Making Constitutionalism Progressive Again: A Primer on City Constitutionalism and State (Re)Formation in a New Constitutional Geography

Abstract

Constitutionalism has been thinned with the idea of progress fading to the background of today’s polytheistic constitutional landscape, while cities become the symbol of progressive values. Putting cities – megacities in particular – at the centre of the global constitutional map, Ran Hirschl’s City, State: Constitutionalism and the Megacity, not only opens a new frontier for comparative constitutional studies but also suggests a progressive constitutional agenda with implications to re-imagination of political spaces. Challenging what he calls ‘spatial statism’ that conceives constitutional geography on the basis of nation-states, City, State envisages a bi-focal mapping of constitutional space where the city finds its own constitutional place vis-a-vis the corporate body of the state and suggests a radical departure from the modernist constitutional tradition moulded in the long process of state formation in Europe. Engaging with Hirschl’s manifesto for the urban turn in comparative constitutional law, this essay advances an alternative version of city constitutionalism aimed at reconnecting constitutionalism and progressive values through a shift of focus from cities to what makes cities attractive and progressive. It argues that Hirschl falls short of giving full expression to a progressive city-oriented constitutional agenda as he shifts focus between cities in general and megacities and implicitly inherits the underlying territoriality of spatial statism in his constitutional prognosis – the recognition of cities in the territorial constitution. As an alternative to Hirsch’s formalist prescription, this essay suggests conceiving of constitutional space imaginatively to put cities as an incubator of progressive values on a new constitutional agenda. With attention shifting from cities as territorial units of constitutional ordering to what Iris Young called ‘urbanity’ in addressing contemporary urban challenges in constitutional terms, an aterritorial city constitutionalism can emerge, envisaging a changing constitutional geography driven by human flow under which state formation can be reconceived in a progressive way.