1 According to a recent UN report, in 1950 “more than two-thirds (70%) of people worldwide lived in rural settlements and less than one-third (30 per cent) in urban settlements. In 2014, 54% of the world’s population is urban, and the authors of the report estimate that this proportion will be around 66% by 2050 [1].

2 Simultaneously with the explosion of the urban phenomenon, a new logic is gradually establishing itself in the world, and a brand-new culture of public governance is emerging and taking shape.

3 The metropolis, which is now covered by a legal construct in France, is not however an entirely new phenomenon. On the other hand, what is entirely new is the current environment in which major cities are emerging and developing. An environment marked by a genuine change in our society which, since the second half of the 1970s and following the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, has seen the State – to some extent everywhere in the world – undergo profound change under the effects of an economic crisis followed by a crisis in public finance. [2]

4 The current pressing need to render our public finances sustainable is in fact a major factor determining numerous public policies and the future of the metropolis in particular. In this regard, the establishment of major cities in France is happening at both the best and the worst time. The worst time in as much as the public finance situation is not good, and without adequate financial resources the most beautiful institutional constructs are nothing but castles in the sand. This is why failing to consider major cities with budgetary constraints and failing to provide a clear financial (in particular fiscal) status will simply condemn them to future confusion. And the best time in as much as their dynamism could effectively support an economic development strategy and consequently help to reverse the infernal logic of uncontrolled public deficit and public debt, which is likely to seriously compromise investment and consequently economic growth.

5 We need to bear in mind that since the late 1970s we have been undergoing a process during which difficulties have been heaped upon difficulties. We have been waiting around forty years for conclusive solutions to appear, but they are still not here. Nothing has been stabilised. Nothing of substance has been resolved if we agree to place public welfare at the heart of our concerns.

6 Forty years ago we were surprised and concerned by a crisis that was initially thought to be merely economic, but has progressively turned into a structural crisis. This has resulted in a situation that is seen as practically normal, in particular for the younger generations who have known nothing else.

7 It was also forty years ago that the world changed with the globalisation of trade, new information and communication technologies, dashed hopes and intellectual trends that change and refrain from addressing any major social projects.

8 Forty years of changes in our society, starts, successive crises, hesitation, doubt, uncertainty, tension and sometimes hope, albeit quickly dashed. During these forty years, everything has been tried: public interventionism, non-interventionism, privatisation, demand-side economics followed by or combined with supply-side economics, tax cuts followed by tax hikes followed by tax cuts again, decentralisation, etc.

9 During this period, the world has ultimately lived through forty years of disarray, as well as the deepening of inequalities, suffering for many of our fellow humans, children, women, men, and of course the most vulnerable amongst us. Regardless of country, the social cost of this change is there to see, and in some cases it is colossal.

10 Throughout these forty years, public finance has been on the front line since by its nature it is fundamentally political, and it is a change in the political model that we have been living through, and continue to live through. Just as the State is taking on another meaning, public finance is taking on different forms, which we are still having great difficulty identifying. In addition to the traditional democratic sense inherent in public finance, more or less recently – depending on the country – it has taken on an economic sense, the managerial sense. It is well known that this latter is a precondition for leaving the crisis in public finance behind. It is based on trust in experts, sometimes accompanied by mistrust of the political classes.

11 Just as we can doubt the effectiveness of the strategy of eliminating existing imbalances alone, so can we doubt that the revival can come from economic theories or institutions that, having proved their worth in the 19th and 20th centuries, are no longer really suitable to the current context. It has to be recognised that we do not create enough and we rely too much on repeating institutional and intellectual models which are past their sell-by-date. With regard to the uninterrupted succession of crises since the late 1970s, and the responses that have been made to them, the question is not whether we should continue with classical liberal policies or whether we should return to Keynesian policies. The priority must be first of all to correctly identify the current reality. Because the 21st century is and will be quite different in all aspects: international, national, political, sociological, ideological and economic. Indeed if we look a little closer, contemporary society is the result and the fruit of a slow process of metamorphosis in our society. If we fail to identify this context, there is a risk of us fire-fighting problems individually and ending up with chaos, a dehumanised system born of an inability to think, in other words to understand and to interpret a rapidly changing world.

12 Consequently, it is crucial that we encourage intellectual audacity, stimulate political creativity so that we can invent the architecture of a new social model and a new governance for public finances, because that will be its very backbone. Major cities, regardless of whether they are international, represent bridgeheads for the construction of the economics and politics of the future. They open up new horizons for us, and give us a chance to innovate. They bring us a new way of organising ourselves and a networked decision-making process that preface the figures of tomorrow’s political model. And they will also have to greatly shakeup some intellectual certainties and established institutional situations.

13 In other words you could say that, through major cities, it is a genuine social project that is taking shape and it is also definitely the major issue for political, economic and social thinking in the coming years. Of course, we are facing a complex composite whole that may raise doubts as to its overall consistency, and therefore the ability to control it. At a time when a financial strategy is essential to control a public debt and deficit that are liable to jeopardise social equilibrium, it is crucial that we invent a new decision-making process. But it is not about going back to the quasi-caricatured vertical, centralised State of yesterday’s France, or about allowing autonomous, horizontal powers to develop ad infinitum, ultimately leading to neo-feudalism. The right path is therefore a narrow one, since it can only pass through a system combining unity and diversity. [3]

14 The objective must be to move beyond all manner of divisions and to shatter the partitioned conception of society, a conception that neither recognises nor formalises the multiple interactions and multi-rationality that characterise them. Ultimately, it is about building a multi-centred order that could be called an order of relative autonomies: an order organised both vertically and horizontally, in other words transversely, governance networked at local, national, European and even international level.