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It’s the new urban blight. Across the country, city governments are in varying states of disarray, if not chaos. The range is wide, from the badly governed fiasco in Toronto to outright corruption in Montreal and boondoggle-prone governments in Vancouver, Calgary and other Western cities. Taxes are rising, spending is soaring, but roads are crumbling and the basics often ignored.

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How this came to be is not chance. One central reason is the rise of a new urban ideology, one that sees city politics not as a provider of services to voters, but as a new paradigm in which mayors and local politicians become the stewards of some new utopian vision. If Mayors Ruled the World is the title of a new book being endorsed by Toronto-based Richard Florida, a New City guru. The book argues that we award city governments more power and create “muscular mayors.”

In the New City, nothing is too big or too small for municipal councillors to focus on, from half-billion-dollar sports arenas to plastic-bag bans and schemes aimed at preparing for extreme climate change. As Mr. Florida put it recently, cities are “arenas filled with possibility” where “muscular mayors” devise and implement “a host of bold initiatives on everything from crime and education to sustainability and carbon reduction.”