Before I left for Liverpool, I moderated a forum at Mayor Daley's U.S.-Arab Mayors Forum. Our topic was "The City as Catalyst: The Creative Potential of Urbanization." Our panel included Vladimir Platonov, President of the Moscow City Council; Ahmed Shareef, Undersecretary of Municipal Affairs in Abu Dhabi; and Lois Weisberg, Cultural Commissioner of Chicago. Four insights shared by panelists struck me as important. Clearly, local government is ascendant. Moscow and Abu Dhabi have both undergone major government restructure -- not playing at the edges, but real overhaul. The changes were driven by the need for local government to solve problems on their own. Abu Dhabi has ambition to be one of the top five governments in the world. Think about that -- a society that believes in government enough to have ambition for it. And this is no modest ambition. One of the key strategies to become one of the world's top government is to become completely transparent. Moscow has 160 ethnic groups. A major challenge for government is how to make Moscow feel like home to all of them. And Lois Weisberg, a true force of nature, related the story of how Chicago decided to celebrate the millennium. "We had a unique way to solve the problem of what to do," she explained. "We asked everyone how to solve it. "