The regional-urban world under Global South great transformation: a renewed multi-scalar perspective for the rest

Abstract

Urban and regional studies that address the new spatial dynamics under capitalist transformations have poorly contemplated the macro-historical perspectives that link global geopolitical and geoeconomic processes, regional macro configurations and national trajectories. The introduction of these topics in an articulated multi-scalar perspective becomes relevant for understanding the way in which the transformation process experienced by the World-System since the beginning of this century restructures the global-spatial dynamic, hierarchizes the macro regional and national strategies, and finally affects the regional and urban processes at the periphery. Along with observing the displaced centrality of the Global North by the unprecedented protagonism of the Global South (GS), particularly Asia, we highlight how a new map of spatial relations between the World-System’s macro-regions is challenging the rest of Global South (Latin America and Africa) to re-organize a multi-scalar strategy of development. To account for this, urban and regional dynamics, +need to be analytically decapsulated and placed within the spatial and historical particularities that global processes, macro regional formations and national trajectories assume in an interpenetrated way.