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For well over two millenia, the notion that human beings can find the greatest intellectual and social fulfillment in civic communities has been a central tenet of Western civilization. Aristotle, together with thinkers across the centuries, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Rousseau, Hegel, and beyond, have stressed the importance of community in nurturing us into the sentient, thoughtful, and articulate beings that we potentially can be. And cities, from the Greek polis to the Swiss Geneva and beyond, have been the communities where that nurturing and creativity have most naturally taken place.

The pages that follow illustrate clearly how cities across the ages have come to generate ideas and undertake policy initiatives of broad human consequence—on many occasions overshadowing nominally more powerful nation-states. This prominence of cities and civic institutions grew especially pronounced over the post–Cold War years of the past three decades, in a revival of ancient patterns dating from the Middle Ages.

Knowledge industries and the interpersonal networks that feed them came to achieve unprecedented political-economic importance. Cities capitalized on the synergies that rapid information flows and cosmopolitan interpersonal networks created, fueled by the rise of global finance and unprecedented connectivity within and between key urban centers. And the most global of cities, led by New York, London, Brussels, and Washington, together with some dynamic Asian aspirants, began assuming even more formidable international agenda-setting roles.

Then the world changed dramatically, in ways that seemed to undermine the continued vibrancy of cities in international politics. During the final drafting of this book, the most devastating global pandemic in over a century blindsided some of the most global of cities with unparalleled ferocity. In less than three months—March, April, and May of 2020—New York lost more than 18,000 residents to COVID-19, and London more than 6,000 residents. Huge numbers of urban dwellers, including many of the knowledge workers so vital to the meteoric rise of these international centers since the 1990s, rapidly decamped to the suburbs and the countryside beyond. Pundits worldwide began questioning the future viability of big cities themselves. Many asked if urban life is now too dangerous to justify the dense concentrations of people prevailing in Manhattan, Belgravia, Akasaka, or Pudong.

Together with the pandemic challenge, 2020 brought a formidable new threat to the political-economic relevance of global cities from another direction. On June 30, following a year of persistent local political turbulence, China introduced a National Security Law for Hong Kong, and shortly thereafter banned dissident politicians and postponed scheduled Legislative Council elections. These actions directly violated the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, led to a hemorrhaging of foreign investment from Hong Kong, and dramatized the political constraints that complicate the emergence of Chinese cities as political-economic actors of broader global consequence. Istanbul, among other global cities, also confronts parallel political constraints in its emergence as a sociopolitical center of international consequence.

Where then will global cities stand within the emerging post-COVID world in their effort to sustain and expand their political and policymaking relevance? Are subversive forces like pandemics, or rising nation-state assertion, capable of dealing fatal blows to the global political city? History, as well as comparative perspectives, can give us useful benchmarks for considering future prospects.

Some major global cities, to be sure, have suffered greatly from COVID-19—New York and London in particular. Yet other major cities with rising global agenda-setting credibility, such as Tokyo, Seoul, and Singapore, have not been nearly so severely affected. During the first half of 2020, for example, Tokyo recorded only 332 fatalities due to COVID-19, compared to more than 18,000 in New York and more than 6,000 in London. Seoul and Singapore, with nine and twenty-seven deaths, respectively, suffered even less. And none of the Asian capitalist global cities recorded lockdowns comparable to what occurred in the West. Public transport continued to run smoothly, and a substantial share of the local workforce continued commuting to work.

From a recent historical perspective, there is no question that the socioeconomic setbacks that cities like New York and London have sustained are severe. Yet they are by no means the gravest in recorded history. The Black Death of the fourteenth century, for example, killed as many as 60 million Europeans, or half the continent’s population, over a five-year period (1347–1352).¹ In more recent times, the 1918 flu pandemic is estimated to have killed 50 million people worldwide, or 3 percent of the world population, between 1918 and 1920. Among the fatalities were 675,000 Americans, many of them inhabitants of major urban areas, such as Philadelphia, Boston, and Pittsburgh.²

The Black Death and the 1918 flu pandemic were arguably the two most important urban pandemic disasters of the past millennium. In both cases, however, major cities recovered as key focal points of political-economic activity. In the case of the Black Death, urban recovery was mainly driven by migration from the countryside, with the average European city recovering its pre–Black Death population by the 1500s. In the case of the 1918 flu pandemic (or “Spanish flu”), recovery was much more rapid, due to the resource demands of World War I and improved medical services.³ The 1918 pandemic did not interrupt the upward ascent of the U.S. urbanization rate, which rose from around 55 percent in 1918 to close to 60 percent in 1930, and to more than 80 percent today.⁴

There is some evidence that COVID-19 may, at least in the short run, affect urban density. For many people, especially in service occupations like law and finance, it is relatively easy, and potentially safer, to telecommute than to remain in urban centers. Carrying on projects remotely for a few days, however, will not obviate the longer-term need for face-to-face interactions, which can most efficiently occur, as heretofore, in urban cores that are even now proving themselves to be marvelously adaptable to the needs of knowledge workers. Recent research suggests that the most serious long-term impact of the simultaneous appearance of both COVID and new connectivity options may be on long-standing manufacturing centers like Rochester and Binghamton, New York, which had been in decline even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.⁵

Global cities, as we point out in the pages to follow, perform a broad range of political functions that are enduring and that are ultimately linked to a physical space. Cities formulate policy ideas, in universities and think tanks. They articulate, initiate, and implement policy, either through higher government levels or independently. And they serve as forums and arenas for political action. Although the roles of cities in the former two areas were temporarily constrained by the COVID-19 pandemic, the significance of cities as arenas for agenda-setting—for articulating and demonstrating the fears and dreams of society—were powerfully magnified, as the Black Lives Matter protests across the summer of 2020 made clear.

Following the killing of George Floyd, two weeks of protest in Washington, D.C., beginning with the Lafayette Park confrontation on June 1, were one high point of the movement. On June 6 alone, 500,000 people protested in 550 cities and towns across the country in response.⁶ Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, among other cities, likewise became major stages for globally evocative political action, just as Hong Kong had become in the preceding months. Protest themes and tactics from individual rallies were emulated around the world.⁷

The twin challenges of COVID-19 and nation-state authoritarianism, both of which intensified after the body of this book was completed, have thus by no means eroded the importance of the global city to the politics of world affairs. Cities remain as dynamic and increasingly important nerve centers of global policymaking, independent of nation-states, due to their sophisticated institutions, financial connections, and interpersonal network base. And they likewise remain as arenas for articulating the fears and dreams of society, because they are the central stage on which political activity takes place in our era of the global village.

This book has been nearly a decade in conception, within a turbulent, changing world that looks very different now than it did when I set out to write it. The volume descends from two other published studies, Asia in Washington and Singapore: Smart City, Smart State, which are much more limited in conception and scale, but which began to provoke my thinking. The research I undertook in these first two books, published in 2014 and 2016, respectively, impressed me strongly with the rising role that cities are coming to play in international affairs, and how the forces of technology, finance, and social connectivity are quietly driving their ascent.

Ever since finishing Asia in Washington, I have been preoccupied with the comparative dimension of research on global political cities. That interest started with the European Union’s Washington, D.C., representative, who asked me at a book talk whether anyone had written “Asia in Brussels,” and what that might look like. I was not qualified to write such a volume, but developed a deep fascination with the comparative study of city-level approaches to the challenges of globalization, and the role that cities could play as both an arena for global agenda-setting and as international actors in their own right.

In the end, I decided to pursue the European official’s insightful question on a much broader canvas than he might have anticipated. Global Political Cities considers the response not just of Brussels, but also of fourteen other cities in Europe, Asia, and North America to the challenges of international politics, both as policy actors in their own right and as physical arenas for political action. Given this book’s scope, and the paucity of both empirical and theoretically oriented work on global cities in their political dimension, this work is inevitably exploratory rather than definitive, as I trust careful readers will understand.

I have been intensively working on this book for nearly five years, across three continents. My thinking benefitted greatly from preparing three seminar courses on “Global Cities in International Affairs” at Johns Hopkins University/SAIS, and entertaining a barrage of skeptical student questions over the years. I am also indebted to seminar participants in Tokyo, Singapore, and Bologna for their insightful critiques of my ideas as they gradually developed.

As this project became an actual volume, Brookings Institution Press, headed by Bill Finan, has been immensely helpful. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Elliott Beard, Cecilia González, Kristen Harrison, Katherine Kimball, and, of course, Bill Finan. This is the third volume on urban issues that I have done with Brookings, and I deeply appreciate their intelligent and efficient cooperation.

Most of all, I must thank a dedicated team of researchers at the Reischauer Center of Johns Hopkins University SAIS, spearheaded by Evan Sankey and Rachel Xian, for the outstanding job they have done in supporting and indeed helping to shape this project from start to finish. Evan and Rachel, together at various times with Yuki Numata, Marina Dickson, Jonathan Hall-Eastman, Yun Han, Sherry Kim, Jayoung Ahn, Tom Ramage, Zongyuan Liu, and Neave Denny, spent endless hours with me—and independently as a team—in our small sixth-floor conference room in the Rome Building, painstakingly hammering out what became the intellectual scaffolding of this volume. Evan was especially influential in stressing the link between finance and idea industries, while Rachel contributed much to my appreciation of both China and global networks. I also appreciate the insights of James McGann, Don Abelson, Erik Jones, and Jacopo Pepe, particularly on the changing global role of think tanks, which helped make this a better book. I likewise deeply appreciate research support from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership and the SAIS Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies that made this work financially possible. In the end, however, misperceptions or misunderstandings must remain, and for those I take personal responsibility.

Although these words are the preface to a work, they also represent a conclusion, as they chronologically follow by several months what I originally intended as my last reflections due to the pandemic inroads of the past year. Yet my sense that the lines of this research unveil future global trends remains strong. In a sentiment that I hope the reader will share, I feel confident that the study of global cities in international affairs is a story that has just begun, and has ample room to advance in future years.