Cities find themselves managing problems and opportunities that used to be the sole domain of national governments. Many cities now have populations and economies larger than many countries. Directly elected mayors of capital cities are often among a country's most influential politicians. Markets, communications and movements of goods, funds and people are all increasingly global. But politics remain local.
Local authorities can help bridge that gap.
We must bring to life the vision set out in the Habitat Agenda, adopted four years ago at the City Summit in Istanbul - which was, perhaps not surprisingly, the first of the great United Nations conferences of the 1990s to admit local authorities, NGOs and other groups, not as observers but as full participants. But the Habitat Agenda cannot be looked at in isolation from the work of the earlier conferences. Indeed, one of the great achievements of the whole series of conferences was to highlight the linkages among different issues. In particular, the central message of the 1995 Social Summit in Copenhagen, which we were reviewing in Geneva last week, is of direct relevance to this meeting. That message was that social and economic welfare are not separate concepts.