DDRO 27A39 - Global Cities. Outposts of the Future Supranational Democracy?

Since the term was coined in sociological literature, the theoretical model of the “global city” has fascinated scholars thanks to its heuristic capacities and potentialities. Having ascertained, in fact, that globalisation was leading to an increased international role for sub-state authorities, urban centres have seized the opportunity offered by the rescaling processes of global economic dynamics to challenge the state, taking advantage of the consequent opportunities in terms of concentration of wealth and technological availability. In other words, cities have become the fundamental hubs of transit and concentration of resources, as well as of populations in a state of perpetual mobility. Or, more precisely they are the globalization's infrastructure, representing the nodes communicating worldwide and designing a web of information as well as of global trade interconnections. Cities fuel the globalization process (according to Richard Florida «if you added the ten largest metros together, you'd get a GDP-PPP of $9.5 trillion—bigger than the world's fourth and fifth largest national economies, Japan and Germany, combined»), while being at the same time the locus where its side effects can be more heavily measured. It is true, then, that metropolises appear as the spatial sphere in which the misalignment between two dimensions is felt most acutely: namely the sphere of legal validity in terms of the regulatory choices of public administration, unavoidably linked to a territory, and economic spatiality, which, on the contrary, knows no borders but only fleeting connections. Nevertheless, there is still the hope of constructing a political dimension that could make it possible to overcome such contradictions. At least since the age of industrialisation, cities have indeed been the standpoint from which scholars investigate macro-phenomena and issues affecting society as a whole. It is to be expected that any change affecting the delicate urban ecosystem will therefore also have wider repercussions on how we conceive global governance itself. As an example, focusing on competition between urban regions in attracting private investment and thus promoting an unprecedented geopolitical role, cities can now challenge even the historically long state's monopoly in international cooperation. Not surprisingly then, cities proved to have a symbolic and political value on which many commentators bet in the attempt to reformulate the democratic challenge beyond the national state and to create new solidarity-based mechanisms for managing the global commons. The emergency actions put in place by Italian cities during the pandemic, the Free Cities Pact signed by the Mayors of Bratislava, Budapest, Prague and Warsaw, the enhanced role of the Forum C40-Cities in fighting climate change, the demonstrations in Saint Petersburg and Moscow during the Ukrainian crisis: all these episodes can be very instructive with reference to the spread of international solidarity beyond borders and for the correlated impact on the decision-making processes. Indeed, if we focus on transnational goods like health, environment, or regional economic stability, we find that they are all commons evoking problems which neither the domestic legal order nor the market can address alone. The aporia is the same for both organizational mechanisms. At the supranational level, political and economic actors prefer to work in a strategic fashion, transforming the quest for common good into a prisoner's dilemma. On the contrary, only the city in itself, as a socio-economic model of governance, reproduced worldwide, becomes the sole interaction context where policy's addressees share its consequences despite borders or national origins. If we accept these general remarks, we should then come to the conclusion that a truly multinational but local-based political community could rise where, in a circular way, native roots and universalism, cultural diversity and international links can coexist and support each other. Similarly to the integration function exercised by the concept of nation (already examined critically by Jürgen Habermas) this community appears to be «a intersubjectively shared form of life» where «a network of relationships of mutual recognition» could call for a cooperation among peers based on communicative utterance. The course aims to investigate the institutional, legal, political and economic aspects of such scenario.

Davide ZANONI

Séminaire

English

Spring 2022-2023

Please note that the: Text commentary (I) accounts for 35% of your seminar grade. Written paper (II) accounts for 35% of your seminar grade Participation (III) accounts for 30% of your seminar grade. At the beginning of the class each student presents the paper indicated in the Syllabus. He/She will have to introduce the class to the broader scholar's conception, to present the issues raised in the text and how the topic represents a step further in our analysis; At mid-semester, students will be asked to do a written homework assignment to check the status of their knowledge and level of understanding of the course so far; Participation will be especially, but not only, positively appreciated during the moments we will be hosting an external guest (public official, invited scholar, practitioner, etc.)