For those who seek to grapple with systemic realities, the city is a beautiful level on which to struggle, so much more feasible than the nation-state as a whole. The city is the locus of our activities. It is what we can easily comprehend, far closer than the concepts of state or nation. Lacking this focalizing point of struggle and desire, we lack the ground on which to organize a real challenge to the nation-state and the system of empire that is its essence. The city gives us a place to grab hold, to take root, to organize ourselves to confront in a holistic way the varied ills now facing us on a planetary scale.
Cities are the seats of power, and every nation-state is a federation of cities at some level.
This way, locally-based, grassroots movements can collectively gain power at national and international scales. Cities, of course, are not innocents in the history of empire. The city and the empire are almost inextricably linked in our consciousness, for we understand that empires rose out of cities, and cities built themselves upon the wealth that comes of imperial conquest. Yet they are distinguishable from empire. History has seen a recurrent theme of king versus city, the military rulers of large stretches of turf living in tension with the merchants and educated classes of cities, often over taxes to support the king's armies.