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Michael Bloomberg wrote an article in Foreign Affairs saying that cities are now the centers of public policy innovation, in part because state and Federal governments are either controlled or blocked by people who want no policy and no innovation.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-08-18/city-cent...

My anecdotal, off-the-top-of-my-head memories bear that out: Almost all innovative policy, from biking to fighting obesity to climate change, seem to come from cities. State and Federal governments struggle with such useful policy issues as, should we have taxes and is climate change real.

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Any region which isn't urban is, basically, Incapable of adaptation. It is totally beholden to the natural resources it has. Fertile soil? Shale oils? Nice beaches? Forests? The environment you have basically fixes your destiny. A government presiding over a rural area basically has to become like a corporation whose sole purpose is stewardship and exploitation of that natural resource.

Whereas cities are human constructs and so governing them is about stewardship and exploitation of the population of the city, which is far more adaptable - and requires more sophisticated governance.

That's a very insightful thought.

I do find it interesting how people are coming to the idea that local governments are where new ideas are formed, but degrade the concepts of States' rights or smaller federal intervention as racism whenever it doesn't suit a liberal agenda.

Because "States' rights" has historically been used as a dog-whistle for racism, segregation, and voter suppression. Moreover, the article is referring to city/local government which is different from the state. I don't see how conflating local innovation with state oppression is a liberal agenda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights#States.27_rig...

used as a dog-whistle

Such an overloaded term. It is also used to mean "something only some can hear, but I can't."

States have also been a source of innovation. California, Oregon, and Washington were noted as "bellwether" states, whose pioneering policies were sometimes adopted by other states. California's pollution/vehicular laws have been a force for positive change and innovation in the auto industry.

You could argue that it was the cities that gave these states such pioneering policies.

Urban California is a pretty liberal place, but rural California really isn't. Granted, I have my doubts it would be as conservative as the Deep South, but if Central California were a state of its own they'd probably repeal a number of these "pioneering" laws that cut into farm profits.

I would argue that states with a liberal voting record also likely have a majority urban population of registered voters, even if we're talking about a large state with plenty of land being used for natural resources.

Can you expand on your thoughts? I see "state's rights" as a call to get supporters when the state might do something that someone wants, and there's no real substance or distinguishing feature that lets us understand what is or is not a state right. It just appears to be a way to justify doing what you want. If you don't want something to happen, then you claim something is not a state right.

They're talking about American politics. "State" is referring to the 50 cosovereign subdivisions of the United States. "State's rights" refers to politics that defends the rights of states, rather than the national (aka federal) government, to set policy in certain areas.

I am an american person. I was referring to the fact that conservatives use state's rights to argue for things they want that the federal govt wants to do differently, but argue against states rights for the things that they want. So I don't see any real clarity in what people argue is or is not state's rights.

Well said. I thought this was a brilliant insight.

It is also something made necessary by the very existence of cities.

For an urban region to be viable, it needs a number of "nonurban" areas, to supply the prime and natural resources you mention, a city is by definition not self-sufficient.

For example, Sicily was known as the "granary of Rome", in ancient times...

This was also my first line of thought. Then I started reflecting... if cities are so dependent on the non-urban areas that provide all the natural resources, why is there such a disparity of power between the two?

The first thing to come to mind is: natural resources have been comoditized / financialized and are controled by "urban power"

(as I wrote in my other comment under parent)

[update] another obvious thing that should have occurred to me first: all the buyers for all the things the "non-urban" produce are in the urban areas...

Your comment made me go into a weird though experiment: What if non-urban areas could somehow "rebel" and escape from the power control of the government controlling the cities?

Thus creating some sort of "Urban city state islands" rich in human/tech resources surrounded by "Urban land states" rich in natural resources.

Obviously in such utopia these 2 entities could enter into much more balanced relationships of power and dependency from one another than what we have today.

I dare speculate that the reason that this currently cannot happen is that everything about natural resources is financialized and thus beholden to the power of the urban capital. The non-urban exploited by the urban is what we have... (also an imbalance in population from one to the other...) and many other reasons other will surely point out better than me!

It has been argued that this is what happened to Detroit: the "city" is financially separate enough from the surrounding state that it collapsed when its population moved into the suburbs. Of course that process of suburbanisation changes the boundary between "urban" and "rural".

'Natural resources' at least in the UK are not so much 'financialised' as in the control of hereditary landowners. The problems experienced today are not so much the urban exploiting the rural, as the rural landowners exploiting rural tenants.

To complicate matters, sometimes the landowners are neither urban nor rural but offshore.

I'm not sure I agree. Your basic point—that governmental options are constrained by the economic options available—is sound, but that doesn't mean resources are destiny for rural areas.

For example, Vermont and New Hampshire are both rural states with similar climates. But the governmental policies are quite different. Rural areas also have non-natural economies and thus can adapt to different policy goals.

I am curious how this contrasts with the increasing freedom of movement -- people are increasingly able to pick and choose which city to live in.

One of the greatest 'anchors' holding an individual or a family to a city is cost, so what happens when that cost is reduced to the bare minimum? Would we see the migration to urban centers accelerate (eg: Chicago holding >50% of Illinois' population rather than the current 20%)?

Would we see a return to informal alliances like the Hanseatic League[1] as cities increasingly view their Federal overlords as inadequate or obstinate?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League

It was my understanding regionalism in Europe was to have a similar effect as more power was being devolved to local public institutions.

The big trend now seems to be state governments blocking public policy innovation from cities. The first time this came to my attention was with states blocking cities from deploying municipal WiFi a few years ago, in order to protect incumbent broadband providers. The current example is the "bathroom laws" in NC, MS, and SC, which block municipal ordinances extending legal protections to LGBT individuals, and furthermore block cities from guaranteeing any civil rights that are not guaranteed by the state.

In the first case, the cause is probably just that it's more cost-effective to lobby at the state level than to lobby every city council. In the second, it seems to be that the state legislatures are controlled by their rural counties. Both of these are probably problems with state constitutions, and so, very hard but not necessarily impossible to fix.

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