century shows how this community and others like it responded to the upheaval of the 1960s social movements by creating a broad and relatively successful concept of worker solidarity that also incorporated racial justice.