The latter attracted the monarchs of Portugal and Spain and the leaders of Italian city states.
Nor have city states authored every advance, but take the development of finance.
From the city states of Sumeria, Classical Greece, and Renaissance Italy, to the Dutch Republic, lands with decentralized governance have fostered great gains in science, industry and arts.
Dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici, the book draws on examples from history, of Alexander the Great and of the German city states, to teach its readers some eternal lessons.
They are also much too quick to assume that the sort of blueprints that work for city states like Singapore or small countries like Denmark might work for goliaths like the United States.
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The only states that have successfully replaced it since then have been the city states of Venice, Florence and elsewhere, which produced great riches and even the Renaissance of art, science, humanism and culture of the 15th century, but never achieved a set of stable, respected, still-less national institutions.
When city-states became nations, very few people understood the implications, but the Medici did.
And the east Asian city-states have the political positions, density and robust transit ridership to make it work.
The difference of course being that the Greeek city-states had strong safeguards, usually, against leaders claiming divinity, or anything resembling divinity.
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Italy remains at heart a collection of city-states, and much of the fashion industry's support for the arts is essentially local.
In the affluent city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore nearly 40% of people now have mobile phones, the highest penetration in the world outside Scandinavia.
The city-states of ancient Greece had populations smaller than Iceland's today: Athens, at its peak in the age of Pericles, had perhaps 200, 000 people, slaves included.
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In the Middle Ages, for example, city-states in present-day Italy or Spain traded from a position of strength with north European suppliers of textiles and north African sellers of gold.
In the power vacuum that accompanied the decline of the Holy Roman Empire, a number of large and efficient city-states evolved, all having an unusually potent sense of a separate identity.
The two other city-states should maintain their leftward tilt.
During the height of their civilization in the 8th century, the Maya recorded dates and deeds at dozens of city-states, from births and battles to the triumphant wrenching of trophies from enemies.
They had an important political raison d'etre as well, however, bringing together representatives from all the various independent city-states that at that time made up the Greek world, states that more often than not were at war with each other.
Explaining the rise of Barcelona as a naval power to rival Italian city-states like Pisa and Genoa, he notes the balanced diet of Catalan sailors: more biscuit and cheese than the Venetians, less wine than the Neapolitans, but plenty of garlic, onions and spices to make hard biscuits more palatable.
With 20 million people, more than the populations of Libya, Lebanon and Jordan combined, Cairo is the largest city in Africa and the Middle East. (By contrast, the most populous city in the United States, New York City, is a bit more than 8 million.) Cairo's size has increased more than sixfold in the past 60 years.
The charter, invoked by Leicester City Council, states markets cannot take place regularly, within six-and-two-third miles of the city.
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Practically every big U.S. city and most states would love to become the next hot-biotech cluster.
Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected official from a major city in the United States.
As background, Campbell is located in Camden, New Jersey, one of the poorest, most dangerous city in the United States.
The mission of Eskenazi Health is to make Indianapolis the healthiest large city in the United States by the year 2020.
Berkeley, California, as the local joke goes, is the only city in the United States with its own foreign policy.
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As the most populous city in the United States, New York has plenty to offer in terms of first-class restaurants, world-famous museums and far-out fashions.
Portland also tops the list of being the most cycle-friendly large city in the United States, with 6.3% of commuters travelling by bike.
In fact, late last year Fort Myers was projected to have the highest net job increase (23%) of any city in the United States.
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Those are just the vehicles that look like the cars, trucks and buses one might see on the streets of any city in the United States.
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