Ranking Economic Performance and Efficiency in the Global Market by Gussen Benjamen Franklen

Author:Gussen, Benjamen Franklen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IGI Global

Moreover, one can discern an (evolutionary) oscillation from the sovereign city, the default mode of organization, to the charter city, and eventually to the territorial city. The shift can be explained to a large extent by understanding the mutuality between cities and territorial nation-states. Nation-states brought about a new scale of war in which cities became politically dependent on these states. Losing this political independence shifted city-states to the status of charter cities. However, this was only a transient phase from which territorial states proceeded to extinguish the economic independence of their cities through the fiction of ‘national consciousness.’ The stripping of political independence can be seen in the military advantage that France and Spain had in the Italian wars of the 1490s, while the loss of economic independence can be seen in the first half of the 17th century in the destruction of German cities in the Thirty Years’ War. Even when the state was organized around mercantilism (rather than ‘pure’ military concerns) as the favored mechanism for economic growth, the territorial city was the favored model. This was clear in the Dutch Republic and the rise of Amsterdam as a global city (Taylor, 1995, pp. 50-52) (see also Chapter VII). By the time of the Industrial Revolution, the transformation of cities to creatures of the state―to territorial cities where growth is driven externally―was complete (Sennett, 1969, p. 4).

However, the cycle does not stop there. It continues through a phase where we see another rise of city-states. A harbinger of this process can be seen in the 20th century where the number of polities doubled (Taylor, 1995, p. 56). Countries in Europe, including Great Britain, are being increasingly challenged by subnational identities (Marx, 1997). There is now not only a growing interdependence between the global and the local scales, but even their fusion into a ‘glocal’ dimension (Beauregard, 1995, p. 239). Moreover, the original ‘security’ function of territorial nation-states is becoming redundant due to an increasingly influential international law.

In a clear departure from the historical trend where cities were created not by governments but by their citizens,2 most legal systems today treat cities as creatures of state and statute (the Dillon doctrine)—as implementation agencies of national and supra-national agendas. In most legal frameworks today, cities do not have any ‘natural’ or ‘inherent’ powers (Frug, 1980, pp. 1062-1063, 1109). They are governed more as bureaucracies than democracies. For example, in the United States cities are treated as administrative subdivisions of their states (Frug, 1999, pp. 3-7). Unlike states, they are not “general lawmaking bodies” (Frug, 1980, p. 1065). Even though there have been attempts in the 19th and 20th century to model American cities after European ‘free’ cities. When large American cities faced an urban crisis driven by unprecedented growth, they looked to the old continent for inspiration. Comparative analysis of the legal frameworks governing cities in the US and Europe resulted in constitutional amendments where many states granted their cities ‘home rule’ (Frug & Barron, 2006, p. 6), although

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