The return of the city-state
How cities are outpacing the nation-state and why that has consequences for how we organize our food.
The return of the city-state
How cities are outpacing the nation-state and why that has consequences for how we organize our food.
Benjamin Barber argues in If Mayors Ruled the World that cities solve the problems where nation-states get stuck. Climate, migration, public health, food supply: in each of these areas, cities move faster, more pragmatically and more effectively than national governments. Not because mayors are smarter than prime ministers, but because cities are operationally closer to the problem.
Parag Khanna extends this argument in Connectography. He describes how the global economy is no longer organized around nation-states but around urban corridors and supply chains that cross national borders. Singapore, Dubai, Amsterdam, Shanghai: they are nodes in a network that is more important than the nation-states they happen to be located in.
For food, this shift is fundamental. Industrial agriculture is organized at national and supranational scale: EU subsidies, global commodity markets, transcontinental cold chains. But the alternatives, urban agriculture, short chains, regional food hubs, are organized at urban scale. Cities like Copenhagen, Milan and Ghent have developed food strategies that go further than what their national governments do.
The Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, signed by more than two hundred cities worldwide, is the most visible example. Cities commit to sustainable food supply, food waste reduction and access to healthy food for all residents. It is not national policy but urban policy, and it works because cities have the scale to experiment and the proximity to see results.
The consequence for the individual citizen is that your food choices increasingly have an urban context. The market around the corner, the urban farm, the cooperative that buys directly from producers: these are urban phenomena that contribute to a food infrastructure more resilient than the global chain. Not as replacement but as complement. As a buffer against the vulnerability that Patel and Snyder describe.
Sources: Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (Yale University Press, 2013); Parag Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (Random House, 2016).
Source: Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World (Yale University Press, 2013); Parag Khanna, Connectography (Random House, 2016)