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  • Sanctuary San FranciscoRecent Developments in Local Sovereignty and Spatial Politics
  • Keally McBride1 (bio)

In 1985, then Mayor Diane Feinstein presided over the designation of San Francisco as a sanctuary city; just one of what would eventually be twenty-two designated sanctuary cities in the United States.2 An integral part of the Sanctuary Movement, sanctuary cities provided asylum to citizens of Guatemala and El Salvador, whose right wing governments were supported by the Reagan administration. In 1989, San Francisco extended the same privileges to all immigrants and declared that no city resources or funds would be used in immigration enforcement, except as mandated by federal law.

This is just one illustration of San Francisco's self-positioning as a liberal refuge: a place that leads the world in progressive policies, whether it is in regard to the environment, sexuality, public spending and planning, employment regulations or health care. San Francisco has been stubbornly progressive during the past thirty years --being called "a San Francisco liberal" was intended to designate a radical political fringe. However, the city's economy and hence its cityscape has changed substantially during this same period. San Francisco still is a bastion for gay rights, animal rights, environmentalists, slow food advocates, communists, and immigrants from around the world, but it is also one of the much-touted economic powerhouses of the global economy. What does it mean to be a sanctuary city and a global city—a center of finance, technology and other hyper profitable enterprises?3

Another way to put this question is to ask what it means to have culture and political ideals that value social justice, refuge, tolerance and multiculturalism, and an economy that rewards competition and innovation, so much so that living in the San Francisco area has become virtually unaffordable for those who aren't amongst the winners of the global economy. New York City has seen a similar intensification of wealth, but the development of the city's economy was accompanied by a shift towards more conservativism in terms of urban policy as exemplified by the imprint of Rudolph Guiliani. San Francisco offers a fascinating example of how political ideals and economic trends can pull in opposite directions, and yet come to simultaneously define a common space.

Taking space as the focus of this analysis allows us to view the sanctuary city designation as it reveals unresolved tensions between local and national officials to assert sovereignty and the continuing diametric pull of political culture and economic development in San Francisco. A more traditional Marxist analysis would assume that economics would be determinate. Institutionalist paradigms would view sovereignty as unified over a given space. In this example, we can see how the local political culture has led to overt challenges to national sovereignty, at the same time that this political culture fails to determine the development of space within the city.

There has been a great deal of attention played to the relationship between space and sovereignty recently, thanks in part to the translation of Carl Schmitt's Nomos of the Earth into English. He argues that law and regulation must be literally grounded; in other words, before there can be law, there must first be appropriation of a given space. In The Nomos of the Earth, he describes the first system of international law, the Jus Publicum Europaeum, which divided the land on the earth into five different categories.4 There were different accepted practices of legality in each of the five spaces; the designation that is relevant here is the fifth category, the Free Occupiable Land. Schmitt points out that in spaces not yet colonized, virtually anything was allowed, it was a space outside of bounded war and mutual recognition.

This spatial differentiation created by a legal system that recognizes its own suspension in given spheres helps to elaborate the relationship between sovereignty and space in San Francisco today. A quick survey of the past ten years suggests that the dynamic Schmitt described of creating a space outside of regulation still persists. Of course he argues that these places do not actually threaten the law as articulated elsewhere, precisely because they are bound spatially. A great deal of...

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