 According to the author, how should progressive urban cities function differently than states?
What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc As you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. "It is often said that great cities survived great empires," says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. "So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong."
 They should partner and contend with other cities to form international networks of commerce
 They should expand their operations into more rural areas to bring economic prosperity to those regions  They should maintain an isolationist approach from other cities as well as rural areas within their own nations  They should partner and contend with other cities to form international networks of commerce  They should work establish a symbiotic relationship with their states to ensure longevity of both entities