For me, places are articulations of 'natural' and social relations, relations that are not fully contained within the place itself. So, first, places are not closed or bounded - which, politically, lays the ground for critiques of exclusivity. Second, places are not 'given' - they are always in open-ended process. They are in that sense 'events'. Third, they and their identity will always be contested (we could almost talk about local-level struggles for hegemony).
If time is the dimension of change, then space is the dimension of coexisting difference. And that is both a source of nourishment (something that the globalisation gurus seem altogether to have foregone), and a challenge (how negotiate difference, how to address inequality, and so forth).
Our overvaluation of speed (time here as only money) has robbed us of many things that are at least equally precious.
Much of life for many people, even in the heart of the First World, still consists of waiting in a bus shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes.
Incidentally, I don't think there is a non-adjectival 'globalisation'. What we have now is a particular form: dominated by finance and multinational corporations and by a rhetoric (though not a reality) of 'free trade' and market forces. So I'm not a localist. I'm an internationalist, but one who believes (a) that such a thing is really only possible through a prior grounding and (b) that the terms of our present globalisation have to be challenged politically.
You ask why London has to 'stand for' anything. One response is that in fact it always inevitably does. One could say at the moment it stands for a complex mix of multiculturalism and financial power. Interestingly, that is a political mix of progressive and oppressive. What I'm arguing is simply that we should take responsibility for the effects of 'our place' around the world. To take responsibility for our embeddedness. If you don't want to, so be it. It does demand an imaginative engagement with our planetary interdependence and that can be quite challenging.
The problem with the finance sector is not that it has crashed (though that has done enormous damage around the world) but the damage that it did even in its pomp. It is for that reason that we must not go back to business as usual. Most of all it is imperative we reduce the dominance of finance. And that means economically, ideologically, and in terms of political voice.
