Despite decades of talk about globalization, democracy still depends on local self-government. In Local Self-Government and the Right to the City, Warren Magnusson argues that it is the principle behind claims to personal autonomy, community control, and national self-determination, and holds the promise of more peaceful politics. Unfortunately, state-centred thinking has obscured understanding of what local self-government can mean and hindered efforts to make good on what activists have called the "right to the city." In this collection of essays, Magnusson reflects on his own efforts to make sense of what local self-government can actually mean, using the old ideal of the town meeting as a touchstone. Why cannot communities govern themselves? Why fear direct democracy? As he suggests, putting more trust in the proliferating practices of government and self-government will actually make cities work better, and enable us to see how to localize democracy appropriately. He shows that doing so will require citizens and governments to come to terms with the multiplicity, indeterminacy, and uncertainty implicit in politics and steer clear of sovereign solutions. The culmination of a life’s work by Canada’s leading political theorist in the field, Local Self-Government and the Right to the City ranges across topics such as local government, social movements, constitutional law, urban political economy, and democratic theory.

This publication contains the proceedings of a conference, organised by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe (CLRAE) in Ukraine in October 2002, the second in a series aimed at analysing the relationship of capital cities with other levels of authority, particularly respective national governments.

Reproduction of the original: The Spirit of American Government by J. Allen Smith

"With tables of the cases and principal matters" (varies).

Curious about the images of the city that have been evolving in the different social sciences, we did what academics often do in such a situa 1 tion: we set up a seminar on "Images of the City in the Social Sciences." From the start, we counted on the help of specialists in other fields to pursue their interests. Of the persons who agreed to participate, all but two came from the United States, and their analyses, in the main, reflect the experience of Western countries and the United States. In our formal instructions to our collaborators, we took fi>r granted that a variety of images of the city could be found or inferred in their fields of expertise. We asked them to identify these images and their functions, to explain how and why they have changed over time, and to relate these images to the distinct intellectual traditions and techniques-analytical or otherwise-in their respective fields. The definition of image was left to the judgment of the participants.

This book uses historical analysis, constitutional economics, and complexity theory to furnish an account of city subsidiarity as a legal, ethical, political, and economic principle. The book contemplates subsidiarity as a constitutional principle, where cities would benefit from much wider local autonomy. Constitutional economics suggests an optimal limit to jurisdictional footprints (territories). This entails preference for political orders where sovereignty is shared between different cities rather states where capital cities dominate. The introduction of city subsidiarity as a constitutional principle holds the key to economic prosperity in a globalizing world. Moreover, insights from complexity theory suggest subsidiarity is the only effective response to the ‘problem of scale.’ It is a fitness trait that prevents highly complex systems from collapsing. The nation-state is a highly complex system within which cities function as ‘attractors.’ The collapse of such systems would ensue if there were strong coupling between attractors. Such coupling obtains under legal monism. Only subsidiarity can make the eventuality of collapse improbable. The emergent and self-organizing properties of subsidiarity entail a shift in policy emphasis towards cities with a wide margin of autonomy.