Are cities the new countries?

http://www.bbc.com/news/education-35305586

by ximeng • 11 years ago

98 99 11 years ago

ekianjo• 11 years ago

"When we talk about countries, it's often about what separates us, language and culture. But when you talk about cities, we face very similar challenges."

Yeah, and big consumer companies (FMCG and the like) have already noticed that for a while and approach regional markets with high density populations the same way - they are are indeed many more shared needs than differences. Once you go out of the metropolitan areas, however, you see way more differences driven by local cultures.

afsina4• 11 years ago

I wish we can have real city states as I think they have a lot of advantages over large-central states. Easier accountability of the governments, easier mobility and probably less trade restrictions.

davidiach3• 11 years ago

When you think that the New York Metropolitan Area has a bigger GDP than Russia, what you are suggesting (real city states) starts to actually make sense.

afsina4• 11 years ago

Why so?

conistonwater3• 11 years ago

Where are you seeing this? I got California > Russia > New York State: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=new+york+gdp%2C+califor...

hobs2• 11 years ago

What evidence do we have that any of those things would occur? The pre-modern city states really did not have better accountability or less trade restrictions, as far as I know they were characterized by kings and tariffs, and were at war almost all the time.

m_mueller3• 11 years ago

I'm not saying it would be a particularly good system to copy, but the old Swiss confederacy is probably the prime example of self governed city states bound only in an alliance, i.e not through a monarchy. What came out of it (after some Republicanism was forcefully infuced by Napoleon) is something most Swiss are very fond of - a federal Republic with a very modest central government and checks and balances on steroids (via direct democratic participation that can overrule anything the elected leaders can come up with). Governance as local as possible makes sense for many things - not all though.

flexie• 11 years ago

Funny. I sometimes wish we had a global "state" with general rights to move freely, vote on global issues etc. Then people could organize in tiny city states or whatever within the global state.

(now when we are talking fantasies)

Brakenshire• 11 years ago

That's in some ways how the EU is working out, although the global state is smaller and the city states are more like regions. The EU provides a single market, a customs area, freedom of movement and to some degree a currency. Most of the former Communist states are a lot smaller than 19th century imperatives would have dictated. In the EU and EU accession countries, there's Poland (40m), Romania (20m), and then all other countries are 11 million and below. And in Western Europe the independence movements are about spin-offs of similar populations. Scotland is 5 million, Catalonia is about 7.5 million (5 million in Barcelona), Brittany is about 4.5 million, the Italian city states a bit smaller. That's the way things are going.

vinceguidry2• 11 years ago

A state exists primarily to defend its polity against other states. It takes a lot of resources to maintain a military, accomplish geopolitical objectives, pursue a coherent foreign policy.

Let's say we found aliens living in the next solar system. That would be the beginning of the global human state. Even if they're not hostile, humanity as a whole world need to band together to figure out just what to do about them.

What you're looking for is pan-national governmental institutions. There are plenty of those.

s_kilk3• 11 years ago

Interesting. My group of friends seem to routinely come back to the topic of the UK becoming a federation of city-states.

Seems we're not the only ones thinking that way.

elthran• 11 years ago

Perhaps not a federation of city states, but I would definitely be in favour of a federation of England/Scotland/Wales/NI/Dependencies - perhaps even with London as a separate federal part

s_kilk3• 11 years ago

Certainly, that alone would be a move in the right direction.

London as a separate federal part

Not the first time I've heard the suggestion of ejecting London from the Union :)

arethuza4• 11 years ago

Arguably the UK already has a pretty "federal" structure - just that the whole thing is dominated, naturally enough by England and London.

Any attempt to balance things out would require devolving powers to the English regions, which nobody seems to want.

alienjr• 11 years ago

Most libertarians/classical liberals believe in that concept. It used to be like that in the middle ages, especially in Germany and Italy.

Look for instance these two articles: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023039195045775226... https://mises.org/library/politics-johann-wolfgang-goethe

djaychela• 11 years ago

There was a portion of a recent TED Radio Hour which referenced this:

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/08/462281067/how-are-mayors-bette...

ajuc4• 11 years ago

Cities grow by drawing in people from around them. They can exist only thanks to the unproductive rural regions.

If we separate cities from their region - it just means the money generated in cities won't be used (among other things) for fixing problems in the countryside. It's just hiding the externalities.

Also from history I know of at least 3 unifications of small states and it was beneficial in all cases (at least for the people involved) - see Polish, German, and Italian unification. Why do we think it's different now?

Jtsummers• 11 years ago

The article isn't about rural versus urban. But even so, a question: why does the countryside have to be unproductive for people to leave? From what I've seen it's more often that it's productive, but too efficient. The people aren't needed for working the land. Or, fewer people are needed to work larger plots of land.

ajuc4• 11 years ago

I meant it's by its nature less productive per square meter than cities.

Modern country could manage with <5% of population working the land, but I don't think we have any countries where 95% live in cities. And I don't think it's obviously good idea to force them to migrate (by putting a border between them and their jobs).

toyg2• 11 years ago

The point is that it's not the XIX century anymore. Telecommunications and airplanes allow people to literally bypass the countryside and hop from city to city. Cheap transportation costs mean that markets are distributed and not as heavily reliant on local expansion as they were. Before, if an industrial business wanted to expand, doing it locally was the easiest and cheapest option; that's not true anymore, and in fact it's often counter-productive for some types of businesses (ones that can get critical mass online but not necessarily in their own country).

The only real barrier left, IMHO, is linguistic. English works in most cases but not all, and especially in some European regions there is still a heavy preference for localized languages.

ajuc4• 11 years ago

Better communication is a point against the urbanization if anything? Why cram millions of people, endure traffic jams and pay outrageous rent when you can telecommute?

logingone• 11 years ago

Telecommunications and airplanes allow people to literally bypass the countryside and hop from city to city. Telecommunications were supposed to let us bypass the city, so that we could live in the countryside.

nkoren9• 11 years ago

Yes.

Countries were relevant back in the days when territory was the most prized thing and war was the best means of acquiring it. Countries evolved as a means of ensuring territorial integrity, via means both explicit (borders enforced by militaries) and implicit (cultural/linguistic homogeneity, leading to xenophobia and other such barriers).

But territories are no longer the most prized thing: economies are. And economies are produced by cities, not countries.[1]

Moreover, the rise of the importance of cities is genuinely a challenge to the institutions of countries, not something that is merely happening in parallel to the ongoing importance of countries. This is because the factors which allow cities to thrive -- internal diversity and external trade -- are almost diametrically opposed to the factors which allow countries to maintain their territorial integrity.

Of these two forms of power, I'm betting on cities.

1: http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html

agumonkey• 11 years ago

But since we're abstracting away from soil, cities are only the sum of people, structures and laws. It's all position independent.

nkoren9• 11 years ago

Not in the slightest: cities are almost entirely about position. The whole point of a city is to provide easy and rapid access to a maximum diversity of goods, services, buyers, suppliers, needs, and ideas. If you took the people and laws and buildings of London or San Francisco and spread them homogeneously across the great plains, then this accessibility would be tremendously diminished and economic productivity would drop accordingly.

Spearchucker• 11 years ago

At some point an administration will need to guarantee supply of sustenance for the people in their city. It makes sense to me for a city to therefore still desire territory it controls, for agriculture.

ogrisel• 11 years ago

Cities also consume a lot of energy which primarily produced from oil, coal and nuclear power that is extracted and transformed outside of cities.

Even if a city would only consume wind and solar, it's quite likely that the majority of solar panels and wind turbines would be installed outside of the cities themselves.

Zach_the_Lizard4• 11 years ago

You don't have to control agricultural land. You just need to trade for food, which is beneficial to both farmers and city residents. Many cities do not control the lands that produce their food. In fact, many cities may not even be in the same province or even nation as the source of their food.

For instance, Washington, D.C. produces no food of its own (excluding neighborhood gardens) as the District contains no farmland within its borders. The Potomac is polluted, meaning fishing is not a viable source of food either. Virginia and Maryland have farmland, though the counties and cities in either of these states in the DC metro area either do not have farmland or have very little farmland.

All of these counties and cities get their food via truck, train, ship or some combination thereof. Modern transportation has made it so we no longer have to have farmland nearby to avoid spoiled food.

de_Selby• 11 years ago

There was an episode of the ted radio hour recently[1] about this very topic, it seems to be gaining a lot of traction.

A lot of it makes sense, one of the big points is that democracy at a state level is broken, but it is still efficient at a city level.

1 http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/462178064/buildin...

codingdave2• 11 years ago

The cities run on resources produced by countries. Food, water, minerals, power. Even if power is generated locally, it probably burns fuels acquired from outside the city.

So a strong economy can import everything it needs, and stand on its own. But that also exposes it to risk, as it cannot truly sustain itself in times of trouble. On the other hand, rural communities can be mostly self-sufficient, but when pushed to that extreme, life becomes harder and not quite as interesting.

So the truth of the matter is that it is a symbiotic relationship. I'm not sure I see any practical value in pitting cities vs. countries.

nkoren9• 11 years ago

I think you're conflating the concept of "countries" with the concept of "land". Cities do indeed need resources which are produced from the land, but the artefacts of countryhood (national identify, borders, etc.) don't really contribute to this production. In practice, cities are supplied by "city regions", which arise through natural economic and geographic forces, and which do their damnedest to ignore artificial jurisdictional boundaries. Hence the irrelevancy of countries as an institution.

(For more on this line of thinking, see the Jane Jacobs link in the post you replied to).

pqs• 11 years ago

This is not new. History is full of powerful city states that were stable during centuries thanks to their trading networks. Venice is a very good example. There are many more examples.

JoeAltmaier6• 11 years ago

All you folks in the city will learn your lesson pretty quick once the food stops flowing in. Don't get too uppity!

Zach_the_Lizard4• 11 years ago

In the US, less than 2% of the population works on farms. That's roughly 6 million people at a full 2%, less than the population of NYC alone.

Should farmers decide to not ship out food for some reason, it would be easy for cities to keep them in line if they are facing an existential crisis.

chadgeidel• 11 years ago

Your assumption that "city folks don't know how to farm" is fairly far-fetched.

vlehto2• 11 years ago

Nobody ever gave shit about territory itself. Just that economic power used to come mostly from arable land.

War has not gone away. We just happen to live an age of global hegemony, so it seems distant right now.

Spooky233• 11 years ago

Betting on cities is betting on continued decline of nations.

Writing off the nation in exchange for the bright lights of the city is also a dangerous bet, because cities are very fragile.

legulere• 11 years ago

The problem is that cities are very dependent on the land around them: Water, Food, natural Resources.

vlehto2• 11 years ago

Country is essentially a political tool. Historically borders have been drawn so that tax collection and defense is easy. There is no reason to assume anything else for the future.

With rising costs of defense tech and automation allowing small crews, defense is about money. Tax money to be specific.

Bitcoin is making money transactions difficult to follow. International banking and tax havens are also a thing. Either we are going to see private armies and private countries, or countries shift taxation away from income and transactions. And start to tax something more traceable.

Location is prized and traceable. Water, electricity, internet bandwidth, everything that moves through fixed cable is also good candidate. Then comes traffic. If we rely on liquid fuels, road traffic could be taxed without tracing. But planes and ships are probably going to see some tax entering/exiting a port.

The article seems to be right for the wrong reasons. Country formation is usually very Machiavellian business.

transfire• 11 years ago

Someone should draw a map of the U.S. if city-states were to rise to power.

nkoren9• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaregions_of_the_United_Stat...

flubert2• 11 years ago

Interesting, but linking Seattle, Boise, and the Tri-cities into one mega-region seems to decrease the seriousness of the concept to me.

loopdedoo• 11 years ago

I made an attempt at something like this a while ago! http://spacesurrounding.blogspot.com/2013/10/rise-of-city-st...

wj• 11 years ago

When I submitted the (exact) same article last night I thought about how this topic was covered in a book I read titled, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. Part of the premise was that people in some of the large (and prosperous) cities of the world have more in common with each other than they might with the many of the people of their own country.

Due to the mobility offered by airlines, the concentration of successful people going to relatively few universities, and the global reach of their companies, many New Yorkers might know more people living in London than they knew living in the majority of U.S. states.

http://www.amazon.com/Superclass-Global-Power-Elite-Making/d...

Personally I have always felt that people who live in large cities have a much easier time navigating foreign large cities (even if they don't speak the language) than people from smaller towns in the same country. Using a subway for instance.

Spooky233• 11 years ago

That's a great example of the endgame of income inequality will transform the world.

I find it sad, as that is the cynical world my children will inherit.

clamprecht• 11 years ago

Honest question: Did you believe this before you had children, or did you realize it afterwards?

flubert2• 11 years ago

Are cities the new countries?

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