We have to deal simultaneously with the abrasion and the imposition of two orders: the modern (national) and the postmodern (cosmopolitan) reality.âPavel Frankowski (2010, p. 98)
Overview
The recent rise of cities in global environmental politics âthe main theme of this Palgrave Pivot book seriesâhas stimulated fresh, even remarkable, debates about the particular meanings and practices of sustainable urban development. It has challenged scholars, for instance, to think increasingly about the urban geopolitics of a more complex world order that is, by all accounts, no longer defined only (or mainly) by tightly bordered regimes of national regulation and social investment (Moisio, 2018; Yacobi, 2009). The rise of cities in global environmental politics has furthermore encouraged everyoneâscholars certainly, but also politicians, public officials, citizens, and activistsâto reconsider, reimagine, and reappraise the potential roles and actual contributions of the sovereign Westphalian state system that has for so long shaped our collective view of the world political map. New policy and political relationships between cities, states, and global environmental concerns like climate change have created nascent spatialities of sustainability no less than novel spatialities of cities, states, and global politics.
The rise of cities, though, is a debate. Some feel that pragmatic cities provide the best hopeâthe only plausible fixâfor a global governance project that has stagnated through the dysfunction of nation-states (Barber, 2013, 2017). Exploring urbanism late in his career, Benjamin Barber (2013), a political theorist, optimistically amplified this renewed enthusiasm for the rise (or return) of cities in world development (e.g., Engelke, 2013). He offered a devastating critique of the nation-state, which he dismissed as increasingly incompetent, democratically distant, and emotionally attenuated from citizens. But the solution to the pathologies of the nation-state, he ultimately argued, is found in one of our oldest, most familiar inventions: the vibrant propinquity of the polis, or what Ed Soja (2000) in several books and multiple public lectures thought of as an urban âsynekismâ that has long forged geo-historic change and innovation (cf. Taylor, 2013). These wereâand areâvoices of urban(ized) hope. Global progressânot just in cities but through cities; through politically creative urban efforts to transform natureâs bounty into socially just economiesâendogenously within specific cities, of course, but especially across cities as they circulate ideas and lobby exogenous institutions for solutions to daunting problems. Barberâs thesis, in particular, and certainly his overriding normative concerns, thus border on a kind of âcity-statism ,â a claim/dream predicated on the idea/l that cities are, after all, older than states and altogether more likely in practice to articulate vibrant democracy with green efficacy.
Others wonder, however, just how cities (or city-regions) can unleash their presumed policy and project creativity in global affairsâin so far as they can or doâwithout the political support of a reformed, yet still institutionally relevant, kind of national state apparatus (Curtis, 2016). Arguing for âa new internationality,â Herrschel and Newman (2017) are nonetheless careful to note, for example, that while cities are âinternational actors,â they have joined rather than replaced states in forging a novel kind of global geopolitics and solution-seeking policy world. Cities and regions are going âbeyondâ the nation-state, in their estimation, but the state has hardly vanished. Indeed, Herrschel and Dierwechter (2018) have suggested more recently that efforts by key city-regions to balance urban competitiveness with global sustainability through new forms of âsmart â regionalization are actually better understood as a âdual transition.â One transition is âinternalâ to the politics of city-regions; the other, âexternalâ to the city-region . Simon Curtis (2016, p. 456) further observes, quite compellingly in my view, that the rise of the city in world (environmental) politics âshould not be seen as a symptom of the exhaustion of the state but rather as an adaptation of the state as it tries to cope with a changing environment.â
The thesis of the stateâs âadaptationâ is also central to the work of Andy Jonas and Sami Moisio (2016). They chart recent forms of city-regionalism as part and parcel of a new type of geopolitics rather than, say, an updated city-statism of disembodied globalized city-regions independently building a twenty-first-century version of the Delian, Lombard, or Hanseatic Leagues of different (urban) geopolitical pasts.1 In particular, they suggest, efforts to sustain city-regions âto green up metropolitan areasâare deliberate strategies in how todayâs increasingly âpolycentric statesâ now secure and project political power across the spaces of global governance. This is changing international relations, without question, but also the geographies of the state (and of cities). Simon Curtis (2016, p. 456) again helps us to sharpen up this point. The ânation-state,â he argues, âis being reassembled into new forms.â As societies have urbanized, we might say, so too have their states, though unevenly and in ways we do not really quite understand. The unsustainable urban is changing world politics, in this view, even as unsustainable world politics are changing what cities are, what they do, how they act, and how we theorize their spaces. For Moisio (2018, p. 1) in particular, ââŚcitiesâand attendant urban politicsâhave not been passive outcomes of state territorial formation processes but instead have occupied a pivotal role in the dynamic geopolitical processes of the nation-state.â
Several key questions emerge. Can we count on the hypothesized creativity of cities (on their own or in still ill-formed horizontal networks) to revive the existentially non-negotiable project of global sustainability ? As much as we fear the state, as much as we worry about its militarization, âbluntness,â and regressive neoliberalizationâabout its powers over usâcan we really jettison the stateâs capacities to help social collectives puzzle through shared problems (Skocpol, 1985)? For some observers, including both eco-radical municipalists and market libertarians, we canâand we should (Bookchin, 2014). But if we still do need the state, should we not spend more time thinking critically about how reassembled, adapted, polycentric, urbanized statesââsmarter,â âeco-states ,â for instanceâmight edify and work productively with increasingly creative, internationalized cities and their urbanized hinterlands (Backstrand & Kronsell, 2015; Dierwechter, 2017; Eckersley, 2004)? Finally and most importantly for my purposes here, as we think about the new relationships between cities, states, and global environmental politics how do we think about the various geographies of these relationships in different cultural and historical settings? Indeed, what new geographies are these developments now creating?
Evidence mounts daily that the global communityâhowever definedâneeds and looks to cities more than ever before (Mohieldin & Ijjasz-Vasquez, 2018). Taki...