Urban
ministry in a global age
A conversation with Andrew Davey
by Bill Wylie-Kellermann
New York is no longer merely an American city. It has become, in the emerging world order, one of the first-tier global cities, a hub in the worldwide network of financial flows. When the very technology of the global economy, airline jets in this case, were turned into weapons against it in September, it was surely to be accounted as much an attack on global headquarters as it was an attack on the U.S. Indeed, not surprisingly, the missing and dead include citizens from England, Germany, Japan, and Canada but also from Mexico, India, Australia, China and some 30 other nations. Barely a few weeks prior, Andrew Davey of the Church of England and Witness contributing editor Bill Wylie-Kellermann had spoken by phone between Detroit and another global city, London. Their conversation meandered through the chapter headings of Davey’s new book, Urban Christianity and Global Order (SPCK, 2001; American edition to be published by Hendrickson in 2002). It touched, analytically and theologically, upon the ways in which globalization is altering the face of the city and thereby of urban ministry. Ironically, it came to rest on a prescient point: the vulnerability of the global city to terrorism and collapse. The attack on the World Trade Center may indeed have changed everything, including how we hear and read this conversation. It is our hope, in turn, that this conversation might alter to some degree how we read the attack on the World Trade Center, how we sift through the rubble for its meaning and consider the future.
AD: You’re right that globalization means so many different things to different people. One of the things I’ve tried to do is to tie it down quite tightly to the way in which certain forces are reordering our world. The particular aspect of this is the compression of space and time. Things happen almost instantaneously throughout the world and that takes us both into the world of the media and into the world of financial movement. There are, indeed, aspects of globalization which are to do with the movement of people, but I think it’s important to see it firstly in terms of a changing ordering in the world.
BWK: I know that you’d include, as part of this neo-liberalism and deregulation, the technological movement of capital with the barrier-free movement of resources and consumer goods as well.
AD: That is also part of the way in which our world is being reordered in favor of certain groups and people. But we do not yet know where this project is going to end. The world is still globalizing. We haven’t suddenly had the advent of globalization and we can’t speak yet of "before and after globalization." The world’s resources are beginning to form new clusters around certain points in the world, primarily cities, and we are seeing resources shifting away from certain other regions, be it Africa or parts of Latin America.
BWK: You’re raising here the connections between globalization and the city. How is the technological infrastructure as well as the neo-liberal political agenda affecting the urban landscape around the world?
AD: Well, I think early commentators on globalization interpreted globalization as the end of the city. We had a lot of talk about telly-cottaging or the ability to work from home in the paperless office. But what we are witnessing is the fact that business, financial business, cannot operate without the proximity that’s possible within a city and without the type of infrastructure that "informational capitalism," to use writer Manuel Castells’ term, demands. Informational capitalism requires a certain level in the quality of communication. Yes, you can access things like the web from remote desert villages, but if we are to talk about the quality of infrastructure that is needed, we will be dependent on cities for a long time to come. And it’s not just an issue of the concentration of resources, but the concentration of what is called "connectivity." In the global south, in Africa and Latin America, we’re witnessing capital cities that have a certain concentration of those resources. But you’d set up your internet company which serves Zimbabwe in the northern hemisphere because the speed of your resources there will be so much quicker. It is in this sense that observers like Castells talk about the "disinformation" of Africa, the way in which whole parts of the globe become excluded very quickly because of the quality of the resources they have.
BWK: Aren’t we talking about several tiers of global cities here?
AD: Yes. Saskia Sassen would be very specific that there are only three, possibly four, cities in the world now which warrant the title "global city." Those would be London, New York and Tokyo. It is those cities which really have concentrated the command aspect of the global economy. And then you would see different hierarchies emerging below. Most of the American cities and most of our cities outside of London would be in that second hierarchy.
BWK: Sassen writes from Chicago, which does have a strong global connection. At present it’s experiencing a huge housing boom and gentrification, much of which is based precisely on this phenomenon. On the other hand, I live in Detroit, which is essentially the loser. What Detroit’s grasping at for an economic base is casinos and ball parks.
AD: That’s very similar to what we’ve seen happening in Britain. Birmingham is probably a second-tier city. It still has a reasonable industrial base, but the types of industry have shifted over the years from heavy engineering to more hi-tech industries. Outside of the key cities, as with Detroit, you see an increasing assumption that they will be dependent on tourist and lesser industries. So you see cities putting in their bid as the "music capital" of Britain or the "space-and-technology capital." And all this is primarily based on multi-million-pound tourist attractions which they hope will regenerate the cities primarily through visitors, but also by possibly attracting allied industries such as music recording or high-technology communication. Globalization is very definitely about some part of the country over-heating because there is such a concentration of activity and other parts declining.
Economic activity then restructures cities socially. One of the key concepts from Saskia Sassen is the issue of "valorization," the way in which in the global economy certain activities, certain people, and certain places become over-valorized. We see this in London in the way in which financial districts have astronomical rents and land values and these are then passed on through the rents in the sectors that support them. At the same time other activities are under-valorized, often in the public services. It’s very difficult at the moment in inner London to maintain our health and education services because those who work in them are paid so differently from the people involved in other activities in the city that they then can no longer afford property prices even in some of the less gentrified areas. The irony is that those office lots or service areas which are so over-valorized are very dependent on under-valorized labor groups.
BWK: Right. People get under-valorized. The poor and working poor.
AD: Not least the cleaners. Offices could not exist and are not sustainable without the assumption that a very underpaid, undervalued group will be willing to clean, to provide security, to work in the canteens, providing basic services on which those high-tech office blocks depend. And looking on your side of the Atlantic, the janitors’ strike and the public transport strikes in Los Angeles are maybe an example of the way in which those dependencies can be forced upon the groups who dominate the city.
BWK: Shifting ground to the biblical, you do a really wonderful and fairly quick survey of ancient Hebrew communities as well as of Jesus and early church issues related to urban ministry.
AD: I guess that comes out as a slight dissatisfaction with the way the Bible has been used in urban debates of the past, the way in which it has always been assumed there was a grand narrative here: Either the people of faith are seen as those who were in control of the city or the city gets a very bad press with the "city of man" (I use the term very advisedly) based upon the blood of Cain and therefore a cursed environment from which we’d best withdraw or leave other people to run.
BWK: In that connection let me raise the city of Babel. The traditional reading is that the arrogance and pretension of the tower issued in the curse, almost as though the diversity of language and culture were itself a curse! Of course, a more post-modern reading could see the single language, the dominant culture, as central to the imperial project. You know, kind of like English-only, or Babylonian-only, and that what is a curse to the centralized project, in fact, is the multicultural diversity of the workers, cultural resistance of the brick makers, that brings down the centralized project. And God’s at work in that.
AD: One of the things that we’ve failed to deal with in the past, too, has been the urban contact of Jesus or the urban context of the first Christians, a lot of which involves reading between the lines or filling in the gaps. We have a memory of Jesus which doesn’t always acknowledge the urbanization that was happening in Galilee or the globalization project along which the first Christians were able to connect. I guess most of our generations were brought up with images of the Gospel coming in at the right time and being able to spread on the back of the Roman Empire. We do find the early Christian communities exploiting the infrastructure of that globalization project, but at the same time being very aware of the corruption of its ordering. Rome was a globalization project solely based on sustaining the city of Rome.
BWK: For me the language of the powers has been important in thinking about the city theologically. I’m just starting to use it as a lens for thinking more about the global principalities.
AD: I was struck in the second volume of Max Stackhouse’s series, God and Gobalization: Religions and the Powers of the Common Life (2000), how he uses "the authorities" as language for the professions. There are indeed challenges that these face from globalization, but the integrity of the profession which he is trying to maintain is the integrity of the professional expert. I think that’s where someone like Leonie Sandercock (Towards Cosmopolis, 1998) comes into this discussion very quickly. She takes on particularly the professionalism of planners and architects, those who are remodeling the cities in a very interventionist way. And one of the problems about intervention is that you do not come in to listen to the stories, the expectations or the hopes of the people who live there, but you come in with solutions already mapped out from above. I suspect that there is an element of this within the Stackhouse book as well – that education, the law, health, are very much about professional competencies, about professional integrity and not about how these professions might actually be challenged by the people they are there to serve. Sandercock is very much about rediscovering an insurgent practice for the planner and the architect which engages them with the communities which then become the protagonists of their own reshaping.
BWK: I like that. It strikes me that what you are saying about the professions is pretty much how Stackhouse would view the profession of theological ethics. I suspect he’d imagine that a circle of ethicists, basically from the top, could nudge and tweak and somehow help shape the globalization project, whispering a few words in the ears of the rulers and powers.
AD: I think this also connects with what we see in this whole movement termed public theology or global ethics. One of the things that we have to be reimagining at the moment is the church’s ability to provide neutral space, or what Ed Soja, the California geographer, would call third space, an environment, a forum, a space in which insurgent alternatives for society can be reimagined. I think as far as the church goes, we might also provide some of the spaces in which such experiments take place. However, that involves opening space not only for the experts, but involving the people that actually are the communities in which we are presently working.
BWK: You are opening up the whole question of urban practice in relation to globalization. Do you know a book called Grass Roots Post-Modernism? The authors are Gustavo Estava and Madhu Suri Prakash. They’re arguing against the commonplace, "Think globally, act locally." In a certain sense their concern goes right to the heart of the challenge you’re putting to the church. They’re raising the temptation of grandiosity in anti-globalization. They reject the notion that it’s possible to build a global counter-force to globalized capital. They argue, in the tradition of Gandhi or Wendell Berry, say, that we need to be thinking locally, with the premise that this will generate not so much a common "no" to global capitalism, but a multiplicity and rich diversity of alternative "yeses."
AD: One of the things which I fear about efforts to do "global ethics" is the notion that religious leaders can make a difference at that level. I think we see all too well, whether it’s in Palestine or Northern Ireland, that regardless of what the religious leaders do, the tribal politics of the street remain the strongest. And the creation of unethical communities is just as much a local reality as the creation of ethical communities. That also connects with the way in which we encourage people to think globally and act locally.
What we’ve witnessed with Jubilee 2000 is that only when it caught the local imagination, when it took people onto the street, did it really began to have an effect. It wasn’t about religious leaders having quiet words with the director of the World Bank. It was actually about religious leaders taking it to the world as a matter of urgency because they had so much pressure coming in from their own constituencies.
Mobilizing that kind of movement is absolutely critical to the way in which we relate between the local and the global. Maybe we’ll also witness something like this with the environment and climate change in the next few years, because we’re going to need to do it somehow! We must use the church as the opportunity to operate both locally and globally because many of the networks already exist for us. We are proclaiming the simultaneous possibility of global and local connectivity. But a word of caution: We may also find ourselves sidetracked by some who would wish to see "global" in terms of centralization rather than the dispersal of the network.
BWK: I’m interested to know whether you would see parish (and I understand we have different histories here), as representing a useful sense of turf, you know? Parish is very much a turf-based approach to ministry, and so an entrée to local struggle. It has the very feet-on-the-ground approach which ends up actually engaging the global forces from a community base. It’s like David Korten arguing that a key response to globalization is to build what he calls "social capital," essentially a community of real relationships. Or like Jeremiah telling the "resident aliens" (in Greek, the parachoi from which parish, right?) to put down local roots even in exile, even in Babylon.
AD: We come to this in the Church of England with a certain amount of ambivalence because we are still very strictly divided up into geographical parishes. When that’s the only thing you’re concerned with, the pejorative sense of "parochial" creeps in very quickly. But I do think knowing what is happening underneath your own nose on your own turf is the beginning of any sort of ethical discourse, of any ethical actions. And it is quintessentially how we learn to live together as community. We, in the Church of England, are always very cautious to distinguish between the parish and the church, because the parish, the place where everyone lives, is the pastoral concern of the church. It isn’t who shows up on Sunday morning. It is in true celebration on behalf of the parish that the roots of Anglican liturgy begin.
BWK: I think you’re quite right. The need in the U.S. is to push local congregations that are often disconnected from their context to think in terms of actually having a geography, a place that needs to be honored, developed, a space where community is built. But I’m not aware of people who are doing church-based organizing thinking of that work in relation to globalization. This organizing essentially develops new, alternative, democratic structures at the moment that state and national structures are being disempowered.
AD: There’s a certain parochialism whether the campaign is to amend living wages or the immediate environment or the immediate power structures of the city. We need models that actually connect issues of living wage in North America or Europe with issues of living wage for those who supply us. We’re beginning to see networks emerge concerning what might be termed "globalization from below." Something we need to look at is how the churches can underpin some of that with the connections which they already have. For example, within the Anglican Communion we’ve talked for years about partnership between dioceses, but have we ever looked at what economic activity connects those dioceses? I cite one very pioneering venture we have going on at the moment between a very poor part of Britain and community groups in Manila and the way in which through the personal encounter these issues are being raised on a larger scene.
BWK: What’s the name of that campaign?
AD: That is the group that connects Christian Aid with Church Action on Poverty. These are two groups who have worked independently in the past, one concerned with the international development agenda, one concerned with the domestic poverty agenda, but who are recognizing now the two are so inextricably linked that they cannot work without each other.
BWK: Let me raise a question about the use of the global technological infrastructure. There are obviously all sorts of ways in which the social movements can be networked. But I do think that the technology is somehow determinative, that it does have a life of its own and that it does shape us. The technology itself draws us systematically into its system, so I’m quite wary. I want the church to be thinking critically about the technology instead of just jumping on the bandwagon. I don’t see that critical thinking.
AD: Oh, I can see this operating on so many different levels as well. One takes us back to the scriptures. We could never advocate a complete withdrawal from globalization just as we could never advocate a complete withdrawal from the city, although we can be ambivalent and derogatory about some aspects of it. After all, the first Christians didn’t say "We’re not going to use roads because they’re built by the Romans!" Sounds like a Monty Python line! I think that sort of technophobia rather frivolous. But it does take us into the debate about at what stage does connectivity become a human right, because if you exclude people from it, you are excluding them from a major aspect of social life in the world today.
BWK: I understand. The famous digital divide.
AD: This is also a civil society point: When local authorities begin to put key information on web sites, on certain types of access, you’re beginning to exclude people immediately. And once again, the whole issue of connectivity in Africa and other parts of the world immediately comes up.
So I see the issue as who controls the technology. Obviously you have the ongoing debates on that concerning Microsoft in the U.S., but it also focuses in on the physical nature of that technology – where are some of the key components being sourced in the world? It’s the issue of fair trade, of sweatshops and whatever. I mean, what happens when all this copper wire is being sourced from Namibia, but being processed in Europe and the Middle East? So there are a whole host of questions that go way beyond the infrastructure and the power control of information technology to some of the key aspects of capitalism.
BWK: Here’s a big question: To what extent is the whole emerging system vulnerable and will it continue to be vulnerable, even to collapse, because it’s so locally dependent and it’s got its feet on the urban ground?
AD: I think vulnerability comes from a number of areas. I think of the whole power crisis in California as a supreme example of the way in which we assume that things are impregnable, but very quickly are proved to be highly dependent. I suspect that also this could lead us into some environmental issues, things we cannot control or have been unwilling to admit that we do have an impact on. In terms of London, one of the phenomena, probably ten years ago now, was when we had a lot of IRA activity in London and the two key financial sectors were targeted by IRA bombs. What looked like impregnable fortresses from the outside were quickly breached and the cities very literally shaken by it.
BWK: Does that foretell the tightening of exclusion which is exemplified by the gated and vertical communities?
AD: Yes, we’re very quickly seeing the equivalent of gated cities in the centers of our cities. In London at the moment we have a number of 1950s, 1960s office lots in prime locations being converted into accommodations, to lofts and flats and condominiums. And these are very, very secure communities. Actually, "communities" is completely the wrong word, because it’s a very individualistic way of living – fine views of the River Thames but no need to relate to the person living next door.
It’s related to the way in which some of the most repressive places in Southeast Asia have chosen to throw in their lot with a high-tech future. Singapore and Kuala Lumpur have very definitely gone down a high-tech route where the cities have been completely remodeled around assumptions of technology and the skills base. The Kuala Lumpur high-tech experiment put everyone on to the connectivity of the city, but at the same time maintains tight controls on some of the opposition, some of the dissident groups within that society.
BWK: It doesn’t bode well! Do you remain hopeful, particularly about the church?
AD: Yes, if Christians can muster the audacity to believe that they can evangelize the global processes through their own local and transnational witness! l
Andrew Davey is Assistant Secretary (Community and Urban Affairs) for the board of Social Responsibility, Church of England. He is also reviews editor on the advisory group for an excellent new journal with the longish name, City: analysis of trends, culture,theory, policy, action [+44(0) 125- 813002]. Witness contributing editor Bill Wylie-Kellermann is Director of Graduate Theological Urban Studies for SCUPE (the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education).