In the late 1990s, Lagos and Mexico City were granted a high degree of autonomy by their respective federal states over their economic development, taxation, social policy, and policing. Their political arenas were institutionalized and recognized with the election of a mayor in Mexico City in 1997, and a governor in Lagos in 1999. Prior to this, in the 1980s, the political spaces of the “global cities” of the Global North and the metropolises of Europe had also opened back up and been granted relative autonomy. From the 1970s, the new globalization had begun to decenter national accumulation, producing conditions favorable to a “return” of the cities of the Global North as major political actors, particularly in the economic development sphere. Transformed by their dominant economic actors, the economies of these cities were disjoined from their national economies and coupled to international growth. These economic transformations resulted in a relative disembedding of the metropolises of the Global North from their state spaces, as a result of which their constituent social, political, and economic relations partly broke free from the framework of the state. In this article, I explore whether the same path was taken by Lagos and Mexico City, which were integrated into the new globalization a little later than their counterparts in the Global North—primarily due to their states’ oil resources.
Highlighting the concentration of advanced activities in the big metropolises of the Global South, economic geographers have argued for their relative disembedding “from above,” in a manner similar to the global cities of the Global North…