CityLAB IX - Cities and states: exploring a complicated relationship
Cities and nation states have historically maintained a complicated relationship. In the late Middle Ages, notably in Europe, cities and states were competing to become the dominant entity through which society is politically organized and governed. At the same time, cities and the modern political institutions they nurtured served as building blocks for nation-state formation.
While over the past two centuries cities were effectively ‘caged’ within national (welfare) states, since the 1980s, global societal trends like economic globalization, migration and climate change are eroding national boundaries and loosening the political control of national states over their territories and populations. Moreover, policy trends like devolution and subsidiarization are redistributing the state’s regulatory capacity and responsibilities towards regions and municipalities.
All these socio-political processes provide actors in cities more autonomy to pursue their own strategies and interests locally as well as nationally and internationally with regard to societal challenges such as poverty, diversity, climate change, democracy and culture.
Participation and lecturers
In this interdisciplinary summer school, we aim to bring junior and senior scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore and discuss how, when and why the relationships between cities and states have evolved and are still evolving. We are particularly interested in how cities and state have differed and differ in the way they govern societies and with which impact on social inequality, power relations, socio-ecological flows and living in diversity.
The summer school consists of lectures by international as well as Antwerp-based scholars, high profile urban politicians and urban professionals in the field of city-state relations. There will be ample opportunity for participants to present their ongoing research on the topic and get feedback from other participants and senior scholars. A detailed programme, including confirmed speakers, will be available by the end of March 2023.
Summer school overview