A new urban paradigm pathways to sustainable development

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Cities have not just
a responsibility to act,
but a right to do so on
behalf of their citizens,
who represent a growing
majority of the world’s
population and more
than 80 per cent of its
wealth generation.
Photo: Roman Boed. Binnenhof, The Hague, founding city of the Global Parliament of Mayors, 2013
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sustainability is at risk and sovereign states
can no longer guarantee it—the sovereign
can be said to be ‘in default’. Citizens then
have a right to reassume their natural rights
and shift their obedience to such governing
bodies as can assure sustainability along
with life and liberty. That is how sovereignty
passed from George III to British colonies
in 1776, and how other young nations
more recently have secured their right
to rid themselves of colonial rulers.
This is how not just responsibility
but power and sovereignty pass from
illegitimate governments to those that
can keep the social contract.
We are a long way from having to
embark on a municipal revolution,
but the empowerment of cities today
and the claim of the GPM to legitimacy
ultimately do rest on this logic. It is unlikely
that it will need to assert so radical an
argument to undertake the common
work both states and cities are likely to
welcome. Yet it is important to note that
as power passes from governments made
illegitimate by their inability to sustain the
lives and liberties of their citizens to new
bodies capable of such sustainability, there
is a new legitimacy for cities to act rooted
in a version of municipal sovereignty.
Cities acquire the right to govern by virtue
of their capacity to do so, whether they
act (ideally) in harmony with nations and
international bodies such as the UN, or act
despite resistance from such bodies.
Their use of collective power and common
action are legitimised by the cities’ capacity
to act, and thus their right to do together
what nation states have failed to do.
The GPM will serve a sustainable and
just planet and all those who live on it, its
legislative authority rooted in their right
to sustainable and free lives. Mayors are
diffident about asserting a right to act even
when nations conspicuously fail. But they
have a right and an obligation to do so,
and the bold may lead the more reticent
in asserting their role as guarantors of
life and liberty.
The founding of the GPM in September 2016
marked the beginning of an experiment
in democratic urban governance that
will depend on the vision, prudence and
courage of its founding mayors and those
who come to join them in The Hague.
This innovative cross-border exercise in
democracy and responsibility, rooted in
the leadership of visionary mayors and
their engaged citizens, and founded on the
right of citizens everywhere to sustainable
and free lives, represents a historic and
constructive moment in unruly and
destructive times.
Barber, Benjamin R. 2014. If Mayors Ruled the
World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
1. The Global Parliament of Mayors.
2. The work of the GPM was memorialised
in The Hague Declaration, which announced the
ambitious aims of the new body in action as well
as in speech, but also commits to collaboration
with national governments, international
organisations and the UN.
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