"If Mayors Ruled the World" and "A Mayor"s Life"

Barber’s book is the most audacious — even messianic — of a torrent of recently advanced urban manifestoes. Generally, they share a theme: Local governments are uniquely positioned to save the planet and themselves. Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley made this case in “The Metropolitan Revolution.” So did Vishaan Chakrabarti in “A Country of Cities.” But no proponent of the idea is as ambitious as Barber, a political theorist at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Barber builds a strong case for an informal parliament of cities, perhaps several hundred strong, which would in effect ratify a shift in power and political reality that, he argues, has already taken place. He supports this idea with help from an enormous cast of experts and authors, ranging from Walt Whitman and John Dewey to Edmund Burke and Richard Florida, as well as from numerous international civic organizations. He tosses out facts with abandon, all in an effort to persuade the reader that modern cities are the incubators for problem-solving while national governments are doomed to failure.

“Because they are inclined naturally to collaboration and interdependence, cities harbor hope,” Barber writes. “If mayors ruled the world,” he says, “the more than 3.5 billion people (over half the world’s population) who are urban dwellers and the many more in the exurban neighborhoods beyond could participate locally and cooperate globally at the same time — a miracle of civic ‘glocality’ promising pragmatism instead of politics, innovation rather than ideology and solutions in place of sovereignty.” And he persuasively builds his case with capsule profiles of visionary mayors from around the world, who have boldly seized the initiative — often because they couldn’t afford not to. Of Singapore, for instance, the only city to exist without a stranglehold by its state (it is the state), he says, charitably, that its mayor has “certainly governed paternalistically.”

Building on an argument he advanced in an earlier book, “Jihad vs. McWorld” (1995), Barber claims that national sovereignty is a handicap. Cities, by contrast, can capitalize on diversity, share intelligence on security and the environment, mull an urban visa system and face up to inequality in housing, jobs, transportation and education. New York City may not even be able to install traffic cameras without the state legislature’s assent, but Barber says the trick is to get burdensome governments to look the other way while the innovative cities join, “if ever so softly,” in an informal coalition. Let presidents and governors pontificate. The cities will pick up the garbage — rediscovering “the polis tucked into the core of cosmopolis.”

“My proposal for a parliament of mayors is no grandiose scheme,” Barber writes, “no mandate for top-down suzerainty by omnipotent megacities exercising executive authority over a supine world. It is rather a brief for cities to lend impetus to informal practices they already have in place.” And he notes that “in changing the subject to cities, we allow imagination to cut through the historical and cultural impediments to interdependent thinking in the same way a maverick Broadway cuts through Manhattan’s traditional grid.”

Barber’s book should be required reading for New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio. So should “A Mayor’s Life: Governing New York’s Gorgeous Mosaic” by David N. Dinkins, a moving memoir by the upwardly mobile son of a barber and a domestic. It is a timely reminder that liberals seem to get elected in New York just as the city is running out of money.

Sam Roberts is the urban affairs correspondent of The Times.

"If Mayors Ruled the World" and "A Mayor"s Life"