A surreal moment on a New York rooftop saw Rotheram searching for a Band-Aid for the late diplomat Henry Kissinger, who had cut his head and was dripping blood to the floor. Kissinger repaid the kindness by telling Rotheram his favorite soccer team was Manchester United — arch-rivals of Rotheram’s Liverpool FC.
Liverpool’s cultural fame preceding him, Rotheram found himself next to Bloomberg on the dinner seating plan. He recalled: “The hypothesis that he put forward was that more than 50 percent of the world’s population are going to be living in cities in the next couple of years, and we know it’s much more than that now, and it’s growing exponentially.
“And so it’s cities where the problem will exist, but it will be cities that have to find the solutions, and therefore, by sharing best practice across the globe, we can all enjoy the sort of ideas that come from that melting pot. That was where we were hooked.”
The program and subsequent work with other cities, said Rotheram, “is around how you can use data differently, how you can stimulate economies in a slightly different way, how you can use AI, how culture is an important part.” (Bloomberg’s team declined to be interviewed for this piece).
There were moments where Britain looked small by comparison, albeit in a good way. At one point Burnham stood up and told the 40 fellow mayors about the problem of homelessness in Manchester — but the numbers involved are far smaller than in the U.S., as the city had 268 rough sleepers on a sample night in 2017. Ben Houchen, the Conservative mayor of Tees Valley who attended the same course, recalled: “You could literally see every American mayor look at each other like, what the fuck?”
There are similarities between the Bloomberg and Burnham approaches — the former led public health crackdowns such as an indoor smoking ban, while Burnham has pushed for a more devolved health policy after the Covid-19 pandemic — but differences, too.