An interesting angle to explore how to improve international cooperation – which has received less attention than it deserves – is the accelerated process of urbanization taking place around the world.
Such process stimulates a special interest in the role that cities can and should play to improve globalization.
The urban centres could function (as they do in some cases) as mechanisms for setting global parameters and best practices to strengthen global governance.
At the local level there is a huge power to build consensus. What would happen, then, if we thought globalization from the cities and not only from national states?
Thinking about the global economy also from the cities could be a decisive structural change.
Just consider that the process of globalization needs to be strengthened, it needs to generate defences against populism, which has a very important component of nationalism.
Cities are key to generate an alternative, to explore the development of a global citizen consciousness.
Rethinking cities as a platform for access to the global economy, without losing ownership, identity and national linkages, would open a door to integration from the closest platform for citizens.
Cities would allow us to bridge the debate and to ease the potential tension existing between national sovereignty and global governance.
Seen in this new light, localism could make global processes take on another dimension.
