Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 17

A final face of the global political city is leadership. Building on powerful input from advisory complexes, forums, and civil-society activists, many leaders of major global political cities are growing more influential on the global stage on issues ranging from the environment to counterterrorism. Gifted civic leaders are making some of the most creative and substantial efforts to address international problems. This is partly by default: national leaders have been abdicating traditional leadership roles that their countries have held, as the United States has done recently on environmental protection and free trade. Yet civic leaders can also, through inaction or lack of capacity, make problems worse, as arguably was the case in Hong Kong during its 2019–2020 crisis.

Figures with real leadership expertise, such as Michael Bloomberg of New York, are taking mayoral positions. Several such dynamic local leaders—ranging from Willy Brandt in Germany and Jacques Chirac in France to Lee Myung-bak in Korea, Mauricio Macri in Argentina, and Boris Johnson in Britain—have subsequently become leaders of their nations as a whole, following successful careers as mayors. Some, including Michael Bloomberg, have become creative innovators in the sphere of global governance. The rise of these hybrid local, national, and international leaders testifies both to the rising political importance of local leadership positions themselves and to the central role of cities as a training ground for broader policy-management skills.

Mayors, to be sure, do not rule the world.²⁰ Yet their collective role in international affairs has recently been rising, together with their individual mobility, in many cases to other positions of importance. That increasingly dynamic mayoral role is thus one key final reason for closer attention to cities in their political dimension.