The article argues for an increase in de facto already claimed city sovereignty. It situates the discussion, first in the historical context of city-state relationships, and second, in the current urban crises in the United States tied to the sanctuary city movement, then examines legal grounds for devolution of power to cities, before discussing the legal concepts of "urban commons" and "city power", finally outlining constraints facing increasingly sovereign cities. The article argues that current legal literature on "urban commons" and "city power" needs a stronger normative lens and better conceptualization of urban inequality, redistribution, and publicness. Moreover, if cities are to assume greater capacity to govern and to ensure life, liberty, and the sustainability of their populations, they have to overcome serious constraints in the four domains outlined in the article: (1) surveillance and control of urban space, (2) privatization of public space, (3) the rise of the luxury city, large-scale developments, megaprojects, and (4) homelessness. of 23 military, taxation, redistribution, infrastructure or public services, international relations, trade and migration policies, they are nevertheless showing signs of leadership in the arenas of land use and development, minimum wage, regional tax sharing, sustainable development planning and climate change, and, especially, as will be emphasized in this article, in the case of sanctuary practices in the area of immigrant inclusion. Sanctuary cities in the United States can be defined as places where a local government or police department have passed a resolution, a city ordinance, an executive order, or a departmental policy expressly forbidding city or law enforcement officials from inquiring into immigration status and/or cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency.The article situates the discussion, first in the historical context of city-state relationships, and second, in the current urban crises in the United States tied to the sanctuary city movement, then examines legal grounds for devolution of power to cities, before discussing the legal concepts of "urban commons" [5,6] (see also [7]) and "city power" [8], finally outlining constraints facing increasingly sovereign cities. While mayors may not "rule the world", as Barber's forceful argument would have it, this article argues instead that cities are not utilizing the powers that they increasingly do possess to sufficiently and substantively address urban inequalities and to expand urban citizenship into a fundamentally inclusive category. Barber is arguing that expanded city sovereignty ought to be a normative goal given the crises of the nation state, while this article argues that the noted normative goal should be approached with caution given the persistence of urban inequalities. The current context of the state hostile to redistributive urban policies, however, opens up a social and political space for a special emphasis on urban sov...
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The article analyses the cinematic imaginaries of motion, mobility and skyline views in Manhatta (Sheeler and Strand, 1921). While the film has been extensively discussed in the literature, its linkages with contemporaneous understandings of the urban have not been sufficiently developed. This article examines reflexivity and disembedding as processes of modernity in relationship to Manhatta, and establishes the skyline trope as the critical visual detail in the 1920s cinematic city cinema. It then explores the way in which Manhatta conveys the transience of urban experience and the fragility of urbanity endangered in particular by economic forces. This discussion further evokes the fragmentation of the new urban experiences and establishes cinematography as a bridge between the city and the nature, present too in Whitman’s poetry. Yet Manhatta succumbs to organic views of the city typical of the Chicago School of Urban Ecology, screening out of view political divisions, social stratification and urban change, and viewing urban problems as inherent to the processes of urbanization. Through a dialectical interlinkage between the city imagined and the city experienced, Manhatta presents the city as a site of strangeness that cannot be easily fathomed, one whose contradictions cannot be resolved. Silhouettes of workers prompt questions about the role of working classes, suggesting a pessimistic view of their power set against the landscape of a capitalist metropolis always in the process of motion, of being re-created. This strangeness and the difficulty of defining and understanding the elusive subject of the modern city – a trope discernable in Manhatta and also in film noir – is noted as well in the writings of Simmel, Mumford and the Chicago School of Urban Ecology.
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