question. i unsaid by making $2.35 per hour and i don't know what you are making. [laughter] he said no no. what remaking at of this year battle? and had not occurred to me as a person working to even think of it. . .

that repaired and then pick up electric motors and take them back to their place i worked. we repair them and then take them back. and so, i did go into the places. and they were so vast and intimidating. but even little machines like this can stick it to you. >> the interesting thing about what happened at the decision where there were going to be rubber plants and glass factories the distil making -- we are back. >> the making of the ford motor was actually sold to the russian steelmaker and so it was actually the russians who gave me permission to go in to the fort. >> but they already abandoned it.

>> they bought a big part of the factory with the furnaces where it comes in and the unloading of the boat. i actually had a company owned by the russian firm. so we are back. so this is just an example of the glory of the architecture of detroit and you can even see there's a beautiful painted matte down below on the vaulted ceiling and it is actually one of the few buildings in detroit, downtown detroit that is very well preserved and maintained. so i didn't want the whole book just to be a decay i wanted it to be a dialogue about the city and about its history. this is a sort of signature

picture from the book. this is a high school which is in fact where philips studied typing. this was in a chemistry class room after the vandal and the intense heat of the fire melted the thin plastic face of the clock so the face of time is literally dripped over the hands of the clock. and i am a great lover of the kalin photographs, and so in the photo if you can also read the name of the clockmaker it says national time, so that's the name of this photograph. and this is on bell island which is one of the great escapes of detroit, sort of their central park if you will. this is in what had been the boat house and this is a little different where a lot of pictures show the ruin for the

destruction. it was a place that had just sort of been emptied out. everything has been removed. the structure still looks okay but everything else is gone. but there are people living in detroit. it's not an empty city. there are 800,000 people down from almost a million in 1950. and there are urban homesteads and urban farmers and people have been there for many generations and this woman lived on a block with a few friends who had bought a house for maybe $500 for the dollar and they have a little community. this man was living all by himself in this beautiful late 19th century what had been beautiful late 19th century industrial building. in fact the place he was apprenticed as a young man and

first when the but combustion engine is where the steam engines were built for the votes that went across the lake. i think in most cities this would have been turned into a loft building 30 years ago and here he is living by himself and he's got this sort of room screen event very dark and created this kind of water a fact. another long term spent quite a few hours with him and his decrepit house. and the roof party in detroit is something because you don't take the elevator to the you have to walk up 40 stories to get to the roof.

it's a great place to watch the ball game. that is the main artery and you mentioned quite well. they look like nomads and there is a sort of nomadic quality to the people who occupy detroit. the scrapper in the old motor car plant, packard was abandoned the 50's. it was turned into an industrial park. was mostly closed around 2,000. besides nature and kids coming and destroying things causes a great deal of destruction to the building to take out a few of the beams and eventually the whole building begins to collapse the are taking odd bits

of the metal. okay. so this is leading to the picture that phill talks about in the afterward. this was a big for story warehouse treacly across from the well-known train station in detroit. it was originally built to be one of the central post offices and then was taken over by the detroit central public system as their warehouse, and was filled with books, report cards, art supplies come everything that a school would need in terms of paper and supplies. there was a shooting and then the building and fires and vandalism and so the books began to literally melt said this is a detail of the books turning

papier-mache. it has a very delicate texture. but the most extraordinary thing was actually on the floor where 20 or 30 years did become organic matter. they were burned and rain upon and snowed upon. so here you see a grove of trees growing out and i thought this was obviously producing books from trees here in new york, trees grow out of books. >> and you mentioned you imagine there were a little poems on each of these. >> and so that is certainly one of the aspects of the book that drew me and i really began to look for evidence situations

where the nature was startling. this is east detroit where a little bit of the roof is complete the overgrown by the vines. and here this was the university club on east jefferson. originally it was an institution where you had to go to college to be a member and was abandoned just about a year ago. a beautiful lines overgrowing and then this man with a tiger looking like the king and he was the owner of the building by default at this point. and again, even in the most heartbreaking scenes i tried to

incorporate that element of nature that life turns again, that there is a process of renewal even if detroit hasn't hit bottom yet, it is right to be reborn and will be in some way. >> now markets a contributing editor at rolling stone magazine who grew up in the detroit area presents a history of the city and profiles the artists, environmentalists and planners imaging the landscape to revive detroit. this is from november of 2012, about seven months before the recent announcement of the bankruptcy. >> i didn't know of the interest of history and the stories here said that is the question is what led you to want to write this book? i remember you calling me when you were starting to work on it and you said i want to write a book about detroit and i said

well so does everybody. [laughter] but this turned out to be a different book than most of the others that we are reading right now. >> i sense that a little bit. you were one of the first people. thank you for doing this. i've always been drawn to the topic and i thought for the longest time in what turned out to be a novel that seems like the way to go. but when i came back in 2009 for rolling stone i was assigned to do a piece on the show. this was january of 2,009 so you remember coming you were here. chrysler and gm or on the brink

of bankruptcy and the former mayor was in jail and detroit had become sort of the poster said he of the recession basically. so seeing reporters come from not only all over the country but all over the world basically to cover the story but also in a weird way to take a few photographs of the plant and use the trade as some sort of metaphor for whatever was happening in the country. that's probably around the time i called you and you were like a good luck. [laughter] but i did believe i guess that as, you know, someone from the area, i could hopefully bring more nuance and a sort of sensitivity to the topic and that includes the kind of nuance includes things like humor. so often somebody comes to be

tried a few days focusing on the most tired americans and again as you know the trade is the city with character and if you actually talk to people and don't just take pictures of buildings with nobody in the picture. >> one of the things that struck me about the book is that it's not about detroit the building it's about the people and in some cases it's not talking heads or public officials. it's just people. one of my favorite stories in the book is the day that you go down to the side of the former, the original train which now has a hotel on that that's sitting there empty and you need a bunch of different people down there but one of them was this guy and i wanted you to talk a little

bit of how you met him and why you included him in the book. >> was just a sort of telling moment. i guess i love that kind of moment for the serendipity of that. i had been reading a lot of the history. there wasn't long after i got here there's probably a lot of people here that no right down near the plaza is where cadillac come the french explorer first landed at there's a statute and i've been reading about that and decided this book is sort of unusual so i decided to make my way down there and said outside. it was a weekday and it was pretty empty. this guy tony approached me and he looked like he might become less that i thought he was going to ask me for money but he saw

me reading and he pulled out a couple of books from his pocket. one was the world according and he started talking about how he loved john irving then somehow he started telling me about his experience in the prison system and started shoving a different scars and wounds and he eventually starts telling me people don't want to mess with him and he and his sweat shirt and he had a kind of shy and machete and acts just in his belt and he said with a straight face a new license carpenter's zero and allowed to carry my tools. [laughter] it was great for the purpose of my narrative detroit moment.

there was a lot of sort of resonance. >> you are telling the story of the city through these characters you are meeting that one of the things that struck me about the book you are making observations when you're not making judgments and there isn't that much analysis in the book. it's the story of what it's like to be here now and to live here now and you tie that in nicely with the history and lots of instances. >> i'd been doing interviews the last few days and people want an office and the kind of sound bite. i did a bunch of interviews and they want to know what is next for detroit and we just have these ridiculous questions.

i announce my candidacy. [laughter] i just try to talk to people and sort of tell their stories. the history as you said is so rich and that just kind of let that come out. >> another striking part of the book was about the blues concert that happened. where i live now in fact i've been over it. i'm not sure that i seen anybody else pick up on the fact that things like that happen and if

he went over and drove through you would think that almost nobody lives there anymore. >> i find that kind of thing interesting. it's a part of the east side of detroit where you go down some of the blocks and there is like one house left and the grass is up to here. you really feel like you're standing in a field in the country or something. and you know, i found it really fascinating the way people kind of take ownership of that and sometimes, you know, turn it it's not exactly but let's make something out of that and this guy happens to be the cousin of john lewis. as began his run for mayor a couple of times. >> said everybody is connected and he started having these once

populated with residential houses and now it's empty so he has these concerts there every sunday during the summer and it's a really great thing and a good crowd of people comes out. that is another thing now you were only five minutes from downtown. >> the city of detroit filing bankruptcy continues now with rick baker the mayor of st. petersburg florida. from april, 2001 mr. maker presents his thoughts on the revitalization of the cities and argues against the large government to solve local problems and what he believes no

area of the city is underserved. >> not all parts of the city are going to be the same. you have some neighborhoods that have large houses and that's okay and other parts of apartment complexes and that's okay too but there are some things we should all have in common in the neighborhoods. they should be places when children can grow up safely where they feel comfortable walking next door going down to see their friend down the street, where the infrastructure looks okay on the streets and sidewalks, where there are not drug dealers hanging out on the street corner or prostitutes down the street. that is and how you and i would want to have to our children grow up and i know we don't want any of our children to have to grow up in places like that. they should vigorous restored on the street and a bank. they should have the general amenities all of us have and every child should have the opportunity there is no

guarantee but they should have opportunities to grow up in a place to believe in the same dream you and i believe and are trying to instill in our children and that is what this book is about. it's hard to get to that but it's important to get towards it because america will only be as great. it's a goldstein had the suburbanization and the 50's and 60's and 70's and we lost ground in the state's but he helped lead that effort and i think it is still under way to try to build back the cities and make them great places so that we can raise our families and be attracted to our cities. the seamless city of the book approaches it from two perspectives. it talks about and in the book i talk about i guess the first

city of leadership and the approach to urban leadership to help bring the city's back across america and at the same time it provides a glimpse into the life of the mayor of the larger city not as large as new york or chicago but one of america's cities. for those of you that aren't familiar when i took office it was the 68 largest of 15 or 20,000 cities of america so it is a biggie in that city that it could provide lessons but frankly small enough where it might be easier to get your arms around some of the challenges quicker if you start to apply some ideas to make it work. the second part of the city is the life of the mayor because there's challenges that you have and there is opportunities and a lot of people don't see the day-to-day life and the mayor goldsmith can testify to that

but hell does live. i took about that in the book and received some criticism but i am okay with that. i think eight is a good part ilves and it's important to see how that plays out. so we talk about those things and it comes from the perspective of my experience which is in st. petersburg but also from the perspective of the major cause he is the leader of the city and needs to identify the path to take. so i talk a lot about the job of the major and the job in my mind is three things. first you run the business of the city, the organization most cities have hundreds of millions of dollars sometimes billions of dollars in the budget and lots of different apartments. our city has 34 departments doing everything with police and fire and parks and water, sewer, sanitation and lots of other

things, traffic and lots of other things. i noticed i wasn't getting any reports i got the crime statistics and the rainfall levels and let me get some reports after three months don't you get the ports? so we decided to start this process of developing the report but it can study of performance measures and the call with the score card so we got together with all of the departments and one at that time it took awhile to do this but they said how is the war department or we serving the city better today than last year and of course they all said

yes. so we said how can we tell how do we know? how do we demonstrate to the community that we are doing it? and that became a remarkable discussion among us and the community of what we want to do? said at the end of the day we delivered 164 performance measures. we wanted to do that in a small enough numbers of it would be meaningful. some cities have thousands. you want to have enough where you can get but we wanted it in the graph form. i can tell you that it took about 7.2 minutes to respond to a priority one police col. that is important to know. it was about 5.6. if you are the one waiting for that call, that's an important things of that became one of the performance measures. performance measures were designed not just to zalmay your

what's going on that community. so we could see how long it took. when i took office i asked what takes the longest, what is the biggest complaint and i would have thought it was crime or traffic or speeding or something like that but it was a sidewalk repair. i said how long does it take to fix a sidewalk so we wrote a check and it 30 months, two and a half years. maybe that's why it's the number-one complaint we put a strike team together and that was the easy part. five days, six days. how long does it take to fix the traffic lights, so we also did it with schools to be we measure the schools to see how the schools are based on the student achievement scores. that's on the city school record as well on the tax breaks and

one of the driving forces as the mayor said in the city was to reduce the tax rates we reduce five of the nine budgets and we kept them flat on the property-tax rate and reduced by almost 20% during that period at the same time we approved the service levels the required as to reduce the government size and the government went from the total number of the employees by 10% in the city which isn't an easy thing to do yet we increase the number of police officers while we are doing that and the service levels and we try to do it in such a way not to harm the individuals we would freeze the budgets by the last three years we got the recession and we just froze the hiring over time so it would be very judicious and in the positions we moved people around so we tried to eliminate devotee positions for the least amount of people. but it wasn't that much compared to the total number of reduction

in the size. that's important. so running the business as a city. second job is dealing with a crisis. some of them are man made like crime and you have to deal with all three. so you are constantly addressing the crisis as you come about to keep the connection going and in 2004 we had four hurricanes targeted going through st. petersburg at one time in the emergency operations center was during the whole three months period of tiny and you deal with those issues. we talk about a lot of the crisis that you go through from the mayor's perspective as well so that's the second part of the job. second is advancing the vision for the city. it's interesting because that's why you run because you want to

do something. to have a plan to make this city better and get quite often the mayor can get so bogged down during the business with the union issues and employee issues dealing with the crisis as they come you get so bogged down and never get to the point of advancing or vision or gestalt in the middle so you have to be very focused and your organization has to be focused making sure you are continuing the forward momentum while you were dealing with the crisis and the business as you are going forward. in our case we had a five-point plant which was our strategic plan for the city to advance the vision and i think every strategic plan needs to settle the mission. was to build the best city in america we wanted st. petersburg to be the best in america. some folks say you are really going to do that? my response is that should be

the objective of every city in america. who is going to follow you if your mission is to become the fourth best city? eight best city in america, nobody's been to follow you. people follow excellence and when you find is when you settled a bold agenda and a goal which becoming the best city in america people are drawn to it. businesses start singing how can we help, and it will start coming forward and other people say i want to be part of that. i saw one out of stanford the large research company we were recording them to florida and curt carlson is the head he can and met with me and he said we are thinking about building here and here and i said what you have to offer? how will you help us build the best city in america. in the recent vote is about to publish he said that's what got him to come to st. pete he wanted to become a part of the

best city in america so that has to be the mission. you do it by an improving the quality-of-life of the people that live in the city every single day. so everyday everybody in your organization, not just that amount but the businesses, everybody in the organizations and everybody involved in the enterprise should come in with the idea of how are we can't make the quality-of-life better. if everything you are thinking about doing you go through and say is this and make quality-of-life better and if the answer is yes you should do it and if the answer is melvin shouldn't even if everybody wants you to. so in our case that was the mission and then we have the five ways to get their. one is to make it safer. number two is improve your neighborhood and number three is

purchase of eight in improving the schools which is a radical idea and i will tell you why in a second. member for is economic development that custody across-the-board and member fight is improving city services and operations which i talked about in running the businesses for the city it to identify the strategy i promise you a free manager in our government can tom que those because everybody understood that was our objective. >> we are focusing our attention on the programs about the difficulties of american cities. this in light of the recent announcement this city of detroit filed for bankruptcy. coming up next on edward argues that the city is humanities greatest invention and selfish and for the future. he considers two-thirds of americans that live in the cities are healthier, more prosperous. this pergamus from march of 2011 and a can be watched in its

entirety online on booktv.org along with the other programs use your on book tv. the creation we are still not done with the developing world these are the great challenges that lie ahead so if you go back to 1900 it's less than the national average and today it is two years longer. i'm not sure that we understand that for the older new yorkers. for younger new yorkers it's clear why that rates are lower it is just better vehicle accidents, taking the subway, it's less interested in driving drunk and lower rates of suicide so while they aren't likely to see if they're happy the actually don't of themselves at the same rate than the low density areas to but that

required investment and the local governments at the start of the plane at sentry for spending as much on water as the national government on everything except the army and the post office and these investments were real and important. while water required an engineering solution of other problems don't so crime of course had been a major challenge in something the city met that required and let's not forget this requited serious government intervention handling the externalities' was difficult. traffic congestion is a problem still with us and i think it is the way i like to describe it new york is running as a soviet stifel transport system and by that i mean in the old soviet union groceries were underpriced relative to the market prices and away the little kid wall lines that would a new york city

traffic jam is is a long line because you're sitting their waiting for someone had u-turn. the only way i know how to handle this is to price the product you have to charge something and that is what congestion pricing does. what we know from the data is you can't just build your way out of the traffic congestion there is the fundamental waltzes the vehicle miles trouble increased one for one with room to build and highways built. if you build it and they will drive. and there is only one solution for that which is directly make people pay for the social cost of their actions. now, the success of cities of course means it also creates a downside and the downside is if you don't allow the supplies to keep up with demand the cities become unaffordable and that is one of the challenges that new york faces, that cities like chicago that has been friendly towards construction has made it possible for young people

without a lot of means to actually live in chicago. new york under the administration has moved towards allowing more construction that you look at the broad path of the 1970's and 90's just as the prices are rising the city was making it more difficult to build the zoning walls and the preservation districts so 15% of the land area in manhattan including central park preservation district and it's not as if i don't read your our architectural legacies. my father was a historian and i believe that the building and of the house are treasures like the mona lisa but not as post word buildings that need to be preserved. now i dhaka a lot on the wisdom of jacobsen this book and she certainly understood the magic that happens can from wandering the cities and she observed old buildings were cheap and new

buildings were expensive and this letter was the way to keep new york and other cities affordable to make sure you kept the old buildings not change them into new buildings that is and will supply and demand works if you restrict the buildings for whatever reason and have - and prices are going to go through the roof and that is what we have seen in new york and in our own neighborhood of greenwich village. greenwich village was affordable to the low or middle-income couples like herself, like her own family. what household can form a town house in greenwich alleged and preservation to help make it happen has been very difficult for the market to supply more housing and a great irony that progressive states like new york and massachusetts and california which allegedly care so much about providing affordable housing for people with less income to do such a bad job let texas which as far as i know would never admit to any particular attention for the low-cost housing yet it does a great job of that by unleashing

the builders and the ability of the relatively unfettered construction to actually deliver this these people need is one of the sort of important lessons i try to get across in the book. now there are many reasons why cities should be relatively unleashed but there is one reason i emphasize in the book which is the green cities. i want to lead into this with a little story about a young harvard graduate and 1844 who went for a walk in the woods outside. we went to the full fishing and of is good because there haven't been much rain lately which made it easy to get fish out of the stream. as the working the chowder the past the wings by the tall grass and the fire grew on the dry timber that was larger and larger and an inferno in sood and by the time it was down more

than 300 acres was burned to the best. during his time he was an enemy of the environment. i think this was pretty damning in 1844. and it's hard to think of course of any boston merchant who did as much damage to the environment as this young man. of course this young man today is on environmentalism. now there is a lesson here which is that we are a destructive species and if you love nature it often makes sense to stay away from it. now, also i started acquiring and out small children five years ago. laughter can you can tell i'm an economist to the donelson moved to the woods not far and i started to do a lot more damage to the environment than monroe did. now it's not -- i'm taking no stand on the science of global

warming in this book but certainly if you are worried about global warming more about the price of gas at the pump that in fact living in relatively compact urban spaces means less energy consumption even holding one fact is that people that live in the house's use on average 88% less electricity than people that live in apartments. the gap is so much smaller but it still is there and a lot of the test to the smaller housing units and less driving. so if you like green's base, live in new york. the book ago is not fundamental thing about trying to urge any particular person to live in an area they don't want. the point of the book is that america has idealized a certain style of living and it's a style that involves picket fences and

suburbs, and it does not include living in urban apartments and we had a terrible policy that i that we want to be part of the national dialogue about with a sense of hope in this the. on this issue of the city's doing themselves damaged by restricting the constrictions policies i think are most obvious and problematic are the home mortgage interest deduction and the way we handle schooling. in terms of the mortgage interest deduction is problematic in the week of the last ten years that we are bribing them to leverage themselves. on top of this we are encouraging them to buy bigger houses and move away from the urban apartments like it is 85% the door on occupied and 85% of the units have good reason for this and renting out an apartment and house involved is inevitable. on average they depreciate and

if you put a lot of owners under one big room you have the chaos of the new york city co-op. so both of these reasons stated that when you subsidize you are pushing people away from the urban living. a transportation infrastructure as well. i'm not surprised but deeply disappointed by the infrastructure in the recent budget. when filtered by the senate is inevitably and urban and during the stimulus the infrastructure per capita was twice as high than most states and it's not since the of a lot of senators. there are reasons why they should be in this business and americans would no longer compete by producing and shipping natural resources and manufacturing goods cheaper than the competitors. we will compete by the idea of the entrepreneur ship that happens national the in cities and the third thing and i will end with this and i want to

emphasize the leave because of the school and in some sense that we that we stricter our school has the entrepreneurship. if you took your expressed about scene which is currently one of the greater glories of the city not of the human what so ever but if you start with the restaurant scene and instead of having it private innovation come entry and clothing it turned out that it didn't work, if instead of doing that what you did is that a single superintendent who delivered food in a system of the city-owned canteen this would be an awful place and that this kind of what we have done with our schools. instead of allowing the private competition and entrepreneurship to come up with new ideas we would turn that off and it is hard for anyone matter how hard working to effect change from the top down. i have enormous admiration and i

think that he tried very hard to introduce more competition and innovation and the district but the slow movement of schools and of his leadership shows how heavy of a lift this is and i think that we have hopeful thoughts for the academy in harlem and other results on charter schools to bail out some form of innovation that as a meaningful thing in terms of improving the test scores. we are unlikely to have better schools and to have improvement in this area without actually harnessing the urban virtues of competition and entrepreneurship once you do that there is no reason the cities can have the best schools in the world but they are unlikely to if they stick with a purely schooling. estimate the final clich is benjamin barber. he argues that it's at the city level where things get done and problems are solved to read he says more should be done to push cooperation between cities on major global issues like climate

change, illegal trafficking, immigration and terrorism. we bring you these on the programs of american cities facing in light of the recent announcement this city of detroit filed for bankruptcy. >> symbol asymmetry. the global level and it alleges, interdependent as the reality and independent nation states born two, 34, 500 years ago in a world in which the sovereign territory and jurisdiction could be and was the guarantor of liberty and the guarantor of security. we need in short new political entities and institutions to deal with an interdependent world were some candidates are not the traditional multinational corporations which in fact are interdependent and global and pay little attention to the nation's states but unfortunately our monopolistic and undemocratic said that isn't

a great candidate to do the work of what has some of the capacity to do the work. international ngos are great. the in fact can do a fair amount, but they lack the power of any kind. the unrepresented and undemocratic. they choose their own leadership and represent the interest of the people, but they do not consult the interest of the people. the international monetary institution that can of brentonwood are mostly nation state based and the nations that own and then and the banks that own the nation more or less determined policy. we are and need of new actors politically that can act democratically across borders and have an impact on the interdependent problems we face, and it's fair that i come to the idea that various in the oldest and a regional political the institution possible potential

for a new 21st century interdependent world, namely the city, the town, the entities we first form whenever a free early culture people come together on trade or creativity were living together. of the neighborhoods in which we gather. but the ancient perales which is where we started could conceivably today act as an alternative actor, an alternative agent in the modern world and the great beauty and the great irony and poignancy of that is that this closes the great circle because the western civilization, civilizations everywhere started in towns and townships, trading posts and cities but by the end of the ancient world and time of the middle ages it was clear that those cities were too small in

scale, too limited in their political representation to be capable of government and the world and the antiyears and then in the renaissance. in other words as the scale of human societies grew, the township and the process turned too small to deal with a large scale problems so it required the inventiveness of the renaissance in the early modern period to create a new idea of the nation, of the people who then constitute themselves as a large entity capable of ruling and social contract theory is that people can concede to themselves being in a contract with another to obey a much larger power. in some the nation's state emerged as a solution to the limited scale, the limited capacity of the city to deal with the new growing problems of

europe and then leader of north america and asia. the nation state was the solution to the problem of adequate scale on the part of the city. but now as i describe it the nation's eight mesoscale is to diminutive to deal with the global reach of the problems that we face today. what i am suggesting is that we circle back to the cities but not one city, one town, one policy at a time, but what cities can do together in networks to work and cooperate across borders to do with individual sovereign states cannot do, but the old wood reconstitute in a network of policies which is say cosmopolis can become a global instrument of global cooperation.

the subtitle of my book if mare's rule the world, that is the argument time trying to make now of why it is a good idea. but the more important part of the subtitle is if the rule the world, why they should come and how they already do because part of what i'm saying is let's talk the city from obscurity and get them to talk to one another and work together and do things if we could do that and create a new utopia. the cities are already deeply that worked in the interests of the association they're happening successfully in the global world have constituted themselves to solve problems and are doing so. the cities are already well on the path to soft and informal

governments, not an executive authority with a mandate telling people what to do through law, but a group of cities and mayors and councilors and citizens working together across the border is voluntarily developing best practice this come exporting, and urban virtues to solve problems that they have proven they are no longer able to take ^. i won't bore you with here because this kind of boring. when i can name for you the inner city networks that are already on operation of an important business around the globe you would both be shocked and suppress a long on a because the names are kind of boring and bureaucratic but the reality is quite extraordinary. one of the most important institutions nobody has ever heard of, for example, is the

united cities and local governments. 3,000 cities and local authorities that meet globally every year and the network cities are not work in the environment, transportation, immigration security and a number of other issues. i hadn't heard of it two years ago. i got too many people here other than their urban specialists in the room have heard of that but it is an organization most people would say i know what you mean the conference of mayors, but they pale in the context of the actual inner city organization from a the national, some with global scope that exists. 40 cities or 58 cities now working on the global

environment to the lot better job than the states have done. cities for mobility and the mayor's running the city pravachol in the new organizations in barcelona that shares best practices, to quit the council of local authorities of international relations, the climate alliance come partnership of space local governments in southeast asia and local environmental initiatives and so on and so on it. they go on and on. they are there and working. i know your junior high school kid would say isn't their something else i can do for my school report? that they are important because they are achieving results in the very areas where the nation states or unable to make any realistic progress. the are actually doing important

things together. and they do it because when you look at cities, the approach to governance and citizenship and policy problems turns out to look quite different from what happens when you look at nation states. what the mayors are and do compared to the presidency and prime ministers are and do is striking and the distinctions and i will just start with a simple fact that might startle you. there isn't one of mayor of any american city despite the greatness of the city's and the names are off the tongue of american mayors who ever become president of the united states. they mostly don't become presidents because they years are a different kind of politician than presidents and part of what my book explores is what makes mayors different.

in france their chosen by the political system of by local candidates and being the mayor is for the big political career. but most places they are elected because they're different. the starting point is that mayors are among the most pragmatic problem-solving politicians the world has ever seen and that is because their job is rather specific if you become president obama, you have to achieve world trade regulations and stop the taliban and deal with chaos in libya and mali and guns across the whole country or not you've to deal with some of america's borders and what to do with the millions who are here without documentation, and those vast insoluble large scale problems when the themselves to a

theology, big government, no government, some government. but when you are the neyer have you had a different set of tasks. you better get the snow off the road when it snows and may you mincy some of you might recall in the 60's when he failed to plow queens and brooklyn and the bronx and new york he almost lost his job and most of his chance for the future career because he didn't pull the streets. the mayor of jerusalem and some very the logical times of palestinian israel in the 1980's and 90's was known as a pragmatist and at one point and as for having said he was in the meeting with rabbis and christians who are arguing and of access to the holy sites, and he finally said to them spare me your systems and i will fix the sewers. the contrast to the religious a

logical war that defied israel and palestine and the middle east from the practical problems that have to be done there is another unknown mayor and the same period who was the mayor of geneina and got himself killed pri insisting his job was to make it function as the city not to engage in universal debates about the jews and the arabs and palestinians and who owned the land and who was their first and who should do it. it's typical that the focus on problem-solving and if you look at what they actually say you'll find again and again and we did the surveys in many different countries and the in that same the same thing our job is to actually get things fixed, to do things, to make things happen and that is a very different thing. mayor nutter says in philadelphia, who is now the new president of the american

conference of mayors he says we could never get away with some of the stuff that goes on in washington. you either fill potholes or you don't. the pool is open or it isn't. someone responded to 9/11 with a didn't. when you are in the city being a socialist, being a conservative, being a tory the have some impact on how you view the government public-private partnerships that in the and you have to do the work of governance. the other thing about being the mayor is if you are president of the united states, in your a figurehead and if you're president of france now president of 99.9% of the population will never do more than see your face on television. but if you are a major even in the big city of new york alone a city like indianapolis or detroit or lawrence kansas, if you are the major air -- mayor

there b.c. and coffee shops, on the streets on their way home. you can't get away because you are their neighbor and a politician who is your neighbor is a different breed of politician than a politician who is a figure who embodies the whole nation. when degaul was different than he was as president of france, the new president of france spent seven years as the mayor in self, that isn't where he came from that part of his political career but he grew fond of it and intellectually when he took the pledge of office he went back to his hometown in the north and took the oath of office where he said are my neighbors. so neighbor means in fact they

used the phrase in the u.s.. when mayors are homeboys. we read about mayors white those that run into burning buildings and a pullout people that are unlike the mayor johnson that actually stopped a mugging on the streets of london. even if obama or bush wanted to, obviously the secret service would not let them get out of their leno and interfere with the mugging or run into a building and say something. it is a different kind of job that has a symbolic power. ..