How do “sister cities” find each other and agree to be sisters?
In: 5760
Local government officials in different cities both looking for an excuse to award themselves with all-expenses-paid foreign trips funded by the taxpayer.
My aunt started the one in my hometown when she went to volunteer in Nicaragua. We’re both island towns so it was the oerfect connection, after it had grown to more than her and her friends the high school set up a summer exchange program and the chamber of commerce set it up an exchange. This was also Nicaragua in the 80’s and it could be pretty rough, she basically ended up smuggling dollars in and coffee out.
Sometimes they just share the same name. My girlfriend is from Tecumseh, Ontario & they’re twinned with Tecumseh, Michigan
i went to high school in los alamos, our sister city is sarov, russia. both of them develop nuclear weaponry and are (technically) closed towns. the parallels are uncanny with their places in the cold war
My city, Kansas City, MO, has an upscale shopping/dining area called the Country Club Plaza. It was built in the 1920s. It’s designed with a lot of Moorish Spanish architecture, including a half-scale version of [La Giralda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giralda), from Seville, Spain.
So now Seville is a sister city of Kansas City. Later, Seville was given a replica of a famous (well, famous here, anyway) statue in Kansas City, [The Scout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KC_Scout.jpg). Appropriately placed in Seville on a street named, “Avenida de Kansas City.”
In the end, is that a strong enough connection to be Sister Cities? What’s essentially an open-air mall has a mini replica of some tower in another city in another country? I guess.
We don’t really have any further cultural ties to Seville or Spain as a whole. Like many cities in the US Midwest, we have more historical connections to France through then New France via their early explorers and fur trappers and such. I’m not even sure the average KC resident knows about the Seville-connection of our Giralda replica, even though it’s one of the icons of our city, like The Scout (yes, a tower in a mall is an icon).
So yeah, that’s one example of how it works.
Paris and Rome are twin cities since 1956 and mutually decided not to sign any other agreement while major world capitals are often with several cities (NYC has 13 twin cities). The motto of the twinning between the two cities is “Only Paris is worthy of Rome; only Rome is worthy of Paris.”
Ann Arbor Mi donated a garbage truck to Juigalpa Nicaragua, their sister city. In the late 80s. We made a doc about it. Truck got a flat tire on its inaugural run on the way to the dump. There was a rubber embargo and no spare tire. Mayor Rito lost his upcoming election due to the trash fiasco. What an adventure it all became.
Thanks for this post. I had forgotten that the concept of sister-anything existed. I decided to look up my city’s sister and was fascinated to learn that it’s located in the Ukraine (I’m in the U.S.)!
Which means now, it’s personal. Go fuck yourself, Putin! You touch my sister city even once I’m braking your skull.
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