Mayors are in fashion. What if they led the world?

This Week Those Books is chock-full of crucial context in just five minutes — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle. Click here for a quick read

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The Big Story:

The biggest byelection in British history is for a mayor and it comes at a time of new prominence for this office from New York City to Johannesburg. Should mayors lead the world? Could they?

• The July 30 contest for mayor of Greater Manchester has more than 2 million eligible voters and was brought on by Andy Burnham’s job upgrade to UK prime minister.
• Recent polls show that New York’s Zohran Mamdani, the highly visible mayor of America’s largest city, is actually becoming more popular with voters even as people turn away from national politics.
• Divisive South African politician Helen Zille is promising to stem the decline of the country’s richest city if she is elected black-majority Johannesburg’s first white mayor since the end of apartheid.

Our first book makes a passionate case:

If mayors ruled the world, the more than 3.5 billion people (over half of the world’s population) who are urban dwellers and the many more in the exurban neighbourhoods beyond could participate locally and cooperate globally at the same time — a miracle of civic ‘glocality’ promising pragmatism instead of politics, innovation rather than ideology, and solutions in place of sovereignty.

This Week’s Books:

• A plea for mayors to be allowed to lead.
• The last mayor of a major city on how it went…until it didn’t.

Click to read on about the books and the back story