Cities are the Atomic Unit of Statecraft
Our political philosophy and practice must start and end with our cities
Tucker Carlson, the preeminent American talking head, recently interviewed Putin. After the interview he was asked what he thought about how Russia is being run:
What was radicalizing was the city of Moscow… it was so much nicer than any city in my country. I had no idea… it is so much cleaner, and safer, and prettier than any city in the United States…
At a certain point I don’t think the average person cares as much about abstractions as about the concrete reality of his life. And if you can’t use your subway, as many people in New York City are afraid to because it’s too dangerous, you have to wonder: Isn’t that the ultimate measure of leadership?
It’s radicalizing for an American to go to Moscow - to Singapore, to Tokyo, to Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. Because these cities, no matter how we’re told they are run, are wonderful places to live. That don’t have rampant inflation, you’re not going to get raped, and so….. what is that?"
I don’t know about Moscow, though comments about that city’s relative crime are questionable at best and the comment about inflation is demonstrably wrong. However, Carlson’s analysis of the other cities he mentions is, unfortunately, correct.
The state of US1 cities is not good. The statistics around city health - housing costs, crime, educational achievement, life expectancy, travel times, air quality and more - do not paint a pretty picture2.
However, even these stats do not make the situation clear in the same way as travelling from a US city to a major East Asian city, like Hong Kong or Singapore. From the moment you step off the plane the comparison is immediate and overwhelming.
Our cities are not moving in the right direction and this has serious consequences for the quality of people’s lives. We may still be getting richer, on average and on paper, but if you live in New York, no amount of money nor a penthouse on Billionaire’s Row can fix the dirt on the sidewalk or the harassment you face at your front door by someone dealing with a mental breakdown.
What has gone wrong in our politics to bring about this state of affairs?
The City as Bounded Space
For most of Europe and East Asia’s history the majority of cities were walled. If roving barbarians, or uppity Feudal lords, decided that they wanted to bring the city under their control the inhabitants could retreat inside these defences. The walls kept them safe until either the invaders disbanded or an allied city or state came to their rescue.
It was not necessary for everyone to live inside the walls at all times, most didn’t, but the walls still defined the boundaries of the city. In a time of crisis, whether or not you could pass from one side of the walls to the other determined whether you were part of the city or not.
Creating boundaries to distinguish between what lies inside and outside is an essential aspect of life itself. The walls that cities put up to safeguard their inhabitants and repel invaders define the city as a distinct entity.
Today our cities no longer have physical walls, the Westphalian political order, the changing technology of warfare, and the rapid expansion of many urban areas have made them an obsolete technology - at least for now. However, our cities still create barriers between insiders and outsiders.
At one level there are the invisible yet impenetrable municipal boundaries, guarded by political apparatus, that set the geography for law making and taxation. Alongside these are explicit designators like ID cards and car registrations as well as large scale infrastructure like transit, and hospitals that support the cities operation.
At another, more subtle, level locals have social technologies to set standards for who should be on the inside of the city’s walls. These standards create an idea of New Yorkers, Londoners, Torontonians, Denverites or Shanghairen (上海人) and clarify who does and who does not make the cut. They include things like, favoured sports teams, regional accents (or dialects), local festivals, even the quirks of how people greet each other. All of these set apart the members of one city from another.
Such standards form not because it is an essential desire for the inhabitants of a place to be exclusionary but because there are natural limits to how people are able to organise. We require cognitive shortcuts to establish trust and effective coordination. If we can tell that certain people are ‘part of the tribe’ that gives us a lot of information about how they will act and what we can expect from them3.
The reason these signifiers develop ultimately is the same reason that the city exists in the first place. The natural scale for most of our problems - including problems of defence, identification, and trust - is the city.
People flock together because of the economic riches, cultural variation, and general social well being that proximity creates. The city, as a bounded space, emerges as the spontaneous, self-organising, solution to having all these people share one place.
The structures each city offers for the solution are multi-faceted composed, non-exhaustively, of architecture, transit, policing, education, civil institutions including city management, cultural centres and festivals, and co-working spaces4.
These structures facilitate the interactions that initially attracted people to the city. Similar to enzymes and inhibitors they define the potential ‘throughput’ of the city amplifying or dampening the creation of knowledge, culture, and economic progress for the inhabitants.
These structures also cannot be determined at any other scope. Every city has problems and opportunities that are unique to the particular confluence of forces that led to that city’s emergence. As such, every city’s solution must also be unique.
When a large population comes together they have a nest of interdependent economic, political and cultural relationships that mesh with the broader context of the geography they meet at, their shared history and more. This presents an unbelievably complex design problem. The city and its structures are the solution. As such, a city cannot be planned externally or centrally5, at least not for very long. This is why decentralization to the level of the city happens inevitably even when undesirable by one group or another.
The Management of the City
Concretely this is made clear by the way the management of our cities, and not our ‘nations’, shapes our society’s businesses, politics, science, and culture.
Companies choose cities. When Amazon was deciding on where to put its second HQ it ran an RFP with various cities arguing for why their blend of tax incentives and labour pools meant they were the best possible option.
Tech startups concentrate in the Bay Area spurred by the ecosystem of engineers and investors there that make company formation easier. Other companies choose to locate further afield to take advantage of the unique positioning certain cities offer. Here’s Tobi Lütke describing why Shopify was based in Ottawa:
I started the snowboard business here because my wife was studying in Ottawa at the time… I think there's a dangerously narrow narrative for how companies in general are created.
I had lots of opportunities to move Shopify. I had term sheets by all the dream venture capitalists that stipulated I would have to relocate the company to Silicon Valley or a similar place. I walked away from these offers because I looked at the history of how great companies were made.
What I found is that while it's true that there's a greater concentration of companies in a place like Silicon Valley, usually what happens for making a world-class company is that one company creates a broader geographical consensus that this is a company where all the best people should go.
I knew how I could become by far the best employer in Ottawa. Montreal, Toronto, and Waterloo are almost right next to us, at least by the North American measure of distance. That seemed like the right way to do it.
Tobi Lütke, The Knowledge Project
Cities also provide the foundations for political rule. They may not represent the literal boundaries managed by the highest national office but they are regularly a breeding ground for that office.
In the UK, Boris Johnson made a significant jump in his political career when he became the mayor of London. This role gave him a platform for national awareness and prestige. He later converted the awareness from that platform to become the face of a movement that was ironically anti-London, eventually earning him the top political office in the country.
On the other side of the world, as Xi Jinping was rising to the premier position in the Chinese Communist Party his most significant political rival - later found guilty of corruption - was not a member of the primary national bodies but the leader of Chongqing (China’s most populous city), Bo Xilai.
There is no directly comparable American president but it is notable that at one point during the 2020 Democratic primaries Michael Bloomberg was a serious candidate largely due to capitalizing on his experience as the mayor of New York.
Even when the relationship between city and national politics is not this explicit certain cities continue to exert their power in more subtle ways. The government must have a physical location and as such must have a city that will shape how they operate. As Samo Burja puts it:
Great cities are the command centers of elite classes. It is in these cities that history happens. Though a war may happen on a far-off frontier, and an explorer may voyage to an undiscovered country, the decision to deploy the army or the explorer is made in the city. The urban halls of power are where those capable of making such decisions meet, deliberate, and organize. Their citizens live together in proximity and organize their daily lives around such networks and opportunities.
In other words, the dynamics of Washington D.C. both in terms of geography and local economic organisation drives how deals get made and politics is done across the United States.
In another country, the isolation of Brasilia (you need to drive for 12 hours to reach Brazil’s most populous urban area São Paulo) has played a huge role in determining the path of Brazilian development. Generating both economic benefits like promoting overall greater urbanisation and economic ills like undermining the economy of Rio de Janeiro (the former capital) and cementing an architecture and culture of inequality where the politicians and wealthy residents live in the gleaming towers at Brasilia’s core supported by a mass of workers living in ramshackle accommodations in the peripheral commuter towns.
At a scientific and cultural level cities foster unique bordered environments that allow them to generate new cultures that can define our societies far beyond their walls. This was the case with the stock exchanges of Amsterdam as the birthplace of capitalism in the 17th century, and Parisian cafés as the bellweather for art and fashion in the late 19th and early 20th century.
In recent times the most important example has been San Fransisco. The city is not even in the 15 largest cities in the US yet it created the culture that we all now live in to one degree or another6 and has unquestionably been the epicentre for global technological development over the last 50 years.
And yet, to return to Tucker Carlson’s surprise, these society level exports from the city are still not its most important aspect. The city is where people live and as such it is how the city solves the more mundane problems of waste water management, policing, and fixing potholes that matters most to people’s experience7.
The city is where the most pressing problems for most people are located and, consequently, where they will be solved. In this solution the city sometimes supports a company, politician, or cultural movement with broader applicability and changes our whole society.
For this reason the city is the atomic unit of statecraft.
What is Political Philosophy?
In this light how can we think about what we need to do to put our affairs in order? Or, what does it mean to practice effective statecraft? Before we start out on any endeavour we need to make sure that we have our theory - our philosophy - correct. If the city really is the atomic unit of statecraft we should have a political philosophy and a practice that begins and end with the city.
This should not be a surprise, polis the root word for political is the Ancient Greek word for city. When the Greeks first started thinking about how to organise themselves it was the city that was the locus of their thought. It would be wise for us to reflect on this.
Unfortunately, though today citizens seem to have a very different view.
Toronto is only one city but the fact that voter turnout for the Municipal government there is lower there than the turnout for either the Provincial government or the Federal government of Canada is representative of the trend in the U.S. and beyond8.
Politics, ultimately, is about solving problems for groups of people. When we focus all our attention on national large scale issues we end up spending our time and energy on problems that are neither relevant nor, more importantly, tractable.
To reform our cities we must start by caring about city level problems. If we are able to govern our cities well we will be able to transform our societies to ones defined by progress and prosperity. If we are unable to govern our cities well then we will be entirely unable to govern ourselves.
And Canadian
There are some bright spots. Houston for example has managed to half their homeless population over the last decade. However, these are bright spots not the general story.
Dunbar’s number is a theory about human cognitive abilities and states that the average person will be able to maintain stable relationships with roughly the same number of people as a medium sized tribe (about 150). A modern city can have 150,000 if not 1,500,000 or even 15,000,000 people. So, it has moved well past Dunbar’s number to a point where no one person can know a meaningful proportion of the inhabitants. This makes such mechanisms of identification, and the associated establishing of trust, essential.
These structures can be very long-lasting and their trajectory is for the most part path-dependent. Once a city has built it’s largest road networks it is unlikely to change them. Despite this though the solution overall is highly dynamic. People constantly come and go in the city and it’s institutions are always being made and remade. Every individual plays a role - potentially outsized - in determining how the city will look in its next moment.
When it is centrally planned the results are never pretty. A city is not a tree and cannot be easily mapped as such.
The future is here it’s just not evenly distributed.
Even if people don’t live in cities they are always dependent on their nearest city for defining much of their quality of life economically and otherwise both as a result of transfer payments and access to broader markets and services as needed.
Why we have ended up here is worth an entire other essay. However, one reason that could be worth considering is the mimetic centralisation of narrative supercharged by modern communication technology.
The media, broadly construed, cannot in fact tell us what to think. No one has figured out a propaganda effective enough to sway people universally. However, at the same time, the media does tell us what to think about. The media we consume en masse sets the agenda for our political discourse and the problems that are most relevant to us.
As we have moved online the number of opinions express has fragmented compared to previous broadcast technology. However, the issues that we care about have continued to centralise. Once everyone is in dialogue with everyone else it becomes almost certain that we will talk more and more about large scale general things without looking too carefully at the reality around us.
I enjoyed your article. It's not often that I find these (urban) issues being analyzed deep beneath the surface. What might be worth further exploring is Geoffry West's - city as superlinear scaling phenomena. And then, how does that work on lower and higher fractal scales, all in the context of urbanization.
This was great, I really enjoyed reading this
Very minor disagreement but in your footnote you say we haven’t found a way to use propaganda to sway people universally- I would say the First World War is a good counter example to that (of course it was not absolutely universal but it was as close as it gets). If you’re interested in learning more about propaganda I highly recommend Walter Lippmann’a public opinion- it’s foundational in my understanding of politics and the public sphere