By Mark Anderson
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA), after a four-month delay, held its annual Pritzker Forum on Global Cities on Oct. 15. Mayors from three major U.S. cities, as well as European officials and others expounded on the way that, under cover of Covid-19, the global cities movement is on the brink of taking a quantum leap forward, far beyond what would otherwise be the case. The thrust is to endow municipalities with unprecedented authority in order to escalate the movement’s general objective of enabling major cities to tightly network with each other around the world, while increasingly sidestepping the authority of nation states. Although this shift has the seemingly agreeable appearance of “enhancing local control,” it raises thorny constitutional questions.