Almost two-thirds of US rural and small-town voters chose Trump, while a similar proportion in the cities chose Hillary Clinton. In the English countryside, 55% voted for Brexit, while cities as varied as Bristol, Glasgow, Cardiff, Liverpool and London voted even more decisively for remain. The stark and growing political division of the US and the UK by population density has been one of the most striking, if under-reported, revelations of the great 2016 electoral reckoning.

Yet the US election and the EU referendum have also shown that even the most confident, expansive cities are politically quite weak. Not simply because their preferred causes lost narrowly in both cases; but because patterns of urban life and both countries’ electoral systems are increasingly out of sync.

According to the Office for National Statistics, there are currently more than a million non-British EU citizens living in London – almost an eighth of the city’s population. Much of the sense of present-day London as a teeming and important global city has come from this influx. Yet none of these converts to the capital, nor foreign residents from outside the EU, nor the more than a million foreigners estimated to be living in other British cities, can vote in British national elections or referendums, only in local ones (assuming they have bothered to register during a stay that may be brief). Their presence may have a huge economic and social impact, but it has little political weight.

In the US, the revival of many cities has also left them under-represented. Between 1950 and 2015, the proportion of urban Americans rose from 64% to 82%. But the ancient, creaky workings of the electoral college mean that the recent population booms in downtown Los Angeles and Brooklyn, for example, have simply concentrated liberal voters even further in urbanised states that were already easy Democratic wins. Clinton’s futile popular vote victory suggests that hipsters are not a decisive electoral demographic, or at least not yet.

The very thing that makes modern cities vibrant and culturally dominant – increasing population density, and the atmosphere and networks that result from it – has left them politically under-represented. Meanwhile, the scattered and thinned-out populations of many struggling rural and small town areas distribute their voters through the British and American electoral systems much more efficiently.