What are the opportunities and risks of these emerging geopolitical constellations, and how should we prepare for an urban, post-national future?

Well, I’m joining minutes from the end here, unfortunately, as I have quite a bit to say,and there are some very interesting thoughts in the conversation… but to sum up in brief:
biosecurity is the big [biggest?] question, and what rights we’ll be willing to give up in exchange for keeping a geoscape that even remotely resembles what we have today. Geoff mentioned the film CODE 46, which is an excellent thought experiment on that subject. I predict that we’ll see the emergence of unprecedented monitoring- [called by many, surveillance]- in response to new biological threats [both anthrogenic, and 'natural'] that we will face. Vernor Vinge’s optimistic vision of a crowdsourced, citizen CDC in the opening pages of his novel _Rainbows End_ is a best case scenario. From an ontological and rights issues POV I have to mention Giorgio Agamben’s thinking about the ‘non human’[can we avoid being reduced by surveillance- to a purely biopolitically neutral 'bare life'?] – and hope that it can somehow inform a general conversation about deep ecology, or radical sustainability, which today raises the question: how much of an anthropocentric mindset can we really maintain, when we can perceive the autonomy of so many complex systems around us- cities being one of those larger networks. All this to say that cities are unique instruments in their ability [economies of scale] to propagate non-human organization, which runs the gamut from belief systems, to energy systems, to infectious diseases. Unfortunately spikes/collapses in these systems have historically yielded catastrophe, and we approach a technological threshold where the disaster might well be orders of magnitude larger. Virilio and Lotringer pessimistically discuss this in _Crepuscular Dawn_. The engineering of cities and the infrastructures that connect them [airtravel and communications, as well as attenuating the general biosphere and weather systems] is our next great challenge. It is a wickedly nontrivial design problem: what could possibly respond fast enough to a real global outbreak?

Friday, October 15 at 8:18pm

It looks like the ability to leave comments will be closing here any second—so I want to make sure I get in at least one final thanks—a huge thanks—to everyone who participated.

I will definitely continue this conversation elsewhere, and I have thoroughly enjoyed all of the points raised here. There are many, many themes and subthemes to explore.

So thanks again—I appreciate the time, interest, and thought that went into this conversation!

Friday, October 15 at 8:06pm

I find another provocative question to this debate would be to invert the city boundaries (or rediscover the inversion) through the same lenses that the nation’s borders have been subsumed. The city is one of the organisms we know that has a larger ratio of addictive/addiction relationship to its surrounding productive areas. This could bring up its sovereign character on a legislative level, but possibly as well, its condition as a negative of forces that are actually located and instantiated elsewhere. To see it as a vortex – suction area pattern – might be nearer to its behavior, and might allow us to look at its power as derived form strong connections with relatively distant neighbors. Bottom-up world unification or Italy (not-long-ago) again?
Maybe we would go back to “Colapse” by Jared Diamond, and the sections across environments that engage neighborhood relationships, their distances and protocols.
I am reminded of “Modernity at Large” by Arjun Appadurai and his transnational “scapes”, and the swaths of land and culture they could encompass/trespass.
As well, I am reminded of the morphological difference on the organization of neighborhood based communities and action-based communities that strip away any physical homogeneity in cities.
Looking at the future problem of water scarcity and also its future messy abundance (rising of sea level) around coastal areas, where main cities are often located, as well the way in which existing infrastructures would have to adapt or be rendered obsolete: there is an interesting section here that connects across the neighborhood-based self-organization all the way to multi-national engagement.

Friday, October 15 at 7:46pm

Urban politics’ barriers to entry are lower than those of national politics. Whether the face offered is that of Boris Johnson, Jon Gnarr, Michael Bloomberg, cities have less inertia, greater susceptibility to personality politics, and – equally – far greater flexibility in the face of unexpected, systemic shocks.

((Here, I’m thinking, John Stuart Mill’s ‘experiments in living‘, the radical alterity promised by Patri Friedman’s seasteading experiments, Black Rock City, Temporary Autonomous Zones, and the megaurban conglomerations of first-wave cyberpunk.))

As emerging geopolitical constillations, we need to remain flexible – within urban politics, there are theoretically infinite combinations of urban units, based on any number of variables. So, we have Ken Livingstone’s deal with Venezuela to provide cheaper oil for London buses. We have California signing climate change treaties with the UK, with Illinois, with Indonesia and Brazil. With over 50%+ of the world’s population, if you could get a cap-and-trade equivalent signed between all the major urban centres, a significant chunk of the issue could be solved, without the need for state-level diplomatic apparatus.

Friday, October 15 at 7:42pm

Have admired the depth and density of this discussion, and sorry to jump in so late, because now I want to respond to nearly everything, but perhaps the best way to wind down is to consider again Geoff’s guiding hypothesis: “that urban centers are accreting new modes of political influence.”
As ever, but in a way that feels especially heightened right now, politics are subject to passions, fueled less by facts than imagination. So where perception influences imagination, why is it that the city emerges as some kind of penultimate or final bastion of society in speculative film and literature? Perhaps because even as dependent on state and federal structures as cities are, even as mega- our megacities are, they are scaled to the extents that a citizenry can identify with and conceptually manage. An entire era’s and nation’s issues are not abstract at the scale of the city.
“Ford to New York: Drop Dead!”
From Escape from New York to Divided Kingdom (endless examples possible), the city is where we manage the end of traditional politics in our imaginations. We know how strongly ideas of Hope conditioned the last election cycle, and sense how Don’t Tread On Me will affect this one. We think we may be able to bunker in an enclave if the rest falls apart. The urban imaginary has hosted scenarios of reconcentrated, semiautonomous urban-political nodes for a long time; we may already be unconsciously shaping reality in this direction.

Friday, October 15 at 7:35pm

The future may have an urban and post-national character, but I think that it’s a red herring to see “the city” as the geopolitical basis of that. The advancing geopolitical entity in the world is the “zone” – the zone of exception, the special economic zone, the offshore zone. Zones are a mutation arising from the neoliberal, globalised state. Shenzhen, Dubai, gated retirement cities in the SW USA – these places are zones first, zones with the ability to enforce exceptions, and cities as a product of that. The “Charter City” concept is just a zone in civic clothing. They thrive because they are able to evade the restrictions of their geopolitical milieu. It’s like the “Bantustans” of South Africa – a way of manipulating labour without a social contract. Neoliberal quasi-urbanism, coming soon to a country near you.

Friday, October 15 at 6:57pm

In terms of the city as an independent entity, what comes to my mind is the Hanseatic League and similar trading networks (Geert Mak’s book Amsterdam: the Brief Life of the City provides a good summary of the extroverted nature of a young city-state, which imported beer from northern Germany rather than brewing its own using grain from the surrounding countryside).

Enrique mentioned this, in reminding us that the medieval European cities had fixed boundaries with their fortifications, whereas Tim points out that the 21st century metropolis has no borders. Nonetheless, there are frontiers, which in some cases are physical.

Surely there are other examples from other corners of the world, but I want to relate my personal observations from my own experiences. What comes to my mind as a good set of examples are the principal/capital cities in Africa, which are often the only places in each country to have a commercial airport, and feature other cosmopolitan amenities, from running water to nightclubs, and so experientially they are in a number of ways more similar to cities on other continents than adjacent rural areas.

Therefore I have encountered a barrier at the extent of paved roads and other utilities, or fixed internet connections, or the driving distance to restaurants or supermarkets. The city is a cluster of wealthy and elite and their 21st century consumer lifestyle, whereas in the rural areas people live as subsistence farmers in virtually another century. Dan mentioned the income disparity of Namibia, and there are more extreme examples within other national borders, which is manifested physically.

In terms of laws, there are several examples of African states where individual and commercial property rights are limited to cities, while in rural provinces and counties, tribal or customary land laws govern, so that there is a legal dichotomy, a frontier separating the city from the rest of the state.

Add these experiential, physical and legal circumstances to often-times weak post-colonial national identities, arising from the counties’ origins as colonies organized to serve external and foreign economic and political forces, and to my mind you have the city operating in many ways as the type of autonomous, post-national urban entity that this discussion supposes for the future.

Friday, October 15 at 6:46pm

The interesting thing about cities (not city states) is that while they are clearly entities, they do not have borders. They bleed and blur around the edges. It’s very easy to come and go. It’s very easy to move there or to move away.

If we anticipate a rise in city power and a drop in state power, this is politically very interesting. Picking up on Nick Sower’s idea that you should be able to run, the city allows this in a way that the state cannot. Once you have crossed the borders of the state (the ones that aren’t police states) it’s free reign to come and go as you please; something that can have wonderful or disastrous consequences for the health of an urban environment and the people left behind.

You can see it in a tour of the nation state that is a continent. Consider the fear that the people of New Orleans just wouldn’t move back after Katrina. Consider the slow disaster in Detroit. Consider the millions who move to New York or Los Angeles in the hopes of making it, and the millions more who leave. Consider the suburbs and bedroom communities of people who want to leave near a city without living in it. Consider that it’s easier to move from Miami to Seattle than it is to move from Buffalo to Fort Erie.

The result is that at the same time that cities are growing in power and making independent deals with other cities (there’s a lot of that around the Great Lakes region) that they have a population that’s shifting and amorphous. You can try weird experiments in governance and if people don’t like it, they can relatively easily just go somewhere else, often within commuting distance.

In some ways this opens up a lot of exciting possibilities but in other ways it weakens civic engagement. Sometimes reforms are necessary and painful. A lot of the problems we’re facing are at a scale that’s larger than the city, but that if cities are the new seats of power that we must deal with tools at city-scale. If your opposition to a policy means you just move a county over to avoid it, policies are harder to enact. But the problems don’t happen county by county. They happen all over.

Friday, October 15 at 3:51pm

RUN. We have to be light on our feet! Cities and the global racetracks between them are a field day for creative forms of living. It’s a safe bet that some of the things we’re worried about this century will happen. Whether it will be rising sea levels, water shortages, or a perpetual war on terror waged in homeland cities–it almost doesn’t matter which one it is. In my opinion, there’s a solution, and it sounds escapist but I’m going to spin it as a productive, survivalist attitude. We should just become better runners, moving from city to city, and especially learn to thrive in the interstices.

Cities aren’t going to save us, not unless you have a lot of money and can always buy yourself higher ground. So if that’s not you, I’d recommend getting yourself wheels, and figuring out how to take a piece of the city with you. When I lived in LA, I was always amazed when I walked around Latino neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, seeing the front yards, the way the streets of the old Jewish neighborhood had been adapted to become Latino. It wasn’t all a beautiful scene. People were living in garages, with multiple families in a single family house, but the fact is, these migrant families were adapting. They took a piece of their culture and grafted it onto the new city. One can imagine this process in perpetuity as the definition of a city.

Nimble, the new “citizen” does not adhere to a national identity. She is urban. What does that mean, to be urban? It is to adapt to a rapidly changing and demanding environment. So the key, the opportunity, is to resist the city’s conservative temptation to become static–that is, the perpetuation of the city for the purpose of accumulating wealth. In light of this critique of cities, such as Javier Arbona’s thoughts on Foreclosing Cities, we should question anew what it means to survive in these times.

As an architect I’m fundamentally concerned with our collective survival. So it worries me when I see so much dedication by those in my profession toward the benefit of so few. Look at eco cities in the desert. Some may hope that these expensive, model green cities will help pave the way toward a cleaner, greener future. But at what social cost? And whose green future is it?

Take it to the extreme: let’s say we’ve got food shortages, and cities are rationing the food produced within its boundaries. Someone is going to get cut off, left outside the feudal gates, and what will be produced: nomadic (and very hungry) populations forming outside of cities. When and where it happens is irrelevant. I see opportunity here while things are relatively easy. In the spirit of Constant’s New Babylon, the production of mobile, temporary cities are fair game for architects wishing to invest design efforts toward our survival. Black Rock City, the temporary metropolis erected at Burning Man in the Nevada desert, is one such experiment, though a far cry from designing for masses of migrating populations.

If we have a trend toward the creation of city-states, I’m interested in what is outside–and at the edge–of the city-state perhaps even more than what the city-state can be. What gets left out? If we take Nicola’s angle on linking cities to its hinterlands of bio-production, what is still beyond the hinterland? Does it all become desert after cities have leached the extra-urban resources?

Perhaps it’s not the cities we should worry about, but what is in between. And by worry, I mean find opportunity.

Wednesday, October 13 at 8:36pm

after a few courses in federal Indian law, the question of a post-national future based on inherent sovereignty can more easily be visualized. the nature of our federal government has been assimilation; translating into architectural homogeneous housing. what % of our cities is housing, and who has the jurisdiction to determine the character and quality of the place we live?

in thinking about sustainability and land use, do we go back far enough? look back one generation? compare the development to the city as it were when we were children? (it has changed exponentially) compare the last several administrations?

Lebbeus Woods has written that all acts of architecture support one groups politics or another. shouldn’t we all be held to this? and if so, to what end?

I suggest, for analysis, we look at the land when we acquired it- analyze how we began habitation, pre-national.

in the quagmire of the colonies, we made several fundamental mistakes, that affect our city states today; 1]we failed to learn from the native cultures, 2]our bundle of property rights laws promote individuality and not the collective group, and 3]our laws support a politics of cultural assimilation

are we upon a circuitous path to post-national sovereign states; originating in pre-national sovereignty?
do we see architectural assimilation in places like burbia?

In the Johnson v. M’Intosh(1823) case, Mr.Cheif Justice Marshall delivered his opinion that the Crown had by right of conquest, extinguished the Indian titled to land, (notwithstanding the right of Indian occupancy) and passed the title to the US. He wrote,
“The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves, that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new, by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity, in exchange for unlimited independence.”

Therein we find our truest first motivation and claim to the land, and the plot thickens as we explore the various negotiations and treaties (many still in effect today).

(1785) Speech of Corn Tassel(Cherokee) at the Treaty of Hopewell negotiations,

“Again, were we to inquire by what law or authority you set up claim, I answer,none! Your laws extend not into our country, nor ever did. You talk of law of nature and the law of nations, and they are both against you.”

Wednesday, October 13 at 3:51pm

The issue that Geoff raises of public and private interest goes to the heart of the original question posed. The transformation of financial markets in the most recent decades constitutes a paradigm shift within the central questions of: geography, authority, collective judgment and resource distribution. Digging into this, would require a careful, considered discussion that certainly exceeds the time and space we are within, but here I would briefly offer a few thoughts and observations.

1. The basic algebra of capital is grounded in the mediation of time, in the ability of equity or currency to defer consumption and the ability of debt or credit to accelerate consumption, to allow us to consume that which we don’t have. These two concepts of deferred consumption and debt or credit act as valves compressing or extending time, they have a direct impact on the ability of capital to affect our perception of time. These tools do not remain external, the porosity of being offers no such shelter, they operate on an instinctual level, providing a sense of temporal shelter. Modern financial markets has developed a complexity and intensity that has arguably positioned capital as the primary ground for our cognition of time.

2. Lets back up a bit; Modern Incorporations were born out of ships and navigation. Individual ship owners grouped together and incorporated the ownership of their ships allowing the predictable burden of loss arising from the uncertainty of the long voyages to be distributed through the corporate structure. When an individual lost their ship at sea, they were sunk in business, if twenty individuals agreed to bind together and share the ownership of their twenty ships, when one ship was lost, the incorporation remained buoyant, it still owned nineteen ships and could redistribute the load of this new value among the shared holders (shareholders) of the incorporation. These early incorporations were promises about time and value, they worked because they were no one individual, they were structures that served as a second self, absorbing the load of losses by distributing them throughout the structure. This displacement of individual risk required a structure of collective judgment, the shared holders were assigned voting rights in the guidance and direction of their incorporations, these votes were and still are, linked to the number of shares owned. In linking votes to share distribution these early incorporations directly linked collective judgment to capital. The early binding together of incorporations and the birth of modern banking contained the seeds of a vast calculus of time promises all of which rest on the requirement of continuous and expanding consumption. As a laser focuses light for a particular task, these tools provided the mechanisms to compress and regulate the vast expense of human energy driving the expansion of all human endeavor. The incalculable energy and effort expended in the century long vertical rise we call New York City could not have occurred without the tools of capital. These instruments of resource distribution have also created the capacity for catastrophic inequities.

3. While the seeds of our current knots of capital and technology lie in the early mirroring of ships and their incorporation, it is clear, that today, we are within a new dimension. In the modern era the capital markets constitute a vast calculus of time promises that have become our primary mode of resource distribution and our dominant form of collective judgment. Over the most recent thirty years we have seen a dramatic transformation in the calculus of global capital. Today, the majority of financial instruments are exchanged within vast frameworks of information technologies. A relatively new practice called algorithmic trading employs massive computational technologies emulating neural networks to monitor the markets and carry out billions of trades a day with no human knowledge of the individual positions being bought or sold. Within this mode of trading, the frequency of the positions held is often in milli seconds and would not be conceivable as a human activity. The risk distribution and collective judgment born in binding together of risk and reward within the early shipping routes is now largely held within the neural networks of computational exchanges. Value determination or “Price discovery” to a large extent, occurs within a computational ‘cloud mirror’; a kind of ship made of water, where algorithms read and write each other in the
constant navigation of a computational global exchange. For better or worse the primary determinate of global resource distribution lives within the computational organisms of the global markets. Like Borge’s ‘Aleph’ this cacophony of inputs/outputs may constitute a new non-human metabolism of collective judgment, one deeply implicated in the double mirror of capital and technology.

4. The financial crises of 2008 is an expression of realignments of such historic significance that we have only just started to witness the changes to come. The very meaning of risk is transforming, as are the fundamental relationships between, public and private, between security and securitization. These transformations are challenging the core ideas of nation state, governance and collective judgment in ways that were not thought possible just 5 years ago. We see early evidence of the profound nature of these shifts in the re-positioning of Washington and Wall Street. What is currently being framed as ‘financial reform’ contains the seeds of a rethinking of the relationship between public and private interest on a scale not visited since Roosevelt and perhaps not implemented since America in the 1770s. This is of course global; we see the first serious challenges to the idea of a geography defined by a currency in the current EU debt crisis debates. Across the entire planet, from individual central banks to the collective body of the United Nations the crisis of 08 has provided the most serious challenges and opportunities in our lifetime. The coming decades will see re-alignments of the meaning of public and private on a scale and scope the modern world has not known. The content, structure and consequence of these re-alignments extend well beyond ‘financial reform’.

5. The instruments, mechanisms and structures of capital exchange are so fundamental to the transformation of our current geographies that understanding their workings and logics is clearly of tangible benefit to all. Comprehending these instruments is essential toward comprehending the increasing speed and complexity of our communicative spaces: from the internet, to political discourse, to global cultural exchanges to the questions of the city posed in this discussion. There are people and institutions across all disciplines and across the globe that increasingly are confronted by the need for new models of asking the astonishingly complex questions of our time. The challenges and possibilities of such a moment are extraordinary.

Wednesday, October 13 at 11:16am

this is an excellent discussion. following enrique, i would also be partial to a historic approach, particularly in terms of contextualizing phenomena–

-most of the cities mentioned in the discussion have been important only for a brief moment of our global history. that cities appear on the globe as soon as 3,500 bce, and many argue before (in terms of contrasting population in relation to their surroundings). cities grow and fade in history, and if we are talking about emerging constellations, perhaps we should shift the conversation to the 21st century–asia, and south america–(i am biased of course).

-also from a historical point of view, cities have had different configurations from the start–powerful city states in mesopotamia, strategic territorial strongholds in egypt, small compounds ruling large territories in andronovo. if the future looks post-national, it is a condition we can also find in our past.

-taking this into account, i’d say geoff’s points on private cities and slum cities actually intersect–both high/middle class gated communities and illegal slum growth are highly organized private ventures. slum landlords in guayaquil hold immense political power, often the ability to swing local–sometimes national–elections. both gated communities and slums develop their own transportation systems, service infrastructure, and security network, in varying degrees of legality and informality. in very simplified terms, gated communities hold power as the tax base revenue they represent, and slum landlords control electoral votes and the ability to sway and affect the value of land. their ability to negotiate with local authorities makes them powerful players in this landscape.

Wednesday, October 13 at 11:13am

Excellent points, all. And here, I would like to address Geoff’s specific remark, the one where he asked about the constitutional redefinition of a city’s political agency. If I interpret his comment correctly, I believe that Geoff is asking about the political importance of the human body in the conceptualization of the city. Again, in thinking about this issue historically (sorry, but that’s what I’m paid to do), I’ll put forward the following proposition: the field of urban planning has historically relied on bodily metaphors in order legitimize its own projects. One reason why this is that there was really no discipline known as “urban planning” until the late 19th, early 20th century, and hence issues of urbanism had to be addressed under the rubric that “the city is a body”, etc.

For starters, consider the term “body politic.” The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that one definition for a body is “An artificial ‘person’ created by legal authority for certain ends; a corporation; commonly a corporation aggregate, but also applied to a corporation sole (cf. quots. 1641, 1642). Always with defining adj. body corporate, body politic.” It goes on to quote the following from an 1837 volume of The Penny Cycle: For the purpose of maintaining and perpetuating the uninterrupted enjoyment of certain powers, rights, property, or privileges, it has been found convenient to create a sort of artificial person, or body-politic, not liable to the ordinary casualties which affect the transmission of private rights, but capable, by its constitution, of independently continuing its own existence. This artificial person is in our law called an incorporation, corporation, or body-corporate.” As these examples demonstrate, the anthropomorphic idea of a body is one that permeates many disciplines. And it is an idea with a very strong metaphoric value: everything is a body, a body is everything.

Now, when it comes to urban planning, the most important point of reference between the body and the city is that of circulation. The term circulation has, of course, physiological origins. It is a term usually associated with the publication of William Harvey’s Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus or De Motu Cordis (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Living Beings) from 1628. The book is well known for its hypothesis concerning the circulation of blood throughout the human body. And although the book did take into account the action of ventricles and auricles in the pumping of blood, it undertheorized the significance of capillaries in the human circulatory system.

The term “circulation” has had physiological connotations that transferred over to the writing of architecture history. Hence Françoise Choay describes how Baron Haussmann’s boulevards were a way to achieve an “efficient working unity of the city” through “designing a circulatory system and opening system of ventilation.” Here, circulation also denotes the movement of particles along a stream. The German term Verkehr, or quite literally, “Traffic”, comes to mind, although others like Wolfgang Schivelbusch have used the term Zirkulation.

On the other hand, practitioners looked to a more direct application of ideas about circulation. Thus Eugène Hénard (1849-1923), an inheritor of Haussmann’s ideas, began to use considerations of traffic circulation as the basis for city planning. For his Études sur les transformations de Paris (1901-04), Hénard identified six categories of circulation in large cities, which he labeled as “circulation ménagere, professionelle, économique, mondaine, fériée and populaire.” Each mode featured outgoing and return circulations. As part of his study, Hénard created a comparative and theoretical scheme showing circulation patterns in Moscow, London and Berlin. The end result was drawing of concentric ellipsoids and radiating diagonals, an ideal representation of circulation in an idealized Paris.

It bears mentioning, however, that even when applied at the urban scale, this notion of “circulation” is still primarily metaphoric. Historian Adrian Forty, in noting how the first reference of circulation as a description of vehicular traffic comes via Pierre Patte’s Memoires sur les objets les plus importants de l’architecture (1769), looks to the metaphoric value of “circulation” as a way for architects to gain control and expertise over their topic. Although Forty mentions the Lectures on Architecture (1881) by Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) as the first instance as where the term “circulation” is used to denote movement in buildings, this text is also important for its understanding of air circulation at the urban scale. Viollet thus writes:

Paris must certainly have been rendered more healthy by the broad currents of air which now circulate through its most populous quarters, and especially by the improved arrangements for house and street drainage; but can we suppose that our massive and lofty constructions, which often have no courts, or which have only wells of air between their party walls, will continue to be wholesomely conditioned when time shall have produced its disintegrating effect on the materials of which they are built? I have heard doubts on this head—and which I myself share—expressed by men who have made sanitary matters their special study. All circumstances considered, the blocks of houses in our great modern cities, particularly in Paris, present agglomerations much too compact and uniformly built to allow of such masses of buildings having a sufficient, free circulation of air. Miasmata fatal to the health of the inhabitants must be developed amid these masses in consequence of the fermentation produced by time in masses of material of various kinds.

Viollet’s suggestion that poor air circulation is as harmful for architecture as it is for the human body also has metaphoric value. The implication here is that proper air circulation is necessary for the maintenance and longevity of buildings. Or put another way, a healthy city is much like a healthy body.

Questions remain: to what extent does the bodily metaphor still apply in the 21st? Is there another way to think of the city/body metaphor? Is the “cyborg” the most appropriate metaphor for addressing our urban future? Following Forty’s suggestion, what terms and metaphors can we deploy in order to help us in this endeavor?

Wednesday, October 13 at 11:07am

These are fantastic replies so far, crossing literature and law, geography and economics. Thanks to everyone who has participated.

Briefly, I want to point out that my original phrasing of this question was not meant to imply advocacy for the rise of post-national city-states, but rather as a diagnosis, however tentative, that urban centers are accreting new modes of political influence. Having said that, of course, the recent decision, as mentioned by Mark Lamster, above, in which Gov. Christie torpedoed funding for a third NJ-NY tunnel, precisely shows the jurisdictional complexities facing any city that thinks itself detached from its regional context—as are the agricultural and bioregional examples citied by Nicola Twilley in her comment.

Enrique, the exact legal definition of a city is a fascinating topic. I would also add, however, that the constitutional redefinition of a city’s political agency (the private corporation defined as a person, for instance, but not the city) has great potential, for good or for bad, to affect how conurbations might someday dispense or limit rights of citizenship. Singapore has been mentioned here already, but I would also cite the imaginary Shanghai as depicted in Michael Winterbottom’s uneven film Code 46 (a city whose ability to control and redirect residents’ movement comes from its sovereign application of biosecurity—i.e. if you don’t have the right health papers then you can’t travel, as if the National Health Service has become the new Big Brother).

In any case, if the city does emerge as a political actor—offering rights of citizenship traditionally associated with the nation-state, from the abstract to the concrete, from the local monopolization of violence to the ability to offer public infrastructure—then it seems quite hard to predict where this will first be seen or felt. In health policy? In public policing? In taxation? In passports?

Here, I think it’s important to add at least one more branch to the discussion, and that’s the private sector. We are discussing the geopolitical future of cities, as if their only competitor, so to speak, will be a different geographical organization of state power—but the private corporation, from charter cities cut from whole-cloth to gated communities, offer another direction altogether for framing future mutations of urban power.

Here, I would mention two books. First is the unfortunately named Boomburbs by Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy, which explores the municipal power structures (or lack thereof) that legally govern exurbs and private gated communities; the constitutional implication of these speculative developments deserves much more, even quite urgent, discussion. The second book I would mention, more as an example than as a recommendation, is Max Barry’s scifi novel Jennifer Government. Barry describes a thoroughly privatized global landscape in which corporations rule everything, from personal identity to vast swaths of geography, and governments are simply minor powers, like playground monitors or crossing guards, without the power or money to enforce anything.

Put another way, it will be interesting to see if the constitutional powers that my question implies might someday be claimed by a city like London or New York will actually first be grabbed by a corporate campus or charter city that has taxationally seceded from the nation it is found within.

And this is before we even get onto topics like seasteading, or the <a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_4_56/ai_110458726/"?feral power of cities that have been excised from the international community altogether…

Tuesday, October 12 at 5:53pm

This is, of course, a huge question; I would start by offering this quote from David Harvey. It can be found in his essay, Capitalism: the factory of fragmentation. In the book, Spaces of capital. Pg. 121

“The drive for capital accumulation is the central motif in the narrative of historical-geographical transformation of the western world in recent times and seems set to engulf the whole world into the twenty first century. For the past 300 years it has been the fundamental force at work in reshaping the world’s politics, economy and environment. This process of using money to make more money is not the only process at work, of course, but it is hard to make any sense of social changes these past 300 years without looking closely at it… the drive for capital accumulation has helped create cities as diverse as los Angeles, Edmonton, Atlanta and Boston, and transformed out of almost all recognition (though in quite different ways) ancient cities like Athens, Rome Paris and London. It has likewise led to a restless search for new product lines, new technologies, new lifestyles, new ways to move around, new places to colonize-an infinite variety of stratagems that reflect a boundless human ingenuity for coming up with new ways to make a profit.” David Harvey

I would also recommend a small book called ‘The History of Shit’ by Dominique Laporte

Laporte tracks the need to remove waste as a central factor in the development of our modern world, our urban condition as well as our financial institutions and political infrastructure…In simple terms, Leporte argues that as we gathered together and began to form more dense, complex towns and cities over the last 1000 years, one of the fundamental issues that arose and problems to be solved was human waist removal. Water in, food in, shit out, those were the basic requirement allowing the density to grow. The inputs could at least in the early days be fragmentary; the outward removal of waist required the largest single and most organized infrastructures projects. Addressing these projects required financial and political structures of collective judgement that had not existed.

Tuesday, October 12 at 10:05am

We should be creating “digital cities” allowing for citizen collaboration at all levels – political, economic,cultural, etc. There should be free public nodes for those without access to either computers or internet services. Networking will take place with other cities as to how well things are working – what is adaptable and what is unique to particular areas. This will spread from local to regional to transnational and eventually global participation. Actually, it’s already here, just not evenly distributed, as William Gibson would say.

Opportunities are boundless. The main risk is that the cities cater to the cognitive elite and early adaptors rather than see themselves as serving the needs of their immediate region within a global context.

Monday, October 11 at 10:36pm

There are already several of this powerful city/states around the world, such as Singapore and Hong Kong. Perhaps we should look at these real examples and see if there is anything we can learn from them.

As an Englishman who has lived in Paris for many years, I feel more ‘Parisian’ than French partly because I can vote in city elections whereas I cannot vote in national elections. Being able to have a say in how things are run is surely also a crucial element to this question.

Monday, October 11 at 4:39pm

Everything old is new again. Back in ’69, Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin ran their New York mayoral campaign with a pledge to secede from the state. (If only!) Our mayor, whatever his flaws, has done well to turn the city into a progressive model in terms of transportation, environment, nutrition, and a general meritocratic/technocratic philosophy of governance. But there are limits to the extent of this revolution, as you surely noticed the last time you recharged your metrocard. Just days ago an important infrustructural project for NY was killed by Jersey’s governor. Harrumph.

The idea of new “geopolitical constellations” and a “post-national future” sounds appealing in a to-the-barricades kind of way, but the reality is that the success of the city will reside in the ability of its lawmakers to compromise with state power, not overthrow it.

Monday, October 11 at 4:10pm

This seems central to lots of important questions about innovation, sustainability, and scale. A few disconnected thoughts in response:

It’s interesting to think that cities (and even states in the U.S. — see California’s climate change deals) can form a unit that has a strong-enough set of shared interests, governance structures, and regional/international impact to pioneer significant policy innovations — as per this great quote from Green Dream / Future Cities by The Why Factory:

“In areas where countries are too slow, cities can take the lead; they are compact enough to enable effective public involvement, but large enough to have a real impact.”
(Ulf Hackauf and Pirjo Haikola with Winy Maas, Annaik Deceuninck, Ryan Forster, and Gonzalo Rivals; Green Dream (Future Cities))

But…

Thinking of cities as independent negotiating units risks creating the illusion that cities are, or could ever be, self-sufficient — and thus forgetting to consider the city as inextricably tied to its productive hinterland (which these days means farms in Kenya and factories in Shenzhen — perhaps even lakes in Alaska!).

When a city implements a food policy, it is designing landscapes, economies, and infrastructures that fall well outside the geographic constituencies it represents. Encouraging cities to act as independent political units will likely have the effect of further removing those productive landscapes (on which the city depends) from the collective urban consciousness and identity. This is dangerous: already, forgotten and hidden landscapes of industrial food production accommodate disease, labor injustices, environmental degradation, and animal cruelty that would most likely not be tolerated if they happened in plain view of their urban customer-base.

Built into that is the problem that, while cities have mechanisms through which talk to each other, as well as to state and national governments, the urban hinterlands form an aggregation of unorganized, non-geographically-contiguous territories that for the most part do not have a voice or mechanism with which to negotiate with the cities they are shaped by. Thus, the conversation is fundamentally unbalanced: a dense, united, group of consumers with a speakerphone dictating terms to loose, unaffiliated, and figurehead-less network of producers.

Solutions? Giving up on the city as an incubator for policy innovation seems like a wasted opportunity. Instead, it seems as though we should be optimizing cities’ ability to test the kinds of bold changes that are required to adapt to today’s most pressing challenges. But what kinds of adaptor plugs could give the hinterland a voice at the table and keep it visible, to help cities make better, more sustainable policy decisions?

Evan Fraser and Carolyn Steel are two people doing interesting (separate) work on regional food visions that connect cities to their bioregions. They have each taken the initiative to act as the curatorial glue to create a way for a pilot city and its redefined, geographically-limited hinterland to plan together. The basic idea, as I understand it, is that you retain some of the efficiencies of industrial food production by mapping a bio-region large enough to retain some specialization based on local advantage, but small enough to make a shared responsibility and equitable give & take possible.

But how those bio-regions negotiate with each other / trans-national corporations / the WTO, etc. is a whole other question…

Monday, October 11 at 4:02pm

In the U.S. context, some cities have once again begun to think big—or rather, to think creatively—after a long hiatus following problematic Urban Renewal programs. The question of infrastructure, more than architecture, has advanced the debate on several fronts. The catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina revealed that the city of New Orelans was left essentially “on its own” to rebuild itself. Meanwhile, numerous cities have launched independent “sustainable urbanism” initiatives which, modest as they are, far exceed any federal or state guidelines. The federal government’s role in shaping the urban environment seems increasingly specialized: Fortifying security controls in response to perceived terrorist threats. Other major areas of activity, such as highway construction and homeowners loan insurance, most directly affect the suburbs.

The planning and implementing of urban infrastructure is one area where the possibilities and limits of newly emboldened cities are taking shape. The streets of New York City, for example, have radically changed over the past few years. Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Jeanette Sadik-Kahn, appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has led the initiative to install hundreds of miles of new bicycle lanes, dedicated bus lanes, furnished pedestrian plazas, and even car-free pedestrian zones around Times Square and Herald Square. The result is a more walkable, livable city that reverses decades of automobile-driven planning. It is interesting to note that New York City’s primary consultants in these efforts has come not from the federal or state governments, but from other global cities—such as Copenhagen, where planner Jan Gehl has made an impact with his “complete streets,” and Bogota, where Mayor ___ has made the streets into lively, car-free public spaces every [Sunday].

The reduction of car lanes and parking spaces demands a corresponding increase in mass transit service. However, major infrastructure projects still depend on federal or state funding. And the city’s public transit infrastructure is controlled by the State via the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Therefore the city encounters a major obstacle in transforming itself: New York is successfully redesigning its streetscape to support a different vision of urban life, but lacks the means to fulfill the capital-intensive aspects of the project that would lead to equitable access to this re-visioned city. How to bridge this gap? Can cities increase their collaboration internationally? Despite a global culture, national borders of course remain all too rigid.

A relaxation of federal control could bring advantages as well as problems for cities. Kazys Varnelis has speculated that in the coming decade, politicians on both the right and left could begin talking about moving the US toward an EU-like model
( http://varnelis.net/blog/the_decade_ahead )
Would such an arrangement place cities in the drivers seat, or merely put them at the mercy of the State governments?

Monday, October 11 at 3:56pm

Here’s a great article on the risks of urban terrorism by an expert on the topic. http://bit.ly/aE2OIS

Monday, October 11 at 3:42pm