The Global City Comes Home: Internalised Globalisation in Frankfurt Rhine-Main

'New urban politics' in the 1980s coincided largely with a process of intense restructuring and globalisation. Mindful of the specific problems of transposition of American concepts to the European case, this paper revisits the Frankfurt urban regime. Based on interviews with decision-makers in 2008, the paper argues that today's Frankfurt regime has turned its attention inward. The region, while still important for the structured coherence of the global city, has been depoliticised as problematic issues tend to be sectoralised and cast in technological terms. The global has lost its lustre as a self-explanatory concept for urban development and urban politics has regrouped as a set of functionalist specialty discourses such as that of the creative city. As city politics was re-localised, it also became largely devoid of traditional political conflict. Instead, questions of social justice and diversity were partly integrated into the formal and bureaucratic political process.