ambitious urban experiments in the colonies of Europe. What then is distinctive about this historical moment and its urban experiments? Roy and Ong (2011) have argued that today’s worlding cities are nodes of an emergent global order marked by the ascendancy of Asian powerhouses, from the Gulf States to India and China. The Asian city then is a specific ‘milieu of intervention’ formed and reformed through the assembling of what Allen and Cochrane (2007, p. 1171) have called “parts of elsewhere.” These elsewheres are often Asianscapes, deterritorialized images of Asian capitalism through which new territories of accumulation and hegemony are produced. Put another way, worlding cities is a conceptual framework for crafting a latitudinal analysis of the urbanism of the global South, be it Simone’s (2010, p. 16) understanding of such latitudes being “hundreds and hundreds of small initiatives” or Ong’s (2006) analysis of “lateral spaces of production” or Roy’s (2010) concern with the citationary structures of 21st century capitalism. Second, worlding practices are not simply the domain of governing and transnational elites. In his work on African cities, Simone (2001: 17), for example, highlights how practices of worlding are set into motion through the “state of being ‘cast out’ into the world.” For Simone, “worlding from below” involve “circuits of migration, resource evacuation, and commodity exchange.” It is in this sense that worlding cities are mass dreams rather than imposed visions. And it is in this sense that worlding cities is about new understandings of the political, those that exceed and elude the standard formats of social mobilization or subaltern resistance and instead are complex compositions – or assemblages of collusions and subversions in the interstices of global urbanism. Indeed, it is precisely because worlding cities are ‘precarious accomplishments’ that it is possible to consider new horizons of politics, especially those that disrupt the referential practices of assembling and worlding. There is thus the poignant story of endangered slum-dwellers in Delhi who are as convinced with the aesthetic normativity of the Asian world-class city as the technocratic
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