World cities as hegemonic projects: the politics of global imagineering in Montreal

A widespread mania for being or becoming a “world city” dominates urban politics today despite the fact that there is no consensus as to what such a thing is. While the economic aspect of a project to build a world city emphasizes capital accumulation, its political–cultural aspect stresses a cosmopolitan ethos and identity in the city. Through the built environment, spectacle and cosmopolitan culture, global capital “sells” a vision of the world city to local political constituencies towards the end of building a class alliance behind the banner of neoliberalism and free trade. This article analyzes the Montreal world city project through a historical study of class relations in the city and the wider political–economic environment since the 1960s. The rise to power of a francophone capitalist class in the 1980s and the defection of Montreal’s urban new middle class from social democracy and Québécois nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s to neoliberalism and cosmopolitanism in the 1980s and beyond are the key developments. The city’s small business and working classes have largely been left holding the bag, paying for cost overruns and industrial incentives, suffering increased air and noise pollution and declining public services, and largely failing to benefit at all from the developing global connectivity.