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Posted

I don't really know what the hell I'm getting at here, so this is really kind of unstructured and poorly thought-out.

 

I was thinking about how important mayors of big cities are, and about how New York keeps bitching about secession. What if Greater Metropolitan Areas were to elect a chief executive who had not only a city, but its suburbs, under its jurisdiction?

 

New York basically has this sort of sub-districting, with your Mayor Of Greater New York and then the four (cough) five borough presidents under him. I'm looking at Chicagoland right now. Since the rest of Cook County, as well as Lake and DuPage counties, are for all intents and purposes, a part of what Chicago is, they should have more say in things. Everyone in the Chicago and the greater metropolitan area could elect an executive to govern over not so much Chicago, as that's basically Daley's job, but to unify the matters of Schaumburg, Evanston, Arlington Heights, Oak Brook, Des Plaines, etc. Each village, city, what have you, would still elect a mayor or city manager, but the mayor would be below the city-state governor. Of course, with the suburbs electing somebody, so that the people of Chicago AND its outlying suburbs can be unified into a powerful jurisdiction, partially autonomous from the rest of Illinois.

 

 

Anyhow, there has to be some nugget of sensibility in my idea somewhere, but this is all really pretty unrefined, so hopefully somebody can help me make sense this thought here.

Posted
I'm just saying that the idea of city-states isn't novel by any measure.

Oh, I'm well aware of the idea of the city-state as a political unit. That's what I based it off of. I just don't really see it happening in the U.S., though I do see it in certain Canadian cities that are Regional Municipalities now, like Halifax and Toronto, which sort of merged with or assimilated their suburbs to form a bigger unit.

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