Great Powers and Urbanization

A Special Bookazine Edition

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A Special Bookazine Edition

GREAT POWERS AND URBANIZATION NAVIGATING GLOBAL CHALLENGES IN AN URBAN WORLD EDITORS IAN KLAUS | ANA C. ROLD WINONA ROYLANCE | SHANE SZARKOWSKI AUTHORS ALYSSA AYRES WILLIAM BURKE-WHITE XIANGMING CHEN LIZA ROSE CIROLIA MICHAEL COHEN AGUSTI FERNANDEZ DE LOSADA MARTA GALCERAN-VERCHER PARAG KHANNA NANCY KWAK CHARLES S. MAIER HARVEY MOLOTCH DAVID PONZINI XUEFEI REN WARREN SMIT PATRICIO ZAMBRANO-BARRAGAN PUBLISHER DIPLOMATIC COURIER | MEDAURAS GLOBAL WASHINGTON, DC

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TABLE OF CONTENTS WELCOME | IAN KLAUS..................................................................................................................................07 CITIES AND INTERNATIONAL LAWYERS NEED TO START TALKING TO ONE ANOTHER | WILLIAM BURKE-WHITE..................................................................................10 CITIES IN A WORLD OF STATES | CHARLES S. MAIER..................................................................16

SCALE WITHOUT POWER: GLOBAL CITIES IN THE WORLD’S LARGEST DEMOCRACY | ALYSSA AYRES...........................................................................................22 CITIES AND NATIONS: A MUTUAL DEPENDENCY | MICHAEL COHEN.............................28 MUNICIPALISM IS AN IMPORTANT GLOBAL MOVEMENT, AND ITS HISTORY MATTERS | NANCY KWAK............................................................................................34 BUILDING A NATIONSCAPE: THE SHOWCASE CITIES OF THE GULF | HARVEY MOLOTCH AND DAVID PONZINI | PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHELE NASTASI..............................................................................................40 BUILDING BACK BETTER: CITIES AND THE EU RECOVERY PLAN | AGUSTI FERNANDEZ DE LOSADA........................................................................................................50 TOWARDS FORMAL REPRESENTATION OF CITIES AND REGIONS: LESSONS FROM THE EU | MARTA GALCERAN-VERCHER........................................................56 LATIN AMERICA’S NEW INFORMALITY STUNTS PANDEMIC RECOVERY | PATRICIO ZAMBRANO-BARRAGAN.....................................................................................................62 THE GEOPOLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF FRACTURED FISCAL AUTHORITY | LIZA ROSE CIROLIAS.....................................................................................................................................68 ASIAN MEGACITIES AND THE FUTURE OF GEOPOLITICS | PARAG KHANNA..............................................................................................................................................74 BUILT BY CHINA, GOING GLOBAL | XIANGMING CHEN.............................................................78 THE URBAN CENTURIES OF CHINA AND INDIA | XUEFEI REN............................................84 THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION, HEALTHY CITIES, AND AFRICA | BY WARREN SMIT...........................................................................................................................................90

WELCOME

O

ver the course of the early twenty-first century, global economic and demographic trends have increased the relative importance of urban spaces, while cities themselves have organized collectively in the face of transnational challenges. But while urban populations, areas and economies expand, and mayors continue their move into the international arena, that arena itself has been shifting. China has arrived as a great power. Russia has opened anew old questions and challenged long-standing norms. Domestic politics in the United States and Europe have undermined long-standing relationships.

These two developments—the return of great power politics and continuing urbanization—are not separate phenomena.

Cities have become the economic engines and sites of innovation for nation-states, as well as targets for surveillance and cyber-attacks for national governments. Successful powers in the twenty-first century will build stable and innovative cities at home while projecting influence, and at times military strength, in urban settings abroad.

However, most conversations about the return of great power politics ignore urban dynamics, dismissing references to urbanization or city-focused efforts as naively post-Westphalian.

Meanwhile, most urban debates, focused as they are on urban dynamics such as planning, public space, and service delivery, proceed with little time for geopolitical trends at the nationstate level. International relations scholars and urbanists, as well as diplomats and mayors, still often operate in worlds apart.

The Great Powers and Urbanization Channel brought them together. A collaboration between the Diplomatic Courier and the Great Powers and Urbanization Project—a joint initiative of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the University of Melbourne’s Connected Cities Lab, the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, the Argentine Council for International Relations, and the African Centre for Cities—the Channel has offered a one stop shop for national security officials and urbanists alike trying to navigate global challenges in an urban world.

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Of course, great powers and hegemons have long sought to influence the shape and scale of cities far beyond their borders. The urban ruins of the Roman Empire stretch to Northern England and the Middle East. The infrastructure and drainage projects of the British Empire continue to give shape to New Delhi and Mumbai. The magistrales, metro-stops and massive housing projects of the Soviet Union continue to provide transportation and housing in the former Eastern Bloc. “Design was not a marginal aspect of the Cold War but central,” argued the art historian David Crowly and curator Jane Pavitt, “to the competition over the future.”

If the Cold War has not exactly returned, geopolitical tension most certainly has. Like global powers before it, China is influencing urban spaces beyond its borders. Just as the form of “global city” that developed in the late twentieth century was a product of a historically distinctive set of relations between international system, state, city, and market, so now does the emerging Belt and Road City have the potential to signal a very different set of these relations in the early to mid-twenty-first century.

The consequences of great power competition ripple far beyond the national and municipal borders of the powers themselves. The return of geopolitics—and with it shifts in patterns of globalization—have particular importance for nation-states such as Singapore and the United Arab Emirates that are highly dependent culturally and economically on the interconnectivity of their cities with the wider world.

The early twenty-first century has seen an explosion of “city-diplomacy” on the global stage. Cities are playing a role in shaping the foreign policies of some great powers and are building their international engagement capacities, pushing the boundaries of their legal authorities vis-à-vis national authorities, shifting the politics of compliance and enforcement of international law, taking new seats at the tables of global governance, and altering the structures of international institutional engagement.

Nonetheless, as international relations professor Simon Curtis put it bluntly in his award winning Global Cities and Global Order, “The re-emergence of the city from the long shadow of the state in the late twentieth century was facilitated by the state itself.” Though differing in their methodologies and analysis, the work of Paul Hirst, Charles Maier, Saskia Sassen, and Goran Therborn align with Curtis on a fundamental matter: the direction of the nation-state will be crucial to the direction of cities, and that includes the relations between nation-states.

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The Channel and the Great Powers and Urbanization Project launched before COVID-19 pandemic and closed shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine that put cities squarely in the sights of great power aggression. Michel Foucault observed that a “whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the same time be a history of powers (both of these terms in the plural)—from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat.” That history is still being written, and to the degree that the little tactics of habitat and the great strategies of geopolitics are now overlapping, you will find that shared space explored by historians, urbanists, planners, economists, and practitioners here in this special anthology curated through the Channel. ***** About the Author: Ian Klaus is Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He was previously Senior Adviser for Global Cities at the U.S. Department of State.

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CITIES AND INTERN NEED TO START TALKI

NATIONAL LAWYERS ING TO ONE ANOTHER

BY WILLIAM BURKE-WHITE

Photo by Anders Jilden via Unsplash.

O

ver the past decade, cities have quickly assumed a place on the global stage. From the Chicago Climate Charter, signed by mayors of more than 50 cities, to immigration debates raging around the world, cities are meaningfully influencing global political discourse. Yet, international law—the primary system of norms, rules, and institutions through which the international order has been constructed—has remained off limits to cities and other non-state actors. The result is a disconnect between cities’ growing role in global affairs and their continued exclusion from the formal structures of the international system.

The disconnect between cities and international law should not be surprising. The international legal system has always been a system of nation states. Emerich de Vattel’s famous treatise from 1758 is titled Le Droit de Gens (The Law of Nations) and its subtitle makes clear that the system is based on the “principles of the law of nature applied to the conduct and affairs of nations and sovereigns.” The ticket for admission to the international legal system was then, and remains today, sovereignty—the full right to govern without outside interference. Nation states alone enjoy such sovereignty. Cities, as subordinate actors within a state, do not. Hence cities have been excluded from the formal institutions of the international order.

While the formal rules of participation in international law have led international organizations, national governments, and the international lawyers in their employ to overlook cities, cities have quietly become important actors in international legal processes. Cities contribute to international norm development and enact policies that promote (or impede) rule compliance. Cities’ commitments in the Chicago Climate Charter, for example, may well do more to shape climate norms than the proclamations of some heads of state. City implementation of low carbon transportation options or favorable building codes may make a greater contribution to meeting the 2°C goal than some state-level policy choices. The incorporation of an international human rights agreement into municipal legislation or cities’ voluntary self-reporting of SDG compliance to the UN may have a more direct impact on rights enjoyed by that city’s residents than would an equivalent national commitment. Cities’ commitments to the November 2019 Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace are an essential component of a broad coalition of actors needed to fill a troubling governance gap.

Today, the success or failure of international agreements may well turn on cities’ engagement in and compliance with them.

Yet, the lawyers who make and implement the rules of the in12 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

ternational system, usually on behalf of states, largely continue to ignore city actions, overlooking a critical component of the global governance architecture that could help advance international rule development and compliance.

Despite cities’ growing impact in global politics, mayors and municipal authorities have yet to find their voice in the international legal system. Cities are only just beginning to develop capacities and expertise in international law or international institutional engagement. When cities do participate in international negotiations, they are usually relegated to the outermost ring of concentric circles of meetings and dialogues as representatives of civil society, not formal participants. Even at a conference about cities—Habitat III, for example—cities themselves were part of an external engagement process by states, rather than negotiators themselves.

Moreover, the connective fabrics that could link the traditional, formal architecture of international law to cities and other substate actors is significantly underdeveloped. Groups of cities frequently make proclamations from outside the formal negotiations, such as that of the 5th Mayoral Forum on Human Mobility, Migration and Development on the sidelines of the Intergovernmental Conference on the Global Compact for Save Orderly and Regular Migration, hoping they will be heard by the actual state negotiators “in the room where it happened.” Nowhere was this better illustrated than at the 2018 Buenos Aires U20, immediately preceding the G20 summit. Despite the support of the host Government of Argentina and the City of Buenos Aires, the Communique of the U20, theoretically a “roadmap to the G20 leaders” did little to inform formal international policymaking in the G20 Leaders’ Declaration. If cities want to actually influence international rule development and harness the power of international law to advance their own municipal interests on issues of global affairs, they need to operate in the domain of international law with the help of international lawyers.

Four shifts are required to bridge this gap between city policies and international law.

First, mindsets must change. Cities need to recognize that they will be more effective contributors to global governance if they speak the language of international law and that by harnessing international law they can advance their own local agendas. On the other side of the divide, international lawyers must recognize that cities can and do make a difference in rule creation and compliance.

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Second, new capabilities are needed. Cities need to build expertise and experience in international law, whether in their solicitor generals’ offices or in international affairs departments. New York, Los Angeles, and London have taken important strides in this respect and other cities would benefit from following their lead. International lawyers need to understand cities’ authorities, jurisdictional reach, and potential governance contributions.

Third, cities and international institutions need to work together to build better connective fabrics linking city policy activities and international rule-making and compliance efforts. Such connective fabrics could include new formal and informal relationships, creative new forms of membership and participation, and direct inclusion of city actions/commitments in formal international agreements. The decision by the UN to accept a voluntary local review of SDG compliance from New York City is a potentially promising new model to directly connect local governance and international institutional processes.

Fourth, and perhaps most radically, the formal rules of international law may need to adapt overtime to the growing role of cities in global politics. Traditional international legal formalism that limits participation to sovereign states may need to accommodate other actors, such as cities, in a more meaningful way. One approach would be to give cities a limited, but formal voice—what lawyers might call conditional international legal personality—to the degree that and within the substantive domains in which cities can make meaningful functional contributions to solving global policy challenges. For example, in an international climate negotiation considering the impact of urban transport policies cities would have a legal voice commensurate with their ability to advance the climate governance agenda. Similarly, in a human rights treaty compliance discussion on police brutality, cities would have a loud voice. In contrast, in a nuclear arms or international trade negotiation, cities legal personality would be far more circumscribed, remaining subordinate to a national government.

As cities and international lawyers start to talk to one another, both will benefit, as will the collective effort to address global policy challenges. Cities can influence global norms by engaging with the international legal system directly, particularly where their policy preferences diverge from those of their national authorities. So too, cities can harness the existing power of international law as political and legal leverage to advance their own local agendas. International lawyers and international institutions will find urgently needed political will—too often 14 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

lacking among national governments today—in the world’s cities. At a moment when the distribution of power and preferences among nation states is changing so rapidly, incorporating cities into the international legal system may well result in new, and perhaps unforeseen, geopolitical realignments among cities, states, and international institutions. It may even yield a new political force to shape international norms and, perhaps, a broader reimagination of the nature of international and transnational politics. ***** About the author: William Burke-White is Visiting Scholar at The Brookings Institution and Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

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CITIES IN A WORLD OF STATES

BY CHARLES S. MAIER | DECEMBER 2019

Photo by Pascal Diekmann via Unsplash.

I

nternational politics, for policy makers, for theorists, and for historians has traditionally comprised the world of states. When thinkers from these disciplines analyze that world, they often invoke “geopolitics,” a vague but supposedly tough-minded analysis taking into account national resources, geography, objectives, and strategy. Geopolitics—a concept developed by Scandinavian, German, British, and American theorists as international rivalries heated up toward 1900—was the language that serious men (and the term dripped with gender) used to envisage global conflict. But what scope did it leave for cities as autonomous actors in international politics? Did they matter? Do they matter today? In what ways do they enter into that world of states?

The city is usually considered as a conglomeration or nexus within the state and not as a geopolitical entity in its own right—exception made for so-called city-states or urban republics in Antiquity or the Renaissance. The Great Powers and Urbanization Channel represents an effort to problematize that assumption, that is to explore what elements of agency cities maintain within the international system or the world of states.

The state is a bounded territorial unit that exists in a world of sovereign peers. The language of sovereignty, encoded in international law, has been developing since the 16th and 17th centuries: Francisco de Vitoria, Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, and Hugo Grotius made fundamental contributions. No matter how small or massive, states exist in a legal realm where they enjoy formal equality and freedom of action, unless they have voluntarily ceded partial sovereignty to an overarching authority such as the European Union. The UN General Assembly currently includes over 190 such sovereign units.

The city can represent the site of government in a state; but the city is also a nodal geographical conglomeration created by economic pressures (production and labor recruitment; exchange with markets; a site for precarious livelihood when agricultural producers become surplus labor). The city traditionally nurtures cultural opportunities: theatre, music, a press. It provides sociability for youth and adults through special institutions (schools, pubs, clubs) as well as everyday mixing on the street. It provides a sensory environment that is familiar and can be exciting. The city, so long as it retains some degree of economic viability and cultural vitality, is one of the great achievements of human civilization. As Samuel Johnson said about his city, he who tires of London tires of life.

Cities have evolved out of political or economic forces, or eventually a mixture of both. Some early modern and even 18th and 18 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

19th century cities developed as creations to service a state that grew bureaucratically and administratively, e.g. Constantinople, Naples, Edo (Tokyo), or Saint Petersburg. Others developed rapidly as a product of the emerging commercial and industrial revolution, e.g. New York, Manchester, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Essen. And many expanded out of a combination of political centralization and affiliated economic transformation: London, later Berlin, and Milan.

Successive waves of rural transformation (demographic increase, mechanization of agriculture, and the attrition of subsistence farming) sent traditional rural populations to work either on monocultural plantations (from 1650 to 1950) on the global and colonial frontiers or into urban barrios (since, say 1830 to the present). For two centuries in Western Europe, Japan, and North America (17501950) the development of urban industry, construction, commerce, and services provided the opportunities for absorbing the in-migration, and indeed from the 1850s to 1950s or 1960s could ameliorate housing conditions and reverse the initial declines in urban life-span from such diseases as typhoid, cholera, or tuberculosis.

But change was hardly unidirectional. Two dramatically different patterns have emerged. Rural “surplus” population has flowed to urban areas, often at a pace faster than the development of industry could absorb, finding employment, if at all, in casual labor, sweatshop production for Western clothing manufacturers, domestic service (also a major source of employment in the West before 1960-70), custodial tasks, peddling, security services, or the narcotics industry, and finding housing in shantytowns, favelas, and barrios. In contrast, those cities that have successfully ridden the wave of digital technology in Asia have also massively increased in population, but with more societal cohesion. Or perhaps their societal cohesion facilitated their economic modernization.

States and territorialized capital thus created the cities twice over in modern times, first between, say, 1750 and 1950 and then again, for the global South, since 1950. But this fantastically transformative process did not confer geopolitical autonomy on the city. The economic city and the political offices of the bureaucratic state inhabited the same node within a territory. This means that most cities—though perhaps not the pure administrative creations such as Brasilia or Canberra or even Washington—exist in an ambiguous or unresolved relationship with the states that encompass them. They are both the centers of state activity, even as their economic and cultural life retain autonomous sources of vitality. It seems to me that this tension of being quasi-encompassed must condition any aspiration for autonomous agency.

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There are other constraining factors. Urban economies go through cycles: we tend to track bad and good eras for cities, e.g., New York in the 1970s versus New York since the 1990s. The lesson may be that it is impossible to specify a long-term equilibrium state for a city that is more than an outdoor museum. Glitzy development can come at the expense of poorer, marginalized residents; decaying centers can find new sources of renewal. One important constant, however, seems to be that cities are chronically underfunded with respect to the services they should provide such as transportation, health, provisioning, housing, and education. The needs of those who migrate to the city or grow old within its precincts tend to outrun the surplus that urban authorities can appropriate. Urban governance is thus constantly preoccupied by its own political and economic needs.

The question arises, therefore, whether and how our massive urban galaxies might play an international political role that takes account of their new weight in economy and society. Saskia Sassen’s “global cities” are those that have found a way to prosper by links with other global cities in the generation of financial capital. Their role reflects the growing proportion of finance to industry. They may exist within a carapace of law and supervision that their territorial state insists on, but that is not essential to their life and growth. These cities can also generate an intellectual synergy that keeps them vital. They are product of a Castell’s “network society.” Whereas the classic industrial city existed in a symbiotic relationship to an agrarian hinterland (e.g. Chicago, Buenos Aires), the new “global city” creates its intellectual and economic surplus by connections to other global cities (Singapore, the Emirates, Hong Kong, London, New York). Can these financial linkages, however, generate a genuinely autonomous political sphere? To put it picturesquely, might a United Cities convene next to the United Nations? And how would it interact?

The geopolitical international order exists because states are multiple and fill the global surface. They maintain the capacity to wage war. They also maintain the capacity to legislate for cities within their borders and to restrict entry from other states. Nation-states achieved their status within a global order by claiming either an ethnic coherence or a military-imperial prominence, or, during the Cold War, an ideological mission that was territorially anchored. But can there exist a geopolitics of cities if they do not fill a global space, they do not raise armed forces, they cannot control the admission of new entrants, and their raison d’être of economic growth or progress should not necessarily be zero-sum? What would be the equivalent of the “national” or ethno-linguistic basis for the geopolitically active city? Indeed, can cities claim a true socio-political autonomy since both the decline of states and the instruments of modern warfare have often brought the depopulation of cities?

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Nonetheless, history (and not just the history of Antiquity) certainly provides examples of urban sovereignty and autonomy. The Italian urban republics prospered as city states, although they did so by actively resisting a larger imperial or national structure. The Hanseatic League offered a different, partially confederal model. The Hansa cities acknowledged a political connection to the territorial unit in which they were contained, although that political unit, in particular the Holy Roman Empire, left the Hansa cities large scope for self-government. Their fabric consisted of economic regulation and interchange. Nonetheless, both the Renaissance urban republics and the Hanseatic League lost their autonomy to larger territorial claimants in the early modern era.

For better or worse, it seems to me that any geopolitical order based on cities must depend upon the partial dismantling of the territorial state order and thus of the notion of a unitary sovereignty as it developed from the Renaissance until very recently. Is that really plausible in an age when populist pressures are reinforcing national boundaries and concepts of ethnicity?

Even if we assume that current populist trends will ebb, the sovereign-state order is a tough structure to crack, and state urban future; I would suggest the idea of geo-governance. As political units in modern times, cities have largely developed within a state framework. The idea of secession, is not really an alternative unless the contemporary state order dissolves. Even Norman Mailer during his Quixotic 1969 campaign for Mayor of New York, mooted secession only from the state of New York. Few cities can be Singapore.

Rather, I would suggest, notions of territorial sovereignty (and even shared spatial sovereignty as in the European Union) will have to give way to concepts of functional governance. We have many examples of functional shared geospatial authority ranging from the 1995 Arctic Council internationally to the Port of New York Authority. These arrangements for shared governance will no doubt proliferate, and urban authorities can claim an enhanced role within them. The future, I would wager, is not with cities displacing states or wiggling out of their embrace, but in the transformation of statehood itself. ***** About the author: Charles S. Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging Since 1500 (Harvard University Press, 2016).

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SCALE WITHOUT POW IN THE WORLD’S LAR

WER: GLOBAL CITIES RGEST DEMOCRACY

BY ALYSSA AYRES | JANUARY 2020

Aerial view of Delhi, India. Photo by Bigstock.

O

ver the past 25 years, two defining trends in foreign policy have gained momentum. The first, and most obvious, has been the gradual shift from the post-Cold War moment to an increasingly multipolar system, with a great shift to Asia driven by rising powers China and—to a lesser extent—India. The second trend has been the diffusion of international power and initiative from national governments to other groups—whether corporations, international organizations, nonprofits, or subnational governments.

Few actors have been as busy as cities. Urban entities have stepped up their international pursuits, including in networks that resemble multilateral organizations but with cities as their constituent members. The earliest networks driven by cities themselves—as distinct from country-to-country consultations on urban agendas—emerged first in the already-urbanized, developed West, but they have expanded to include the global South. These global city networks represent a horizontal and vertical decentralization that brings both prevailing foreign policy trends together.

Scholars attentive to the emergence of subnational diplomacy have noted the legal and other questions that arise with “global city” interactions unmediated by the nation-state. Unlike national-level diplomatic interactions focused on negotiating treaties or other broad agreements, city multilateral networks more often resemble peerto-peer knowledge exchanges. They offer a forum for technology transfer and collaboration in the form of best practices on solutions to 21st century challenges like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and tackling climate change.

But what happens when the power to take decisions and devise urban best practices does not reside fully with municipal authorities?

As we consider the impact of city multilateral networks—often seen as a framework for action where national-level progress has been more difficult—we should bear in mind the asymmetries among constituent cities. Some, as in the case of India, enjoy substantially less power and autonomy than their global peers, and thus cannot act in similar ways. So as the movement of city networks grows, we should give thought to whether and how the asymmetries affect the functions of these networks—as well as how they shape the nature of national power in a world where countries increasingly lead with their cities on the world stage.

Global Cities in the World’s Largest Democracy India is part of the larger story of a power shift toward Asia. While comparatively poor in per capita terms, in the bottom third globally, 24 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

the Indian economy briefly grew larger in 2019 than those of France and the United Kingdom using market exchange rates (per IMF data). India possesses the world’s third largest military by personnel strength, and fifth largest defense budget. It is a strategic partner of the United States, and one of the four partners in the “Quad” consultation (Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) among major Indo-Pacific democracies.

India is also extremely active in the United Nations, in virtually all its agencies, and in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. India participates actively in the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Regional Forum, and has also invested heavily in the creation and development of new multilateral organizations like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Brazil-RussiaIndia-China-South Africa grouping (BRICS), the New Development Bank (the development bank formed by the BRICS), and others, even while it pushes for a larger role in the older institutions of global governance set up in the 20th century.

This rise to prominence—both economically and diplomatically—occurred while India remained, for the most part, predominantly rural.

During this same period—the second half of the 20th century—large developing economies like Brazil, China, and Indonesia urbanized rapidly; by 2011 all were more than 50% urban. India’s intensive urban transition, meanwhile, is happening now. Between now and 2050, just three countries, India, China, and Nigeria, will account for around a third of the world’s growth in urban residents: India will add more than 400 million urban residents, China more than 250 million, and Nigeria nearly 190 million.

In spite of India’s tremendous urban population growth, municipal governance remains the last horizon in devolution of power within the federal structure. India’s constitutional division of power allocates authority to the federal government over some issues (like defense and foreign policy), and others to the state level (such as health, law and order, and local government). The federal and state levels share authority on other matters (contracts and forest management, for example). In 1992, the 74th amendment to India’s constitution sought to devolve some authority to “urban local bodies”—but nearly three decades on, implementation of this amendment remains uneven and incomplete across the country.

Indian cities, as local governments, generally receive their budgets from state-level allocations, and to add to that, municipal commissioners rather than elected mayors generally hold executive authority. These municipal commissioners are typically career civil servants employed by the national Indian Administrative Service, serving a DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 25

time-limited state-level rotation in a city-level post. While some cities do have elected mayors, as well as “corporators” or other local elected leaders, the typical structure of urban governance leaves elected city leaders without the executive power their counterparts elsewhere in the world enjoy.

Due to India’s global standing, and the size and importance of many Indian megacities, some of the newer city multilateral networks include Indian cities as members. Take C40 Cities, a network of nearly 100 cities focused on climate change. The participation of five Indian cities in the C40 illustrates their relevance to getting climate change right. The Indian C40 cities’ decisions in theory affect lives on the scale of a major European country: together, Delhi (National Capital Territory), Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, and Jaipur are home to more than 72 million residents. For comparison, Germany’s entire population is around 83 million (all data from the UN World Urbanization Prospects estimates.) As a voluntary network the C40 creates a forum for exchange of data, best practices, and solutions on issues like urban flooding, building efficiency, mass transit, and others. City-level exchange like this, unmediated by national governments, represents a “frontier” of international policy engagement.

But the C40 announcement of a new air quality network, co-led by Bengaluru and London, illustrates precisely the fault line in India’s system. Announced during London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s 2017 visit to India, the air quality network’s first workshop took place in July 2018 in Bengaluru. That gathering featured the mayor of Bengaluru, but also the chief and deputy chief ministers of Karnataka (Bengaluru’s home state), and the municipal commissioner of Bengaluru (a career Indian Administrative Service official in a state-level rotation with the city-level post). City leaders cannot act on their own even in contexts involving their global counterparts.

Equally perplexing, in October 2019 the Indian government denied permission (required in the Indian system) for Delhi’s chief minister to attend a C40 gathering in Denmark. The explanation offered to reporters? That the meeting consisted of mayors, so Delhi’s chief minister was “overqualified.” These episodes underscore the governance constraints on the international activities of Indian cities, even in a context nominally showcasing a leadership role for the city of Bengaluru, and the important example of Delhi as it battles a worsening air pollution emergency.

Urban Transition an a Global Era As India continues to become more prominent on the world stage, as India continues to urbanize, and as India’s cities continue to grow and interact with counterparts around the world, the federal, state, 26 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

and municipal levels will continue to face challenges of coordination.

Indian cities have become centers of innovation, leading the country’s services economy, and therefore exert an outsize economic effect. But the costs of their inability to direct their own growth and development are readily apparent in traffic, water and sanitation, insufficient housing, and myriad other familiar problems of rapid growth. As Isher Ahluwalia succinctly puts it, “the cost of unplanned urbanization is borne by not only the cities but the whole economy.”

Experts working on urbanization in India have long recognized the mismatch between the importance of cities to India’s economy, not to mention national civic and cultural life, and their level of autonomy. Some of the most creative research, policy thinking, and training on urbanization issues is coming from India, like the work of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. Calls for greater devolution of power to cities are gaining steam, such as those offered by the IDFC Institute’s Reforming Urban India report released in July, or the Indian National Congress earlier this year in their national campaign platform. Both these sets of recommendations press for devolution of political as well as fiscal power to the municipal level.

But as long as such devolution remains incomplete, Indian megacities involved in international city networks will be constrained by their governance context. They will need state- and national-level colleagues to enact programs even in their own municipalities, and will likely miss out on innovative strategies implemented elsewhere.

We may find that the participation in city multilateral networks provides a norm-setting push for governance reform within India, just as involvement with global trade agreements (the GATT and the World Trade Organization) has prompted economic reforms. But this will not likely happen quickly, nor evenly. And for some years ahead, city diplomacy with the world’s largest democracy will most likely continue to require national and state involvement.

In this sense, the present structure of authority in Indian cities does not allow the diplomatic decentralization inherent to the promise of city multilaterals. For the time being, this means that including the cities from world’s largest democracy in urban multilateral networks will require adjustments in procedure, in scope, and most likely in ambition. ***** About the author: Alyssa Ayres is senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World.

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CITIES AND NATIONS: A

A MUTUAL DEPENDENCY

BY MICHAEL COHEN | FEBRUARY 2020

Photo by Bigstock.

T

hough it might, at first glance, seem a paradox, the history of nations has been dominated by cities. Those cities were created by colonial empires in locations with water and possibilities for transporting people or goods, and the economic advantages coming from centralized economic activities. Historically, tax revenues were frequently sent to imperial cities such as Beijing, Istanbul, or Rome. Cities as diverse as Abidjan, Buenos Aires, Karachi, London, and Mumbai share these origins.

The historical legacies of these cities are apparent today in the global concentration of wealth—with 65 percent of global GDP coming from 600 cities—in the global concentration of greenhouse gas emissions, and the growing share of global population, now almost 55 percent. Both the power of these cities and their current serious problems are legacies of their histories but also their contemporary inability to resolve many of the urgent and important problems they face.

The resilience of cities has, for a decade now, been trendy policy catchphrase, but it masks their many vulnerabilities. To name but a few, cities are sensitive to global interest rates, global oil prices, sealevel rise and extreme weather events. And we can name more, including the social and cultural challenges coming from diversity and new migratory flows resulting from climate change and civil conflicts.

With these challenges in mind, it may be that concentrating more and more people into limited spaces could become less a source of resilience but eventually a source of political instability and insecurity. More than half the world’s population lives within 70 miles of the coast. The anticipated “water wars” will not be between rural farmers. Rather, they will occur when urban centers make disproportionate claims on available water resources to assure urban food supply and human survival itself. Cities in arid climates, such as Cairo, illustrate this competition for scarce fresh water. Similarly, the demographic concentration of people in cities likely to face sea-level rise in the next half century suggests that urban dwellers will need to move to new settlements in previously unoccupied rural land.

Amid all these challenges, a fundamental contradiction is likely to shape the global urban future: the very sources of wealth and power generated by these cities can also become the forces that undermine them.

The case of New York illustrates this conundrum very clearly.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was an effective cheerleader for his 30 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

city, touting it as an example for the global future, with its financial and economic base, its cultural creativity and diversity, and its seemingly unlimited capacity to generate employment and income. Yet, in his electoral campaign Mayor Bill de Blasio pointed out that 56 percent of the New York City population lived below the poverty line, while others began to count the number of millionaires in the Big Apple, a number that exceeded 650,000 by 2016. In his first State of the City Report, Mayor de Blasio declared that New York was becoming “Apartheid City” and a “gated community”. Skyrocketing rents and housing prices are driving young couples to New Jersey and beyond in search of affordable housing. The high costs of housing in New York City, together with those in Silicon Valley in California, were even found to have the power to reduce America’s GDP. This process is, in some ways, analogous to the experience of Brazil. In 2014, the future host of the Olympic Games and the World Cup appeared to many investors to have the magic mix of resources and government commitment to assure financial and economic success. Yet, by 2016 its economy had faltered because enthusiastic global investors had contributed to the overvaluing of the Brazilian real. Brazil’s exports declined, unemployment increased, and the Brazilian government faced an economic and public financial crisis. Poorly managed success was fatal, as deficits rose, trade faltered, and short-term thinking undermined economic performance. Widespread street demonstrations in urban Brazil in 2016 contributed to the downfall of President Dilma Roussef and the subsequent election of Jair Bolsonaro, a Brazilian former military officer and Trump-like figure.

Other local problems have the potential to undermine stability over time. The dramatic examples of the 62 million empty apartments in Chinese cities in 2016, or the five million empty housing units around Mexico City in 2014, suggest that ineffective use of resources and the lack of effective regulation can ultimately have high opportunity costs while distorting patterns of growth. “Too much” can be hard to swallow. Or, as Mexican urbanist Alicia Ziccardi has written, “mucho vivienda, poco ciudad.”

What do these local examples have to do with global politics?

The answer is that these cities account for a very large share of national GDP, usually over 75 percent, and together, for an equal share of global GDP. If these cities—the most favored sites for public and private investment—are unable to manage their problems, what can be expected for global stability? The answer, in a word, is trouble.

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When specific cities face serious problems, such as Wuhan with the Corona Virus crisis of January 2020, or the Arab Spring halting the Egyptian economy in 2014, the global economy feels the impacts. Similarly, the impacts can go from the global to the local levels. If trade wars between the United States and China, or unequal trade agreements between the United States and Mexico, upset global markets, their greatest impacts will be found in cities where local economies will contract, cutting jobs, incomes, and opportunities for upward mobility. Public revenues will decline, thereby leading to reduced public infrastructure and social services, such as health or education.

In other words, the sustained productivity of cities requires international political stability. Again, the example of the impact of the attack of September 11, 2001 on New York as a case where catastrophe results from either conflict or a weather event illustrates this very well.

On September 11, 2001, New York’s “city product” was larger than the incomes of 191 countries, including Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden. Its product was bigger than Argentina, or more than three times the size of Portugal, or oil-rich countries like Norway and Saudi Arabia. It was 20 percent larger than the more than 40 countries of Africa combined. In 2001, New York accounted for about 62% of the GDP of Spain. This metropolitan area, with a population of 17 million, would have been the 49th largest country in the world in demographic terms and the 13th largest national economy.

Three weeks after 9/11, the City Government estimated the economic loss of the attacks to New York to be between $90 to $105 billion. (The equivalent of wiping Portugal or the Netherlands off the map for a year.) While the economy had already started to slow down in the second quarter of 2001, with increasing unemployment in the technology and financial sectors. The capital loss in terms of buildings and infrastructure amounted to about $45 billion, while the ongoing economic losses in 2002 and 2003 would be between $45 and $60 billion. About 115,000 jobs were lost in the months after the attack. However, when the likely losses to the New York metropolitan economy, which produced about $1 billion a day in 2001, were projected forward, the combined estimate of capital and ongoing losses of $90-105 billion alone was greater than many national economies.

The losses to the New York economy in 2001, beyond the terrible loss of life, should have raised a red flag about the high 32 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

degree of interdependence between the globalized economy and polity. The August 5, 2019 decision by the Chinese government to devalue the yuan had notable consequences in the global economy, from stock market losses, estimated to be USD $750 billion in the New York stock market alone, to increasing uncertainty affecting the borrowing power of national and city governments and weakening the medium-term prospects for sustained economic growth. These cumulative effects at various scales suggest that disruptions in cities can be both the cause and the effect of changes in global politics.

Taken together, it is clear that the performance of cities and their ability to manage challenges, such as the Wuhan case, can have global consequences. But the path of causation can go the other way as well, with global disruptions generating instabilities at local levels. Interdependence is inevitable in a globalized world.

The question is whether national and local institutions are able to take interdependence into account when they make decisions. ***** About the author: Michael Cohen is Professor of International Affairs at the New School in New York.

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MUNICIPALISM IS AN MOVEMENT, AND ITS

IMPORTANT GLOBAL S HISTORY MATTERS

BY NANCY KWAK | APRIL 2020

Photo by Bigstock.

L

ocal politics is no longer local. Urban bureaucracies have become important global players, at times challenging, at other time adopting the behaviors of nation-states, building international alliances and independently pursuing large-scale aims. Municipalism—as this movement has come to be known—relies on radical politics to justify this usurpation, perhaps best captured in Barcelona mayor Ada Colau’s call for “fearless cities,” for a “renewed municipalist movement… standing up to defend human rights, radical democracy and the common good.”

But taking a slightly longer view, what precisely makes this kind of urban diplomacy new?

Municipal movements today find more than a few echoes in earlier moments. Beginning in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, urban networks proved indispensable in the governance of large empires. The colonial-era Singapore Improvement Trust, for instance, deliberately nurtured relationships with parallel governments in Hong Kong, Calcutta, and Nairobi, and they aspired to set up research exchanges with other city leaders outside British empire in the first half of the twentieth century. Municipal exchanges were in equal parts a search for efficient governance and a claim to power independent of the metropole—in this case, networks occurring outside Westminster. Local leaders in Singapore also articulated common bonds with other cities as part of an imagined regional (“tropical”) urbanism. According to their logic, cities in the “tropics” merited unique expertise justifying some degree of autonomy.

And during the Cold War, the U.S. Department of State funded organized urban tours of U.S. cities by municipal officials from around the world—an effort to showcase American democracy that unwittingly exposed racial segregation and American poverty to shocked guests, but that also built personal relationships between city officials around the world, and led to direct exchanges between cities and city officials long after State Department funding ended. In other words, city leaders continued talking after international diplomats lost interest. These city-tocity networks grew over time as mayors and other local leaders realized the connections between their parallel struggles with adequate shelter, provision of municipal services, and more recently, climate change.

There are precedents, too, for the radicalism at the core of twenty-first century municipal movements. Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley eloquently argued for city leaders to take the helm 36 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

in a 1985 speech to the National League of Cities Congress of Cities: “I submit to you,” he stated gravely, “that cities have the right—indeed, even the obligation—to be part of the great national debate on weighty issues: from foreign trade policies to opposing South African apartheid, from immigration policies to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.” Two days later, Father Luis Olivares declared La Placita church in Los Angeles a sanctuary for Central American refugees, defying federal law and setting in motion the urban sanctuary movement.

The origins of current-day municipalism, then, are found—not in the most recent rejection of authoritarian regimes by urbancentered protest movements—but in the longer history of citymaking. While cities have arguably always served as nodes in larger systems, mid- to late-twentieth century urbanization brought a new kind of radical politics to cities expanding at a scale not seen before. Mass migration and explosive growth both in urban population and in number of cities meant that global political concerns would necessarily include urban ones, while increasingly globalized economic and political networks meant that a single city’s actions could directly contradict state policies. Some scholars have detailed the growing economic power of key “global cities” and their dominance in the financial sector. The rise of municipalism, however, is more fundamentally connected to the power of mass movement—of individuals and families choosing to make long voyages, often repeatedly, and living in transnational circuits of space and resources. More than the elite globe-trotting class, it is the working classes that have articulated radical demands for more just, equitable, and sustainable cities and whose language now permeates the municipalist movement.

It is this history that makes the municipalist movement so powerful today. While drawing on longer trajectories of human rights movements, municipalism is embedded in a renewed demand for the rights of citizenship—this time guaranteed by local governments instead of by nation-states. The idea that individuals have a right to the city, that these rights are guaranteed by their residence rather than by membership in a nation, took shape over half a century as a response to political and physical dislocation, and implicitly, as a critique of the state’s failure to protect—indeed, at times, of its assault on—basic rights.

The role of property rights in this story is a peculiar one. At the conclusion of World War II, many urban dwellers in decolonizing areas occupied and used lands without title. Vast tracts remained outside the purview of state control or knowledge.

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States pursued formalization in earnest during the 1960s, with the unintended consequence of drawing a bright line between landowning and landless classes in fast-growing cities around the world. In the Philippines, for instance, the majority of families living in greater Manila occupied vacant or marginal land without title for the first three decades of independence. The National Housing Authority attempted to relocate and “rehabilitate” the urban poor in the early 1970s, fueling mass political organizing by informal dwellers. One of the most powerful groups, the Zone One Tondo Organization (ZOTO), proved particularly savvy at working with international bodies (charities, church organizations) and utilizing indirect pressure on the World Bank. In their words, they sought to “economically and politically empower the urban poor… [by] organizing and strengthening citizenship in communities.” When the Marcos regime failed to provide real citizenship, ZOTO filled the void.

ZOTO was not alone in this sort of activism, but part of a growing chorus of urban social movements structured by organizations like the National Slum Dwellers Federation in India (1975), the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (1988, joined with South African counterparts in 1992), and culminating in the creation of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (1996). This transnational organization brought together federations of global urban poor residents and highlighted the importance of local knowledge, local solutions, and women’s participation and leadership. This articulation of a different kind of citizenship, belonging, and rights—along with the work of other grassroots activists in cities around the world—helped reshape the way the UN, World Bank, and other global actors, viewed the legal position of the urban poor.

The history of grassroots politics must not be lost in current discussions about fearless cities. It was not municipal governments first, but rather individuals, workers, parents, and families residing in places like Manila, Nairobi, and Los Angeles who claimed power as urban citizens—a power that is still claimed today to challenge the strongest states and international bodies. ***** About the author: Nancy Kwak is Associate Professor of History at the University of California San Diego.

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BUILDING A N THE SHOWCASE CI

NATIONSCAPE: ITIES OF THE GULF

BY HARVEY MOLOTCH AND DAVIDE PONZINI PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHELE NASTASI JUNE 2020

Photo by David Rodrigo via Unsplash.

I

n various parts of the world, national regimes use buildings and urban infrastructure to foster regional power, exercise world economic and symbolic impact, and impress indigenous citizens of their own significance. Such is the case among cities of the Persian Gulf—particularly Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Doha—where we presently focus. Drawing as well on other urban zones for occasional comparison, we outline how a process of creating a distinctive type of cities can simultaneously constitute the reality of nation. Central to the effort is capacity to mobilize international architects, access wealth, and deploy labor for ambitious and exceptional projects.

Buildings can show off wealth and power. That’s why the West got spectacular palaces and cathedrals. But in capitalist systems, underlying economic forces have often proven decisive in the making of cities. Commercial and industrial towns and metropoles of Europe and North America ultimately grew in response to the buying and bartering within or nearby in league, of course, with colonial exploitations over much of the rest of the world. Showy things—if not palaces, then bridges, towers, dams and other geo-features of industrial power—came about as a collateral consequence of such trade. Sometimes, as the term “industrial design” would suggest, such constructions were artfully finessed, but that was always secondary to commercial functioning.

New York’s greatness is perhaps the most prominent case of such a mix: factories, office skyscrapers and, yes, some symbolic glories—like the world-inspiring Statue of Liberty. The skyscrapers were pushed up by business-related interests responding to market forces, including crowded districts nearby.

Buildings grew higher as land prices surged. When successful, it all—including the aesthetic pleasures—could reverberate back to create still more financial value through reputation and tourism. Ultimately, an unleashed flow of immigrants, money, and energy drove New York to the top of the world city league.

The new cities of the Gulf arose quite differently. Much was due to happenstance—the accident of oil and gas being sudden, unexpected, and transformative. The grand edifices came about largely without industry (other than extractive) or most of the other appurtenances of contemporary urban economies. Even in the case of Dubai, which did have a heritage of maritime trade (and pearling, an aspect of other Gulf towns and villages as well), the bulk of the built environment does not derive from a funneling of market forces into urban development. Conditions have not been ripe for in situ entrepreneurial evolution.

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Civic initiative similarly recedes where there are no political parties and few local associations. With little opposition to get in the way, real estate assumes salience.

View from the observatory of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, world’s tallest building.

Hot humid air hinders visibility (2017).

The massive migrant labor force is rarely represented in promotional and touristic images.

Here window washers are shown at work in Abu Dhabi (2012).

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What is left on the land are thus not residues of market forces but of enactments for country-creation—what we term “nationscapes.” The dynamic resembles, at least in physical terms, building out a capital—as happened with Washington DC, Brasilia, or Chandigarh. But in those cases, the urban apparatus, however richly endowed with symbolic authority, was primarily accessory to national development, not central to it. As a helpful vestigial feature, Gulf sites, not rich in prior visual particulars, are sets to stage a nation. Structures can be built, at least initially, with nothing around them—no mountains, outcroppings, or even trees. Some western architects marveled at having access to such “a perfect clean slate.”

Capital Gate Tower, built as anchor of Abu Dhabi’s National Exhibition Centre, is said to be the “most leaning” building in the world (with a tilt of 18° west) (2010).

Designers of the Gulf buildings (and connected engineering firms) have been drawn in from across the world, with a heavy bias toward the already branded, which has meant well-established U.S. and European starchitects. The ability to import top drawer operators bespeaks the larger capacity to buy, with pride, much else. Once reputation gets consolidated, say, by building the tallest skyscraper in the world or the most spectacular museum, similar real estate competences can be marketed internationally and exported to other cities, sometimes with a Gulf brand attached.

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Prevailing conventions of architectural photography can enhance the effect. Buildings are shot to accentuate their standalone sculptural qualities, stripping away “distraction.” Excised are sheds, trucks, taxis, or police vehicles. Workers, including those maintaining the buildings, roadways and landscaping, are not present. Images of skylines (the other important photo-asproduct) similarly omit particulars that might remind of the extractions needed to have created them. The cleaned-up results go on the web to attract tourists, investors, and additional clients for the architects.

What may have been built and photographed to impress the world also impresses the locals. We learn, thanks to ethnographic work by Asher Ghertner on urban India and his aptly titled book, Rule by Aesthetics, that the hoi polloi may take pride in what rises around them, even when, as in his Delhi study, his interlocutors are talking about buildings that displaced them from their own homes.

The places where the national aspirations come visibly together in the urban Gulf are not the grand mosques, but the grand shopping malls. Wall-to-wall global logos cover vast floor areas and rise multi-stories. Among citizens, there is strong brand

Visitors dining in comfort of the “St. Moritz” restaurant at the base of the ski slope, Mall of the Emirates, Dubai (2010).

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awareness. Acquiring (foreign) goods further serves, perhaps ironically, to bond citizens to the state as well as to one another.

For citizens, the glittering availability of goods signals cosmopolitan arrival. For privileged foreigners, it assures Arab normality. In stupefying incongruence with local conditions (summer temperatures are often well above 100F), there are indoor skating rinks and ski slopes (the largest in the world is at Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates); beyond recreational value, such marvels display national triumph over a hostile environment.

Among other acquisitions is a strong body of museums, nearly all from the global marquee architects. The Gulf region previously lacked both publicly accessible art “collections” or the very idea of creating them. The museum itself is an import, sometimes based on long-term loans but also advanced by hugely ambitious purchasing programs. Abu Dhabi has grouped a number of its art institutions on an island now called “Saadiyat” (“happiness” in Arabic). The island is home to the Louvre Abu Dhabi (Jean Nouvel) and soon to be joined by a Guggenheim (Frank Gehry). In preparation nearby is the country’s “premier” Zayed National Museum, developed with the British Museum and designed by Norman Foster. NYU Abu Dhabi (Rafael Viñoly), also on Saadiyat, has been open and running for several years, and a branch of the Sorbonne finds a home in another part of the city.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi, pictured here with women in regional dress, is a place for potential cultural mix and friction between traditions and cosmopolitanism (2017).

46 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

Qatar has its own impressive cultural array, with its Museum of Islamic Art (I.M. Pei) set off as a peninsula into the sea. The sister of the current ruling Emir (and head of the Qatar Museums Authority) aims to make Qatar “the Mecca of Museums.” Qatar also has campuses of ten different Western universities—including Carnegie-Mellon, Northwestern, and HEC Paris—located on a kind of giant campus of campuses. Their handsome presence asserts, in a world-inviting way, a belonging of science and culture. What goes on inside the buildings is less important and indeed is sometimes, like in a notorious instance of an NYU Abu Dhabi studentorganized drag show, something that needs to be contained.

As with other such Gulf landmarks, Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art is located in a visually-dramatic setting (2017).

Safer for domestic consumption is sport, although here as well, the players along with the heritage do not derive from the local.

Events are designed to attract tourists and media attention. Doha sponsored the “Asian Games” of 2006 and is currently developing massive infrastructure to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup; Abu Dhabi and Bahrein have Formula One. Falconry, a sport throughout the Gulf is an important signifier of nation; a falcon image dominates the national seal and thus appears at ceremonial entry points to public buildings, although the bird itself has to be imported because of the harsh climate.

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The Abu Dhabi Yas Island Formula 1track with the luxury Viceroy Hotel constructed above it (2017).

Urban sprawl permeates life. For citizens, large single-family houses are taken for granted as are domestic staffs to service them.

In official reaction against prior nomadic existence, houses (more modest ones in earlier times) were, in Ahmed Hashim’s phrase, tools with which to “build the nation”. Heavily trafficked freeways are punctuated with billboards honoring the sheiks’ leadership and wisdom. Fencing and bountiful landscaping obscure unsightly elements. Dormitory like camps for workers are located out of view. Foreigners, heavily drawn from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and other poor Asian countries, make up to 90% of the population. Present under temporary work permits, lower income workers cannot be accompanied by family members. Ethnic and cultural “diversity,” of a sort, is thus enfolded as national practice.

For citizens, tourists, and well-off ex-pats, the conspicuous pleasantness of Gulf city life helps counter any lingering notions of backwardness, regional tension, or danger. It is all done with attentiveness to global narratives of what makes for great cities—including in-vogue concepts of creativity, best practices, sustainability, and even social inclusion (the latter is among recent publicly-stated policy goals). Such narratives, made without irony (even in Saudi Arabia) leave the buildings undisturbed as signals of benign nationhood. The exposure of such national imaginaries is amplified by international trade fairs, conferences, and art exhibitions. The 48 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

impressive facts of attainment—highest building, largest fountain, indoor skiing—plus the iconic scenography, are seductive. Officials and functionaries from nations with weak economies and very different political and social structures are striving to imitate some of the Gulf city strategies. But with fewer resources and weaker governing capacity, they risk deep debt, corruption, and construction of buildings that, reflecting misplaced ambition, presage resource waste, and social turmoil.

Workers are typically omitted from urban representation and from nation-building narrations, Kuwait City (2017).

About the contributors: Harvey Molotch is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies, New York University and University of California, Santa Barbara.

Davide Ponzini is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and director of the Transnational Architecture and Urbanism research unit, Politecnico di Milano.

Michele Nastasi is a photographer and a researcher in the field of architecture, cities and their representation.

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BUILDING BACK AND THE EU RE

BY AGUSTÍ FERNÁNDEZ DE

K BETTER: CITIES ECOVERY PLAN

E LOSADA | FEBRUARY 2021

Photo by Logan Armstrong via Unsplash.

A

t first glance, 2020 does not appear to have been a banner year for multilateralism. Log-standing organizations and platforms showed worrying paralysis during the onset and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet, the European Union (EU) has been able to agree on a budget with the potential to generate unprecedented stimulus and guide the bloc’s recovery process.

After overcoming resistance from the so-called “Frugals”—rich northern countries inclined toward austerity policies—and the most reactionary populists (especially the members of the Visegrád Group) the EU ultimately managed to lay the foundation for emerging from the crisis.

During the European Council Meeting on 10-11 December 2020, an agreement was reached under the German Council Presidency to adopt a €1.8 trillion budget to tackle post-pandemic recovery. This budget consists of the new Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) 2021–2027—the EU’s long-term budget—and Next Generation EU (NGEU), an exceptional stimulus package of €750 billion that is designed to tackle the COVID-19 crisis. It includes the Recovery and Resilience Facility, a mechanism for financing member states’ national recovery plans.

EU and national recovery strategies will focus on driving a process of socio-economic transformation based on a redoubled commitment to building a greener, more digital and more resilient Europe that is able to adapt to current and future challenges. Cities, which have been on the frontline of the COVID-19 crisis, have offered widespread support to the EU’s commitment to passing the ambitious agreement. Dario Nardella, President of Eurocities and Mayor of Florence, was very clear when, last November he called on the governments of Poland and Hungary to end their veto of the EU budget. It is time for solidarity, not for vetoes, he argued.

Yet, support does not necessarily translate to influence or power. It remains far from clear whether cities will be properly engaged in the design and implementation of national recovery strategies. To the contrary, it may be that top-down mindsets prevail once again.

Multiple studies have shown the eminently urban dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic both in terms of sheer numbers but also complex knock-on effects. Cities are home to the vast majority of the people affected by the pandemic, and local governments often had to guarantee basic services for citizens at the most complex points of lockdown. But the urban dimension of 52 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

COVID-19 transcends those well-known features of demography. Cities’ economies have suffered dramatically, accentuating inequalities and creating a social emergency of a magnitude not seen in Europe since the 2008 financial crisis. This emergency is added to the climate crisis which, until a few months ago, had been the focus of many urban-led efforts and which must under no circumstances lose centrality.

The role of cities goes beyond mitigating the impacts of the pandemic. As Ursula Von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, recently acknowledged, cities and urban areas will be crucial to the recovery process. Cities are responsible for a significant percentage of public spending in the EU—an average of 23.3% in 2018—and their areas of competency give them a privileged position in promoting the transformation of local production systems and social behavior patterns, moving towards climate neutrality, and serving the most vulnerable by bridging gaps and guaranteeing rights. Local governments tend to promote alliances with citizens and urban operators to lead collective processes of change. Good examples of this can be found in cities like Amsterdam, where the recovery strategy is based on the circular economy; Barcelona, which is committed to promoting a humanist, rights-based digital transition; and Paris, whose “15-minute city” model proposes a polycentric city that is sustainable, healthy, inclusive, and prosperous.

However, more resources are needed to empower cities to foster collective transformation processes. Such resources must respond to cities’ needs and interests and enable them to design and deploy more effective solutions. In a letter sent last November to the European institutions, the mayors of nine European major cities and capital cities urged the EU to recognize local governments as “key allies” in the recovery process.

Crucially, the letter stressed that to fulfil this role, cities need to be better engaged in the design of member states’ national recovery plans, and they should be given direct access to the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RFF)—it proposes earmarking 10% of the RFF for local governments.

But despite this and other advocacy efforts, cities’ aspirations are unlikely to be given due consideration. The policymaking of the European Union continues to be shaped by states’ reluctance to cede sovereignty and by top-down approaches. Most member states do not provide any formal channels to cities for participating in the definition of national strategies such as the forthcoming recovery plans (exceptions include the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, and Scandinavian countries). Instead, DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 53

local governments’ involvement generally depends on their ability to influence national authorities through professional or political ties and in processes that lack coherence. Even if cities will be able to benefit from the EU recovery funds, they will not be given direct access to them. Rather, they will be obliged to follow mechanisms and priorities defined by national governments and, in federal systems, by regions and federal states.

With the EU budget approved, and with national strategies still under negotiation, there is scant evidence that the recovery funds will be allocated according to a multi-level governance logic. Despite the services they deliver, the populations they serve, and the challenges they face, cities will most likely be denied the involvement they deserve. Since the start of the pandemic, they have demonstrated great potential and resilience to stand on the frontline, to address emergencies, and to lead local processes of change. The failure to engage cities in a systematic manner may limit the success of the European recovery plan. If the needs and priorities of cities, their neighborhoods, and communities are not properly addressed the transformation process will no doubt be less solid and sustainable. ***** About the author: Agustí Fernández de Losada is senior research fellow and director of the Global Cities Programme at CIDOB at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs.

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TOWA THE FO REPRESE OF CITI REGIONS: FROM T

BY MARTA GALC MARCH

Photo by Robert Tjalondo via Unsplash.

ARDS ORMAL ENTATION IES AND LESSONS THE EU

CERAN-VERCHER H 2021

C

ities, organized collectively around transnational municipal networks, have sought for decades to carve out a formal role for themselves within global and regional governance structures. Early municipalist visionaries, such as Emile Vinck, the first secretary general of the International Union of Local Authorities (forebear of UCLG), attempted a century ago to forge an organic bond with the League of Nations. Today, the slogan “listen to cities” resonates loudly in most United Nations conferences and pervades the campaigns around which the international municipalism movement has coalesced.

In a moment when the multilateral order is crying for a branchand-root reform, it seems timely to ask how a formal role for subnational governments within the current global and regional governance architecture could be established. And there is no lack of proposals here. Among the most prominent proposals is the institutionalization of a mechanism for a permanent and structured dialogue between cities, regions and national governments within the UN system, one which would involve the upgrading of the World Assembly of Local and Regional Governments. Yet, could such a formal link become something more than just a symbolic presence? And more importantly, how should such an instrument be organized to be genuinely representative of the heterogeneous reality of local and regional governments?

The case study of European Committee of the Regions (CoR), deemed the most advanced institutional mechanism worldwide for giving local and regional governments a voice in international policymaking, throws some light on this question. Set up in 1994, following the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty, the CoR was conceived as a supranational body of consultative nature, that could guarantee cities and regions a formal say in the European Union’s (EU) policy and law-making.

Now a fixture of the EU’s institutional makeup, the CoR hinges on a threefold rationale. First, the logic of multilevel governance, implying responsibility being shared between the different tiers of government concerned with a given EU policy. This is particularly noticeable in the fields of public health, education, employment, social policy, economic and social cohesion, transport, telecommunications, energy networks and climate change, where the opinion of the CoR is mandatory (albeit not binding). Second, the principle of subsidiarity, meaning that decisions must be taken at the level of government best serving the public interest – as close as possible to citizens. It should be noted that over 60% of decisions taken at the European level 58 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

have a direct local impact and that roughly 70% of EU legislation is implemented by local and regional authorities. And third, the willingness to reinforce the democratic legitimacy of the Union by bridging the gap between the EU’s institutions and citizens.

Being the closest governmental level to people, it is expected that local and regional authorities could play a crucial role here.

To be sure, the non-binding advisory character of the CoR is one of its most conspicuous and severe structural weaknesses.

Yet, assessing its representativeness is equally essential, for its arguably dysfunctional membership model may be strongly related to its poor effectiveness in delivering on its mandate. The committee was designed as a political assembly composed of 329 locally and regionally elected representatives, appointed by national delegations and grouped according to their political affiliation. Unsurprisingly, many divisions cut across this membership scheme; and that is precisely the crux of the matter.

The landscape of subnational governments in Europe is a complex and heterogeneous one. It includes territorial entities as diverse as municipalities, provinces, departments, counties, substate federated units, and regions. The most obvious dividing line is the one between the local and regional level, although disparities within these two groups are also significant. For instance, representatives from regions that have mostly administrative powers (e.g., most French departments) hold significantly fewer competences than those with legislative powers and a greater degree of autonomy (like Scotland or Catalonia).

Oftentimes this entails the latter feeling more interpellated by the decisions taken in Brussels, as they have responsibilities comparable to those of Member States for transposing and implementing the European legislation.

For its part, the local level encompasses over 87,000 municipalities. Under this category, metropolis such as Paris, Milan and Barcelona coexist with small and medium-sized towns of less than 2,000 inhabitants (29 percent of all municipalities in Europe) with whom they have little in common. The ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic in large cities, when contrasted with the lower impact in more rural settings, is a glaring example of such disparity. Yes, containing the spread of disease in densely populated urban areas is significantly more challenging, but major cities have also been among the hardest hit areas by the ensuing economic and social crisis. As a result, today Europe’s major cities are in dire need of resources to build back better.

Tellingly, city calls to get direct access to the funds provided by EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility have not been channeled DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 59

through the CoR, which is playing a relatively marginal role in this negotiation. Instead, Europe’s most prominent mayors have collectively addressed a letter to the EU institutions and favored networking spaces like Eurocities to build up their advocacy messages. This is but one example of the largest cities showing scant interest in the CoR and seeking alternative avenues to influence EU policymaking and make their voice heard.

Interestingly, a parallel situation exists globally, where cities like London, Tokyo and New York often prioritize club politics and engagement in spaces restricted to their equally sized peers (i.e., Urban20, C40 Cities and the likes).

No doubt CoR’s degree of heterogeneity hinders establishing a single cohesive and functional model of local and regional representation at the EU level. However, urban diversity is not an exclusive feature of the European context, as attested by the fact that there is no universal agreement on what a city is, nor a common understanding of the idea of urbanity that comes with it. Therefore, it must be assumed that the multi-colored and multi-sized “local and regional voice” will hardly ever be adequately represented by a single assembly attempting to fit all shapes, sizes, and levels of jurisdictions. And this applies both to the regional and to the global governance arrangements.

Now, is there any alternative, more suitable model?

Looking beyond the EU institutions, the bicameral system of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe (not to be confused with the European Council) merits consideration. The Congress’s mandate is to strengthen local and regional democracy in its 47-member states, uphold human rights and promote local self-government. In similar fashion to the CoR, the Congress works as an advisory assembly of 648 elected officials which fosters consultation and political dialogue between central, intermediary and municipal governments. Yet, it operates under a dual structure: the Chamber of Local Authorities and the Chamber of Regions.

Even if the policy relevance of the Council of Europe cannot be equated with that of the European Union, several lessons can be extracted from its model. To start with, a compelling advantage of any bicameral system is that it enhances pluralist participation and representation. It also allows discussions to be grounded on the differing local and regional challenges and daily realities. Hence, attaining higher levels of homogeneity within these spaces would surely improve not only its representativeness, but also its usefulness. While the bicameral model may not be the panacea (larger European cities are also 60 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

absent from the Congress), the international municipalist movement would surely benefit from giving serious thought to multichamber schemes of representation when calling for a formal seat at the global table. ***** About the author: Marta Galceran-Vercher is Adjunct Professor of International Relations at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 61

LATIN AMERICA’S N STUNTS PANDE

BY PATRICIO ZAMBRANO-B

NEW INFORMALITY EMIC RECOVERY

BARRAGÁN | AUGUST 2021

Photo by Leon Overweel via Unsplash.

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ore than a year has passed since the pandemic fully reached Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

Yet, as wealthier countries ramp up vaccination campaigns and gradually reopen, the region has become a COVID-19 hotspot. LAC now registers over 20% of global cases and over 30% of deaths, even though it is home to only 8% of the global population. While the world’s economic output shrunk by 3% in 2020, the region’s fell by 7%. Whatever social and economic progress LAC made during the commodities boom of the early aughts has been wiped out by the economic and social effects of the pandemic.

The underlying drivers behind this trend are multiple and interrelated, with some predating the pandemic: chronic underinvestment in public health systems, limited or unambitious fiscal stimuli, and reduced access to vaccines top the list. However, beyond these factors, which to various degrees also affect other developing regions, LAC cities entered the pandemic with two pre-existing conditions: informality coupled with inequality. Over a quarter of the region’s citizens live in informal neighborhoods and almost half of all households lack adequate housing (i.e., lack access to water, sanitation, legal title, in overcrowded homes and with little to no access to public spaces and quality mobility services). LAC also has some of the most unequal cities in the world (i.e., with high GINI coefficients). While regions such as sub-Saharan Africa also stand out for high levels of inequality, LAC has a uniquely harmful and pervasive combination of extreme inequality and informality in urban areas.

The patterns and drivers of urban informality and inequality in LAC have evidently changed over time, yet the pandemic is showing us an essential point policy makers all too often fail to recognize. The need to work informally, the undue impacts and burdens on women and the young, poor access to healthcare, the inability to learn or work through digital means--all of these impacts have a clear geographic and spatial expression. This is a new kind of informality, manifold and intangible in its social and economic expressions yet always anchored in a specific place.

To illustrate this, consider how the rapid spread of COVID-19 has ‘capitalized’ on pre-existing informality and inequality, while simultaneously exacerbating them. Historically, LAC has had notably high levels of labor informality. Quarantine measures caused tremendous job losses in so-called ‘contact-intensive’ sectors, from domestic services (which involve direct contact between poor and wealthy residents, thus helping the spread across socioeconomic groups) to restaurants and hotels, hitting poor 64 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

families—many without access to quality infrastructure, could not observe simple health recommendations such as handwashing—in low-income areas the hardest. Women, in particular, have experienced higher than average employment losses, having not only left service jobs but also taken on additional care work at home. Migrants, particularly those without legal status, have had no choice but to continue to work, all without proper access to health services. Few among these groups have the skills or digital tools to find ‘work from home’ alternatives; most still have to use mass transit as low-income families have continued to move around cities at a greater rate compared to wealthier households). Inequality throughout LAC’s cities has been unmasked and deepened.

They overlap in very specific neighborhoods and determine how their residents experience and navigate unequal cities. Recommendations for post-pandemic recovery correctly point to the need for more consistent investment in healthcare, for fiscal relief for people and firms, for improved taxation and welfare systems, and for improved broadband access and digital literacy.

Yet they often ignore the interdependency these topics have with the precarious nature of contemporary city life.

To be sure, informality in LAC cities is not a new phenomenon.

In fact, it has characterized city growth since the mid-twentieth century, during which the region experienced unprecedented levels of economic growth and a dual phenomenon of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Rural-to-urban migrants often settled in peripheral, self-built neighborhoods, which have since been surrounded by rapidly-growing cities and are now part of consolidated urban centers or ‘innerburbs’. Ironically, today’s urban expansion is explained by both premium-gated communities as well as state-sponsored social housing.. The former depends entirely on private cars to access the city. The latter, distant from mass transit and all manners of services, often lays vacant. Informal development in at-risk areas, at times encouraged through clientelistic networks, can still be a better alternative.

The pandemic has catalyzed overdue conversations about our cities and has turned previously disinterested citizens around the world into urban planners. Weeks and months of confinement have created a clear demand for ‘liveability’ and its environmental and climate benefits: bigger and greener parks, uncongested and walkable streetscapes, access to food and services, fast internet. Some among us have even left cities, perhaps never to return (though most often to smaller and, yes, more liveable urban areas). Forward-looking municipalities have embraced concepts DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 65

such as the fifteen-minute city. As companies embrace permanent arrangements for teleworking, astute property managers are turning vacant offices into multi-purpose spaces.

All of these ideas, and the underlying demand for more liveable cities, provide a way forward for post-pandemic cities in LAC. However, these alone cannot redress the historic legacy of urban informality, which would require considerable and parallel efforts to ensure quality access to basic infrastructure and services. And even then, accompanying strategies to close the digital gap and prepare vulnerable populations for the new (and already unequal) data economy. This complementarity of interventions is crucial and is a key element in the Inter-American Development Bank’s Vision 2025, a blueprint for the region’s recovery and growth, which has sustainability as a cross-cutting principle to guide our work.

Throughout history, cities have held the promise of a better life: people want to live in places that offer opportunities for a better life, while firms locate where demand and talent lie. For this promise to hold in LAC after the pandemic—and for democratic governments to reemerge without losing their legitimacy—cities must ensure that broader fiscal and health agendas recognize the spatial and urban nature of informality and inequality. Specifically, the new informality demands that LAC cities address historic ‘bricks and mortar’ issues such as inadequate housing all while embracing planning innovations and a civic-minded embrace of digitalization and exponential growth. ***** About the author: Patricio Zambrano-Barragán is a Housing and Urban Development Senior Specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank.

66 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 67

THE GEOPOLITICAL IM MENTED URBAN SYSTE

BY LIZA ROSE CIROL

MPLICATIONS OF FRAGEMS IN AFRICAN CITIES

LIA | FEBRUARY 2022

Photo by Clodagh da Paixao via Unsplash.

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here is now a resounding call for African cities to engage directly with geopolitical processes. The call is premised on the important acknowledgment that African cities are the economic powerhouses of the continent and that, as they continue to grow, they will need to form part not only of local and national debates in their respective countries, but global debates that transverse the world systems. In addressing this call, it is first important to consider what we mean by ‘African cities’ and what sorts of political maneuvering we are expecting of them.

In doing so, it is equally important to start by considering how multi-scalar and multi-territorial geopolitics already play out in and through African urban areas and city governments. In other words, from the hyper-local to the global—African cities are already key sites of the exercise of geopolitical control, claimstaking, and configuration. In reality, and depending on how the concept of geopolitical is used, this can take many forms.

My research, and that of others like Sylvia Croese, Andrea Pollio, Tom Goodfellow, shows how geopolitical power is animated through and with urban infrastructure. By geopolitical, I mean power and politics as they play out across and among spaces that themselves have been fashioned by logics of territory, authority, and geography. By infrastructure, and specifically urban infrastructure, I am speaking about the many material systems which intersect with and shape urban areas.

This is not just the infrastructure that is explicitly framed as city-scale, such as water, energy, or waste—but includes cloud infrastructures, social infrastructures, and even the financial infrastructures that shape urban life. The trans-African highway, for example, a network of highways connecting the entire continent, is very much framed as a pan-African project—however, it shapes cities large and small. Similarly, regional efforts to roll out broadband infrastructures across Africa are having an unprecedented impact on cities and nearly every effort of urban life and culture.

As Simon Bekker and Göran Therborn point out, power struggles over the urban, and particularly through infrastructure and space, are particularly apparent in Africa’s capital cities.

As can be seen in cities such as Kampala, Harare, and Dakar, capital cities are where political tension bubbles. However, my work on smaller cities in Kenya, South Africa, and Senegal, suggests that secondary and non-capital cities also experience these geopolitical infrastructural tussles, sometimes by default as regional mega-projects come crashing through their 70 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

jurisdictions (e.g. the trans-African highway in Kisumu), and sometimes by careful design (such as played out during the FIFA World Cup in South Africa).

From the colonial times to the present moment, city infrastructure has reflected a key site through which local, national, regional, and global power is negotiated. Overlapping claims play out, for example, in key mobility infrastructures or energy provision. More recently, the development of undersea and terrestrial cables—which provide broadband to Africa’s urban areas—as well as the pricing and taxing of data, has been shaped by geopolitical battles and has, in effect, also shaped the sorts of digital political constituencies which can form in and between city contexts. For example, in Kampala, additional daily taxes to use social media accounts have shaped online activism and political mobilization by making access costlier.

While there are many conjunctures that can help us understand how we have arrived at this hyper-(geo)politicization of urban infrastructure, I would like to suggest one narrative. Both the fragmented nature of urban infrastructure systems and the fractured nature of urban governance provide fertile ground for city infrastructure to become the site of power-battles.

Here it is important to provide context on Africa’s urban trajectory with a particular focus on cities as both places of economic material, infrastructure, and social agglomeration and density, and as institutional actors (such as communes, local governments, municipalities, etc.).

We can start with the question of the material. African cities today reflect a combination of on and off-grid, large and small, formal and informal, networked and distributed systems of service delivery. Water, energy, sanitation, mobility, and now broadband infrastructures are delivered through heterogeneous and hybrid configurations. This contemporary reality reflects a palimpsest of investment epochs—a colonial focus on settler towns, extractives, and logistics; a post-colonial focus on national-building mega-projects (such as new capital cities); modernization projects driven by multilateral donors and lenders; structural adjustment and urban austerity; and the contemporary ‘African frontierism’ where a plethora of lenders and donors now scramble invest in African cities, sometimes in search of profits, and others times hoping for long-term political alliance.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this frenzy of investments is rarely attentive to the other investments being made by global playDIPLOMATIC COURIER | 71

ers, nor is it attuned to the potential which lies in the existing hybridized models. For example, bus rapid transit (BRT) and trains are shoved over effective mini-bus systems, and stateof-the-art sanitation treatments facilities are built when cities in fact rely on low-tech vacuum trucks and septic tanks. These new investments and projects might be fine if interoperable with existing systems and the debt conditions were favorable, but this is rarely the case.

At the interstices of this material fragmentation, exacerbated by decades of questionable mega-projects, is the fractured nature of urban governance and urban management. This brings us to the question of urban state-craft. The urban state in Africa is not reducible to the municipality or local government but is rather given effect through the relationships which form, over and through, the control of urban infrastructure.

Tracing this process back some ways, much of this dynamism (and confusion) over who has the mandate to build, manage, and regulate urban infrastructure systems stems from the very partial and imposed processes of decentralization implemented since the 1980s in Africa. Because of the limited subnational control and private sector involvement, the vast majority of investment in cities still takes place through and by national governments, often through ring-fenced agencies and utilities.

The urban experience of fractured fiscal authority and material fragmentations has been driven by geopolitics, historically and currently. But there is more. In fact, these arrangements become geopolitical, reflecting discourses, adjustments, demands, and incentives of actors both global and local. This geopolitical fragmentation has direct implications for responding to the call for cities to be part of geo-political processes. If cities are neither single material entities nor governed in ways that are legible and conscripted, how do cities—in all of their material and institutional messiness—engage in ongoing and, or emergent geopolitical fora? To begin with, this reality requires us to understand the urban state-craft as something which is not singular, but is by its nature relational—multi-actor and agency. ***** About the author: Liza Rose Cirolia is a senior researcher at the African Centre for Cities. Her work is focused on the social, political, technical and institutional dimensions of urban infrastructure, decentralization, and human settlements in African cities.

72 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 73

ASIA’S MEGACI FUTURE OF G

BY PARAG KHANNA

ITIES AND THE GEOPOLITICS | FEBRUARY 2022

Photo by Ishan via Unsplash.

C

urrently in Western societies, there is significant discussion about de-urbanization and suburbanization—people wanting to get away from cities and live the remote life.

By comparison, young Asians still aspire to move to cities because of the quality of life, access to public services, education, higher wages, and better health care. Asia is going to continue to be a rapidly urbanizing region and represent the better part of the urban population of the world. Asian cities, especially Asian megacities, are an order of magnitude larger than Western megacities. If you take the entire US Northeast corridor (Boston, New York, and Washington together), this represents a population of 60 to 70 million people, which is approximating the Greater Bay Area of China. In the West, however, there are only a few “urban archipelagos” that could be characterized according to those geographical parameters—in Asia, there are many more.

As such a large proportion of the world’s population, the urban demographics of Asian megacities obviously matter greatly, but how do they influence great power geopolitics? Within Asian megacities, there is stratification, a micropolitics depending on economic equality and inequality, access to services, and different spatial organizations. There is a clear relationship to geopolitics based on the function different city components serve in terms of domestic and international economic connectivity and connection to global supply chains. This is, of course, true of megacities across the globe. However, the difference in Asia is that some of the large urban agglomerations and wealthier countries have evolved beyond that to an extreme stratification and have built sufficient infrastructure to absorb populations that provide high-quality services across the board. “...geopolitical power begins with building a supply chain empire, and that begins with building cities. We really cannot and should not separate conversations about what constitutes or comprises a superpower in geopolitics from its urban foundations.” The story of this growth and stratification begins with Special Economic Zones (SEZs). As urban populations in Asia expanded rapidly through the 20th century, SEZs represented a conscious strategy for countries to attract investment, become part of global supply chains, expand the labor force, and boost incomes and savings. It is a story identified very often with Shenzhen, which just over 40 years ago was declared China’s first SEZ. There are two models of how SEZs become part of the pursuit of national modernization: firstly, those with genuine spillover effects, where local firms copycat those inside the zone leading to more industrial activity and competition, and secondly, those where development spreads and regulations harmonize such that SEZs are no longer needed because the country has one common legal and regulatory standard for investment. Singapore is an example of the latter. Many 76 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

countries have witnessed the success of China’s SEZs and have begun to emulate those practices, as seen in Vietnam and India.

Through a lens of geopolitics and urbanization, SEZs contribute to the historical process of building empires and superpowers. The origin of any system story of imperial rise is industrial policy. In many ways, this harkens back to the European colonial era and the way cities connect to global supply chains and anchor a country’s growing economic weight and gravity in the world. In other words, geopolitical power begins with building a supply chain empire, and that begins with building cities. We really cannot and should not separate conversations about what constitutes or comprises a superpower in geopolitics from its urban foundations.

The larger processes of urbanization, connectivity, and investment in urban infrastructure in Asia have intensely geopolitical dynamics and territorial consequences. In building a supply chain empire, there is always some resistance, and we are seeing this around the world, but particularly in Pakistan, South East Asia, and Africa. It is evidenced through the militarization of supply chains and particularly anti-Chinese protest in some of these regions.

The enormous investment in urban infrastructure across the Asian continent is further drawing young people to cities, and when projecting forward 10 to 20 years, we should question: which next set of cities will emerge as key hubs of commerce and diplomacy? These are the cities that will act as foundations of power for the countries or regions in which they reside. Many of these may be sitting at the intersecting lines of new Eurasian urban infrastructure. The answer to this question will also have an enormous territorial impact on Central Asian countries, becoming scenic, resource-rich passageways for the connectivity they enable between China and West Asia, the Gulf countries, and Europe.

These seismic shifts in geopolitical power on the Eurasian continent and worldwide are all linked to the complex history of the Western politics of outsourcing and globalization in the 1950s and 1960s and the expansion of Asian megacities as the world’s factory floor. The dual processes of urbanization and globalization which have produced Asia’s megacities as the foundations of geopolitical power are now reshaping those regions and global urban development on a global scale. ***** About the author: Parag Khanna is Founder & Managing Partner of FutureMap and author of MOVE: The Forces Uprooting Us (2021), which was preceded by The Future is Asian: Commerce, Conflict & Culture in the 21st Century (2019).

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 77

BUILT BY CHINA

BY XIANGMING CHE

GOING GLOBAL

EN | FEBRUARY 2022

Photo by Ishan via Unsplash.

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n November 2021, Chinese state-owned rail companies were putting the finishing touches on the few remaining stations and testing the operating systems of the China-Laos Railway (CLR) for the launch of its operation on December 2, 2021. For reasons outlined below, China has touted the CLR as among a handful of “flagship projects” of its eminent Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Originating in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province in southwestern China, and terminating in Vientiane, capital of Laos, the CLR runs south through the China-Laos border covering a little over 1,000 kilometers, around 600 km in China and 424 km in Laos (see map). It passes through 93 tunnels and over 136 elevated bridges within China and 75 tunnels and 165 bridges inside Laos, respectively. The Railway cost around $6 billion to build, for which Laos has borrowed $3.5 billion, about 60 percent, from the Export and Import Bank of China.

Ambitious as it is, the CLR is only the transport backbone of an even more audacious infrastructure-driven cross-border development corridor that includes a new economic zone in the small town of Boten, which is located right on the Lao side of the border with China. The Boten zone serves as the midway hub for the CLR. The CLR-Boten zone exemplifies China’s distinctive capacity of delivering bundled infrastructure beyond its borders. This case reveals three salient features that should guide our understanding of China’s powerful impact on global urbanization via the BRI. First, we should see this rail-zone corridor as projecting China as a dominant player in global infrastructure provision as its primary manufacturing sector has waned. This deliberate shift from “made in China” to “built by China” helps address the huge infrastructure gap in developing and emerging economies, which account for 63% of the global need through 2035. With half of this project need coming from China itself, China has been “building out” from its own accumulated experience with construction of large-scale infrastructure to support its expanding cities and rapid economic growth. Driven by a saturated and more regulated domestic construction market, as evidenced by the recent tighter approval of new subways in lower-tier cities, China’s inside-out infrastructure building, the BRI’s most defining dimension, has solidified it as the world’s most powerful infrastructure state.

China is now capable of building individual infrastructure projects and delivering bundled infrastructure systems designed 80 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

and integrated to reflect international standards. Drilling through a large number of tunnels for the CLR required rail engineering and hydropower companies to work together using China-made specialized heavy equipment, and Chinese companies brought homemade long tracks to Laos to be laid by China-designed special track-laying vehicles.CERC coordinated the design for the CLR train based on the mature technology of China’s own high-speed “Fuxing Express” train to meet the CLR’s requirements of slower speed, larger capacity, and lower maintenance cost. Jointly manufactured by two subsidiaries of China Railway Rolling Stock Group Cooperation (CRRC), the train was recently delivered and tested on tracks in red, blue, and white colors of Laos’ National Flag (see photo 1). The CLR embodies China’s full capacity of delivering integrated largescale transport systems to any host nation.

As part of the CLR, albeit not through integrated planning from the outset, China has designed and built an economic cooperation zone over the China-Laos border in Boten and the Chinese border town of Mohan. While the Chinese side focuses on attracting regional corporate headquarters, the larger Boten zone consists of four subzones: international commerce, international duty-free shopping, international education and medical industry, and international services. These zoned functions would be integrated into a comprehensive new city with housing for 300,000 people working and living locally. A major station along the CLR, the Mohan-Boten special zone serves as a logistics hub for through freight and a border crossing for passengers. Boten has already attracted a number of Chinese investment projects. Like the CLR, the Boten zone projects China’s “export” or extension of its fairly successful mode of domestic special economic zone development to Southeast Asia and Africa that traces all the way back to Shenzhen.

Haicheng, a private real estate development company headquartered in Kunming, is the primary financier and builder of the Boten city. This helps soften the BRI’s geopolitical image as a top-down, state-driven initiative. In return, Haicheng has benefited from the BRI’s political wind in advancing its business into neighboring Laos to offset the saturated and dwindling domestic property market.

At the CLR’s southern terminus, near the Vientiane station, China and Laos have jointly built the Saysettha Comprehensive Development Zone, financed mostly by China’s national and provincial state and private companies. The zone will use the CLR to ship assembled or lightly manufactured export products. Both Boten and Saysettha add embedded urban and economic infrastructure assets to go with the CLR as a connective infrastructure project DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 81

(see map). Together they make up a bundled infrastructure package that China has delivered to Laos via multiple state-state and state-private partnerships.

How will this rail-zone corridor benefit its two connected parties, especially Laos? With this new north-south transport artery extending to Bangkok, Laos will transform itself from a landlocked to a land-linked country, while landlocked Yunnan province will also gain an access to the sea via Thailand pending a short 22-km rail connection between Laos and Thailand.

The CLR will reduce a train ride from Vientiane to Boten from two days to three hours, while a trip from Kunming to the China-Laos border will be shortened from six to three hours. This much reduced travel time will stimulate Laos’ tourism industry, which accounted for 12 percent of its GDP and employed over 40,000 people before the pandemic. The cultural and Buddhist attractions in Luang Prabang in northern Laos, as UNESCO heritage sites, will draw more Chinese tourists traveling on the CLR. It appears that Laos’ agricultural sector, representing 60 percent of its workforce, stands to benefit even more. The two governments have recently agreed for China to import larger amounts of Laos’ main exports such as cows, rice, cassava, and tropical fruits, all of which can be transported efficiently north by the CLR. Regionally, the paved roads linking the CLR stations and nearby villages in northern Laos make it possible for local farmers to drive rice and cows on tractors to the stations for fast shipping to China. The CLR can extend this traditional benefit of transit-oriented development to more urban and economic spillovers along the cross-border rail-zone corridor.

Beneficial as it will be, the CLR carries both short- and longterm costs and risks. It delayed and denied wage payments to some Laotian workers. Some rural households affected by the CLR received insufficient compensation. Given its upfront costs of heavy borrowing and short term insufficient demand, the CLR may lose money for the first decade or so as its usage gradually ramps up. While China has granted Laos annual exports of 50,000 tons of rice and 500,000 cows, Laos is currently only able to deliver 20,000 tons of rice and over 2,000 cows annually. This lack of Laos’ export capacity will limit or delay demand for the CLR and its return on investment. A similar lag in demand could turn the new zone in Boten into an underutilized hub.

With the Boten zone still under construction and the CLR on its maiden run, the full balance of benefits and costs from this 82 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

massive cross-border infrastructure bundle won’t be known for some time. What is already clear, however, is that China has built a prominent number of embedded and connective infrastructure projects similar to the CLR. They include the Djibouti International Free Trade Zone, industrial parks in Ethiopia, the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway, and a similar combination of port and zone development in Mombasa and the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway in Kenya.

These projects mark China’s exceptional role in designing, building, and delivering bundled infrastructure that distinguish itself from the West. They also pose challenges and lessons for the West as it is ramping up initiatives like the G7’s Built Back Better World (B3W) and the U.S.-led Blue Dot Network that aim to help close the infrastructure gap in developing countries by providing inclusive, transparent and economically viable infrastructure projects and certifying them against robust criteria and standards.

To the extent that these will provide alternatives to China’s approach, could it lead to cooperative opportunities for both based on their complementary strengths? A yes to this question would be good for all parties, especially the developing world. ***** About the Author: Xiangming Chen is Raether Distinguished Professor of Global Urban Studies and Sociology at Trinity College, Connecticut, and a Visiting Professor at Fudan University, Shanghai.

DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 83

THE URBAN CENTURY

BY XUEFEI REN |

Y OF CHINA AND INDIA FEBRUARY 2022

Photo by Ishan via Unsplash.

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ith their similar population size and fast-track growth, cities in China and India are frequently compared. Commentators often attribute the differences between Chinese and Indian cities to regime type, such as democracy vs. authoritarianism. While political regimes powerfully shape societies, they only offer a partial explanation. For a deeper understanding of why cities in China and India work the way they do, and their global implications, one must cast a broader lens.

Territorial vs. Associational Governance Beyond regime types, one major distinction between Chinese and Indian cities is the territorial logic of urban governance in China and the associational logic of urban governance in India.

Urban policymaking and implementation in China are strongly shaped by a thick layer of territorial institutions, such as the hukou system and the cadre evaluation system for promoting city officials. These are “territorial” institutions because they unevenly distribute rights, benefits, resources, and rewards according to localities and jurisdictions. For example, the hukou system links a citizen’s welfare entitlement to the physical locality where the person is registered; China’s cadre evaluation system is a territory-based reward method, as it promotes and punishes local officials based on their performance within their jurisdictions.

Indian cities lack strong territorial institutions. Urban policymaking depends on a dense web of networks and alliances among the state, the private sector, and civil society groups.

Urban affairs are domains of state governments, and municipal institutions are often minor players in policymaking. The execution of urban programs—in housing, land, transportation, and environment—is contingent upon coalition-building among stakeholders. This arrangement presents a fluid “associational” form of urban governance.

Air Pollution The ways China and India tackle their air pollution further illustrate the difference between the territorial and associational approaches to urban governance.

The key actors in China’s clean air campaigns are municipal governments. Following the central government’s mandates, cities draft detailed action plans and allocate generous funding for implementation. The central government exerts strong pressure on city officials, whose promotion is closely tied to their 86 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

record in air pollution control. Local officials are strongly incentivized to cut air pollution in their jurisdictions, but they are less motivated to collaborate with other city regions in China to tackle air pollution because such efforts in collaboration are not rewarded in their annual reviews.

In Indian cities, the key actors in clean air campaigns are often environmental NGOs, which mobilize a variety of stakeholders including the Indian Supreme Court, the private sector, and different bureaucracies of the state to achieve their agenda. Municipal governments play a minor role. Most Indian cities don’t have official action plans, and few have allocated sufficient funding.

Responses to COVID-19 The local responses to COVID-19 in China and India also reflect the territorial vs. associational approaches to urban governance.

Although there are huge variations within each country and it’s hard to generalize, some larger patterns nevertheless emerge.

Chinese cities, especially those in the north, quickly resorted to lockdowns, mass-testing, and neighborhood surveillance to eliminate new outbreaks. All these measures are “territorial” as they target specific localities, and their implementation was orchestrated by local territorial authorities, such as district governments, street offices (jiedao), and residential committees (juweihui). China has also been using big data for contact tracing. Digital surveillance should not be territorial, but the way it is implemented in China exhibits a strong territorial flavor. Every city has its own contact tracing apps, and no attempt has been made yet to share data across jurisdictions.

India also announced a strict lockdown in the early phase of the pandemic, but it does not have local territorial institutions with which to enforce lockdowns. The nationwide lockdown in the first half of 2020 triggered a migrant crisis, and it was associational alliances of NGOs, citizens, private charity groups, government agencies that patched together an emergency support system that extended some help to the struggling migrants.

Inequality The distinct logics of urban governance have produced different forms of inequality in the two countries. In China, its territorial approach to governing cities has widened regional disparity. The gap between China’s superstar cities—Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou—and everywhere else is further widDIPLOMATIC COURIER | 87

ening in all accounts, as local officials turn inwards and focus on their respective jurisdictions. Inequality in China, therefore, has a strong spatial dimension. In India, inequality is structured both spatially and through networks. The rich and the middle class are more likely to mobilize politicians and local bureaucracies to get urban amenities. The poor are less likely to succeed, and their best chance at getting basic amenities is right before elections as politicians roll out favors to get votes.

The Belt & Road City Understanding urban governance in China and India has far-reaching implications beyond national borders. China’s Belt Road Initiative (BRI) has produced a new generation of cities on the route of BRI. With Chinese funding, China has also exported expertise and ideas on how to govern these new cities, often modeling its domestic experience of city building. Therefore, to understand Khorgos, Hambantota, and Duisburg—the booming BRI cities—one must also look at Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Chongqing, Chinese cities that built their urban fortunes on special zoning policies, urban renewal, and rural-urban integration.

Understanding urban affairs in China and India is also instrumental for an informed view of international relations. Much of the debate on the US-China relations today focuses on the rivalry between the two countries in defense, military, and trade.

Few analysts pay attention to subnational governments and city-level engagement. While mayors do not have a say on matters such as defense spending, city-level exchanges form a crucial part of US-China relations in fields ranging from public health security to climate change. An urban lens offers a more holistic view of US-China relations than the sole focus on national-level policies. The same can be said about India: the way the nation runs its cities has deep implications for its international engagement. Unless India empowers its municipal institutions, Indian cities will not be equal players on key issues such as climate change and poverty reduction. This will in turn hinder India’s multilateral engagement with other countries. ***** About the author: Xuefei Ren is a comparative urbanist and the author of three award-winning books: Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020), Urban China (Polity, 2013), and Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

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THE WORLD HEALT HEALTHY CITIE

BY WARREN SMIT

TH ORGANIZATION, ES, AND AFRICA | FEBRUARY 2022

Photo by Zoe Reeve via Unsplash.

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he ongoing global pandemic has brought cities a distinct set of urban health challenges and has highlighted the challenges of applying universal policies in specific places, as shown, for example, by the lack of success in applying COVID-19 social distancing measures in high-density informal settlements in the Global South. It is therefore worth reflecting on previous attempts at implementing universal health programmes, such as the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Healthy Cities program and its application in the Global South, particularly in Cape Town, South Africa.

Like the United Nations itself, the WHO emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was created as an intergovernmental agency to exercise international functions with the goal of improving global health. It began with a relatively narrow focus on health care, but from the late 1970s onward, the WHO began to focus on broader health promotion. The period from 1973 to 1988 is regarded as the golden age of the WHO, with Health for All by the Year 2000 a particularly key initiative. This strategy, launched in 1981, advocated that governments were responsible for the health of their citizens and should be active in promoting good health.

The development of this strategy was linked to the rise of the “determinants of health” approach. This growing body of work highlighted that changes in living conditions had a much larger impact than changes in health care on health conditions. In particular, there was a recognition that elements of the urban environment (such as streets, housing, infrastructure, recreation facilities, transport, urban agriculture, food markets, and even the spatial form of cities) have an enormous impact on the health and wellbeing of residents. A related shift in the approach to health was the recognition in the Ottawa Charter of 1986 of the importance of participation by individuals, groups, and communities in decision-making (for example, relating to urban planning) in order to increase control over the determinants of health, and thereby improve their health.

In 1987, the WHO’s European Office initiated its Healthy Cities program “to support integrated approaches to health promotion at the city level.” This ambition, one of the first tangible impacts of the Ottawa Charter, was subsequently adopted in other regions. The Healthy Cities program emphasized the relationship between the urban environment and health, the role of local government in promoting health at a city scale, and the key role of public health officials in local decision-making. A healthy city was defined as “one that is continually creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources which enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the functions 92 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

of life and developing to their maximum potential.” Fundamentally, the program centers around public health experts driving participatory processes to make cities healthier using a range of tools, from regulations and planning to the implementation of projects.

The introduction of the Healthy Cities program was accompanied by a series of events to amplify this approach, with the first WHO International Healthy Cities Conference held in Liverpool in March, 1988. The Healthy Cities concept spread around the world and was enthusiastically adopted by governments and civil society.

What began with 11 designated WHO cities soon became a widespread, “new public health movement.” By the mid-1990s, several hundred cities around the world, mainly in the Global North, had healthy city initiatives underway.

Although the concept of “healthy cities” was intended to be universal, in practice it was tied to the contexts where the idea originated.

The concept of the healthy city was initially developed in the Global North and depends on having effective and accountable local governments with sufficient capacity to intervene in the urban environment. Many of the policy tools identified and used did not apply in parts of the Global South, where local government is often relatively under-capacitated and has fewer powers and functions than many in the Global North. Furthermore, many cities in the Global South have a large proportion of residents living in informal settlements, where the state often does not significantly intervene through service provision or regulation.

As a result, as the Healthy Cities program spread to the Global South throughout the 1990s, implementation became increasingly challenging. Nonetheless, the WHO Regional Office for Africa held various capacity building exercises around healthy cities, and by 2000 most African countries had at least one Healthy Cities initiative under way. Notably, even these programs faced the challenge of having to compete with other global programs (e.g. on sustainable cities) and a lack of resources. In 2002, one set of scholars observed, that “although the WHO healthy cities movement has been widely implemented elsewhere, the African region lagged behind.”

The Cape Town Healthy Cities Project Cape Town particularly illustrates some of the challenges with implementing the healthy cities program in the Global South. As part of the WHO Healthy Cities program, a healthy cities initiative involving participatory decision-making forums was implemented in Cape Town in the 1990s. Cape Town was ripe for experimentation, as it had—and still has—a large and complex burden of disease, very DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 93

high levels of intra-urban inequality, and was undergoing a change in governance structure, with the 56 existing municipalities merging into a new metropolitan authority, the Cape Metropolitan Council. At the time, South Africa was in the midst of the transition to democracy and experimenting with innovative new policy ideas. The Cape Town Healthy City Project was initiated by the Cape Metropolitan Council (CMC) in 1996 with an extensive public consultation process.

The project formally started in 1997. There was an overall steering committee that included local government officials from the Environmental Health and Planning Departments, councilors and other stakeholders, including NGOs, academic institutions and a community representative. The CMC employed a full-time coordinator. Participatory meetings were held at both the city and community scale. In practice, however, public health officials with no experience of community participation struggled to facilitate these complex processes with competing interests.

In 2002, the Cape Town Healthy City Project was terminated. Although the reasons remain unclear, it is likely that this was linked to the local government restructuring and a large amount of new local government legislation. The introduction of a new intersectoral planning process (which required local authorities to produce Integrated Development Plans) essentially spelled the death knell of the initiative in Cape Town as it didn’t have political champions. As the Cape Town Healthy City Project drew to a close, there was the potential for the new City of Cape Town’s Integrated Development Plans (IDPs) to become a vehicle for achieving a healthier city. At first, the signs were promising. The new unified City of Cape Town’s first IDP, drawn up in 2001, included the goal of “a healthy city for all the people.” The contents of the IDP reveal a relatively broad understanding of how a number of activities across different sectors would be required to improve health indicators. But in subsequent Cape Town IDPs, this broad focus on health withered away. By the 2004-05 IDP, the only mention of health was in relation to stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis.

Despite the rapid spread of healthy cities projects around the world, the achievements of the projects have been generally modest, with research suggesting that “progress has been largely incremental or marginal, rather than the radical changes that had been hoped for”. In Africa, although there have been a number of Healthy Cities initiatives that have achieved progress with regards to important issues such as the provision of water and sanitation, the challenges have been severe, including insufficient mobilization of financial resources, insufficient monitoring and lack of commitment from municipal authorities. While there are many flourishing Healthy Cities initiatives elsewhere in the world, in Africa 94 | GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

comprehensive Healthy Cities initiatives have, in practice, largely been replaced by initiatives focusing on healthy villages, healthy homes, healthy schools and healthy food markets.

The modest achievements of Healthy Cities projects are most likely a result of over ambitious objectives and a failure to sufficiently account for the complexity of governance and participation processes.

The Healthy Cities concept, at least initially, was based on “the modernist belief in the power of science and expertise to solve problems” , and on the belief that “technical-rational solutions can solve complex socio-political problems.” The Healthy Cities program was thus arguably turned from a value-driven movement to “a technomanagerial process.” In addition, it is noted that the program was “conceptually contradictory, because, on the one hand, it claims popular participation; but, on the other hand, is a top-down international program.”

There is still a WHO Healthy Cities program, but it has undergone a shift from implementing participatory health-driven initiatives to trying to get policy makers and urban planners to think about health and incorporate health objectives. The Urban HEART tool for local decision-makers, for example, is used for prioritizing place-based urban health interventions. Since 2016, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals have essentially subsumed much of the Healthy Cities work.

The story is in some ways simple: a global agency with the best of intentions struggled to implement a global program to make cities healthier. The need to make cities healthier is more important than ever, and the need for global agencies and global programs to support, through financial resources and technical support, those ends remain. But they should not done through top-down techno-managerial programs; rather, such initiatives require the flexibility to allow for different processes to emerge in different places, including through the use of co-production methodologies that bring together policy makers, civil society and other stakeholders to redefine problems and develop context-specific solutions. Experiences with coproduction methodologies show that, although complex and time consuming, bringing different stakeholders with different perspectives to collaborate on policies and projects can help contribute to more equitable cities that are better places to live in. ***** About the Author: Warren Smit is an Associate Professor and manager of research at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He has a PhD in Urban Planning and has been a researcher on urban issues for more than 25 years.

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