Mayors are in fashion. What if they led the world?
A manifesto for trickle-up politics. Memories of the power and peril
This Week, Those Books links the big international story to the world of books and has a few thousand followers on every continent except Antarctica. We aim to provide, in roughly five minutes, crucial context – from fiction and non-fiction – to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.
The Big Story:
The biggest byelection in British history is for a mayor and it comes at a time of new prominence for this office from New York City to Johannesburg. Should mayors lead the world? Could they?
The July 30 contest for mayor of Greater Manchester has more than 2 million eligible voters and was brought on by Andy Burnham’s job upgrade to UK prime minister.
Recent polls show that New York’s Zohran Mamdani, the highly visible mayor of America’s largest city, is actually becoming more popular with voters even as people turn away from national politics.
Divisive South African politician Helen Zille is promising to stem the decline of the country’s richest city if she is elected black-majority Johannesburg’s first white mayor since the end of apartheid.
Our first book makes a passionate case:
If mayors ruled the world, the more than 3.5 billion people (over half of the world’s population) who are urban dwellers and the many more in the exurban neighbourhoods beyond could participate locally and cooperate globally at the same time – a miracle of civic ‘glocality’ promising pragmatism instead of politics, innovation rather than ideology, and solutions in place of sovereignty.
More context, fewer walls
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This Week’s Books:
A plea for mayors to be allowed to lead.
The last mayor of a major city on how it went…until it didn’t.
Here’s another relevant free-to-read post from the archives :
If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
By: Benjamin R Barber
Publisher: Yale University Press
Year: 2013
The late Benjamin Barber was the founding figure in the Global Parliament of Mayors, which launched in The Hague in 2016. This is a key fact in understanding his worldview.
Barber passionately makes the case for city mayors to lead the way in effective governance – worldwide. He starts with American educator John Dewey’s statement: “The local is the only universal, and as near an absolute as exists”.1 He follows it up with a stirring explanation of the city’s place in human development. The township was “democracy’s original incubator,” he writes. Despite great expectations of the nation-state, it “has become too large to allow meaningful participation”. Therefore, it is cities and their mayors who can and should actively tackle problems at a manageable level. “Cities represent a level of governance sufficiently local to demand pragmatism and efficiency in problem solving but sufficiently networked to be able to fashion cooperative solutions to the interdependent challenges they face”.
He adds that they should share examples of effective policies with counterparts around the world, preferably at a parliament of mayors. But informal information-sharing could also yield dividends. Who could have predicted the results of Chicago alderman Rey Colón’s initial observations of bike-share innovations while on a trip to Seville, Spain? Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel subsequently promised 100 miles of ‘green’ protected bike lanes. Not long after, in 2013, NYC began its bikeshare programme.
Barber is honest about the issues that could pockmark his proposal for mayors to rule the world and cities to become the building blocks of a global democratic architecture. He notes the endemic corruption and inequality of cities, their crass commercialism and their “tendency to loneliness in the midst of crowds”.
Choice quotes:
Presidents pontificate principle; mayors pick up the garbage.
[Networked cities] are birthing something resembling a global “civil religion” whose reality is interdependence, whose liturgy is rights, whose doctrine is cooperation, and whose practice is democracy.
Let’s See What Happens: The Last Mayor of Bristol
By: Marvin Rees
Publisher: Picador
Year: 2024
This is an absorbing account by the man who served two terms as mayor of the southwestern English city of Bristol. Marvin Rees, who became the first directly elected black mayor of a major European city, tells a good story. How he vanquished his demons, overcame limitations and pushed back against racism to govern his city through good times and bad. Rees was in charge of Bristol during Brexit, the Covid pandemic and that charged moment when anti-racism protesters toppled the bronze statue of 17th century slave-trader Edward Colston.
This book is especially noteworthy because Rees details how Bristol decided – by public referendum – to create the position of executive mayor, only to reverse its decision 12 years later.
An indication perhaps that not all cities want mayors to rule them, let alone the world?
The Back Story:
** The Greater Manchester mayor has the most powerful position of any elected politician outside London, controlling a £3bn annual budget and covering an area that includes 10 local authorities and two cities.
** Some signature policies championed by serving mayors around the world:
San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie’s energetic robotaxi crackdown reflects his city’s worries over self-driving cars.2
NYC’s Zohran Mamdani is building five city-run grocery stores, which will offer staple foods at a 30% discount.3
Fukuoka’s Sōichirō Takashima drove reforms that gave his city one of the highest rates of business start-ups in Japan.4
Addis Ababa’s Adanech Abiebie pushed through social reforms for children and women and is also controversially rehousing the poor and beautifying Ethiopia’s capital.5
London’s Sadiq Khan has funded 640,000 new trees, quadrupled the cycle network and rolled out a fleet of electric buses.6
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Dewey, John. The Public and its Problems. Gateway Books, 1946. https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:081b58e6-58d4-4a81-9441-3aed7371964f
San Francisco mayor backs national robotaxi rules after Waymo meltdowns. Politico, July 28, 2026. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/28/san-francisco-waymo-washington-01013227
Mamdani’s favorability rating jumps in latest poll. What to know. USA Today, June 26, 2026. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2026/06/26/mamdanis-favorability-rating-jumps-in-latest-poll-what-to-know/90705790007/
Why Fukuoka is Japan’s most innovative city. BBC, May 9, 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20190508-why-fukuoka-is-japans-most-innovative-city
The bulldozer methods of Adanech Abiebie, the mayor remodelling Addis. The Africa Report, December 1, 2025. https://www.theafricareport.com/400617/the-bulldozer-methods-of-adanech-abiebie-the-mayor-remodelling-addis/
‘London is a case study in hope’: Sadiq Khan on 10 years as mayor. The Guardian, May 11, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/11/sadiq-khan-10-years-london-mayor-labour-environment