Jeb Brugmann

An old friend has written a book for which my City, Save Thyself! might serve as a companion volume. In Welcome to the Urban Revolution - How Cities Are Changing the World (N.Y.: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), Jeb Brugmann asserts that nations are “losing their centrality in the economic, ecological, and political end games that will play out in this century. The momentum of development has steadily shifted to the city, a territory still poorly understood by most nations.” (p. 274)

Brugmann provides fascinating case studies from cities in Brazil, Spain, Canada, India, and the United States, of urban growth and change, in some cases immensely productive, in some destructive, all in continuous flux. He describes the roles played by national and city governments, neighborhood associations, politicians, corporations, and city planners. Success for city residents as the world grows more urbanized, hinges on many factors. What city dwellers most have going for themselves is population density. Their power of association can be leveraged to overcome the destructive results of economic, technological, and individual mistakes made at the national level and in corporate offices.

I would add that, just as national and corporate planners create misery when they manipulate the economy for narrow, short term profit aims, exploit natural resources, relocate populations without regard for the necessities of association and community, and build infrastructure in disregard for human scale and use, so they perpetuate the war system. They fail to control and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, and spawn terrorists, because they make populations targets for fighting war instead of links to overcome grounds for conflict and to prevent war.

City, Save Thyself! argues that the worst national mistake is to prepare for war while neglecting globally enforced law that could prevent war. The target populations, leveraging their numbers in the manner that Brugmann describes, but adding direct elections to a global municipal security congress, could force the nations to remedy that neglect.

Jeb Brugmann and I were together in 1986 in Cambridge’s first sister city delegation to Yerevan, capital of Armenia, then still part of the U.S.S.R. Twenty U.S.-Soviet sister city pairings did as much to end the Cold War as Reagan’s arms race escalations, and without the ruinous economic and terrorist side effects of the nuclear arms race. Both Jeb’s book and mine describe these city initiatives.

Jeb made further trips to the Soviet Union and describes how powerless the Soviet government was to repress citizen initiatives, try as they often did. It is interesting to reflect that both the Gorbachev and Reagan governments encouraged the U.S.-U.S.S.R. sister city movement, and that, when it comes to security, Soviet cities may have freed themselves from national constraints better than our American cities that now, because of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons, may be more in danger from weapons of mass destruction than cities in any country.