Assessing Justifications for Enhanced Municipal Autonomy

This paper asks: what are the political and normative considerations involved in enhancing cities’ autonomy and how could it be justified? Global trends of urbanization demonstrate not only population shifts from rural to urban areas, but also an increase in the political power of cities. While cities are typically characterized as a sub-unit of the state that functions as a socio-economic node, cities are changing their role and becoming semi-independent political actors. Cities’ actions in global politics (e.g., supranational city-based networks) and within the state (e.g., regulations that challenge national laws) indicate an aspiration towards or even a direct claim for more political autonomy vis-à-vis the state. Recent scholarship studies this changing role of cities; however, the effects of the rising autonomy of cities on their citizens (city-zens), and the political and normative considerations involved warrant more scholarly attention. Addressing this practical and theoretical lacuna, the paper analyzes three forms of justification for enhanced municipal autonomy: 1) Enhancing urban autonomy increases individual liberty. 2) Enhancement of municipal autonomy is justified since cities constitute thick moral communities with a shared political ethos and conception of the good, entitling them to ‘urban self-determination.’ 3) Enhanced municipal autonomy yields more efficient solutions to contemporary urban challenges. The analysis of these justifications indicates the following shortcomings. 1) Although cities are ‘schoolhouses for democracy and citizenship,’ they are also sites of corruption, oligarchies, and are bound to elite power struggles, thus potentially infringing upon individual political freedom and civil liberties. 2) While a shared political identity is a necessary condition for enhanced municipal autonomy, it is insufficient since it may serve as fodder for patterns of exclusion. 3) For addressing many contemporary urban challenges, cities are better situated in comparison with the state. However, focusing on a supposedly value-neutral and non-ideological ‘problem solving’ is a depoliticizing and highly problematic rhetoric. The paper concludes by assessing the extent to which these shortcomings may be overcome by conditioning the enhancement of urban autonomy by deepening democratic practices, norms and values, with increased and more efficacious forms of political participation of city-zens.