Benjamin Barber: Why mayors should rule the world

154,183 views ・ 2013-09-20

TED


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00:12
Democracy is in trouble, no question about that,
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and it comes in part from a deep dilemma
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in which it is embedded.
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It's increasingly irrelevant to the kinds of decisions
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we face that have to do with global pandemics,
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a cross-border problem;
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with HIV, a transnational problem;
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with markets and immigration,
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something that goes beyond national borders;
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with terrorism, with war,
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all now cross-border problems.
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In fact, we live in a 21st-century world
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of interdependence,
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and brutal interdependent problems,
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and when we look for solutions in politics and in democracy,
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we are faced with political institutions
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designed 400 years ago,
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autonomous, sovereign nation-states
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with jurisdictions and territories
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separate from one another,
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each claiming to be able to solve the problem
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of its own people.
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Twenty-first-century, transnational world
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of problems and challenges,
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17th-century world of political institutions.
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In that dilemma lies the central problem of democracy.
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And like many others, I've been thinking about
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what can one do about this, this asymmetry
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between 21st-century challenges
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and archaic and increasingly dysfunctional
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political institutions like nation-states.
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And my suggestion is
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that we change the subject,
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that we stop talking about nations,
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about bordered states,
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and we start talking about cities.
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Because I think you will find, when we talk about cities,
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we are talking about the political institutions
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in which civilization and culture were born.
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We are talking about the cradle of democracy.
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We are talking about the venues in which
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those public spaces where we come together
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to create democracy, and at the same time
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protest those who would take our freedom, take place.
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Think of some great names:
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the Place de la Bastille,
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Zuccotti Park,
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Tahrir Square,
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Taksim Square in today's headlines in Istanbul,
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or, yes,
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Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
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(Applause)
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Those are the public spaces
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where we announce ourselves as citizens,
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as participants, as people with the right
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to write our own narratives.
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Cities are not only the oldest of institutions,
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they're the most enduring.
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If you think about it,
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Constantinople, Istanbul, much older than Turkey.
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Alexandria, much older than Egypt.
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Rome, far older than Italy.
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Cities endure the ages.
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They are the places where we are born,
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grow up, are educated, work, marry,
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pray, play, get old, and in time, die.
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They are home.
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Very different than nation-states,
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which are abstractions.
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We pay taxes, we vote occasionally,
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we watch the men and women we choose rule
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rule more or less without us.
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Not so in those homes known as our towns
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and cities where we live.
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Moreover, today, more than half of the world's population
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live in cities.
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In the developed world, it's about 78 percent.
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More than three out of four people
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live in urban institutions, urban places,
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in cities today.
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So cities are where the action is.
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Cities are us. Aristotle said in the ancient world,
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man is a political animal.
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I say we are an urban animal.
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We are an urban species, at home in our cities.
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So to come back to the dilemma,
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if the dilemma is we have old-fashioned
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political nation-states unable to govern the world,
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respond to the global challenges that we face
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like climate change,
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then maybe it's time for mayors to rule the world,
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for mayors and the citizens and the peoples they represent
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to engage in global governance.
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When I say if mayors ruled the world,
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when I first came up with that phrase,
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it occurred to me that actually, they already do.
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There are scores of international, inter-city,
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cross-border institutions, networks of cities
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in which cities are already, quite quietly,
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below the horizon, working together
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to deal with climate change, to deal with security,
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to deal with immigration,
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to deal with all of those tough,
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interdependent problems that we face.
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They have strange names:
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UCLG,
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United Cities and Local Governments;
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ICLEI,
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the International Council for Local Environmental Issues.
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And the list goes on:
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Citynet in Asia; City Protocol, a new organization
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out of Barcelona that is using the web
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to share best practices among countries.
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And then all the things we know a little better,
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the U.S. Conference of Mayors,
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the Mexican Conference of Mayors,
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the European Conference of Mayors.
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Mayors are where this is happening.
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And so the question is,
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how can we create a world
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in which mayors and the citizens they represent
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play a more prominent role?
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Well, to understand that,
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we need to understand why cities are special,
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why mayors are so different
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than prime ministers and presidents,
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because my premise is that a mayor and a prime minister
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are at the opposite ends of a political spectrum.
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To be a prime minister or a president,
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you have to have an ideology,
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you have to have a meta-narrative,
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you have to have a theory of how things work,
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you have to belong to a party.
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Independents, on the whole,
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don't get elected to office.
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But mayors are just the opposite.
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Mayors are pragmatists, they're problem-solvers.
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Their job is to get things done, and if they don't,
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they're out of a job.
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Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia said,
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we could never get away here in Philadelphia
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with the stuff that goes on in Washington,
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the paralysis, the non-action, the inaction.
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Why? Because potholes have to get filled,
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because the trains have to run,
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because kids have to be able to get to school.
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And that's what we have to do,
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and to do that is about pragmatism
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in that deep, American sense,
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reaching outcomes.
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Washington, Beijing, Paris, as world capitals,
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are anything but pragmatic,
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but real city mayors have to be pragmatists.
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They have to get things done,
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they have to put ideology and religion and ethnicity aside
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and draw their cities together.
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We saw this a couple of decades ago
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when Teddy Kollek, the great mayor of Jerusalem
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in the '80s and the '90s,
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was besieged one day in his office
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by religious leaders from all of the backgrounds,
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Christian prelates, rabbis, imams.
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They were arguing with one another
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about access to the holy sites.
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And the squabble went on and on,
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and Kollek listened and listened,
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and he finally said, "Gentlemen,
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spare me your sermons,
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and I will fix your sewers."
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(Laughter)
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That's what mayors do.
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They fix sewers, they get the trains running.
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There isn't a left or a right way of doing.
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Boris Johnson in London calls himself an anarcho-Tory.
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Strange term, but in some ways, he is.
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He's a libertarian. He's an anarchist.
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He rides to work on a bike,
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but at the same time, he's in some ways a conservative.
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Bloomberg in New York was a Democrat,
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then he was a Republican,
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and finally he was an Independent, and said
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the party label just gets in the way.
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Luzhkov, 20 years mayor in Moscow,
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though he helped found a party, United Party with Putin,
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in fact refused to be defined by the party
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and finally, in fact, lost his job not under Brezhnev,
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not under Gorbachev, but under Putin,
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who wanted a more faithful party follower.
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So mayors are pragmatists and problem-solvers.
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They get things done.
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But the second thing about mayors
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is they are also what I like to call homeboys,
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or to include the women mayors, homies.
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They're from the neighborhood.
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They're part of the neighborhood. They're known.
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Ed Koch used to wander around New York City
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saying, "How am I doing?"
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Imagine David Cameron
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wandering around the United Kingdom
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asking, "How am I doing?" He wouldn't like the answer.
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Or Putin. Or any national leader.
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He could ask that because he knew New Yorkers
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and they knew him.
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Mayors are usually from the places they govern.
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It's pretty hard to be a carpetbagger and be a mayor.
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You can run for the Senate out of a different state,
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but it's hard to do that as a mayor.
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And as a result, mayors and city councillors
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and local authorities
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have a much higher trust level,
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and this is the third feature about mayors,
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than national governing officials.
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In the United States, we know the pathetic figures:
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18 percent of Americans approve of Congress
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and what they do.
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And even with a relatively popular president like Obama,
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the figures for the Presidency run about 40, 45,
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sometimes 50 percent at best.
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The Supreme Court has fallen way down from what it used to be.
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But when you ask, "Do you trust your city councillor,
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do you trust your mayor?"
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the rates shoot up to 70, 75, even 80 percent,
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because they're from the neighborhood,
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because the people they work with are their neighbors,
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because, like Mayor Booker in Newark,
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a mayor is likely to get out of his car on the way to work
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and go in and pull people out of a burning building --
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that happened to Mayor Booker --
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or intervene in a mugging in the street as he goes to work
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because he sees it.
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No head of state would be permitted
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by their security details to do it,
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nor be in a position to do it.
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That's the difference, and the difference
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has to do with the character of cities themselves,
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because cities are profoundly multicultural,
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open, participatory, democratic,
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able to work with one another.
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When states face each other,
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China and the U.S., they face each other like this.
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When cities interact, they interact like this.
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China and the U.S., despite the recent
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meta-meeting in California,
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are locked in all kinds of anger, resentment, and rivalry
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for number one.
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We heard more about who will be number one.
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Cities don't worry about number one.
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They have to work together, and they do work together.
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They work together in climate change, for example.
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Organizations like the C40, like ICLEI, which I mentioned,
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have been working together
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many, many years before Copenhagen.
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In Copenhagen, four or five years ago,
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184 nations came together to explain to one another
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why their sovereignty didn't permit them
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to deal with the grave, grave crisis of climate change,
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but the mayor of Copenhagen had invited
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200 mayors to attend.
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They came, they stayed, and they found ways
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and are still finding ways to work together,
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city-to-city, and through inter-city organizations.
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Eighty percent of carbon emissions come from cities,
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which means cities are in a position
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to solve the carbon problem, or most of it,
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whether or not the states of which they are a part
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make agreements with one another.
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And they are doing it.
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Los Angeles cleaned up its port,
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which was 40 percent of carbon emissions,
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and as a result got rid of about 20 percent of carbon.
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New York has a program to upgrade its old buildings,
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make them better insulated in the winter,
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to not leak energy in the summer,
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not leak air conditioning. That's having an impact.
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Bogota, where Mayor Mockus,
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when he was mayor, he introduced a transportation system
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that saved energy, that allowed surface buses
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to run in effect like subways,
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express buses with corridors.
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It helped unemployment, because people could get across town,
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and it had a profound impact on climate as well as
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many other things there.
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Singapore, as it developed its high-rises
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and its remarkable public housing,
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also developed an island of parks,
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and if you go there, you'll see how much of it
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is green land and park land.
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Cities are doing this, but not just one by one.
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They are doing it together.
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They are sharing what they do,
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and they are making a difference by shared best practices.
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Bike shares, many of you have heard of it,
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started 20 or 30 years ago in Latin America.
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Now it's in hundreds of cities around the world.
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Pedestrian zones, congestion fees,
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emission limits in cities like California cities have,
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there's lots and lots that cities can do
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even when opaque, stubborn nations refuse to act.
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So what's the bottom line here?
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The bottom line is, we still live politically
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in a world of borders, a world of boundaries,
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a world of walls,
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a world where states refuse to act together.
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Yet we know that the reality we experience
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day to day is a world without borders,
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a world of diseases without borders
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and doctors without borders,
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maladies sans frontières, Médecins Sans Frontières,
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of economics and technology without borders,
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of education without borders,
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of terrorism and war without borders.
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That is the real world, and unless we find a way
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to globalize democracy or democratize globalization,
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we will increasingly not only risk
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the failure to address all of these transnational problems,
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but we will risk losing democracy itself,
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locked up in the old nation-state box,
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unable to address global problems democratically.
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So where does that leave us?
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I'll tell you. The road to global democracy
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doesn't run through states.
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It runs through cities.
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Democracy was born in the ancient polis.
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I believe it can be reborn in the global cosmopolis.
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In that journey from polis to cosmopolis,
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we can rediscover the power
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of democracy on a global level.
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We can create not a League of Nations, which failed,
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but a League of Cities,
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not a United or a dis-United Nations,
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but United Cities of the World.
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We can create a global parliament of mayors.
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That's an idea. It's in my conception of the coming world,
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but it's also on the table in City Halls
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in Seoul, Korea, in Amsterdam,
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in Hamburg, and in New York.
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Mayors are considering that idea of how you can actually
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constitute a global parliament of mayors,
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and I love that idea, because a parliament of mayors
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is a parliament of citizens
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and a parliament of citizens is a parliament of us,
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of you and of me.
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17:18
If ever there were citizens without borders,
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I think it's the citizens of TED
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who show the promise to be those citizens without borders.
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I am ready to reach out and embrace
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a new global democracy,
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to take back our democracy.
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And the only question is,
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are you?
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Thank you so much, my fellow citizens.
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17:45
(Applause)
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Thank you. (Applause)
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About this website

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