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How Are Cities Inserting Themselves in the International System?

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City Diplomacy

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Series in Global Public Diplomacy ((GPD))

Abstract

At the beginning of the new millennia, the performance of cities for their residents, their positioning vis-à-vis the nation-state as a container and their re-insertion into the international system increased exponentially throughout different ways of internationalization. This chapter answers the question about how cities are inserting themselves in the international system through an insertion typology of cities in the international setting that arises from the importance of the image that these places have compared to other international actors. The strategies identified in the typology can be adopted by any city in order to review its current internationalization and to design cross-border strategies, programs and specific public policies for its positioning. Moreover, this typology identifies and measures the concrete mechanisms and actions cities have to adopt in order for them to be inserted internationally, to build up stronger images and to consolidate their new identities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Peter Taylor (1994) uses Anthony Giddens (1985) metaphor about state as a “power container”. When we look at the twentieth-century state in the core of the modem world-system, we are immediately impressed by the sheer magnitude of functions it has acquired. That they can be reduced to just four basic strategies of territoriality, these amount to containment of power (state wage war), wealth (manage the economy), culture (give national identity) and society (provide social services).

  2. 2.

    The typology uses the data of world according to GaWC who is a city-centered world of flows in contrast to the more familiar state-centered world of boundaries. Cities are assessed in terms of their advanced producer services using the interlocking network model. Indirect measures of flows are derived to compute a city’s network connectivity—this measures a city’s integration into the world city network (GAWC 2019).

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  1. Department of Public Policy, University of Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico

    Ray Lara

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  1. Pardee RAND Graduate School, Santa Monica, CA, USA

    Sohaela Amiri

  2. Center on Public Diplomacy University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Sohaela Amiri

  3. Department of Mass Communication, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA

    Efe Sevin

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Lara, R. (2020). How Are Cities Inserting Themselves in the International System?. In: Amiri, S., Sevin, E. (eds) City Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan Series in Global Public Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45615-3_9

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