Introduction
After having spent centuries at the margins of international relations, cities appear today among the protagonists of world politics. What happened?
Across the world, cities have created new spaces for their international action, partially subverting the traditional hierarchies and sometimes going as far as building international city coalitions to vocally oppose the foreign policy of nations.
Such fast-paced evolution appears primarily due to the participatory and impact-driven connection between local and global that many cities across the world have built. As it will be duly analyzed in the book, cities have perfectioned the practice of addressing transnational issues such as climate change, urbanization, mobility, migration, violent extremism and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, by building horizontal partnerships with their peers across the world and fueling them by means of vertical partnerships with their residents and local stakeholders. Thanks to such an approach, city diplomacy has grown to represent a multilateral, participatory practice (mainly) aiming at building a brighter future for all.
Nevertheless, this perception, often bordering to a “romancing” of the international action of cities—most visible in relation to ecological challenges (Teles 2016, 69)—hides an ampler, manifold practice. In fact, city diplomacy includes an extensive set of municipality-led bilateral and multilateral interactions with foreign actors—mainly other cities, city networks, and international organizations—in order to advance an international agenda inspired by local values and interests. As such, city diplomacy represents a practice and a research topic at the crossroads of local and international affairs.
Hence, it is not surprising that most of the available publications on city diplomacy focus either on municipal planning and management (mainly prescriptive reports by cities, city networks, and international organizations) or on its impact on international relations and world politics (scholarly analyses, often featuring a descriptive, comparative perspective). As a result, a hiatus between practice and research has emerged. The aim of this book consists of offering practitioners, scholars, and students alike a clear, cross-cutting analysis of city diplomacy’s value, scope, impact, and challenges across the world. By combining extant research with practical reasoning, this publication aims at representing a handbook to support city diplomats’ daily duties, while providing scholars and students with a comprehensive overview of the multi-faceted international action of cities.
As its guiding principle, the book will follow cities’ agency in international relations, a topic that will be addressed from three different but coexistent perspectives:
- I.An international perspective, by focusing on a variety of global governance issues (climate change, migration, creativity, diversity, security, global economy, digital transformation, transportation, etc.);
- II.A national perspective, taking into consideration interactions between national and city diplomacies;
- III.A local perspective, focusing on the urban impact of international activities (exchange of best practices, introduction of pilot projects) as well as on the role of local actors in the design and implementation of city diplomacy, namely through co-creation, participatory approaches.
Structure of the Book
The book consists of 9 chapters and an afterword. This first chapter will lie the ground of the discipline of city diplomacy by presenting its core protagonist—the city—as well as the components of successful city diplomacy strategies. The second chapter will present the origins and evolution of city diplomacy through the lenses of its relationship with the other actors of international relations, namely the state, international organizations, and NGOs.
The book will then delve into the specificities of the seven main dimensions of city diplomacy (development cooperation, peace and reconciliation, economy, innovation, environment, culture, and migration). For each dimension, the book will offer an overview of the scope and challenges, mapping the actors involved and their interactions, and evaluating available tools. Each chapter will include the analysis of a selection of best practices, as well as a focus on the impact of COVID-19, offering a perspective on the possible evolution of the discipline over the next few years.
Defining the City
A key methodological challenge for this handbook lies in the diversity enclosed in the term “city,” both in its political meaning of local administration and in its spatial one of an urban area. This duality calls for a comprehensive definition of both dimensions.
City as a government: across the world, city governments are the public, subnational body responsible for the governance of an urban territory. Their internal organization varies a lot across the world, but it usually features an executive branch—headed by the mayor—a political assembly—the council—and a permanent staff. As a result of the global trend of decentralization (see below), most mayors and city councilors are elected by residents and no more appointed by the central governments. Most city governments worldwide are in charge of providing a similar set of public services to their local communities, such as public housing, lighting, waste management, public transportation, and the management of public spaces and parks. These shared tasks explain the widespread practice of city-to-city knowledge exchange and peer-learning in each of the seven main dimensions of city diplomacy.
City as a territory: this book will define cities according to their administrative boundaries—an area often defined as “city proper.” This choice does not intend to disregard the socioeconomic relevance of larger functional areas. Nevertheless, such areas are not actors of international relations unless governed by a second-tier administration (e.g., a county/province/metropolis) able to act internationally.
In terms of size, the book will adopt the following population thresholds, which consider the diversity of the urban phenomenon across the world:
- Small city—urban areas with a population ranging from the (varying) national minimum threshold between village and city, and up to 50,000 inhabitants;
- Intermediary city, featuring a population between 50,000 and one million inhabitants. The term is generally preferred to that of the medium or secondary city by city networks such as UCLG (United Cities and Local Governments 2014) and by international organizations such as UNESCO (UNESCO Chair on Intermediary Cities, Urbanization and Development at the University of Lleida in Spain), in order to highlight its role in connecting rural and urban areas;
- Large city: more than 1 million inhabitants (sometimes called megacities, for agglomeration of more than 10 million inhabitants).1
The term metropolis, used across the world with different meanings, is intended in this book as the local government whose administrative boundaries comprise a center city and a series of surrounding smaller municipalities (in accordance with the use of the term in countries such as France and Italy). In such a definition of metropolises, constituent city governments maintain a part of their competencies, among which international affairs are often included. The coexistence of international capabilities between metropolitan and municipal governments might in fact create some confusion and discrepancies in terms of international action2 (Kihlgren Grandi 2020, 23–24).
Alongside these administrative/size-based definitions of cities, one of qualitative nature is often used in relation to city diplomacy: the global city. This term is generally used to refer to a city playing a fundamental role in the global economy. Coined by Dutch-American sociologist Saskia Sassen, global...