Aaron Straup Cope:

Between plane-living and the Internets we may be midway through the process of distilling every place on Earth down to one of a half-dozen archetypal city-states but until that happens trying to affect a person’s relationship to the history and geography of whatever piece of dirt they call home will continue to be a source of tension.

Eighteen city-states within a global Imperial political model = late 21st Century.

I first began hearing the city-state meme in the mid-1990s. An awarness of it, or a tendency to quote it as Aaron Cope has done, is almost a marker of a generation. John Ralston Saul and his wife are part of the last generation of Canadian nationalists, always ready to write books on Canada and to talk about what it means to be Canadian. Meanwhile, people my own age, in my own city, started Spacing magazine, which is very much of the city-state mentality.