By: Michael Mortimer

Cities have historically competed with one another for resources. Land for agricultural products; territory to supply taxable populaces; for preferential trade routes and concession privileges; and for talent (luminaries, artists, and scholars).  This competition has occasionally escalated to armed conflict, particularly in Renaissance Italy where a unifying strong central government was very late on the scene.  It only took a three-decade early version of a world war to bring about a fundamental change in this competition.  The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, ending the Thirty Years War in Europe, also formed the basis for the modern nation-state.  The rise of nation-states freed cities from competition and conflict, largely by pawning those same behaviors onto their new sovereign state successors.  The nation-state created the space for cities to see one another as peers and eventually as partners; as kindred rather than cutthroat.

Ironically, it was the enactment of rigid borders and boundaries by national governments that launched cities into a post-boundary, post-Westphalian era.  Today, this irony is even more profound.  Cities are actively addressing transboundary Anthropocentric environmental challenges like climate change in ways unavailable to nation-states.  Hunkered down as they are behind their borders and boundaries, nations are largely immobilized by the scope and scale of their diverse polities, obsessed with where one place stops and another starts.  Real-time examples abound: the Syrian refugee crisis driving border closings and barriers in the EU, US presidential candidate Donald Trump and his proposed 1000-mile international border wall with Mexico, and the half-century of ongoing violence between Pakistan and India over the disputed Kashmir region.

Like nations, cities are specific places on a map.  But so much of what identifies a city also exists ephemerally, flowing around the world, disregarding national borders—talent, technology, capital, and innovation.  Nations are rooted in place, stuck with the competition and conflict skin that cities were able to slough off in 1648.  Solutions for the future are going to be led by urban examples.  Vive la Ville!

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The opinions expressed are those of the individual and not of Virginia Tech or the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability

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