This chapter demostrates with town council deliberations and records from other local assemblies that political discourse and complaints at the very local level mirrored those in bailiwick assemblies , provincial estates, and meetings of the Estates General, and they reliably reflect public opinion. It shows that national complaints came from the bottom-up, both in rural as well as urban areas.

This chapter outlines a framework for understanding what drives city governments in the early twenty-first century to engage in environmental protection efforts in the absence of mandates or generous subsidies from higher levels of government. The chapter begins by emphasizing is the central preoccupation at the local level with promoting economic growth, partly to fund the services that local governments provide, such as police and firefighting. The chapter distinguishes between two archetypal categories of environmental problems: local public goods problems, such as the need to collect solid waste or inadequate green space, that local residents benefit from addressing; and global public goods problems, such as planetary warming, that people throughout the world benefit from addressing. Local elites may push from “the top” for measures, such as building parks and collecting garbage, that simultaneously will improve the local environment and promote economic growth by making their cities more attractive to existing and new residents. In addition, community groups may push from “the bottom” for measures to improve the local as well as the global environment, such as limiting planetary warming. However, U.S. local governments are likely to resist imposing costs on local actors to address global environmental problems, such as limiting climate change, because of localities’ nested position as relatively small entities within a large federation competing for businesses and residents. Left to their own devices, local governments are more likely to undertake measures that will yield local benefits, such as improvements in the health of local residents and the beautification of the local environment. For cities to contribute meaningfully to addressing the global task of limiting planetary warming, local activists will need to mobilize over a sustained period to maintain the pressure on local officials who are sensitive to the need to cultivate local economic prosperity.

In the early twenty-first century, New York and other cities established targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to help limit global climate change. Limiting these emissions is not an obvious task for local governments: no city’s efforts will materially affect planetary temperatures, and curtailing these emissions imposes costs on local actors mainly for the benefit of the world as a whole. Between 2007, when the city set its first GHG reduction target, and 2019, the city’s emission reduction efforts were consistent with the preoccupation of local elites with economic growth. The city did not impose costly requirements on local actors to reduce their emissions, and the city did not achieve significant emission reductions. However, in 2019, the city government passed a local law that establishes declining caps on greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, and portends real costs on private actors – including the owners of residential real estate – if the city enforces the law. This 2019 law emerged from the efforts of city insiders, and local progressive interest groups motivated by environmental, social justice and labor concerns in the first Trump presidency. The history of the city’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions illustrates the precarious politics of local decarbonization efforts.

In Egypt, by the mid-1980s, as a result of a deep economic crisis, thousands of Islamic voluntary associations managed to develop a parallel economy and a parallel welfare system. In some instances, these modes of informal organizations translated into an Islamist-inspired challenge to the state. The rise in political influence of the Islamic Investment Houses dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood aided that organization in its recruitment programs that expanded its membership. Moreover, where radical Islamic groups were able to exploit informal financial networks and procure informal labor contracts for their supporters, particularly in the informal settlements around Cairo, they used these as bases of power and influence. Using private sources to establish social networks in defiance of state regulations, organizations such as the militant Islamic Group (al-jama’at al-Islamiyya) have sought to build, literally, a “state within a state.”

Chapter 7 explains how militant Islamist leaders adapted “traditional” Egyptian rural norms in ways that allowed them both to supplant the political power of local notables, while simultaneously institutionalizing extortion practices and implementing their own brand of “law and order.” Islamic militants exploited the high levels of social and economic uncertainty in Cairo’s informal housing areas. An important reason behind the popularity of radical Islamists among local residents is due to the ways in which their leaders have utilized highly coercive methods to settle local disputes and enforce informal labor contracts for their members, while simultaneously preaching against the ills of conspicuous consumption in their sermons and imposing strict Islamic modes of conduct. The chapter shows how the socio-economic conditions that have served, as a “recruiting ground” for Islamist radicals was made possible as result of economic change at both the international as well as domestic level.

In Egypt migrant remittances and the flow of petrodollars in the era of the oil boom provided capitalization of Islamic banks and a host of Islamic investment companies that operated outside the system of state regulation. Such bankers drew on the rapidly growing wealth of those businessmen with long-standing connections in the Gulf, including, most importantly, members and sympathizers with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). This boom in labor export and remittance flows also helped shape Egyptian national economic functions, out-migration and the burgeoning informal economy afforded the Egyptian state enough “relative autonomy” to allow it to expand the private sector and begin to decentralize the country’s economic system. It enabled the Egyptian state to relax foreign exchange regulations to stimulate a foreign capital influx. However, the unintended consequences of these policies were opening the door for Islamic financial institutions, which helped finance and popularize the middle class-based Islamic movement.

Chapter 1 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet elaborates on both the myth of Inanna’s chaotic riverboat journey to Uruk and the vision of the goddess’s ordered urban state depicted on the Warka Vase to meditate on the many birthplaces and birthdates of cities and their surrounding “urban worlds.” It identifies river valleys (and other Sun and Earth-delivered sources of fresh water) as crucial to our ability to harvest enough energy from the Sun and Earth to build cities and it discusses the importance of “energized crowds” that arise in large, proximate, specialized, diverse, and anonymous settlements. Ultimately, though, the chapter argues that urban political communities and the especially powerful institutions of state required to govern them best account for cities' ultimate indefinability: their sheer variability and the sheer unpredictability of their human uses, ranging from immense acts of creation to immense acts of destruction. Cities, it concludes, are places where we harvest enough energy from the Sun and Earth, through water, to engage in the ambitious and dangerous human-directed practice of city-enabled politics – the polis of Earthopolis, the only Urban Planet we know of.

In the winter of 2019, four surprising pieces of news emerged from New York City in quick succession. First, in mid-January, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new program that would provide free healthcare to undocumented immigrants and other uninsured New Yorkers, at an expected cost of $100 million (Goodman 2019b). Across the river in Queens a month later, local activists protested and ultimately defeated the arrival of the Amazon HQ2 corporate campus, which would have employed tens of thousands and generated millions in revenues for city and state coffers (Goodman 2019a). Each of these outcomes runs contrary to long-held beliefs about how we expect American cities to govern themselves in an era of inequality, mobile wealth, and porous municipal borders: public and private elites partner to court outside investment as a top priority, override grassroots protests, and avoid redistributive programs that might push the wealthy out and draw the poor in.

Chapter 7 explains how militant Islamist leaders adapted “traditional” Egyptian rural norms in ways that allowed them both to supplant the political power of local notables, while simultaneously institutionalizing extortion practices and implementing their own brand of “law and order.” Islamic militants exploited the high levels of social and economic uncertainty in Cairo’s informal housing areas. An important reason behind the popularity of radical Islamists among local residents is due to the ways in which their leaders have utilized highly coercive methods to settle local disputes and enforce informal labor contracts for their members, while simultaneously preaching against the ills of conspicuous consumption in their sermons and imposing strict Islamic modes of conduct. The chapter shows how the socio-economic conditions that have served, as a “recruiting ground” for Islamist radicals was made possible as result of economic change at both the international as well as domestic level.