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Why, then, have once-parochial and passive cities become markedly more cosmopolitan, proactive, and significant politically on the global stage in recent years? What does this transformation portend for the global future? These are key questions that this book addresses. Where market forces are allowed to prevail, historic, synergistic changes in financial markets and communications technology have unleashed the power of proximity inherent in global cities themselves to influence international political processes, while harnessing data and ideas for policymaking in new and creative ways.

It is important from the outset to be clear about the varied capacities and options that twenty-first-century cities have for shaping international affairs. All stand even in the shadow of nation-states. Yet they can operate with varying degrees of autonomy and dynamism in addressing global problems, as both actor and arena.

Cities have varied ways of influencing global affairs. They can participate directly, first of all, in global governance—as city-states, in the most extreme variant, or as formal participants in transgovernmental bodies such as C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40). They can also address pressing global problems, ranging from environmental pollution and mass transportation to sanitation and personal safety, as autonomous international actors.

Cities, including their leaders, former leaders, and local grassroots movements, can also influence world affairs indirectly. They do so through the networks they create, the forums they provide for agenda-setting, and the activities of their “idea industries” and the penumbra of power surrounding national and local leadership.¹³ Cities can likewise exert indirect intellectual influence through the policy paradigms they foster, as New York and Singapore, for example, have so effectively done in the environmental and resource-use areas.¹⁴