On the city’s terms: How are cities redefining the concept of the ‘city’

The rise of the nation-state has put local government in perpetual tension within democratic theory. On the one hand, local politics and government are celebrated in most accounts of the liberal state as a desirable political institution benefiting national governments and promoting the personal freedom of citizens (Tocqueville 2012, Mill 2011). On the other hand, those same institutions are a looming danger to justice and equality, undermining the liberal political order and unity of the polity (Frug 1980, Schragger 2016, Young 2002). Recently, politicians, activists, and scholars alike have revisited the role of local governments within national systems (Filipcevic Cordes 2017; Weinstock 2014), and in particular, advocating redistributing power in favor of local governments (Barber 2013; Katz and Nowak 2017; Schragger 2016), and describing changes in the balance of power between states and localities (Bulkeley et al. 2018; Barak and Mualam 2022; Weinstock 2014; Magnusson 2015; Harvey 2012). Meanwhile, democratic theory has focused mainly on deliberative democracy on the local scale, seeing local government as a better scale for political deliberation within a bigger system of government (King 2014) or for political mobilization (Young 2002), but not for independent political government. This limited scope has allowed democratic theory to side-step normative questions on who, why, and how to empower politically when advocating local governments’ autonomy. This paper focuses on the subject matter of local government empowerment by examining the current phenomenon through the lens of democratic theory. First, it will examine contributions to political theory that ultimately grapple with the fact that there isn’t a satisfactory definition for a local political polity capable of bearing democratic authority and power (Wachsmuth 2014). Second, it examines real-life conflicts between cities and states on the distribution of political power in Naples and Toronto to show how local activists deal with this conceptual lacunae. Not only do these conflicts challenge the very normative legitimacy of central governments’ control of local governments (Pagliaro 2019; de Majo 2020; Roth, Russell, and Thompson 2023), but they go beyond issues of governance and autonomy and into the very core of democratic local government (Pratchett 2004) and deal with the fundamental normative questions of local power and authority and the very definition of a city as a democratic polity. Political speech acts about a self-governing local allow us to examine how political actors ground the city’s democratic legitimacy and will show that they use ideological patterns of thought by re-imaging what a city is, how it should be spatially understood, and its source of authority. Finally, through the analysis of the various definitions of a city and by stressing the democratic fundamental principles in local self-government this paper will attempt to build a political definition of a democratically self-governing ‘city’. It will claim that, in this context, a ‘city’ is better understood as a ‘geographically structured system’: a system of politically guided institutions and build space, experience and constraints for people and that, therefore, city self-government should result in popular control over that system its mechanism.