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In conceptualizing the notion of the global political city, a distinctive idea in studies of the international political economy, it is important first to remind ourselves of the basic functional roles of politics more generally in international affairs. There are arguably three such basic roles: governance, agenda-setting, and resource allocation. Governance is the most explicitly political function, performed most clearly by national governments in national capitals. Civic leaders, however, also play governance roles of major global consequence, not only through the impact of municipal decisions but through their dealings with counterparts elsewhere in the world, in both transnational and intergovernmental organizations. The informatics and geopolitical revolutions of recent years have greatly expanded their ability to forge such ties and to disseminate best-practice ideas worldwide.

Agenda-setting is a second key dimension of politics in international affairs. Once the near-exclusive province of national governments, agenda-setting has recently also begun to involve think tanks, political advisers, grassroots activists, mass media, and even financiers and entrepreneurs who generate policy ideas. It occurs both through continuously operating organizations at fixed locations and intermittent forums convening at diverse locations, ranging around the world from Singapore to Davos. Through their articulation and advocacy of policies, agenda-setting groups and their related policy networks have also become participants in governance, not just at home but around the world.

A third key dimension of politics in international affairs is resource allocation. The classical political expression, of course, is budgeting, which can have international dimensions, such as defense expenditures, overseas development assistance, and contributions to international organizations. Politics can also shape resource allocation more indirectly through regulatory policies, as in the case of capital markets, and in turn be profoundly shaped by embedded regulatory patterns as well. The rise of buoyant, liberal equity capital markets, in particular, has empowered entrepreneurs, local governments, and civil society institutions in cities like London, New York, and San Francisco, thus further transforming and decentralizing the chessboard of international affairs.

A central role in formal governance might thus be considered one, but only one, core characteristic of a political city. Agenda-setting and resource-allocation clearly assume important auxiliary functions. Both national capitals and major subordinate units with important resource-allocation or agenda-setting functions can thus appropriately be considered political cities.

A global political city can thus be conceptualized as a global city that serves as a major node of governance, agenda-setting, and/or resource allocation in the international political economy. This definition would include many of the cities, including New York, Tokyo, and London, that meet Sassen’s economically oriented criteria. It would also, however, include many other national capitals and hubs for NGO activity, such as Washington, DC, and Geneva, which have a stronger political and less economic focus than the cities Sassen centrally considers, but nevertheless exert significant influence in international affairs. The diverse orientations and roles of global cities along the political-economic continuum are suggested in figure 1-1.

Global political cities vary in their distribution of the defining characteristics, but do share in common important sociopolitical traits. They are all home to a mixture of domestic and foreign political actors, who also tend to have overlapping domestic and international networks. Domestic and international political transactions thus often tend to be linked or conflated. Many actors in the global political city are cosmopolitan, travelling frequently and connected continuously to streams of information from throughout the world. Such cities are also replete with institutions capable of publicizing and processing information and demands from diverse sources, converting inputs into policy proposals for further consideration.

Global political cities are thus nodes in world politics and policymaking networks that significantly shape and are also influenced structurally by the international political-economic system as a whole. They include major national capitals, such as Washington, DC, Beijing, London, Paris, and Brussels. Major cities that are not capitals but have major mediating and agenda-setting functions related to their concentration of intergovernmental organizations (IGO), mass media, technical innovation, or financial transactions, such as New York, Geneva, and even San Francisco, can also be considered global political cities. As resource allocation and global agenda-setting grow more decentralized, with the advance of telecommunications and social media, new metropolitan areas displaying the traits of global political cities are rapidly emerging as well, in cities ranging from Atlanta to Addis Ababa.

Figure 1-1. Conceptualizing the Global Political-Economic Role of Cities

Source: Author’s illustration.

We argue that global political cities in the twenty-first century can operate most effectively in international politics, to shape global agendas and to achieve concrete policy outcomes, if they have four structural-functional characteristics: (1) a well-developed policy advisory complex (“penumbra of power”); (2) cosmopolitan political forums, bringing together specialists intermittently to debate key issues; (3) mechanisms for assuring systematic grassroots input; and (4) dynamic, articulate, and visionary local leadership. Cities vary in their potential and optimal mix of these structural traits, with late industrializers such as Korea finding it harder to develop penumbras as vehicles for policy generation than those in mature Western industrialized nations, hence making such emerging cities more dependent on intermittent forums. It is possible to identify these structural features, however, in all well-functioning global political cities.

The structural features of the global political city naturally relate closely to the political functions being performed therein.¹¹ Indeed, they are mechanisms through which politically relevant activities are carried out. Those connections are shown clearly in figure 1-2.

In evaluating global political cities, it is important to recall the power of proximity—a latent general strength of cities, in Glaeser’s formulation—and how it might apply to global political cities more specifically. To be sure, proximity does generate some formidable challenges for urban political life: it increases vulnerability to local disasters, including floods, storms, fires, and droughts. Close proximity makes people more subject to contagions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to mass outrage and communal violence. Government surveillance and coercion are also easier in urban areas.

Large cities in the modern world can also, paradoxically, be prone to social alienation and apathy that inhibits political expression, as social scientists from David Riesman to Robert Putnam have pointed out.¹² Owing to its impact on human ties, proximity can also conversely make politics in cities at times more volatile and chaotic, as was demonstrated during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Negative externalities, including vulnerability to military predation resulting from the concentration of power, people, and infrastructure, are likewise more pressing. Social life in cities is simply more varied and volatile than elsewhere.

Figure 1-2. Anatomy of the Global Political City

Source: Author’s illustration

Proximity appears to clearly strengthen the political efficacy of cities, however, in at least three important ways:

 Proximity helps cities to build human networks. Developing such networks involves direct personal contact, and proximity is obviously crucial in fostering that—even (or especially) in the digital age.

 Proximity reduces transaction costs. That makes complex resource allocation problems, in applications ranging from budgeting to personnel selection, easier to solve.

 Proximity facilitates the formation and communication of ideas. It also makes agenda-setting easier and more effective. Proximity thus makes the functions of global political cities easier to perform, both internally and on the global stage as well.

In the final analysis, proximity thus is a double-edged sword. It magnifies both possibility and peril, with the persistence of cities across history providing strong evidence that the former generally outweighs the latter. Proximity makes political life more uncertain and volatile, to be sure, but it also gives it the promise of being more creative and efficient at problem solving. Above all, proximity makes decisive policy action in the twenty-first-century world, through a dynamic competition of ideas, at once more imperative and more efficacious.

For many years, failure to conceptualize the political role of cities, or to include primarily political towns within the notion of global city, was quite understandable. These politically oriented cities—including even America’s capital, Washington, DC—were for decades remarkably parochial. They had little international dimension and remarkably little overall connectivity, even as the world surrounding them grew increasingly cosmopolitan. The overriding concern of these classical political cities was domestic politics, with a focus on the local legislature. Standing in the shadow of national governments, mayors of these political centers were often minor figures, with limited powers and limited ambition to match.

Lobbyists, to be sure, naturally existed, in the quintessentially political cities of the world. Yet in the era before advanced telecommunications and the internet, think tanks had little funding, access, or political weight. Nongovernmental actors had few tools to shape policy agendas, apart from newspaper op-eds and the proverbial three-martini lunch. Washington itself was dominated by parochial congressional politics throughout the first two-thirds of its existence, from 1800 to 1950 or so. And the cosmopolitan transition unfolded only slowly and grudgingly thereafter.