Subsidiarity and the City

Abstract: It seems to be a near universal feature of the intellectual project of justifying enhanced formal and material autonomy for cities that adherents invoke subsidiarity and believe that it offers a presumptive endorsement of the case for city autonomy. This chapter examines the symbiotic interplay between subsidiarity and the city, by exploring four types of justifications for increasing city autonomy—the consistency argument, the expertise argument, the stake-holding argument, and the distinctiveness argument—and the extent to which they track with four models of subsidiarity—subsidiarity-as-federalism, subsidiarity-as-efficiency, subsidiarity-as-democracy, and subsidiarity-as-respect-for-distinctiveness. It will be argued that this reflective exploration yields important learning opportunities on both sides. For subsidiarity scholars, closer analysis of the concrete case of city autonomy exposes the dangers of eliding the differences between subsidiarity and federalism and between subsidiarity and efficiency, and showcases the surprising attractiveness of a model of subsidiarity that focuses on the distinctiveness of the (putative) decision-making level involved. For city scholars, deeper reflection on the challenges that subsidiarity scholarship poses to it will demand, first, greater clarity about how the city is to be defined and, second, greater specificity about the level of autonomy the city should bear.