“Are Cities the New Countries?”

As cities turn into megacities—often defined as metropolitan areas with more than 10 million citizens—many academics are asking if, given their size and power, they are becoming more important than the countries that contain them. “Greater Shanghai has a population that has passed 20 million. The sprawl of Mexico City is estimated to house another 20 million. And Mumbai too,” the BBC News Magazine’s Finlo Rohrer writes. “These cities are bigger than many industrialised nations. And they are growing at a dizzying rate, sucking in workers from rural areas.”

Rohrer’s BBC story comes on the heels of statements by London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who was recently “handed a raft of new powers over planning, housing and the environment.” Afterwards, he said: “Having been to Singapore and seen how successful it was I think anything short of a fully independent city state is a lost opportunity, with its own foreign and defence policies thrown in.”

It was a joke, but considering the comments of London School of Economics professor Richard Sennett, a wider return of the city-state doesn’t seem so far fetched.

Prof Sennett says the inequalities between London and other British cities will only increase. And with the economic and demographic gulf widening, it will soon be even harder to accept that London has more in common with Sheffield than Shanghai, with Preston than Paris.

It all has echoes of Europe’s great tradition of city states, from Ancient Greece through Renaissance Italy and pre-1870s Germany.

Via Gridskipper, where yesterday Sennett recently received a Gridskipper salute.

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