Anthony Weiner\u2019s mayoral campaign in New York was dealt a blow by two sexting scandals<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n <\/p>\n
Many mayors operating on smaller budgets have left their mark on history for better reasons.<\/p>\n
Teddy Kollek, who served as Jerusalem mayor for nearly 30 years, was described as the most influential Jewish builder of the city since Herod the Great in Biblical times. He took office in 1965 and advocated Arab-Jewish co-existence. I interviewed him once in his Jerusalem office, where he was told me that Jerusalem was a better city united than divided.<\/p>\n
And Pasqual Maragall was one of a succession of mayors in Barcelona who transformed the city in the post-dictatorship era. Think too of Willy Brandt, who led West Berlin through the city\u2019s dark days and later became Chancellor.<\/p>\n
Mayors can be more effective than national politicians because there is less posturing. If you govern a city of ten million people, you have to make sure everything is working and the police are on the streets. They\u2019re not highly political acts, they\u2019re done by conservatives, labour, republicans, democrats and socialists in the same way.<\/p>\n
Political theorist Benjamin Barber takes this argument a step further in his book, If Mayors Ruled The World<\/i>. He says mayors are far better at addressing global issues than heads of nation states. Countries are dysfunctional in global relations, he argues, because they\u2019re walled states with borders strengthened by sovereignty and national culture. \u201cNational political figures adhere to great historical norms and political ideologies, but mayors have to fix things \u2013 they have to pick up the garbage and fix the sewer. They\u2019re problem solvers and that\u2019s what makes them pragmatic.\u201d<\/p>\n
And now that a majority of the world\u2019s population is found in urban areas, perhaps this will be the century of the city \u2013 and the mayor. Tokyo is the largest city in the world \u2013 the only mega-city in a developed economy. The area accommodates 34 million people \u2013 a population bigger than many countries. One mayor runs that city.<\/p>\n
Another runs Mexico City \u2013 a city that has expanded ten-fold in population and area in the last 50 years, and now generates a quarter of Mexico\u2019s total wealth. It\u2019s the perfect example of the rise of the city state. As global populations fast become city dwellers, mayors will become the leaders that most affect our lives. From the air we breathe to the way we work to the water we drink, the cars we drive, the houses we live in and to where our waste ends up.<\/p>\n
Mayors are often more grounded, more focused, more connected and more interesting than their national counterparts who, very often, they go on to replace. But they aren\u2019t working alone. These leaders are taking their cities into the next century. India\u2019s capital, New Delhi, is run by Sheila Dikshit. She sees herself as a chief executive, not a mayor of a city of 14 million people. It is a city in transition, trying not to be. As Dalrymple put it, Dehli is \u201ca city disjointed in time but rather a modern city, a \u2018megalopolis\u2019 to rival Bangalore\u201d.<\/p>\n
So what should a future city look like?<\/p>\n
Well, according to Dikshit: \u201cWhen you look at a world-class city, it should be neat, clean, spic and span, with good amenities, wide roads and should be aesthetically well developed. And, of course, intellectually sharp, something that attracts, that has a soul, culture and intellectual happenings.\u201d<\/p>\n
The United Nations and its numerous agencies, along with the World Health Organization, the World Bank and other international bodies, have all established guidelines that stress the importance of cities. Wealthy S\u00e3o Paulo, with its 42 million inhabitants, has made the most of this opportunity. Its governor, Geraldo Alckmin, has signed more international agreements (50 per year), received more foreign delegations (on average 450 per year) and managed more international co-operation programmes than any other regional governor in Latin America.<\/p>\n
So cities are the future and the future is in the hands of the men and women who lead those cities. One such leader is Walter Veltroni, the jazz-loving, ex-communist and one-time highly visible mayor of Rome. He saw the city as a global player. \u201cThe city is taking a leadership role when you think of happening cities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since becoming mayor in 2001, Veltroni, now 50, has been creating a new identity for the capital. His recipe: a mixture of cultural, social and technical initiatives, as well as architectural plans that promise to give the city a facelift. As a former newspaper editor and communications director, he understands the value of visibility. Rome\u2019s has been boosted by high-profile events, like free concerts using the Colosseum as a backdrop, that have drawn hundreds of thousands. Veltroni is a typically charismatic city leader and representative of many others. A growing number of mayors see their job as promoting business-friendly environments and selling their cities abroad.<\/p>\n
The mayor of Houston, Annise Parker, boasts about promoting a \u2018concierge\u2019 service for companies. Mayors are competitive people and desperately want their cities to succeed.<\/p>\n
Now that cities house more than half of humanity they can become more internationalist and inclined towards bottom-up solutions than states. Cities could become, in the words of Benjamin Barber, the \u201cbuilding blocks\u201d of a form of global governance enshrined in a \u201cparliament of mayors\u201d. That\u2019s because mayors often lead better than parties because parties are all too frequently locked in ideological death struggles.<\/p>\n
Mayors step in where others fear to tread to tackle economic and social problems on their own. And it works. The claim is echoed in the words of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s mayor Eduardo Paes, that the leaders of cities have the \u201cpolitical position to really change people\u2019s lives\u201d.<\/p>\n
In the developing world, more than a million people move to cities every five days and those cities need great leaders who are businessmen more than politicians. In 1892 Joseph Chamberlain, a retired mayor of Birmingham in Britain, likened the governments of cities to a joint stock or co-operative enterprise in which every citizen is a shareholder and of which the dividends are receivable in the improved health and the increase in the comfort and happiness of the community.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a pretty good manifesto for the best-run cities and the mayors who lead them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As urban areas grow in size and importance, mayors could find themselves with more power than heads of government I grew up in Solihull in the English Midland county of Warwickshire. The town\u2019s motto is \u2018Urbs in Rure\u2019 \u2013 translated from the Latin it means \u2018city in country\u2019. It was a prescient choice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1587,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[182,19,40],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10449"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1587"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}