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Subnational governments entering the international arena through lobbying may be a turning point in global governance, but numerous challenges remain at regional level. This paper charts a municipal geography of the planet that is strongly conditioned by its capacity to respond to the dynamics of urbanisation and rural depopulation, and reflects on the need to structure more representative, supportive regional governance. With the global implementation of the 2030 Agenda focussing on the ability of local governments to institutionalise the “right to the city” and “leave no one behind”, the regional level becomes the ground in which territorial intermediation can help germinate the right to “leave no municipality behind”.

This paper synthesizes the main lines of work boosted in recent years by the UNESCO Chair in Intermediary Cities of the University of Lleida, with the aim to highlighting the relevance of an intermediary city that is the majority in the world's urban geography. It also plays a key role in the relationship between urban and rural areas. Aspects such as intermediation and territorial cohesion, human scale and local governance reinforce the idea of the intermediate city as a new paradigm in the global urbanization process, and as a key element in the implementation at local level of the 2030 Agenda.

“Economies of agglomeration” have acted as catalysts of the progress and modernisation of many nations in the Global South but have also contributed to unbalancing the territory, widening the gap between urban and rural populations and the accumulation of high environmental and social deficits. In contrast to the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the economies that make up the MINTs (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) have better territorial integration of their urban systems, with intermediate cities that act as “economies of intermediation” with the rural hinterlands, and which could contribute to achieving the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals. The United Nations Habitat iii of October 2016 placed intermediary cities at the heart of the New Urban Agenda. The aim is to promote national urban policies in many of the economies of the Global South, allowing them to strengthen their role as the main instrument of economic integration and regional cohesion.