The Anthropocene and the City

The COVID-19 lockdown created different experiences of living in the city. Even in the walking. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way of experiencing the city, even walking in the city. A sense of changing the relationships in the city has inspired us to question the mainstream of political publics and social imaginaries.
Governance structures and city planning are currently constructed and diffused through a top-down approach, formed in national institutions that are then passed through and filtered down to the regional and local tiers. In times of major global interconnectedness, pandemic, apocalyptic scenaries, environmental changes, there is an intensified pressure to identify, create, and exploit new resources. In this regard, the Anthropocene presents political systems and institutions with profound challenges: existing modes of economic production and consumption are proving unsustainable in the midst of the climate and global environmental crisis. There is a failure to organize with local communities, local realities, and local governance systems. Thus, in this paper, we problematize city organization and city leadership, proposing to re-think local environmental, social and cultural nuances and variations, in order to work towards the diminishing of the impact of urban activities on the Earth System, especially at a time of climate crisis. We will discuss why it will be important to re-organise the concept of city leadership, as well as re-organizing the economies of cities towards sustainable models of production and consumption proposing a new approach on leadership, economic growth, and innovation.