The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Inter-Urban Cross-Border Government on China Miéville's The City and the City

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This article focuses on China Miéville’s The City and the City, working towards an in-depth analysis of the role of ‘Copula Hall’, a fictional municipal government that administrates the concerns of two theoretically independent city-states, in the context of cross-border governance. Having considered the mutually constituting roles of the city, this paper will then examine how Copula Hall is used to create order out of municipal chaos. This article draws from literary analysis, and a number of spatial theorists to address current questions about the feasibility of managing interest groups in our increasingly diverse, and occasionally confrontational, modern cities.