Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Building Better Cities.

About Benjamin Barber's TED Talk

Political theorist Benjamin Barber argues that cities and city mayors are the key to bypassing political gridlock and solving many of our global challenges.

About Benjamin Barber

Barber was catapulted into the media spotlight soon after Sept. 11, when his book Jihad Vs. McWorld, published several years earlier, took on new relevance.

In his most recent work, If Mayors Ruled the World, Barber explains how decentralized local governments can be more flexible — and more in tune with their constituents — than their federal counterparts.

Barber is a senior research scholar at the City University of New York. He is also the project director of CivWorld and the Global Parliament of Mayors project at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, CUNY. The first meeting of the Global Parliament of Mayors is scheduled for 2016.

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