Cities as Centers of Growth and Diplomacy

Cities are the pivots of civilizations and the cradle of the future. Cities are where cultures, religions, and identities intersect. Since 2007, more people worldwide have been living in urban areas than rural ones. This population growth mirrors cities’ growing importance in international affairs.

The most significant human activities occur in cities. Urban areas are where economic growth and fiscal experiments take place. Cities are responsible for 80 percent of global GDP. Political reforms, social innovation, and protests and revolutions also happen in cities. Crime, terrorist attacks, counterinsurgencies, missile strikes, and wars occur or develop in cities. Pandemics spread in densely populated urban areas. Cities are sources of pollution but also sites of environmental transformations, such as urban gardens. Urban interaction spurs the production of knowledge, technological innovation, and big data collection, along with social surveillance and crime prevention. 

Several cities, including Tokyo, London, New York City, Beijing, Seoul, and Singapore, significantly shape global politics as they become more active on the world stage. Cities such as these share information and sign cooperation agreements with each other, develop twinning networks and projects, contribute to national and international policies during the drafting process, provide development aid, promote assistance to refugees, and do territorial marketing through city-city or district-district cooperation. Decentralization and subsidiarity are important in the creation of political opportunities within which cities go international.

Cities engage with international institutions, foreign governments, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and many other types of global players. A significant component of such international projects is developed between and among cities through multilateral networks, bilateral partnership, and joint initiatives.

Essentially, city diplomacy is the combination of institutions and practices that allow urban centers to engage in relations with a third party – whether a state or an international organization – beyond their borders to pursue their interests. In a hierarchy of diplomatic engagement, city diplomacy ranks below state diplomacy but above citizens’ diplomacy and civil society activism.

Cities practice diplomacy by themselves but also, increasingly often, along with national governments and international groups. National governments, recognizing opportunities for cities to engage at the international level, are learning to use cities as proxies, using urban allure to indirectly pursue their national foreign policy goals. However, cities can sometimes take a direction that contrasts starkly with that of their national government. These differences can generate both international and national controversies. The four broad categories of interaction between central and local authorities are collaboration, competition, competitive collaboration, and indifference. 

City actions can certainly complement the international strategy of a nation-state, especially in coordination with a foreign ministry. When the state is so weakened that it can no longer effectively manage certain international issues, opportunities emerge for cities and other new actors to take on the functions previously performed by states. Complementarity occurs in cases where both actors can carve out roles in solving the same problem, but from two different perspectives. From the state’s perspective, this is foreign policy by proxy – though cities will sometimes go their own way.

Then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks at an event hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on Oct. 26, 2016, in Chicago. The council is an independent, nonpartisan organization that promotes discourse on critical global issues, according to the organization. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)