Cities for peace
Although cities can be settings for war and destruction, this chapter reflects on how they can also become major actors in the promotion of peace. Cities have to manage economic, environmental and social conflicts on a day-to-day basis, and through self-management, they pioneer public services, mobility, affordable housing, integration projects, social assistance and poverty reduction, while working to improve coexistence between generations, peoples and cultures. Cities also respond to global crises by deploying diplomacy, operating in networks and mobilising resources.
History will recall Ukrainian cities Mariupol and Bakhmut as sites of war and destruction; like Aleppo, devastated in the Syrian war, and Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin in the battles during the Second World War. They are moonlit, ghost cities reduced to rubble, massacred, with survivors in hiding and infantry advancing inch by inch. Other cities like Sarajevo, Leningrad, Ceuta and Troy are remembered for withstanding prolonged brutal sieges. Yet, cities are also the settings for peace and hope.
Addams and the ideals of urban peace
Early in the 20th century, US philosopher Jane Addams published Newer Ideals for Peace (2007[1907]). She formulated the new ideals while observing citizen activism and cooperation in cosmopolitan Chicago’s most populous and poorest neighbourhoods, which also hosted the most immigrants. America’s most dispossessed people, she found, combined the compassion and empathy needed to develop community values with a cosmopolitan sensitivity when it came to respecting and understanding the individuality of new arrivals from across the Atlantic. At the same time, she noted that even if immigrants shed numerous habits acquired over generations, they also strove to understand one another and make connections in a new world. Addams’ (2017[2012]) contribution went beyond the ideals of peace – she also participated in the city's evolution. She co-founded Chicago's Hull House, which used innovative educational techniques, art and social work programmes to help migrants and the needy to integrate; she also fought alongside the US suffragette movement and led pacifist discussions during the First World War.
A far cry from the eternal, static and abstract peace based on a treaty between sovereigns imagined by philosophers since Immanuel Kant, Addams perceived an active, dynamic peace amidst the bustle of the city that was full of compassion and kindness, nourished by the people’s mobilisation, cooperation and activity. She believed that cities’ dynamism and “generous experiments” meant they were “cradles of liberty” and “centers of radicalism” in which people find space for their interests, welcome others, form relationships, innovate and successfully overcome conflict. “These various peoples who are gathered together in the immigrant quarters of a cosmopolitan city worship goodness for its own value”, Addams observed (2007: 11). She believed that their goodness was not only valuable for governing the community, but could potentially serve as an inspiration to all: “their hopes and dreams are a prophecy of the future development in city government, in charity, in education, so their daily lives are a forecast of coming international relations”). They were, according to Addams, the “humble harbingers of the Newer Ideals of Peace” (ibid., 12-13).
Despite winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, Addams’ contributions, relating peace ideals to the evolution of cities, have largely gone unnoticed. In all likelihood, this is because peace is too abstract and general for urban studies, and cities are too concrete and individual for peace studies. Urban studies have traditionally focused on planning the development of cities and their infrastructure to achieve order, wellbeing and growth; while more critical studies have focused on the tensions generated by the uniformity and rationality of large-scale urban renewal, in which the context is ignored and some people face exclusion and marginalisation. But the debate is rarely framed in terms of conflict and peace. The peace generated in cities – from ideas and inhabitants’ interactions and self-organisation as they seek to foster social harmony and imagine new futures – has been of little relevance historically (for an exception, see Jacobs, 1961). Similarly, urban spaces have had a secondary role in peace studies, which tends to place states and peace negotiations conducted by political leaders centre stage. Even in “bottom-up” peace processes – with civil society at the centre – urban spaces remain far from the focus of analysis. It is as if war and peace happen “in” cities, but not “from” or “because of” cities.
Cities as architects of sustainable peace
This focus has changed over recent years. The background has moved to the foreground as is the leading actor. Because cities have to manage economic and social conflicts on a day-to-day basis, and because self-management means they are pioneers in public services, mobility, affordable housing, integration projects, cultural exchange, social assistance and poverty reduction. Because cities are resilient and enable highly diverse people to coexist. Annika Björkdahl (2013) has studied cities’ importance to peace-building processes in conflict zones. Belfast, Mostar, Nicosia and Sarajevo, Björkdahl notes, are all cities that endured bouts of extreme violence and whose ethno-nationalist divisions persisted following the implementation of national peace projects and state-centric governance models, which reproduced the logic of walls and segregation. Nevertheless, concrete peace practices are also emerging in these cities. People have managed to reconcile themselves with the past, to trust, empathise and reconnect, to share neighbourhoods and common spaces, and to build interdependencies that bridge war’s fiercest divisions. Peace processes should empower urban dynamics to achieve greater national stability, Björkdahl believes, and help peace take root over generations.
Cities are not just microcosms striving to manage conflicts and working to adapt to the effects of global crises. Their emancipatory projects are also linked to the idea of sustainable peace at global level, as the New Urban Agenda of the United Nations (Habitat III) pointed out in 2016. With the number of people living in cities expected to double by 2050, the agenda provides inspiration for the planning, design, financing, development and governance of cities to ensure that they can contribute to sustainable development and peace in plural societies.
Marta Galceran-Vercher (2023) has analysed how cities’ diplomacy and mobilisation of resources are fundamental tools when responding to crises and emergency situations. The solidarity aid received by Ukraine shows as much. As well as the symbolic displays of municipal solidarity and diplomacy, European cities have contributed a range of resources, both tangible (material donations like electrical generators and transformers, fire trucks and trams) and intangible (such as the transfer of knowledge and best practices) and have taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees. Increasingly, international platforms and partnerships like Mayors for Peace and Peace Messenger Cities that use the power of “city diplomacy” to promote peace, security and development in conflict zones are gaining momentum (Musch et al., 2008).
Shows of solidarity of this kind also take place between states. Their greater capacity, resources and competences mean they can be much more pivotal. There have also been infamous episodes of violence and human rights violations perpetrated in cities and by municipal governments and neighbours. But cities’ capacity to facilitate coexistence should not be underestimated, and nor should the unique potential of municipal solidarity in international relations.
Being further from the centres of power, cities do not follow military, centralising and bureaucratic logics; nor do they have borders to patrol, or national identities or security to protect. Quite the contrary, cities seek alternative, decentralised, pragmatic solutions that can integrate and work towards day-to-day satisfaction and improve coexistence between generations, peoples and cultures. Perpetually growing, bursting with challenges and trends, teeming with neighbours, migrants and passers-by, cities innovate and inspire. As Addams said (2007[1907]), progress requires “human dynamic character”, and it was in the dynamism of cities that she glimpsed the new ideals for peace and progress.
References
Addams, Jane. Newer Ideals of Peace. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007 [1907].
Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull House: With Autobiographical Notes and Sixty-Three Illustrations. Pantianos Classics, 2017 [1912].
Björkdahl, Annika. “Urban Peacebuilding”. Peacebuilding, vol. 1, no. 2 (2013), p. 207-221
Galceran-Vercher, Marta. “Multilateralismo urbano en tiempos de guerra: ¿de la solidaridad simbólica a la solidaridad pragmática?” CIDOB Opinion, no. 748 (2023)
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.
Musch, Arne, Chris van der Valk, Alexandra Sizoo, Kian Tajbakhsh. City Diplomacy: The Role of Local governments in Conflict Prevention, Peace-Building, Post-Conflict Reconstruction. The Hague, VNG International, 2008.
All the publications express the opinions of their individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of CIDOB as an institution.