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Cities are thus becoming increasingly important political actors in world affairs, through their local leadership, their idea industries, and their role as a global stage, for both elites and grassroots actors. All these functional roles—in which the sociopolitical role of advisers, media, and business is often more important than municipal leadership—build on the latent urban power of proximity that great cities innately possess and that is leveraged by advancing technology. A diverse range of actors collectively releases that latent power. Documenting the new but as yet insufficiently understood and conceptualized reality of rising civic influence on the international scene is a central empirical task of this book.

Figure 1-3. The Varied Strength of Transnational Forces in Global Cities

Source: Author’s illustration.

Global Political Cities also strives to contribute to broader ongoing theoretical debates in both international political economy and domestic politics. It does so in six major areas: (1) explicating the concept of global political city and assessing its heuristic value; (2) explaining how and why global political cities and their international functions are changing; (3) exploring the institutional role of research and agenda-setting institutions (idea industries as catalysts for civic-policy influence on a global scale); (4) understanding twenty-first-century global agenda-setting; (5) examining contemporary global-governance prospects; and (6) critiquing realist theory, in the light of recent social, political, and economic developments that challenge the centrality of nation-states. After defining and assessing the “global political city” concept abstractly in relation to existing literature, and noting the deep relationship between the evolution of such cities and the profile of local financial markets, the book proceeds to explore the political influence of cities, through four exploratory hypotheses presented later in this chapter.

Explicating and testing the concept of global political city. In the post–Cold War world, where cross-border information and social transactions proliferate and the role of the nation-state is in decline, new subnational actors are playing larger international roles in a system of complex interdependence. Cities are among the most important such actors. How do they fill functional gaps in international agenda-setting, governance, and resource allocation, opened by the decline or inaction of nation-states? Through what sort of decisionmaking mechanisms, involving what range of actors, and with what implications for world affairs? These are central questions that this volume addresses.

Exploring the relationship of research and agenda-setting institutions to international policy influence. The world has clearly been growing more complex in recent decades, with some key dimensions of the global political economy, including finance and telecommunications, becoming subject to rapid and often volatile change. Government has not adapted quickly or in most cases flexibly to these revolutionary technical changes, leaving scope for new, responsive, nongovernmental institutions to exercise increasing policy influence. The literature on policy advisory systems has previously documented the technological transformation and the domestic policy challenges that such change presents, although in more local and domestic policy contexts. This book explores the global policy influence of advisory systems. It does so by probing how think tanks, universities, and mass media, in various combinations, are now shaping global policy formation—often much more dynamically than local or even national governments and more extensively than even a few years ago, leveraged by new technologies.

Contribution to understanding global governance. The importance of strengthened global governance institutions has been ever more keenly recognized over the past four decades, as worldwide political-economic interdependence has steadily risen.²¹ This book strives to show how transnational interaction within the most influential global cities of the world, and the networks among their leaders, shape global norms and institutions under the system of complex interdependence prevailing in the world today.²²

Contribution to understanding global agenda-setting. In many important policy arenas, particularly relating to nonmilitary dimensions of human security, such as migration, the environment, and at times pandemics, nation-states have been remarkably slow to act. Yet global norms, agreed practices, and ultimately international treaties have nevertheless emerged on subjects ranging from rights of noncombatants in warfare to restrictions on the disposal of plastic. The roles of cities and their varied panoply of actors in framing these norms, securing their adoption, and actually implementing proposed changes have arguably been substantial but need further verification. The role of urban actors in setting agendas for transportation, land use, and the environment for the post-coronavirus world could be of special importance.

Critique of realist theory. For at least half a century, realist formulations of international politics have been under intermittent attack.²³ How the behavior of sociopolitical communities at the subnational level actually inhibits or redirects national power projection at the national level, however, has rarely been systematically examined, even though it seems to be growing increasingly important. This book demonstrates through concrete comparative case studies of local politics in fifteen major global cities, and the resulting impact on global agenda-setting, that influence does not flow only from conventional national power parameters. It is instead profoundly shaped by subnational sociopolitical characteristics such as local leadership, grassroots activism, and idea-industry development, as well as a feedback loop of media outlets to idea industries and then to policymakers. Transmission via the media is often catalyzed by trigger events, or critical junctures.

Explanation of how global political cities and their international functions are changing. The book explores, in particular, how social media and e-commerce are transforming global agenda-setting and resource allocation, giving rise to new types of global political cities in the early twenty-first century. Technological change, especially in social communications, is dramatically enhancing the role of the global city as a stage for domestically visible international negotiations and agenda-setting.²⁴