

The Big Idea

The Mayors Shall Inherit the Earth*

*(Except Rob Ford.)

Think about what a city is in comparison to a country. A city’s essence lies in function rather than in identity, in processes of innovation and creativity rather than the substance of their cultural origins. Its citizens are defined not just by who they are or where they come from but what they do and where they are going. They are less likely to be hobbled by national cultural distinctions and more likely to unite around their common aims and interests.

Cities may be prideful of their autonomy, but they are fundamentally interconnected. More and more, they even look the same. They fly signage and advertising rather than flags; they are defined by connectivity and hence motion, never by stasis; and they are driven by aspiration, rather than history. They trade in risk and cultivate danger. Mayors don’t talk like presidents and prime ministers about autonomy and sovereignty and self-determination. They are compelled to persuade rather than enact and order, to debate rather than proclaim and pontificate. When they do talk, it is about crime, transportation and jobs; about plowing the snow and picking up the garbage. They focus on common problems rather than distinctive identities. The absence of sovereignty becomes a virtue: Local politicians don’t build walls, they build ports and bridges. They define success by how well they integrate, communicate and network with one another. No wonder New York and Shanghai are willing to share best practices and learn from one another while China and the United States bicker.

Indeed, cities are far more alike than we sometimes imagine. How many ways, after all, are there to stuff a million people into a radically delimited space? Even in the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau noticed that “all capital cities are just alike. … Paris and London seem to me to be the same town.” Are Sao Paulo, Tokyo and New York all that different today? Shared characteristics mean, of course, there are networks of like-minded friends, artists, colleagues and artists linking cities around the globe. In other words, points of connection for cooperation are not waiting to be born but are already half-grown, waiting rather to be recognized, exploited and formalized. These synapses that connect urban nodes are already marking new pathways to interdependence.

More formally, we can even imagine a parliament of mayors that would assemble to solve common problems—and then comply with common policies of their own choosing. If mayors ruled the world, not by fiat but bottom up and consensually, the more than 3.5 billion people who are urban dwellers and the many more in the exurban neighborhoods beyond could participate locally and cooperate globally at the same time—a miracle of governance that might deliver pragmatism instead of mere politics, innovation rather than ideology and solutions in place of sovereignty. Cities woven into an informal cosmopolis would reinforce a set of shared values and become new incubators of democracy on a global scale.

This is no fantasy: The idea of a global parliament of mayors has already gained some traction. At meetings in Seoul last winter and in New York this fall, more than a dozen mayors gathered to debate the virtues and benefits of an assembly of cities. A third meeting will be held in Europe next spring. The assembly would be a bottom-up gathering of representatives from small, medium and large cities who would come together several times a year to confront shared problems—and look for shared solutions—on topics like crime, immigration, economics, terrorism and climate change. Such a parliament would not represent the whole planet and would not pass universal “laws.” Cities could opt-in to whatever initiatives and agreements that suit them. But it would offer alternatives to a veto-crippled U.N. and to global financial partnerships that are more reflective of corporate interests than public interests. In an age of interdependence, this sort of body would provide some hope that global cooperation and governance is within reach.

Let cities, the most networked and interconnected of our political associations, ... do what states cannot. Let mayors rule the world.

The call to let mayors become global governors does not reflect a utopian aspiration. It asks only that we recognize a world already in the making, one coming into being without systematic planning or the blessing of any state-based authority. When mayors like New York’s Bloomberg institute measures to end smoking or control childhood obesity by curbing large container soda sales, the gridlocked government in Washington can only look on in wonder, deprecating or admiring the initiatives but powerless in the face of mayors elsewhere in the world who might choose to enact copycat measures. Soda or tobacco companies—each influential with national governments via campaign contributions and the like—can do little more than whine in advertising campaigns. (Although of course, courts can intervene, as they did in overturning Bloomberg’s soda ban.) This is not to say cities can do as they please, or that nation-states are powerless in controlling, even strangling, cities that try to circumvent them. Legislative sovereignty and budget authority give states plenty of ways to block runaway towns. The only global city that coexists friction-free is Singapore, where city and state are one.

In the meantime, if mayors are actually to rule the world in some meaningful sense, it is clear they will have to pay dues to prime ministers and presidents. Cities may already constitute networks of collaboration that influence the global economy and bypass the rules and regulations of states, but they lie within the jurisdiction and sovereignty of superior political bodies. Mayor Bloomberg may have his own army, but let him try to deploy it in Cuba or Washington, D.C., or Albany—or even across the river in Hoboken or up in Yonkers, a few miles north of New York. He can route bikes through Manhattan, but try doing it on the state thruway or elsewhere along the interstate highway system. Unlike corporations, countries are territorial by definition, and cities always sit on land that is part of some nation’s territory. New York may not be looking to Washington, but Washington is paying attention to New York.

And to be sure, the mayors of plenty of other big cities will be watching as well, taking cues from a New York that’s become a free-floating metropolis that calls to mind both the past and the future of cities. Carl Pope, who is chairman of the Sierra Club and also a good friend of Bloomberg’s, says the mayor’s approach, modern as it’s been, harkens to antiquity. “[He’s] almost a Greek city- state guy,” Pope told me. Someone who helps “other mayors succeed by giving them a global voice that can compete with heads of state. … He believes cities are where you can make the most change. He’s really the first urban global diplomat we’ve had.”

Benjamin R. Barber is senior research scholar at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of If Mayors Rules the World, from which this article is adapted.

Additional credits:

Lead image by AP Photo.

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