Mayors: Citizens are the Mayor

SO FAR, I’VE RESEARCHED OVER 30 MAYORS from around the world for this series of posts and I’ve been surprised at how diversified they were when they first came to office. Almost half of them come from the educational or non-profit sector, with many of that group championing human rights and citizen engagement. Then there were billionaire businessmen, like New York’s Michael Bloomberg, who have left their mark. We continue to hear that mayoralty candidates require business experience, but it intriguing to note how many of the most successful mayors come from other sectors.Like Park Won-Soon, the mayor of Seoul, South Korea, who was first elected in 2011. Emerging from humble origins, he nevertheless ended up graduating from both Harvard and Stanford Universities, specializing in law and economics. Yet he remained fascinated by citizen engagement – so much so that he opted to run for mayor of Seoul as an independent candidate and triumphed with 53% of the vote.If you were to ask Won-Soon today what qualifies him as mayor now, since he had no previous experience, he doesn’t emphasize his law or economic background, but rather his experience as a human rights advocate and a community organizer. Put simply: he believes in the bottom-up form of politics, where citizens grow active enough to implore the political elite to make changes. He comes by it honestly, having founded his own non-governmental organization in 1994, called People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy. He went on to establish the Beautiful Foundation, dedicated to encouraging voluntarism and community service.When deciding to run for mayor as in independent, his opponents were quick to point out his lack of political experience and business acumen. What they didn’t count on was his appeal with younger generations between the ages of 20-40. He eventually pulled in some 60% of those groups to win the election.No sooner had he won than he developed the phrase that characterized his entire outlook towards political purpose: “Citizens are the mayor.” He’s prolific with social media and inaugurated a “citizen as mayor for a day” program.In his first year, he moved government’s efforts from large development projects to issues of inequality, affordable housing, renewable energy, local agriculture, and indoor urban mini-gardens. He was initially ridiculed by political professionals, but citizens took to his direction in ways that altered the prevailing customs of politics as elite-driven.He likes to say that a mayor should be the embodiment of his neighbours. How many times have we heard that in Canada recently? “I’ve been working for ‘us’ my entire life,” he said in a recent interview, once again linking his fate with the people as opposed to some mere political agenda. His accomplishments are all the more remarkable given that Seoul is a city of 10 million inhabitants. To manage a city like that takes much more than business or legal experience; it requires the ability to inspire and view a city’s main resource as it people, not its money.As the old political order, and the kind of politicians that once benefitted from it, recedes into history, it is being replaced by a new kind of organized humanity that, difficult as it is, puts the fate of future communities in the hands of those who live in them. It’s the next emanation of democracy and we’d better start voting for it.