In the medieval period, empires battled and colluded with each other in the quest for land. The resulting system, in which nations became the main actors on the global stage, is perhaps the one most of us know best. But it’s changing.
We’re now moving toward a new era where insular, political boundaries are no longer as relevant. More and more people are identifying as “global citizens,” and that’s because we’re all more connected than we’ve ever been before. As a result, a “systems change” is taking place in the world today in which cities—not nations—are the key global players, argues Parag Khanna in his new book, Connectography: Mapping the Future of the Global Civilization. In it, Khanna, who is a global strategist and world traveler, writes: [...]
Cities are a key element to that evolution for many reasons. First of all, the world has become urban. If you want to understand where people are, people are in cities. Second: economics. Most of the world's economic power is concentrated in cities, and therefore they become the pivotal entities you need to analyze to understand the world economy. Thirdly, cities are increasingly connecting to each other. They're forging their own diplomatic networks, [which] I call "diplomacity. [...]
I think the spread of technologies across leading cities, things like the C40 does, are very very important. [C40 is a network of cities around the world working to tackle climate change.] I think it's literally, empirically more important than our climate-treaty negotiations, because those are not binding. Meanwhile, what the C40 does ... is lower the cost of technology. You don't get China to implement CO2 scrubbers just by telling it to do so. You have to devise and deploy the technologies to make it cheap, and to make the factory owners say, “This will not harm my output.”
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