The Business of Cities Greg Clark Main Paper June 2011

The Business of Cities City Indexes in 2011

Greg Clark

Greg Clark Greg Clark is an international advisor on city and metropolitan development. Current roles include: i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii.

Senior Fellow, ULI, EMEA/India. Chairman of the OECD LEED Forum on Development Agencies and Investment Strategies Advisor to the World Bank on Urbanisation Knowledge Platform Chairman of British BIDs (Business Improvement Districts) Advisor on Cities and Urban Development to global corporations. Advisor to major cities and metropolitan areas world-wide. Visiting Professor, City Leadership, Cass Business School, City of London. Writer. Commentator, speaker, conference moderator.

www.gregclark.com

1.

st

Introduction: the 21 Century and The New Urban Age: what do we know about cities?

The number of people living in cities worldwide is increasing by more than the population of Britain every i year. By 2030, it is estimated that the proportion of the human population living in cities will rise to 60%, ii increasing further to 70% by 2050. As such nations are progressively more dependent on cities for vital services, functions, and international dynamism. ‘Global cities’ have emerged as the decisive physical nodes of iii the global economy, of environment, information systems, infrastructure and of leisure and culture. The role of cities in all aspects of public and commercial life is rising rapidly. In conjunction with cities’ gradual accumulation of economic powers and political responsibilities, the contemporary context presents an urgent impetus to evaluate how cities can lead and innovate. The world is entering a new cycle of development, with the economic crisis and restructuring of 2007 – 2010 largely over and new energy infusing the investment and development agenda once more. Moreover cities are confronted with the inescapable reality that already damaging climate change is potentially made more dangerous by rapid urbanisation unless the form, design and management of cities is revised. Tools, strategies, and trends forged in the present are set to shape how the new cycle unfolds and how the challenges of an urbanised world will be met. City leadership challenges facing the world, therefore, have just got much bigger. Early indications suggest that in 2011 city leaders are prepared to undertake key roles in shaping the forthcoming cycle. Inevitably they are committed to persevering with those trends that have survived the flux of the recession, while embracing profound change where new ways of thinking are demanded. In terms of continuity, the quest for quality of life remains the key overarching goal for many city leaders because it is the profound common ingredient uniting the needs of citizens, businesses, investors, and visitors in a city. Quality of life was a pivotal response of cities to the hyper-mobile world that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, and it remains the means to attract those who possess locational mobility, and meet the needs of those who lack that privilege. Local amenities, connectivity, and good local public services therefore remain essential to the urban project. In order to achieve these liveability advantages, most of the world’s mega-cities, and even more numerous historic and de-industrialising cities, still need to address ongoing substantial infrastructure deficits. Existing infrastructure, including transport links, energy storage, waste management, and housing, has to be renewed, managed, and in many cases re-financed, while investment and reinvestment is critical to create new infrastructure that can cope with the challenges of growth, restructuring and adaptation. These new and updated infrastructures will be essential tools for city managers to meet economic and social goals, but their achievement entails, in current conditions, an unaffordable public finance burden. These financial restrictions are exacerbated by enduring local government constraints, amid outdated nation state paradigms which allocate resources in ways that fail to address new and future imperatives. Another theme which grew in the previous business cycle and is now a focal point in 2011 is the role of sustainability and the evolution of ‘Smart City’ concept. (see section ….) City leaders have gradually gained access to technological management arrangements that can reduce urban carbon outputs while delivering fiscal efficiency. These technologies’ improved precision and flexibility is driving a second wave of sustainability through city government. The sustainability agenda is thereby usefully merging with liveability ambitions, enabling both fields to be handled within one regime of urban design upgrades. At the same time, city leaders continue to seek to lead changes in citizen behaviour in relation to waste and recycling, energy use and supply, transport modes and use, and other areas of civic life. The ambition to facilitate residents to make lifestyle choices that contribute most to collective wellbeing has moved towards the centre of the leadership agenda at least partly because of the marriage of sustainability and liveability goals. Amid these continuities, substantial new imperatives have emerged for city leaders over the past three years. Citizen trust and public confidence in political leadership has been substantially eroded by the crisis, breeding a widespread and destructive cynicism. City governments, especially but not only in the West, have the new challenge of generating civic renewal, forging new relationships with the public based on the principles of patience, realism, ambition and communication. The need to articulate and communicate collective aspirations ‘downwards’ has become critical just as has ‘upwardly’ rearticulating cities’ relationships with national and supra-national systems. Those cities lacking ‘self-governing’ powers and largely dependent on public transfer payments, are in constant tension with central governments and supra-national bodies such as

the European Union, whose emphasis on fiscal balance and rigorous redistribution often clash with urban economic competitiveness. City leaders now have to make a new case for urban arenas as the competitive edge of nations, the key sites for CO2 reductions, and the incubators for progressive social development. Challenging higher tiers of government during the early years of this cycle is essential to acquiring the tools needed to succeed across the whole cycle. New challenges of economic strategy underpin cities’ quest for success in the next cycle. The Next Economy is emerging rapidly, with cities emerging as the indispensable sites of knowledge creation, entrepreneurship, and face to face transactions. To optimally leverage of these sources of competitive advantage, cities have the task of serving the needs of growing markets around the world with distinctive and sustainable offerings. Many cities have invested considerable time and money in devising new economic strategies that identify which leading sectors to prioritise and building new identities around these sectors that can effectively communicate to new customers and investors in the emerging world. Strategic economic positioning is accompanied by the pressure to increase, through innovation, the investment rate in the new cycle so as to ensure vital existing assets do not become liabilities. In a climate of severely constrained public finance and debt finance, new financing tools are being explored – from municipal bonds to tax increments, value capture techniques, special investment funds, public land leverage and user-fee tolls. Partnerships with institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds, niche fund managers, and syndicated investment clubs are under negotiation in cities everywhere, leading to a new investment terrain. Finally the new business cycle has brought into clarity the reality of demographic change that is profoundly shaping cities’ revenue capabilities and service delivery demands. As well as increased mobility, especially of younger knowledge workers and aspirational immigrants, cities are confronted with dramatically extended life expectancies often coupled with low birth rates. As a result urban life is for the most part becoming more and more racially, socially and economically diverse. This produces greater heterogeneity in citizenry aspirations, and the need for cities to provide distinctive services and representation to different population segments. 2.

Building the performance science of Cities

Collectively these new and long-established challenges for cities and their leaders are set to unleash a period of profound and practical innovation. Even if many cities are not formally empowered, active national and supra-national spheres will have to become more focussed on solving city problems in a more co-ordinated way. But to increase the accuracy of this focus, and to enhance the capacity of all cities to address shared imperatives, a further task remains; building the management and performance science of cities. In the last business cycle there had been a wide consensus of what constituted medium-term success for aspiring cities; mobility and space to grow, quality of life and place, skills of labour force, industrial structure, transparency of business environment, concentrations of banking and insurance firms, and city branding. But even within this now slightly outdated horizon, our systems of public information - relatively rich with national level information and led by major institutions such as the OECD, European Union, World Bank, United Nations – could tell us comparatively little about which cities are succeeding or improving and how or why they are succeeding. For at least the last decade we have had a decisively urbanising world, but largely statist information systems. The science of city success has therefore remained imprecisely formulated or tracked. The pursuit of rigorously measuring city performance does, however, have at its disposal a flourishing collection of city indexes, benchmarks and comparative rankings. An ever-expanding range of governmental institutions, private consultancies, research foundations and media outlets produce these reports, at domestic, regional and global levels. Together they offer a critical insight into how various constituencies – business, political, cultural, civic and academic – view the changing fortunes of cities in a globalising world. They can be used to identify the ingredients of city success over five or ten business cycles. Indexes provide tools for comparing everything from commute times to foreign investment success, from brand power to broadband speeds. Environmental, social and economic indicators are all given in depth coverage by these studies. While each by itself offers only a partial view of the city, dictated by the information it acquires and the focus it chooses, in synthesis these indexes potentially encourage a holistic picture of urban success and city futures to emerge. Together they offer us a diverse and valuable set of outlooks on cities,

ranging from global forecasts on mega-cities in the international economy, to intricate studies of mid-size regional city performance in tackling sustainability. 3.

The attraction and possibilities of urban performance management

The global urbanisation phenomenon, and the highly competitive dynamics set to define the new business cycle, have gradually persuaded city leaders to become more interested in comparative evaluation, benchmarking, indexes, and rankings. While the recession has in some instances prompted a re-territorialised attachment to the nation-state paradigm, cities have – for economic, cultural and mobility reasons - become further untethered from national systems and urban hierarchies, and increasingly thrust onto an international scale of competition. Cities are inevitably coping differently with these changes, and some are performing better than others, both as engines of trade and innovation, and as exemplars of climate change mitigation and social inequality management. Benchmarks, reports and indexes provide particularly useful tools in today’s globalised economy for a number of reasons: - Diagnostic/prior assessment: enables the development of analysis about a strengths/weaknesses, and a diagnosis of where attention and effort may need to be focused.

city’s

- Comparative ‘pegging’: Reports, benchmarks and indexes usually compare cities against one another, and as such can be used to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of different cities. This is useful not only for outside observers, but for the cities themselves who can accordingly develop strategies which focus on their weakest competitive areas. - Pedagogy: Reports, benchmarks and indexes are essentially educative tools. By uncovering trends and examining the reasons behind city’s successes and failures they can prove instructive both for cities themselves and for other interested parties. Small businesses and multinational firms are coming to see cities as important ‘emerging markets’ for services, products, and sites, and benefit from learning how to develop long term approaches to urban markets. Those who wish to partner with cities for their own purposes may have to support city efforts better and embrace the potential of cities to achieve their civic and metropolitan goals. - Leveraging/persuading: Cities which are performing well can use these benchmarks, reports and indexes as “evidence” to demonstrate their strengths to prospective investors, inhabitants or workers. For example, Zurich and Geneva have used their high rankings in quality of life benchmarks to encourage investment from a wide range of firms. Where cities are very close rivals, benchmarks, reports and indices can be used to gain leverage over direct competitors. - Evaluation / review: Reports, benchmarks and indexes are often produced on an annual basis, or at least at regular intervals, using the same criteria and methods for comparison of cities from year to year. This allows cities to review their recent performance relative to their competitors. Benchmarks thus also prove useful if a city has implemented a major change e.g. introduced tax incentives or launched a new development strategy, as the results of such a change may be assessed by comparing past and present city rankings. - Home truths: Reports, benchmarks and indexes can illustrate “home truths” to cities which may not have been apparent to them before, highlighting problem areas or underlining particularly successes. Much of the impetus for Mumbai policy leaders’ efforts to focus urgently on developing as an international financial centre, for example, was derived from comparative assessment revealing the iv city’s shortcomings in relation to other world cities’ financial services provision.

4.

City Indexes, Benchmarks, and Scorecards

The advantages to using these comparative tools are clear, but benchmarks reports and indexes are tools are still, rightly, employed with caution. There are a number of ways in which error, distortion or partiality may be incorporated into these comparative tools. The more information the user has about the background to the benchmark, report or index the more objectively they may be used. Possible areas of error include: -

Quality of data. Issues such as qualitative versus quantitative data, time lags in data, absence of time series, and patchy geographic coverage, or limited segmentation are each issues with different data sources.

-

Comparability of data: Different indexes are not always directly comparable due to differing parameters used in their construction (in terms of both space and time). E.g. “London” may refer to Central London, Greater London or even the City of London

-

Geographical scale at which data collected: Data collected at too large a scale may overlook smaller scale intricacies, e.g. unemployment rates are highly divergent in different boroughs of London. In addition as indices, benchmarks and reports are compiled from data collected at different scales, this in turn affects comparability of data

-

Perception data versus performance data: Where data used in the formation of benchmarks or indices is qualitative rather than quantitative, issues of objectivity may arise. For example, ranking the quality of life in different cities around the world is inherently a subjective exercise – what one researcher perceives as contributing positively to quality of life e.g. presence of wireless internet, another may see as irrelevant or even a negative. Equally some indices are solely based on perceptions, e.g. the Anholt Brand Index quantifies people’s perceptions of different city brands, and are therefore necessarily more subjective than indices based on performance data

-

Independence of assessment: Assessment of indices is made by people, and as such is subject to significant subjectivities, and may only provide clues to the perception of particular audiences and constituencies.

-

Who produces? Who buys?: Many benchmarks, reports or indexes are made with a particular purpose or particular audience in mind – in this sense they are a form of policy driven research. Neutrality of findings and recommendations is therefore not always assured as inputs may be doctored to ensure the outcomes best suit the needs of interested parties.

-

Multiple or singular data sources?: Those benchmarks, reports and indices which are compiled from a singular data source are necessarily more prone to inaccuracies and subjectivities than those which are compiled from a wider range of sources.

-

Peer Review element. Bearing in mind these possible areas for error then, it is clear that the real value of benchmarks, reports and indexes is the potential that they offer to use and compare several at a time. It is only in doing so that their limits of accuracy will be overcome.

In this report, over a hundred reports, multi-layered indexes and single-variable rankings are explored and mined for their insights into urban presents and futures. Below we list each according to the area of urban performance it examines.

All-round comprehensive studies Name Type MORI Global Power City 6 field all-round city ranking Index

Scope

# Cities

2008

Global

35

Global

500



Select city in-depth coverage

Global

26



5 field all-round city ranking

Global

65

4 field all-round city ranking

Global

40

Type

Scope

# Cities

Employment and growth Tracker

Global

150

GDP analysis and forecast

Global

151

GDP and household income forecast

Global

25

National

102

National

100

National

367

National

200

National

10

2009 

2010 

2011 

Quantitative-led

Global Urban economic focused Competitiveness Project indicator study PwC/PNYC Cities of Opportunity AT Kearney Global Cities Index Knight Frank Global Cities Survey



 



 







Macro economic performance Indexes Name Brookings Global Metro Monitor PwC Global Metropolitan GDP McKinsey Urban World Top 25 hot spots by 2025 Market Watch Best US Cities for Business Brookings US Metro ssMonitor Kiplinger Best Cities for the Next Decade Milken Institute Best Performing Cities (US) Ajilon Top 10 Cities to Find Employment

Employment and growth Tracker Employment and growth Tracker Creative employment, income and growth tracker Employment and growth Tracker Employment Tracker

2008

2009

2010

2011 

  

 







 









 









Finance, investment and business environment Indexes Name Z/Yen Global Financial Centres Index C&W European Cities Monitor GaWC World City Network fDi Cities of the Future fDi Global Outlook IBM Global Location Trends Tholons Global Outsourcing Cities TBoT Scorecard on Prosperity America Economia Best Cities for Doing Business in Latin America CEPEC Urban Investment Attractiveness Index IW Consulting German City rankings Capgemini US Metro

Type

Scope

# Cities

Executive survey

Global

70

Executive survey

Regional

36

Global

500+

Regional /Global

600+

Global

50+

Global

20

Industry survey and secondary research

Global

50

Comprehensive data indicators

Global

24

Comprehensive data indicators and survey

Regional

37

Data indicators

Regional

48

Comprehensive data indicators

National

100







Population tracker

National

10







Company location survey Data indicators plus expert assessment Investment project and capital measures Investment project count

2008

2009

2010

2011 

















 

 





 

 



Wealth Index Portfolio.com Small Business Vitality Rankings Forbes Billionaire Index KPMG Competitive Alternatives: Tax CASS Blue Book of Urban Competitiveness (China)

Six part data formula

National

100

Population tracker

Global

10

Tax calculation

Global

41

National

294

Scope

# Cities

Global

140

Global

221

Key metrics

Global

20

Editor assessment

Global

25

Quantitative-led economic focused indicator study

 



 









2008

2009

2010

2011

Quality of Life Indexes Name

Type

Comprehensive Economist Liveability Unit metrics Comprehensive Mercer Quality of Living metrics

IBM, Commuter Pain Survey Monocle Quality of Living Gallup Healthways Well Being Index Eurobarometer, quality of life survey AskMen Top 29 Best Cities to Live in Liveability Index, CII (India) Symantec, Riskiest Cities for Cybercrime (US) Richard Florida, America’s Top 25 Cities for Recent College Graduates Portfolio.com Best Places for Young Adults to Live NAVTEQ, Europe’s Most Congested Cities Britain’s Top Cycling Cities AskMen Top 10 BicycleFriendly Cities Most Bike-Friendly Cities in America Forbes – America’s Top 25 Cities for Shopping Portfolio.com Top retirement metropolitan areas Farmers Insurance Safest Cities to Live Careerbliss Happiest Cities to Work Kiplinger Top 10 Cities for Commuting



 

 

  





 



Resident survey

National

Resident survey

Regional

75

Global

29

Metrics

National

37



Data-led

National

50



Economic and population metrics

National

223

Economic metrics

National

67

Traffic data

Regional

10

Key metrics

National

20

Informal metrics

Global

10

Informal metrics

National

20

Informal metrics

National

25



Key metrics

National

157



Comprehensive metrics

National

379

National

50

National

10

Informal measures

Company review analysis Key metrics

 







    





  

Knowledge economy, human capital and technology Indexes Name Buck Consultants European Tech Cities Index Robert Huggins World Knowledge

Type

Scope

# Cities

Comprehensive technology Regional competitiveness metrics

30

Comprehensive R&D/knowledge economy

145

Global

2008  

2009

2010

2011

Competitiveness Index metrics 2thinknow Innovation Comprehensive Cities Top 100 index benchmarks AON People Risk Index Ericsson Networked Society City Index Matthiessen et al, World Cities of Scientific Knowledge QS World University Rankings ShanghaiRanking Consultancy FT Global MBA rankings Robert Huggins UK Knowledge Competitiveness Index Centre for Cities Outlook (UK)

Global

289

Global

100

Global

25

Bibliometric research data tracker

Global

100

Comprehensive university assessment

Global

200+

Comprehensive university assessment

Global

200+

Comprehensive business school assessment

Global

50+

Comprehensive R&D/knowledge economy metrics

National

12

Unemployment and knowledge job tracker

National

63

Scope

# Cities

Global

220

Global

66

Investor survey

Global

100+

Trend data

Global

60+

Trend data

Global

269

Trend data

Global

20

Trend data

Global

150+

Trend data

Global

100+

Trend data

Global

10

Trend data

Regional

104

International retailer survey

Global

100+

Trend data

Global

100+

Trend data

Global

100

National

10

Spending and ridership National figures

10

Demographic/ education indicators ICT data and city performance metrics





   







 

 

 





 





Infrastructure and real estate Indexes Name Mercer Top Cities for Infrastructure fDi Global Free Zones of the Future ULI-PwC Emerging Trends in Real Estate Citi-Knight Frank Wealth Report Cushman &Wakefield Main Streets Across the World Cushman & Wakefield International Investment Atlas Cushman & Wakefield Office Space Across the World Cushman & Wakefield Industrial Space Across the World Colliers International Global Premier Streets La Salle Real Estate Growth Index CB Richard Ellis How Global is the Business of Retail? Akamai State of the Internet Emporis Skyscraper Cities REIN Top Canadian Cities for Investment US News Top 10 Cities for Public Transport

Type Comprehensive metrics Comprehensive metrics and expert assessment

Economic metrics

2008

2009

2010

2011

  





















   



 



   



Ongoing  

Environment and Sustainability Indexes Name Mercer Eco-City ranking Siemens/EIU European Green City Index Siemens/EIU Latin American Green City Index Siemens/EIU Asian Green City Index European Smart Cities Forbes World’s Smartest Cities Ethisphere Institute 2020 Global Sustainability Centers Business Courier Green Cities (US) Forum for the Future Sustainable Cities Index (UK)

Type

Scope

#Cities

Infrastructure metrics

Global

220

Comprehensive environmental indicators

Regional

30

Comprehensive environmental indicators

Regional

Comprehensive environmental indicators

Regional

SustainLane Green City rankings (US) Corporate Knights Sustainable Cities (Canada) NRDC Smarter Cities (US) EPA Energy Star Buildings (US)

2008

2009

2010

2011

 

 

Comprehensive sustainability Regional indicators (mid-size)

70

Editor assessment

Global

10

Indicators and subjective measures

Global

20

Semi-comprehensive environmental indicators

National

41

Environmental indicators and plan assessment

National

20

Comprehensive environmental indicators, surveys

National

50

Comprehensive environmental indicators

National

17

Environmental indicators, online survey

National

100+

Building Count

National

25

 



 

























Image, brand and destination power Indexes Name Euromonitor International Top City Destinations ECA International Location Rating Survey International Congress and Convention Association Rankings Greater Paris Investment Agency Attractiveness Survey Anholt/GfK Roper City Brands Index Forbes World’s Happiest Cities

Type

Scope

#Cities

Data tracker

Global

100

Regional/ global

400+

Data tracker

Global

100

Executive survey

Global

25

Resident survey

Global

50

Resident survey

Global

10

Quality of living analysis

2008

2009

2010

 





 

2011

 





2011

  

Cost of living and affordability Indexes Name

Type

Mercer Cost of Living Survey

Goodsaccommodation price tracker Goodsaccommodation price tracker Wages, prices and rents tracker

ECA International Cost of Living UBS Prices and Earnings

Scope

#Cities

2008

2009

2010

Global

200+







Global

390+



Global

73



 





 

UBS Big Mac Index UBS iPod Nano Index Pricerunner Most Expensive Cities Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey Price of Travel European Backpacker Index

Wage:cost ratio tracker Wage:cost ratio tracker

Global

73



Global

73



Global

33

Trend data

English speaking nations

272

Travel and accommodation cost check

Regional

40

Global

72



Global

80



Retail price tracker

Price of Travel World Taxi One off cost check Prices Price of Travel Public One off cost check transportation Prices

 



Culture and diversity Indexes Name

Type

Scope

No. of Cities

Global Language Monitor Fashion Capitals Forbes Best Cities to Eat Well Forbes Best Cities for Minority Entrepreneurs Flavorwire Best Cities for Young Artists

Media frequency tracker

Global

40

Respondent survey

Global

10

2008

2009

2010







2011



Metropolitan statistics National

52



Editor assessment

8



Global

City Performance: a Summary Table of Indexes 1st

2nd

3rd

4th

5th

6th

Global Cities Index (2010)

New York

London

Tokyo

Paris

Hong Kong

Chicago

Global Power City Index (2010)

New York

London

Paris

Tokyo

Singapore

Berlin

Global Urban Competiveness Project (2009-2010)

New York

London

Tokyo

Paris

Chicago

San Francisco

Cities of Opportunity (2010)

New York

London

Chicago

Toronto

Singapore

Tokyo

Global Cities Survey (2011)

New York

London

Paris

Tokyo

Brussels

New York

London

Hong Kong

Paris

Singapore

London

New York

Hong Kong

Singapore

Shanghai, Tokyo

Singapore

Shanghai

London

Dubai

Hong Kong

New York

Tokyo

Paris

Hong Kong

London

7th

8th

9th

10th

Sydney

Seoul

Hong Kong

Sydney

Seoul

Hong Kong

Paris

Stockholm

LA

Beijing

Toronto

Berlin

Sydney

Beijing

Shanghai

Milan

Chicago

Zurich

Geneva

Sydney, Toronto

Beijing

New York

Bangalore

Paris

Sao Paulo

Beijing

Singapore

Shanghai

Seoul

Chicago

Comprehensive Benchmarks Los Angeles Singapore Amsterdam

Seoul

Los Angeles Singapore

Sydney

Los Angeles Singapore

Business , finance and investment GaWC World City Status (2008) Global Financial Centres Index 9 (2011) FDI Intelligence (2011) – Global Outlook, Destination Cities for FDI AT Kearney Global Cities Index (2010) - Business Activity

Tokyo

CB Richard Ellis 2011, Top 20 Cities for Retail

Dubai

London

New York

Paris

Madrid

Hong Kong

Moscow

Los Angeles

Singapore, Barcelona

Cities of Opportunity (2011) – Economic Clout

London

Paris

New York

Hong Kong

Madrid

Singapore

Toronto

Shanghai

Beijing, Tokyo

Global Power City Index (2010)- Economy

New York

Tokyo

London

Beijing

Hong Kong

Singapore

Paris

Shanghai

Geneva

Zurich

Bangalore

Mumbai

Delhi

Manila

Chennai

Hyderabad

Dublin

Pune

Cebu City

Shanghai

Tokyo

New York

Los Angeles

Chicago

London

Paris

Osaka

Istanbul

Shenzhen

Lima

Singapore

Santiago

Shanghai

Guangzhou

Beijing

Manila

Rio de Janeiro

New York

Tokyo

Shanghai

:London

Beijing

Los Angeles

Paris

Chicago

Rhein-Ruhr

Shenzhen

Singapore

Munich

Copenhagen

Tsukuba

Yokohama

Düsseldorf, Vancouver

Global Power City Index (2010) – Accessibility

Paris

London

New York

Singapore Amsterdam

Tokyo

Frankfurt

Moscow

Seoul

Cities of Opportunity (2011) – Transportation and Infrastructure

Paris

Chicago

New York

San Francisco

Madrid

Tokyo

London, Hong Kong

Seoul

Mexico City

Houston

New York

Montreal

Berlin

Los Angeles Amsterdam

Toronto

Paris

Tholons Top 100 Outsourcing Cities PwC UK Economic Outlook (2009) – Metro GDP rankings for 2008 Brookings Institution 2010 Metro Monitor, Economic recovery McKinsey Global Institute 2011, top Cities by GDP in 2025

Mexico City Philadelphia Sao Paulo

Transport and infrastructure Mercer Consulting (2009) - Best Cities for Infrastructure

IBM – Commuter Pain Index 2010 Toronto Board of Trade, Transportation, 2011 Airport Council International (2011), Top 10 cities by airport passenger traffic 2010∆

Stockholm Melbourne

Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London Hong Kong

Tokyo

Hong Kong

Paris

Stockholm

Oslo

Madrid

London

Berlin

Milan

New York

London

New York

Tokyo

Atlanta

Chicago

Paris

Beijing

Los Angeles

Dallas

Miami

Stockholm

Toronto

New York, San Francisco

Paris

Los Angeles

Houston, Tokyo, Sydney

Toronto

New York

Singapore

London

Montreal

Zurich

Singapore

Stockholm

Seoul

London

Paris

New York

Tokyo

Los Angeles

Shanghai

Beijing

San Jose (US)

Boston

Hartford (US)

Bridgeport (US)

San Francisco

Stockholm

Seattle

Providence (US)

Tokyo

San Diego

London

Boston

Hong Kong

Chicago

San Francisco

Los Angeles

New York

Paris

Sydney

Tokyo

New York

Tokyo

London

Boston

Seoul

Paris

Singapore

Chicago

Boston

Paris

Amsterdam

Vienna

New York

Frankfurt

San Francisco

Copenhagen

Lyon

Hamburg

London

New York

Chicago

Tokyo

Sydney

Boston

Toronto

San Francisco

Greater Paris Investment Agency (2008), Image Perception among Global Decision Makers

New York

London

Paris

Tokyo

Berlin

Hong Kong

Beijing

Singapore

Sydney

Rome

2009 Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands IndexSM

Paris

Sydney

London

Rome

New York

Barcelona

San Francisco

Los Angeles

Vienna

Madrid

Knowledge Economy Cities of Opportunity (2011) – Intellectual Capital and Innovation*† AON People Risk Index 2010 Ericsson Networked Society City Index 2011 Robert Huggins - 2008 'World Knowledge Competitiveness Index' Times/QS University top 100 (2009)‡ Global Power City Index (2010) - R&D 2thinknow Top 100 Innovation Cities AT Kearney Global Cities Index (2010) - Human Capital

Los Angeles Hong Kong

Chicago

Stockholm Copenhagen Amsterdam Los Angeles

Los Angeles Hong Kong

Image and Brand

Greater Paris Investment Agency (2008), ‘Number of [city] articles in the world press’ in 2007

London

New York

Paris

Hong Kong

Singapore

Brussels

Berlin

Beijing

Amsterdam

Madrid

Singapore

Hong Kong

Curitiba

Seattle

Houston

Charleston

Huntsville, Alabama

Calgary

Berlin

Sydney

San Francisco

Sao Paulo

Santiago

Madrid

Zurich

Geneva

Berlin

Frankfurt

Tokyo

Amsterdam

Vienna

Zurich

Copenhagen

Tokyo

Munich

Helsinki

Stockholm

Vienna

Paris

Melbourne

Berlin

Vienna

Zurich

Geneva

Vancouver, Auckland

Dusseldorf

Munich

Frankfurt

Bern

Sydney

Stockholm

Sydney

Toronto

Berlin

Houston, Chicago, Paris

Vancouver

Paris

Osaka

Fukuoka

Milan

Berlin

Madrid

Amsterdam

Tokyo

Vienna

Vancouver Melbourne

Vienna

Toronto

Calgary

Helsinki

Sydney

New York

Melbourne

Tokyo

Madrid

London

Cape Town

Miami

Zurich

Geneva

New York

Sydney

Los Angeles

Oslo

Copenhagen

Environment Forbes (2009), World's Smartest Cities Cities of Opportunity (2011) – Sustainability Global Power City Index (2010) – Ecology and Natural Environment

Monterrey Amsterdam

Stockholm Johannesburg

Toronto, Mumbai

Sao Paulo Copenhagen

Madrid

Quality of Life Monocle 'Quality of Living Index' (2010) Mercer Human Resource Consulting 'Quality of Living Survey' (2010) Cities of Opportunity (2011) – Demographics and liveability Global Power City Index (2010) – Livability EIU Most Liveable Cities (2011) AskMen (2010), Best Cities to Live In

San Los Angeles, Francisco Madrid

Perth, Adelaide Buenos Aires

Auckland Sydney

San Francisco

Tokyo

Miami

Cost of Living, wages UBS Prices and Earnings (2010), Net Wages Big Mac Index Ipod Nano Index Mercer (2010), Cost of Living survey ECA (2010), Cost of Living Survey

Toronto, Tokyo, Chicago New York, Zurich

Miami, Los Angeles, London Sydney, Los Angeles

Dublin

Sydney, New York, Hong Kong

Dublin, Miami, Luxembourg, Geneva

Zurich, Montreal, Luxembourg

Montreal, Oslo, Toronto

Luanda

Tokyo

Ndjamena

Moscow

Geneva

Osaka

Libreville

Zurich

Hong Kong Copenhagen

Tokyo

Oslo

Luanda

Nagoya

Yokohama

Stavanger

Kobe

Copenhagen

Geneva

Zurich

London

Bangkok

Singapore

Kuala Lumpur

Antalya

New York

Dubai

Paris

Istanbul

Hong Kong

London

Paris

New York

Tokyo

Singapore

Beijing

Berlin

Los Angeles Hong Kong

Vienna

New York

Paris

London

Toronto

Sydney

San Francisco

Tokyo

Los Angeles Hong Kong

Moscow

ICCA Rankings (2011)

Vienna

Barcelona

Paris

Berlin

Singapore

Madrid

Istanbul

Lisbon

Amsterdam

Sydney

AT Kearney Global Cities Index (2010) – Cultural Experience

London

Paris

New York

Tokyo

Moscow

Los Angeles

San Francisco

Buenos Aires

Berlin

Chicago

Destination power Euromonitor's Top City Destinations (2010) Global Power City Index (2010) – Cultural Interaction Cities of Opportunity (2011) – Lifestyle Assets

* Limited number of cities surveyed † Power and quality measures combined ‡ number of universities in top 100, ranked if tie ∆ Accumulated passenger numbers from multiple airports

5.

Trends in index provenance and form since 2008

In 2008 we undertook a first review of the international city indexes. Since that time there have been some remarkable developments in city indexes: i. leading comprehensive global indexes are increasingly collaborative. Universities and think tanks are now more closely involved in top indexes’ concept-building and data collection processes. GaWC’s four yearly network connectivity study was carried out in collaboration with the Global Urban Competitiveness Project at v the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Universities are also more likely to be involved in the creation and data collection for an index. This is a promising sign that indexes are meeting higher standards of rigour. ii. Rankings are also becoming mutually referential. This trend can be interpreted positively or negatively. On the positive side, there is a consolidation of widely accepted figures on city rankings in certain areas – quality of life, finance, international connectivity. But this trend can be interpreted more negatively, as original research by index authors has become less common. This can cause a degree of complacency about what factors really do constitute a liveable city, a finance hub, or a connected city. iii. For the first time, global and regional indexes are emerging beyond Europe and America. The respected Global Urban Competitiveness Project and the Global Power City Index have been created in East Asia and are the biggest contribution to the indexes genre since 2007. Universities, think tanks and senior urban academics are heavily involved in both projects and are leading the drive to understand more deeply the roots of urban success. The focus of these rigorous comparative studies reflects the concerns of economic dynamism and durable urban renewal which are gripping policymakers in China and Japan respectively. The GUCP is oriented around key competitiveness indicators such as productivity, growth rates, and per unit GDP, while the GPCI arguably the biggest contribution to the indexes genre in the last three years - examines cities’ responses to livability and ecological challenges. Elsewhere the AméricaEconomiá Best Cities to do Business in Latin America ranking has emerged as one of the most intricate and advanced gauges of urban business environments. iv. Some indexes are growing in sophistication. As indexes become more complex and sophisticated, straightforward lists are being complemented by categorisation, which places cities into a typology according to their prospects. Quantitative measurements remain the most common form of ranking, but often now coexist with more robust interpretative profiling. For example, Z/Yen Global Financial Centres Index introduced in 2010 categories of ‘Global’, ‘Transnational’, and ‘Local’ to give important qualitative geographical distinctions to the numerical ranking. The diversity, quality and depth of cities’ finance sectors is also translated into a table of ‘Leaders’, ‘Diversified’, ‘Specialists’ and ‘Contenders’. This enables the reader to make sense of what can be a daunting list otherwise, and enables cities, especially further down the rankings, to better understand which other cities around the world have similar challenges of scale and ambition. What are the key changes in city index performance since 2008? Overall some important trends are observable: 

New York has successfully caught up or overtaken London in key measures of finance centre capability, business connectivity and comprehensive competitiveness, and maintained its lead in terms of density of talent and human capital. The sheer scale of New York’s commercial and informational capacity, the range of its connections, and the resilience of its talent, appear to have shielded it from major downgrades in reputation and performance among policymakers, businesspeople and general publics alike. The Big Apple has maintained an outstanding tourist and business brand status, recorded excellent investment attraction figures, regained its position as world fashion capital and even increased its number of high net worth individuals (HNWIs) since before the financial crisis. Furthermore it has attracted favourable commentary and ranking performance for its sustainable development initiatives, which have compensated for more critical assessments of the city’s congestion, unaffordability and income inequality.

The same, to a slightly lesser extent, also applies to London, as the Anglo-American dyad retains its remarkable grip as the most important nodes in the global economy. Far from losing its lustre, the British capital continues to offer compelling advantages for foreign investment projects, leading the world in the years after the recession according to IBM. The city’s labour force is rated the world’s most productive by the GUCP, and remains the unassailable European leader for qualified and multilingual staff. As in New York, the role of higher education appears critical to the city’s model of nurturing ideas and specialised workers; London’s HE institutions continue to be the world’s top ranked cluster, and the wider metropolitan region is the second most productive globally in terms of scholarly research output, after Tokyo. Both London and New York are leaders in rankings of diversity and cultural experience in 2010, and London has preserved its substantial lead as the most visited destination by international travellers. 

Paris and Tokyo have important strengths that are unmatched by London and New York. While London and New York are widely considered to be a distance ahead of Paris and Tokyo in the ‘big four’ – particularly in terms of business environment reputation - it has become more apparent since 2008 that Paris and Tokyo have important strengths that outshine their Anglo-American counterparts. Tokyo performs much better on environment measures than either London or New York, and in most indexes is placed higher on R&D and commercialised knowledge capacity. Paris’s deficit in terms of business and finance power is noticeably less of a concern in newer indexes, with the city instead garnering praise for its superior transport infrastructure and lifestyle benefits. The French capital also appears as a very strong nd incubator for talent and ideas; it ranks 2 in the 2010 innovation economy rankings, behind Boston, and st vi 1 for labour attractiveness in the 2011 Scorecard for Prosperity, ahead of London. Both Tokyo (3rd in th nd Monocle’s Quality of Life survey, 9 in GPCI, 18th in EIU Liveability) and Paris (2 in GPCI, 16th in EIU Liveability) typically achieve high rankings for quality of life - a characteristic not shared by either London or New York. It is notable that for LON-NY there remains no obvious link between quality of life performance and brand strength. Both cities are unfailingly rated among the very best city brands but conversely rated as having comparatively deficient liveability.



From ‘big four’ to ‘big six’? The ‘big four’ world cities that have been identified since the early 1990s London, New York, Paris and Tokyo – continue to retain their rarefied status in comprehensive world city indexes. However for the first time their position is being challenged by Singapore and Hong Kong, who have recorded exceptional results in a range of studies, especially those whose audience are executives, knowledge workers and tourists. Both autonomous Asian cities appear to have matched or surpassed Paris and Tokyo in the fields of finance, business environment, global firm connectivity, human capital, international visitors and smart growth. Hong Kong is rapidly closing in on New York’s runner-up spot in the Global Financial Centres Index and London’s second place in the GaWC’s World City classification. Singapore meanwhile is now one of the world’s leading cities for internal and external transport and has emerged as one of the only top finance hubs to have truly world-leading infrastructure. The city-state is also commended as the outstanding environmental city in Asia, benefiting from seamless policy execution. Currently the indexes suggest the pair’s main limitations, which prevent an absolute breakthrough into the big four, are in cultural and educational assets, innovation-led R&D, political-informational influence, and (in Hong Kong’s case) some environmental indicators. The GPCI in 2010, for instance, reported a considerable setback in quality of life scores for both Singapore and Hong Kong, exacerbated as the cost of living rises inexorably in both cities. While enhanced entertainment and recreational provision is in some survey-led rankings shown to have penetrated the consciousness of certain influential communities, in more quantitative assessments of overall cultural density Hong Kong and Singapore still fall some way short. The duo’s achievements are nevertheless among the noteworthy developments in global city indexes over the past three years, and suggest that the ‘big four’ may soon, at least temporarily, become the ‘big six’. Singapore and Hong Kong’s progress within the leading group of world cities is visible in the table of city performance in the five major comprehensive ranking studies below. The aggregate score of th rankings in the five reports shows that Singapore has overtaken Los Angeles into 5 place since 2008, th while Hong Kong has overhauled Chicago and Toronto to move into 7 . The other city to show significant improvement since 2008 is Seoul.

Top 10 Global cities on comprehensive indexes in 2010/11



#

City

1

New York

2

GCI

GCI

GUCP

CoO

1

1

1

1

1

5

+1

London

2

2

2

6

2

14

-5

3

Tokyo

3

4

3

14

4

28

-6

4

Paris

4

3

4

8

3

22

-4

5

Singapore

8

5

8

9

7

37

+2

6

Los Angeles

7

14

7

10

6

44

-9

7

Hong Kong

5

9

10

12

17

53

0

8

Chicago

6

25

7

3

11

52

-7

9

Seoul

10

8

9

13

13

53

+5

10

San Francisco

12

22

6

3

16

59

+4

11

Toronto

14

23

23

2

9

71

-28

12

Sydney

9

10

46

5

15

85

+4

(ATK)

(KnF)

Total

+/since 2008

GPCI

Asian cities have by far the most impressive climbs in rankings since 2008. Singapore and Hong Kong spearhead a clear shift Eastwards in the upper echelons of global city indexes, as emerging Asian cities have by far the most impressive climbs in rankings since 2008. Comparative surveys measuring investor/business confidence unanimously voice more confidence in emerging Asian cities than in established Western cities, reflective of a widespread belief in an evolving balance of power. In particular it is the Chinese centres of Shanghai and Beijing that stand out for their remarkable progress across a whole host of indices. Shanghai is consistently identified as a global business leader of the very rd vii near future, now forecast to be the 3 wealthiest city by 2030, and has performed outstandingly in indexes on foreign direct investment, real estate, financial asset management and GDP growth. The megacity recently reached the elite Alpha+ tier of cities in GaWC’s World City Network, overtaking Alpha cities such as Seoul, Mumbai and Buenos Aires since 2000 in rising from the 35th to the 9th most globally connected business city. Furthermore it has for the first time recorded very competitive rankings in terms of international visitors and talent, and has an ever-improving image among both business executives and tourists alike. The primary constraint holding Shanghai back from an even greater ascent of the global rankings is the lack of human capital, world-class educational institutions, advanced research capability and robust sustainability initiatives. Over the same period Beijing has achieved similar business ratings, slightly less impressive scores for talent and tourists, but has notably improved to the highest echelons in terms of political and intellectual th th influence. China’s capital rose remarkably from 40 to 8 in the GaWC network ranking since 2000, while the recession impact was adjudged by Brooking’s Metro Monitor to be the least severe of 150 world cities. The city-region has enjoyed remarkable growth as an academic research hub; having not even been in the rd top 30 cities in 1996-98, it moved ahead of San Francisco Bay Area into 3 place towards the end of the viii last decade. This acceleration of knowledge production reflects the wider positioning of Beijing as an indispensable political location. The capital is firmly in the top 10 of the GCI and the GUCP’s assessments ix of political engagement and international influence respectively. While its rate of development as a financial centre is somewhat more modest, currently hovering just inside the world’s top 20, the overall impression from global rankings is that Beijing is keeping pace with Shanghai spearheading Mainland China’s international urban renaissance.

Behind the extraordinarily fast ranking improvement of top Chinese cities are a small group of regional centres whose progress is steady although less spectacular. These include Seoul and Kuala Lumpur, which have become GaWC ‘alpha’ cities since 2004, at the expense of western European hubs, namely x Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Zurich, which have all dropped to ‘alpha-’ level. Of these three, Seoul is recording the biggest improvements across global rankings, with demonstrable comparative success in R&D, real estate, international transport connectivity and multinational firms. In 2011 Seoul made the th world’s biggest ranking gain in the Global Financial Centres Index - rising 8 places to 16 – reflecting its prolonged promotion campaign, while it achieved a similar feat in the 2010 GPCI thanks to enhanced xi liveability. In a host of rankings Seoul’s performance closely tracks that of Beijing, to the extent that it may be considered the third East Asian megacity on the verge of joining the established world cities of the previous decade. Another Asian capital city to reach the GaWC Alpha level and demonstrate encouraging ranking advances is Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia’s number one city has entered the top five cities in the world for international travellers, and since 2009 it has improved two tiers in the Global Financial Centres Index as it becomes an xii established capital for Islamic finance products. While KL is evidently some distance behind Seoul as an all-round twenty-first century city, its success illustrates that Asia’s urban resurgence is also extending to those cities playing more of a regional than global role. 

Not all large Asian cities are making global strides. The rise of Eastern cities is not monolithic, and the story is much more complex than a simple West-East shift allows for. Large Asian capitals such as Taipei, Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok and New Delhi have remained fairly static in business and finance terms with their overall brands not making headway on leading Western cities. For these cities, improved numbers of international travellers and increased embeddedness in the global economy has not translated into anything like a compelling all-round offering for international talent, and frequently they are not considered significant enough to include in several worldwide comparative indexes. While this group of cities are offering attractive real estate investment opportunities, they are typically fairly stagnant in terms of financial services provision. This is indicated by the Global Financial Centres Index, where Taipei, Jakarta and Manila have all fallen in status since 2010, rated as only possessing local significance, and xiii appear to have lost their advantage over Latin American and Eastern European centres. Other populous cities in Pakistan and the Philippines are almost entirely absent from global indexes, except to appear at the bottom of global quality of life surveys. The modest performance of Indian cities in regional and global comparators is exemplified by finance capital Mumbai which despite much fanfare about future growth projections, is progressing only very steadily. While its recovery from the recession has been highly competitive globally according to a late 2010 review by Brookings Institution, Mumbai ranks a lowly 34th of 35 cities surveyed in the last two years of the GPCI, with critical weaknesses in R&D, cultural provision and transport, and its financial th xiv services capabilities are currently ranked only 58 worldwide alongside Helsinki and Warsaw. The GCI th also finds the home of Bollywood is losing ground in terms of cultural experience (57 of 65 cities) and th xv political influence (56 ). The one index Mumbai performs extremely well is the Tholons Global nd Outsourcing Cities study, where in 2010 it jumped ahead of Delhi into 2 , due to its exceptionally large labour pool and improved reputation for service delivery. But the Indian city dominance in this index (six of the top eight cities) rather reflects a reliance on low cost, low or medium value-added service employment, a phenomenon which so far has not necessarily either required or accelerated a comprehensive urban upgrade. Furthermore, the gradual shift towards proximate locations, or xvi nearshoring, identified by Tholons may throw India’s supremacy in this field into question. The areas in which all major Asian cities - except Tokyo and Singapore - have struggled are in indices of liveability and environmental progress. While central European cities such as Vienna, Amsterdam and Zurich have been outpaced by a cluster of larger Asian cities on business and investment, they remain much stronger than their Asian counterparts in quality of life perception, cultural-historical kudos and environmental outputs. Hong Kong is one city to particularly suffer in this field; it places last of the 35 city th GPCI on liveability, 27 of 40 in the Knight Frank Global Cities Survey for quality of life, and lost 8 places for xvii cultural experience in the 2010 GCI. Other than Tokyo and Singapore, which are in the second tier, all the Asian cities in the Cities of Opportunity study are in the bottom half for health, safety and security.

Equally, other than Mumbai and Seoul, all Asian cities are in the bottom half for sustainability. Meanwhile both global higher education rankings do not show dramatic improvements for Asian cities. Hong Kong in rd 2010 ranks 3 after London and New York in terms of the number and position of universities in the QS th th global top 100, while Beijing and Singapore place 10 and 11 respectively, but no Asian university yet xviii enters the global top 20 overall. One city in the wider Asia-Pacific region that has performed quietly but effectively in recent global city indexes is Sydney; often overlooked when accounting for major world cities, Australia’s financial centre is frequently highlighted in comprehensive benchmarks for its excellent balance between quality of life and economic prosperity. Its visionary leadership has been praised for advances in managing its public realm and congestion, and the city has been gradually climbing the liveability rankings. It has established itself in the second tier behind the ‘big four’ for business/firm connectivity, and is also in the top ten in finance. Sydney’s brand strength is also repeatedly commended. 

Eastern European cities are emerging slowly, but there are stand-out performers at the start of the new business cycle. Polish cities, led by Warsaw, are heading the group of vibrant Eastern European urban centres finding new niches in the post-recessional global economy. Warsaw is now in 20th place in the GaWC world network rankings, having overtaken the likes of Zurich, Frankfurt and Amsterdam in the last decade. Brookings Institution figures indicate the Polish capital’s minimum growth year was the 15th mildest of 150 world cities, while its 56th rank in terms of 2009-10 recovery growth is superior to almost xix every European city. It financial services status is improving accordingly; Warsaw rose 8 places in the 2011 GFCI, overtaking much larger cities with a longer record of international financial transactions, such as Bangkok and Jakarta. The city’s business brand has undeniably improved, thanks to a reputation for a well-qualified and multilingual labour force, cheap costs, attractive incentives and proximity to important markets. In 1990 Warsaw ranked last in the European Cities Monitor, but in 2010 it was well clear of cities xx previously ranked above it, including Glasgow, Budapest, Athens and Moscow. These factors also apply to other Polish cities, which in a notable finding from recent indexes, are challenging the stranglehold of Middle Eastern and East Asian free trade zones which have been fairly uncontested in recent years. Both Lódz and Walbrzych Special Economic Zones are in the world’s top 20 xxi Global Free Zones of the Future for 2010/11, the only European zones to achieve this feat. Meanwhile Krakow is rated by Tholons as the 4th most dynamic global outsourcing market in the world, immediately behind Shanghai and Beijing, credited with outstanding provision in business analytics, F&A, HR and xxii R&D. Together these ranking results suggest that Polish cities are successfully adapting to the new economic landscape and evolving business practices. There are some promising signs for other Eastern European cities. The region occupies four of the top five European cities for attracting FDI megaprojects in 2009-10, with Bucharest, Warsaw, Moscow, St. xxiii Petersburg all proving desirable locations for large firms. Eastern European capitals have in some cases improved their financial services position; Prague and Vienna both rose by 4 places to 43rd and 55th xxiv respectively, as the much larger population centres of Mumbai and Mexico City lost places. And while Istanbul and Moscow were both hit very hard in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, they have recovered strongly into a new robust growth pattern, with Istanbul recording the sharpest xxv recovery in the world, edging the likes of Singapore and Shanghai according to the Brookings Institution. Both cities’ residential and retail real estate markets have been very competitive in recent years, as figures xxvi from La Salle and Cushman & Wakefield testify. These figures bode well for this pair of megacities’ capacity to deal with economic shocks in the future, and are a testament to the role city size can play in regenerating lost employment. But their instability has also led to a reputation decline compared to the more stable patterns seen in East Asia and Latin America. Both were among the biggest losers in the 2010 GCI, and remain outranked by much smaller rivals Birmingham, Prague and Leeds in the European Cities Monitor executive survey, due to pervasive xxvii infrastructure, transport, health and security weaknesses. Currently these two powerhouses do not yet seem capable of sharing the burden with London and Paris of refuelling European growth. And with perhaps the exception of Warsaw no Eastern European cities presently set to break into the top dozen of any comprehensive city index any time soon.



A wide divergence of long term fortunes is manifesting itself across continental European centres. Examination of new benchmarks shows how several cities are seen as dynamic performers globally, while others are regularly falling down the rankings as a larger number of cities become internationally competitive. Top European performers, such as Barcelona, Berlin, Stockholm and Zurich, record excellent scores on cultural and/or niche economic-science functions. Each very different, these cities tend to record excellent scores on cultural and/or niche economic-science functions. Barcelona’s performance across city indexes since 2008 provides a timely illustration how smaller European cities can continue to project an image project beyond their size, recording outstanding results for quality of life and international travellers. The city has risen rapidly up the European Cities Monitor, reaching a twenty year high in 2009, when it xxviii xxix overtook Brussels. It is also ranked 5th in Europe for foreign direct investment potential, performs exceptionally well in many quality of life indices and is now the 16th most visited city in the world, just xxx behind Los Angeles. Berlin is now rated as the European city improving itself most for business promotion, and is now second as of 2010. The German capital, despite its poor global business connections, has improved its overall provision impressively, reaching the heights of 6th in the 2010 GPCI, and 10th in the 2011 Knight Frank xxxi Global Cities Survey. Such outstanding improvements have been achieved thanks to excellent scores in cultural, entertainment and environmental measures, rather than economic performance. These have compensated for the city being barely in the top 100 wealthiest urban economies according to PwC’s most xxxii nd recent assessment. Similarly Stockholm, only the 82 wealthiest city, was incorporated into the select Cities of Opportunity study in 2010 and recorded the highest scores in the world for sustainability, health and security. In 2011 it subsequently gained the highest score in the intellectual capital and innovation, th xxxiii confirming the merits of its 6 place in the World Knowledge Competitiveness Index. And Zurich, at st 101 wealthiest, ranks top of the GPCI’s environmental measure, appears in the top dozen cities in all major global quality of life rankings, and continues to operate comfortably as one of the top ten financial xxxiv centres. This quartet of mid-size European centres, in some respects joined by Vienna and Munich, represent Europe’s biggest urban success stories, although their lack of scale means they do not present an all-round offering capable of matching Paris and London in the near future. Outside this select group, there are clear signs that many of the continent’s urban leaders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are rapidly being matched and surpassed by other world cities on a range of benchmarks, especially those emphasising business capability and power. European hubs no longer dominate the list of the most expensive office and retail locations. Rome and Milan, for example, are forecast to drop out of the world’s top 50 wealthiest cities (by GDP) by 2025. The Italian duo have seen a decline on business and innovation measures, reflecting the fact that their pre-eminence vis-a-vis historic prestige and social richness have not been optimally leveraged to create a new knowledge economy. Elsewhere Lyon, Stockholm, Hamburg, Turin, Munich, Helsinki, Leeds and Budapest are all set to fall out of the world’s top 100 urban economies over the same period. Frankfurt, which was arguably the third strongest European performer across city indexes in the period 2006-2008, is gradually losing ground compared to other European centres, as quality of life and brand have trumped financial measures. The home to the European Central Bank has fallen dramatically down the GaWC list of most embedded cities in global business networks, overtaken by the likes of Buenos Aires and Kuala Lumpur. While it remains a leading competitor in commerce and finance, its social attributes are largely absent from consideration or praise in recent city indexes. Indeed it was omitted altogether from the 26-city Cities of Opportunity study in 2011. In between the winners and losers in Europe are a cluster of historic cities that are holding their own. Amsterdam, for instance, remains fairly robustly rated for quality of life, culture and environment, but while declining on business power and investment measures, the bohemian city has improved its creative sectors and is ranked third globally for economic innovation and the capacity to build future industries for xxxv employment. Overall while some European cities retain their pre-eminence based largely on factors of historic prestige, social richness and successful city branding, cities that have been unable to effectively leverage off these factors are witnessing a decline in global index ranking. The cumulative message of index results is that European cities urgently need to think carefully about how to manage their future

roles in the international system, and how to optimally position in an entirely reconfigured urban hierarchy. 

Smaller niche cities are growing in prominence within a North American urban field in flux. North American cities have, on the whole, declined in global business and real estate rankings since 2008, but they retain a leading edge in a handful of niche areas. Miami and Atlanta fell significantly in the GaWC world city status project, along with Los Angeles and San Francisco. These four cities recorded very modest achievements in recent global indexes, especially in business and real estate terms, although Los Angeles still performs strongly in terms of cultural and educational output. To some extent the disappointing performance of American cities is due to their economic geography being inadequately considered by index producers. In many cases the central core is not a high performer in a number of areas, but its wider metropolitan region is a significant driver of trade and quality of life. This phenomenon results in important metropolitan characteristics being frequently omitted (as in the case of Miami) or the aggregate capacity being underplayed (as in the case of San Francisco). Nevertheless there are worrying signs for many leading metro areas’ comparative global th relevance. In GaWC’s world city network San Francisco and Miami plummeted from 17th and 25 th th respectively in 2000 to 46 and 68 in 2008. This is corroborated by the 2010 GCI, where Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Boston all lost places in the major measure of economic intensity, with the former three xxxvi cities all losing substantial rankings for political influence. With the exception of New York, all six North American cities in the 35-city GPCI have slipped a number of places since the first edition in 2008, with xxxvii Boston, Toronto and Chicago losing over 10 places. In this context, medium sized cities which perform high on environmental and entrepreneurial measures are more and more prominent in national and international indexes. Seattle, Austin and Portland are three US cities which appear several times towards the top of individual measures assessing sustainability, business environment and innovation, while Vancouver and Montreal are also punching above their weight in terms of finance and quality of life. Portland is rated as the American city with the best overall green credentials by both Business Courier and Sustain Lane; the former ranking placed the city 3rd nationally for carbon emissions, 2nd for LEED certified projects and 4th for low sprawl, while the latter found the Portland to have the highest figures in the country for green buildings and green economy, as xxxviii well as in innovation and governance to reduce emissions. Figures from Kiplinger also show that Portland has, of cities above 1 million in population, the highest percentage of workforce in the creative class, at over 40%. For these reasons, Portland appeared in the top 25 of Monocle’s global ranking for the first time in 2010 on account of its burgeoning reputation. Another very high performer since 2008, Austin is rated the most dynamic city nationally over the next decade for its leadership in incubating small businesses and supporting entrepreneurs. Elsewhere the Texan city ranks top for small-business vitality, based on outstanding performances in terms of rd employment and start-up growth, is 3 for proportion of creative class workforce, and is one of the few xxxix sizeable metropolitan areas to consistently rate among the safest in the country. Seattle also emerges as an internationally-oriented, well-connected city performing at a very high level after the recession in th the US. The city ranks 13 worldwide for comprehensive competitiveness, in the 2010 GUCP, rising within xl the top 20 since 2008 and overtaking Dublin, Stockholm and Geneva. Seattle, like Portland, is an environmental leader, and appears in Forbes top 10 smart cities. Of the larger hubs, Toronto and Chicago stand out for their performance across business, diversity, environmental and affordability indicators. These neighbouring cities are both among the nine ‘global leaders’ for financial services and offer excellence in a wide range of fields besides, which is why in Cities of Opportunity their aggregate scores place them second and seventh in the world respectively. Toronto in 2010 reliably rated among the world’s top dozen cities for human capital, cultural diversity, innovation and quality of life, while also performing strongly in environmental and cost of living measures. Chicago performs slightly less well in the latter two fields but is recognised by both Cities of Opportunity and the xli GCI as one of the planet’s top half dozen cities for intellectual assets and knowledge economy talent.



A handful of Latin American cities show serious promise, but none decisively stands out. Central and South American capitals are increasingly prominent in city indexes, and while only sporadically recording globally competitive ranking positions, are improving sufficiently quickly to be reckoned with as future contenders among the second tier of world cities. In terms of sheer size and urban economic power, there is uncertainty as to precisely what scale Latin America’s biggest cities can achieve in the near future. In the middle of the last decade Sao Paulo was the th big mover in the continent in terms of GDP, rising to 10 globally according to PwC figures from 2009, but by 2011 forecasts of the global hierarchy in 2025 appeared less positive; Sao Paulo is projected by th McKinsey to only be the 15 wealthiest city by 2025, while Buenos Aires, which had been forecast to enter the top 10 by PwC, does not feature at all in McKinsey’s top 25 cities. On the other hand Mexico City th does feature, in 20 place. Sao Paulo appears to be emerging as the continent’s largest hub, recording strong relative progress in retail markets, international travellers and meetings. Brazil’s financial powerhouse has improved one level in the GFCI to become an ‘established’ local provider while Buenos Aires has also improved one status in 2011. Along with high achiever Santiago, the city is now included in the prestigious Cities of Opportunity which indicates that the continent’s top cities are now serious challengers. But while São Paulo is the top Latin American country in most finance measures, its external rivals for Latin American hegemony, Madrid and Miami, are currently still some distance ahead as all-round service providers. The Brazilian megacity’s nd embryonic financial capabilities are confirmed by the city falling one place to 32 of 35 cities for economic size and vitality in the 2010 GPCI. In Latin America it is clear that in general capital cities have – with the exception of Brazil – become the major players on the continent. The major business benchmark by AmericaEconomia finds eight of the top ten cities on the continent to be capitals. But there appear to be few guarantees that capital status and large demographic base will translate into an ascending role on the world stage in the region. Mexico City, for example, has lost several places in the 2010 GCI and the 2011 GFCI, with Western index commentators often less persuaded that the megacity’s political status will enable it to achieve urban success given its current constraints. In this regard Western focused indexes tend to be much more impressed by sustainability leader Curitiba, which features in a host of liveability studies.



African and Middle Eastern cities remain at the periphery of global index attention. African and Middle Eastern cities remain largely conspicuous by either their absence from, or unfavourable position in, global rankings. The exceptions to this situation are the major cities in the Gulf, South Africa and Egypt. Prior to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Cairo had emerged as a more significant player in the global diplomatic th system, for example rising ahead of Beijing into 9 place for political engagement in the 2010 GCI. The historic capital is also Africa’s leading outsourcing city at present, ahead of Johannesburg, and is forecast xlii to be the only African city in the global 25 of middle-income households by 2025. The growing prominence of Dubai has stalled in the last 2-3 years due to the impact of the global recession, although it is still the most highly ranked Middle Eastern city in many indexes, while Abu Dhabi’s comparative success has not been converted into striking ranking achievements. Dubai remained th static in 27 place in the GCI, lost 6 places in the GUCP, 4 places in the last two years of the 2010 Knight Frank Global Cities Survey and was excluded from the Cities of Opportunity study for the first time. Despite retaining the top regional position in the financial centres index, just ahead of Qatar, the gap has closed considerably and the emirate is no longer on a par with Shanghai and Singapore in terms of future forecast as it was in 2008. Abu Dhabi’s cultural investments meanwhile, have earned the emirate a place in the Cities of Opportunity report, and have seen it emerge as a competitive international traveller xliii destination, albeit from a low base. The South African centres of Johannesburg and Cape Town are the region’s only other cities to regularly feature in global indexes and show signs of promise. While mostly overlooked for its business credentials, quality of life in Cape Town is rated very high by African standards and tends to be graded on a par with xliv higher performing Eastern European and Latin American cities. Along with Abu Dhabi and Dubai, Cape xlv Town is also in the top three cities in the region for ideas and innovation economy as rated in 2010.

Johannesburg is typically Africa’s major representative in indexes, although its economic recovery has been assessed as very sluggish, while its human capital and finance rankings remain near the very bottom xlvi of international studies. For most other cities in this region, improved rankings can only be found in terms of visitor numbers associated with more and cheaper medium-haul flights. Mercer’s annual cost of living survey has begun to include a larger number of less renowned African capitals in response to demand from corporate firms, which does indicate the growing attention commercial interests are giving to the high potential of the African market. Overall, however, African cities outside South Africa and Egypt are not seen by index creators and contributors as worthy of particular focus just yet. It is important to recognise that index reports and rankings cannot tell a complete story of a city, not least because of the inclusion and exclusion of cities from most indexes. While London can be examined comparatively in almost every global and European index, many significant population centres in Asia and Africa are only present in a handful of reports. With certain cities pre-selected for inclusion for reasons of time, cost and audience, a thorough all-encompassing comparison cannot be achieved. This is especially the case in environmental, human capital and diversity indexes, which are in their infancy.

6.

What is the impact of the global economic crisis on index performance?

The recession has created both winners and losers in the global urban system with regard to their index position. 

Anglo-American urban economies and index performance were adversely affected, but the most dynamic cities have bounced back while others are suffering even more chronically from the effects of deindustrialisation. London’s job losses and more demanding tax and regulatory environment in the post-recessional economy initially caused the British capital to fall off the top of several rankings, notably the Citigroup World Cities Survey and the Z/Yen Global Financial Centres Index in 2010. But by 2011 it became clear that London’s world class depth of knowledge workers had enabled it to hang on to its long-standing position as one of the two most important command centres of the global economy. The European Cities Monitor, the Main Streets Across the World review and the E-REGI index all found that London is categorically Europe’s number one hub for real estate, labour talent and business networks, despite very high cost of living, business costs and less than exemplary liveability. While London is the only British city to consistently occupy a presence in the top 50 world cities in global indexes, a handful of vibrant centres have shown their capacity to recover. Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham have all improved their position in the European Cities Monitor. Manchester ranks in the top 10 European cities now for external transport links, internal transport and qualified staff; Leeds has the best-value office space in Europe and has overtaken Stockholm and Vienna for inter-city transport connectivity; and Birmingham is now more recognised as a business location than Copenhagen or Moscow. The knowledge economy leaders of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Oxford have also proven very mildly affected by the financial crisis, thanks to the shield of highly competitive clusters in advanced services, creative industries and higher education-led R&D. These three cities have the highest percentage of highly skilled residents in the country in 2011, and at the same time have among the highest rates of business churn and lowest numbers of job claimants. At the other end of the spectrum, there have been very large increases in unemployment and productivity stagnation in cities already struggling and with high proportions of low-skilled jobs. These cities include Hull, Doncaster, Liverpool xlvii and Sunderland. Meanwhile the property-led downturn in North America stimulated a decline in the position of large North American cities - outside of New York and Chicago - across business, real estate and liveability indices, but cities with an embedded entrepreneurial culture have been resurgent while many former manufacturing centres with no compelling economic niches are recording much less positive results. Brookings’ Global Metro Monitor reports a very wide variation since 2008 between the top performing US cities of Austin, Washington DC and Dallas, and those which have struggled both before and after the

recession, such as Milwaukee and Indianapolis. In many high performing metro areas in the South and West of the country, severe job losses during the 2008/9 recession made only a small imprint in overall gains in the recent decade. In summary the recession appears to have exacerbated already existing inequality between city performance in the UK and the US. Those with new or ongoing distinctive and high-value propositions have maintained sound macro-economic performance, but in an environment of both lower liquidity and tougher global competition, small to medium sized cities without specialisation or quality of life advantages are experiencing considerable turmoil. 

More focus is channelled into East Asian cities’ effective business leadership, governance and liveability practices. The recession has focused considerable attention on the effective business leadership, governance and liveability offerings provided by Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. Assessments of global real estate have found that Asian city markets have massively outperformed European and American hubs as a result of the recession. Knight Frank/Citigroup found a 17% increase in Asian city markets despite an average decline of 5.5% worldwide. But they are also gaining credit in indexes which emphasise not just power but softer factors of quality, business environment, stability and housing. Beijing for example was praised by the UN-Habitat for being the most equal city in the xlviii world by Gini co-efficient measures, with Shanghai also performing well. Shanghai (10th), Beijing (8th) and Hong Progress of finance centres in the Global Financial Centres Index since 2007, indicating the convergence of cities’ overall provision

Source: Z/Yen (2007-2011), chart by Greg Clark

Kong (7th) all feature in Forbes’ top 10 culinary cities, indicating these Chinese cities’ flourishing reputation for high-class living. In Toronto Board of Trade’s 2011 Scorecard for Prosperity, Hong Kong and Tokyo’s transport infrastructures are rated the two strongest in the world. And Singapore is acclaimed by Siemens for its highly effective governance regime and proficient and transparent civil service which have enabled the city-state to implement the most ambitious environmental policies in xlix Asia. These all point to an increasing interest and respect among Western firms and policy agencies for not just the dimensions and capacity of East Asian urban economies but also the approaches and innovations they have produced. 

There is a new recognition that Euro-American cities no longer represent the model to be adopted by others, allowing for a much broader geographical and conceptual interpretation of city success. Whereas five years ago, developed Western cities comprised the overwhelming proportion of cities under index analysis, emerging cities – especially those with dynamic capital markets – have come to comprise up to half the global index total. For example the number of Asian cities measured in the Global Financial Centres Index has increased from 7 in the first edition in 2007 to 15 in 2011, and Asian cities account for 29 of the 90 cities in American consulting firm AON’s 2010 People Risk Index. The upshot of this trend is that European and North American cities are being pitched in a globally competitive field rather than a limited regional one. It is not just the case of Western back office cities such as Dublin being evaluated against high flying emerging hubs such as Chennai and Pune, as occurs in Tholons’ Global Outsourcing Cities report. There is also the implication, as for example in the IBM Commuter Pain index, that cities such as Milan, Madrid and London should be concerned about their congestion in comparison to Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and New Delhi. Such flat, distributed measurements are fostering a horizontal culture of learning and sharing about urban policies and experiences.



The model of the resilient and creative medium-sized city has gained extensive credibility. The more critical gaze on London and New York’s city performance has inspired comparative urban studies to focus on new principles for success. Many of the best performing cities and metropolitan areas since 2008 have had populations of 2-6 million in population and are recognised for their attractive balance of commercial and lifestyle interests. The importance of ‘balance’ in successful world cities is a much more widespread theme since the recession. After the excesses of fast growth real estate bubbles and finance speculation, indexes created in the West and Japan are now giving extra weighting towards liveability, a diverse economic base, and cultural-intellectual assets in reflection of the accent now placed on human capital, specialisation and high value-added economic sectors. Several index reports, headed by Cities of Opportunity and the GUCP have pointed towards the impressive performance of medium-sized cities whose key proposition is their attractive equilibrium of commercial and lifestyle interests. Singapore, Chicago, Zurich and Toronto are the four world cities which are immediately seen to meet multiple demands, cultivating diverse populations, investing in advanced education and encouraging a work-life balance. The Toronto Board of Trade’s inclusion of a new transport element to its Scorecard on Prosperity in 2011 reflects the city’s own recognition that liveability and mobility are just as critical as business environment. Slightly beneath these big financial hitters, at least by global standards, are cities whose ‘balance’ takes the form of ‘smart’ sustainable development, hosting dynamic firms and entrepreneur innovation. Portland, Seattle and Stockholm are in this category as strong social and environmental cities as well as small business and R&D hubs. Mid-size East Asian cities with strong infrastructure also perform well, dominating the list for broadband connectivity. The premise that Western cities in particular must be ‘smart’, that is to combine economic competitiveness and sustainable urban development, alongside urgent innovations in housing and culture, informed the creation of the European Smart Cities project, run at the Vienna University of Technology. The smart, self-sufficient and ecologically sensitive urban environment looks to become an enduring and pervasive theme and aspiration. McKinsey forecasts that many such cities will lead in terms of GDP per capita by 2025. Trondheim, Macau, Asan, Al-Ain (Abu Dhabi) and Bridgeport are such some of the cities projected to be in the global top 20 for concentrated l wealth.



Small cities struggle in national or regional indexes, particularly as these indexes tend to focus on economic and human capital capability. From this review this is especially the case in studies of UK, US and German cities, where centres with modest scale often witness a decline in innovation and jobs. Germany’s major index, the IW Consulting ranking, finds in 2010 that economic indicators illustrate that Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Düsseldorf are fairly unchallengeable high performers, and that smaller li cities in the Ruhr region and in East Germany have very little prospect of closing the gap. While some minor UK cities achieve excellence, a majority of de-industrialising Northern cities have struggled to retain their talent and maintain small businesses. Furthermore, small Chinese cities are absent from reviews of the most attractive cities for investment, which are heavily preferential towards those with lii the largest overall economic size, ahead of specialist centres.



The gulf between high performing and vulnerable cities appears to have widened. Comprehensive indexes point to increasing competition at the top of the global urban hierarchy, as up to two dozen cities worldwide lay legitimate claim to world city status. But while the global economy in the new business cycle may be more open than ever to urban excellence from several continents, many liveability studies point to an ever-widening gap between the first-rate and cities with poor health, security and economic prospects. The latter exist in both developing and developed countries, even though circumstances contrast. In the developing world, the 2011 the Economist Intelligence Unit study for example points to ongoing crime, violence and conflict as holding back many very populous cities in Africa and South Asia, including Harare, Lagos, Algiers, and Karachi. The worst performing cities in such rankings that are oriented around the needs of firms and knowledge workers are mostly located in Asia, liii Africa and the Middle East. But there are gulfs even within developing nations; whereas Mumbai and Bangalore’s rankings suggest they are well positioned for future rapid growth, Kolkata is highlighted on multiple occasions for its poor housing and concerns about socio-political risk, bureaucracy and liv corruption. Additionally there are indications that where the links for agglomeration have not been adequately forged, that satellite cities in the vicinity of large megacities in India are having protracted lv difficulties. Meanwhile there are large cities in North America and Europe whose index positions indicate neither the economic or environmental credentials for medium-term productivity. The NRDC study into smart cities in America finds that many of the struggling economic centres over the past decade, including New Orleans, Detroit and Cleveland are also the least equipped for sustainable living. Moreover the new Well Being Index underlines wide national disparities in American resident well-being. High income communities typically score higher, and most of the highest-scoring cities located on or near the country’s West Coast while many of the lowest-scoring cities are clustered in the South.



Rankings targeted at mobile workers, entrepreneurs, executives and those making lifestyle location choices are growing. More emphasis on security, entrepreneurial freedom and liveability has been found in comprehensive city indexes. In the US in particular a succession of rankings has emerged since 2009 – Small Business Vitality Rankings, Best US Cities for Business, Best Cities for the Next Decade, BestPerforming Cities, Happiest Cities to Work, Best Cities for Young Adults to Live - exploring the comparative opportunities for employment, especially for younger populations and creative classes who possess greater mobility. The weighting on terrorism and political stability is strong in many international indexes led by consulting firms, accounting for up to a quarter of the total assessment, as favourable conditions for setting up new businesses becomes an important differentiator. New rankings have also appeared in such areas of cybercrime and broadband speed. This reflects an emerging interest in softer questions of lifestyle and business environment as pre-occupation with finance and size wanes The chart below illustrates the focuses on how quality of life is conceptualised and researched differently across city indexes. Corporate-led studies, on the left, prioritise the demands of investors, executives and talented workers – security, entrepreneurial freedom, high-level infrastructure. The EIU index, for example, is explicitly a liveability index for professionals and managers, as it has measures for private healthcare, private education, corruption and good quality housing. Studies carried out by media outlets, and surveys carried out by governmental and other institutional bodies, more usually focus attention on everyday living of permanent residents. Comprehensive indexes try to cover issues that concern both these constituencies.

Issue areas compared by measures and sub-measures of quality of life

House prices Sustainability – CO2 Economic/job opportunity Romance Natural environment

Media publications





 









 

Green spaces

More permanent resident focused













Urban dev’mnt/infrastructure Crime/policing Global connectivity Terrorism Political stability Hotel rooms Housing quality/ availability Consumer goods Corruption/ freedom Business environment-services Interviewee perception







 













  



 



 





 



Transport/ congestion More investor/ executive focused

 











   









  

   





 











 

      



Public services Sports/ entertainment Food Creative class/young pop. size Diversity/integration Art & culture Fashion Cost of living Education/Health Climate

Resident surveys

 

Gallup Healthways Well Being Index 2011

Minor focus

Comprehensive indexes

Cities of Opportunity ‘Lifestyle Assets’ World Cities Survey Quality of life Global Power Cities Index ‘Livability’ Global Cities Index ‘Cultural experience’ European Cities Monitor Monocle 2010 Quality of Living Survey Ask Men Best Cities to Live In 2010 Best Cities for Young Adults to Live 2010 Eurobarometer quality of live survey



Mercer QoL 2010

 Major focus

EIU Liveability report 2011

Business research







    



  







 

  









 



Increased future-oriented indexes. Another notable index trend associated with the recession is the increased future-oriented focus of indexes, in particular through the consideration of future strategies. This to some extent reflects the uncertainty pervading policy and business communities about the contours of the forthcoming urban terrain in light of the recession, and the desire to re-establish new patterns of predictability after the volatility of the last four years. Many ranking reports acknowledge that the previous model for firms to base themselves in the command centres of London, New York, Tokyo and Paris and subsequently in a handful of leading emerging megacities may not yield the best outcomes, with growth becoming more diffuse geographically and across varying city scales.

As such business research teams are redirecting attention to long-term outlooks The new report by McKinsey’s research arm, McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) - Urban world: Mapping the economic power of cities’ launches the new tracking of over 2,000 cities GDP, demography and income. The tracker soon intends to incorporate figures on infrastructure investment, consumer demand and economic structure for these cities, to aid policymakers involved in planning efforts, businesses looking to make strategic investment and location decisions, and even political representatives and institutions seeking to be relevant and effective in an urban landscape that is very different to that in the 20th century. Some new studies have been created precisely to provide a valuable tool for establishing future urban strategies for individual cities. The Global Power City Index uses the annual results to create and adjust scenario analysis for Tokyo, simulating future rankings based on potential new urban agendas in the city. Elsewhere studies in both environmental and investment rankings now have an explicit theme of future strategy. In fDi Intelligence’s Cities of the Future series, for example, there is now a sub-indicator on world cities’ FDI promotion strategy and governance, which considers not only current initiatives and department staff numbers but also investment ‘vision’. For this measure, almost 100 cities and regions submitted details about their promotion strategy which was judged and scored by a judging panel. Despite the challenges involved, using subjective and objective assessments of strategies and future success is set to become a key genre of the comparative urban studies field. 

R&D, technology and innovation is a growing field of analysis. The post-recessional spotlight on diversified economies has spurred new rankings of non-finance sectors. It is now one of the six key functions in the Global Power City Index, and is a key feature of the Global Urban Competitiveness Report and the Cities of Opportunity review. New global rankings have sprung up on the innovation economy and technology commercialisation, and an academic study on scientific scholarship across lvi global metropolitan regions was extensively covered by the magazine-journal Nature in 2010. This trend suggests that these lucrative high value-added fields are being acknowledged as critical to not only economic vitality but also political and intellectual influence, especially for the fast emerging cities in Asia and Latin America.



Cities with strong higher education institutions have recorded strong results nationally and regionally. Cities ranging from Cambridge, Austin, Houston, Munich, and Boston have been rated very highly for their private sector knowledge economy and well-being since 2008, linked to their strong university provision and niche science firms. Boston, for example, ranked top of 2thinknow consulting firm’s innovation economy ranking in 2010, one of only three cities to gain the maximum score for human infrastructure, benefiting from its world-class universities and business schools. Coastal American and Western European cities performed very well in this index, comprising three quarters of the global top 20, and each of these cities possesses at least one established international quality university. Cities which host strong higher education institutions have also recorded strong results nationally and regionally. Political capitals such as Washington DC have also performed strongly during the recession as they possess a much more stable jobs base. On the other hand, manufacturing centres without large and diverse concentrations of young people have failed to achieve comparably on economic and social indicators. Currently, international rankings more typically explore the quality of individual institutions rather than the overall take-up of higher education in cities around the world, and this is one area that merits further attention.



There is still a very strong tendency towards judging financial capitals over other, sometimes larger, cities, because of the continued pre-eminence of finance. For example, Mumbai is now typically included in studies of 20-50 world cities, whereas India’s capital New Delhi is very rarely afforded such a place. IT specialist Bangalore is also fairly absent from global city indexes because of its weak finance provision. The same is the case among South African cities, where Johannesburg is assessed every time instead of Cape Town. The Global Power City Index measure 34 cities up against Tokyo, including Geneva, Frankfurt and Milan over emerging powerhouses Buenos Aires or Istanbul. And despite its recent woes and dimunitive population size Dubai continues to be the first choice Middle Eastern representative in a global index. Cities with the capacity to host major banking and insurance firms and their accompanying labour force are still widely seen as the benchmarks in the new business cycle

7. How is environment and climate change addressed by new benchmarks? The theme of sustainability has emerged – in many cases for the first time - as a prominent feature of some comprehensive city benchmarking efforts, but has yet to be incorporated fully as an indispensable metric. 

Urban environment and sustainability are conceived in many different ways. Indexes vary depending on methodology, priorities, and target audiences. Some interpret sustainability holistically in terms of longterm infrastructural overhaul and management of low-carbon mobility, green buildings, waste disposal and water. Others include social and economic indicators associated with cohesion and economic diversity. Still others frame environmental qualities much more narrowly, considering symptoms such as pollution or disaster risk. Among the major global city comparative studies, Cities of Opportunity has a sub-index entitled ‘Sustainability’ and the Global Power City Index has a category for ‘Ecology and Natural Environment.’ Cities of Opportunity, for which sustainability is one of its ten packets of measures, interprets sustainability in terms of resilient models of urban transport, building efficiency, renewable energy, waste and water. It argues that Berlin and Stockholm provide the finest illustrations of sustainable urban practice, while Dubai is described as the antithesis of a sustainable city, given its unbalanced growth and overly narrow economic base. The Global Power City Index has removed the energy sustainability measure from its environment section, for practicality reasons, concentrating instead on ecological conditions. This reflects an enduring problem of data collection that renders a quantitative comparison of global cities’ sustainability problematic, although Siemens/EIU Green City Indexes have gone a long way to resolving this. Elsewhere the most economic and globalisation-focused city benchmarks – such as the Global Urban Competitiveness Project or the Global Cities Index - do not currently include environmental or sustainability considerations. This is the same for most quality of life indexes - the EIU Liveability index does not include any consideration of environmental factors – its ‘culture and environment’ measure focuses instead on climate and social conditions. The only exception is the 2010 Mercer study which has incorporated a new ‘Eco-City’ ranking which builds on previous individual criteria such as disaster risk. The business-oriented indexes that do have an environmental indicator, such as the European Cities Monitor, typically focus on pollution and surface phenomena that directly affect the health and living standards of business workers.

•

Several valuable national and regional studies now compare urban environmental outputs. Again, among these new indexes there are varied interpretations of environmental performance and sustainability. Firstly there are the comprehensive environmental measures, which consider all types of ecological impacts – including CO2 per capita, air/water quality outputs, green space and buildings. These indexes aim to help provide an element of standardisation in a complex field, and are often geared towards city governments such that they can prioritise their weak areas in carbon-reduction. Chief among these is the landmark Siemens/EIU Green City Index, which offers comprehensive sustainability assessment of large cities in three regions, and identifies sustainability across the full range of environmental indicators. Alongside new North American studies by Corporate Knights and Sustain Lane, the Green City Index incorporates consideration of governance of environmental practice at the city level into its measure. Its sub-indicators assess how the management of environmental issues is being driven, and the degree of innovation and leadership shown in creating green policies. Siemens/EIU even includes a measure of public participation in environmental decision making. A second type of index has some environmental measures but also includes consideration of social and economic indicators associated with infrastructure, cohesion and economic diversity. More typically these indexes intend to encourage healthy competition between cities domestically and internationally and provide a popular talking point. The major example in this field is the academic European Smart Cities project which examines 70 cities with population between 500,000 and 1 million across Europe. Its premise resembles those of other business indexes on sustainability; urban smartness is about not compromising on any one of economy, environment and quality of life. A third type of ranking addresses a particular facet of sustainability, producing lists such as the most bike-friendly cities, as interest in comparative conditions for recreational cyclists and bike commuters increases.

The varied focuses on sustainability can be seen from the selection in the chart below. While the comprehensive indexes on the left focus their sub-indices strictly on environmental outputs, as might be expected, the new specialist indexes often take the more holistic approach analysing overall smartness and exploring the effects of governance and policy. Siemens Corporate Ethisphere Global /EIU Forum EU Sustain Knights – Institute Mercer Cities of Power European for the Smart Lane Sustainable Global Eco-City Opportunity City Green Future Cities (US) Cities Sustainability index Index City (UK) Project (Canada) Centers Index

ENVIRONMENT CO2 emissions figures CO2 reduction strategy Local food sources Renewable energy Ecology/ Biodiversity Air quality Waste recycling Water supply/quality Green space/ land-use





  

   

Green buildings Firms’ environmental impact





 

    

   







 

  







  











   

  

 



QUALITY OF LIFE Public transport Congestion Car usage Health Housing Housing affordability Natural disaster risk Social cohesion Diversity Media/Speech Education, Art-Culture Law/Regulatory Framework





  





 













 

 

 

 

    



 

ECONOMY and LEADERSHIP 

Economy/ employment Business development





  

Green Economy Environmental Governance Leadership Environmental innovation



 





 



 



 





Quantitative comparison of global cities’ sustainability remains problematic. Some comprehensive benchmarks and almost all quality of life indexes have removed or omitted energy sustainability measures because of data comparability issues. Currently only standards of ecology and basic infrastructure are available for global comparison. The Siemens/EIU Green City Index series represents the biggest breakthrough yet in comparative urban sustainability evaluation. In comparing up to 30 cities on each continent, it provides city leaders and citizens with an excellent grasp of where their city stands against their neighbours. However even the authors of the series concede that beyond Europe there is a great deal of difficulty in producing reliable

and transferable data. The Latin American edition of the index had to omit Guatemala City, Salvador and lvii Santo Domingo due to a lack of specific data. In Asia’s case the number of qualitative rather than quantitative indicators - plan grading for reducing congestion and increasing recycling, for example – was increased to compensate for the lack of city-level data points. Quantitative indicators were in many case incommensurable and had to be simplified to a ten point scale Furthermore the impact of informal settlements was entirely discounted from the final gradings because of the inherent lack of consistent data. In both Asia and Latin America the structure of the index was considerably revised due to the absence of assured data quality and availability. Concerns about data reliability meant no numeric quantification was possible in these regions, only groupings of ‘well above average’, ‘above average’ and so on. An additional problem is the inapplicability of a uniform set of measures due to; widely diverging development stages and patterns of growth, and the binding of cities to varied sets of environmental commitments made at national and continental level. Finally the nature of globalisation is that cities are increasingly tied into webs of relational effects and dependence, and this is especially the case with environmental outputs. The exceptional speed of movement of goods and the international trade of items for consumption and waste is so huge and diverse, that pinpointing which cities are accountable for which environmental loads is both difficult and controversial. Currently large Western cities are both praised for their low CO 2 per capita outputs, and denounced for their large carbon footprints left in less developed agricultural and manufacturing regions lviii and hinterlands. In summary, while the pressure to create fully applicable and comparable indicators is set to grow and grow, for now environmental comparison may have to accept more limited ambitions of measuring infrastructure and planning efforts. •

Environmental benchmarks lead the way in exploring comparative urban governance and strategy. New environmental studies – led by Siemens/EIU, Corporate Knights and Sustain Lane - assess environmental management, innovation and leadership shown in creating green policies. Each include clear judgement of a city’s future strategy and provision, including ambitiousness of carbon reduction strategy. Sustain Lane, Siemens/EIU and the Ethisphere Institute have all introduced a measure of the strength of a city’s planned carbon reduction strategy. In the case of Siemens/EIU, the strategy ‘ambitiousness’ is rated from 0-10. Sustain Lane’s US index defines sustainability as ‘meeting the needs of the present generation so it doesn't lix compromise the quality of life for future generations’, while the UK’s Forum for the Future accounts for a city’s preparedness for future urban challenges in its index. Even Bicycling Magazine’s Bike-Friendliness index has taken into account long-term bike strategies in its rankings. Future strategy assessment is usually carried out through examining local environmental commitments which consider such things as lx adaptation and mitigation strategies as well commitments to building efficiency. The introduction of normative assessment of urban strategies represents a potentially major step forward in index sophistication, and may be transferable to other areas of urban governance, such as infrastructure, branding and international openness. The strategic element means that environmental indexes are arguably the most attentive of all indexes currently in operation to issues of leadership. Corporate Knights speaks of the need for ‘systemic, transformative leadership’ that go beyond ‘half-hearted promises’ and rearticulate the relationship with resources and places so that cities can become beneficial to the planet. Many others report a mixed record among world cities in their efforts to respond to climate change. While often identifying relative success among cities in Europe and Canada, indexes are implicitly or explicitly critical of the slow roll-out of renewable energy and the low proportions of waste recycled.

8.

Longer-term implications for indexes

The index and benchmark genre has existed for barely a decade, and as a result its limitations and areas for remodelling have yet to be fully explored. The indexes covered in this report are rich and diverse and offer a huge range of different outlooks on cities. These range from global outlooks on cities in the international economy to micro-studies of individual urban variables. One intractable concern with city indexes is the incompatible interpretation of the same (or similar) variables. Different indexes understand quite different things when thinking about sustainability, quality of life, city ‘power’, infrastructure, accessibility, knowledge economy, and even cost of living. These intricacies complicate matters for those seeking to make comparative insights, but they are also highly informative about the way urban challenges are being conceived over time. A number of other questions are raised by the indexes in this study: (i) Is liveability about safety and security, or entertainment and cultural density? London and New York, for example, receive wildly varied scores for liveability, depending on the weighting of crime, stability, entertainment or nightlife. While New York is regarded with New York only ranks 94th out of 162 cities in the national 2010 Well Being Index, performing particularly poorly in emotional health and th working experience, while Chicago fares only slightly better, at 76 . These cities’ poor scores routinely raise questions about our conceptions of urban quality of life and whether they can ever be commensurable. The failure to properly interrogate the meaning or assumptions behind quality of life is apparent, and is an area that may need to be clarified as indexes increase in sophistication and policy relevance. The mode of data collection is highly significant in affecting rankings, with outcomes that are obtained by indexes on the same theme tend to be somewhat different depending on the methodology. A case in point is in quality of life indexes; the EIU and Mercer studies rely purely on secondary data sources focusing on expat requirements, and both these studies find that the major world cities are a long way behind smaller Canadian and European centres. However Cushman & Wakefield’s European Cities Monitor ask employers to interpret their own definition of quality of life when considering business locations. Here larger cities such as Madrid and Paris perform much more favourably in comparison to the likes of Copenhagen and Zurich. This suggests that perceptions of cities remains crucial and emphasises the role city branding can have on business prospects over the course of several business cycles. (ii) Can the gap between quantitative analysis and subjective perception be bridged? Many comprehensive indexes obtain their data firstly from global organisations, primarily the OECD, World Bank, UN and IMF. National statistics agencies are then critical for obtaining information not stored at regional-global level, while commercial data service providers are also a common source. These sources form the backbone of most keynote city indexes, which continue to use quantitative figures at least partially. The gap between indexes drawing upon quantitative analysis and those based on subjective perception remains, but there are an increasing number of studies which seek to occupy a middle ground between the two, combining the strengths of both. To some extent this is the product of realising that it is nearly unachievable to acquire entirely applicable data on each city. Cities use varying definitions for categorising aspects of the city, based on a whole set of historical and cultural practices. Definitions of what counts as a green space, what should be judged waste, and how to understand transport and mobility, are not identical lxi across the world. Surveys are now an increasingly popular method of obtaining impressions of cities’ global image, or for obtaining subjective data from samples of investors, bankers or residents in each city. Survey-based indexes typically combine the results with ‘hard’ data to achieve an overall score, or to compare ‘image’ to ‘reality’, or ‘brand’ to ‘asset’. The GaWC research group itself accumulates data of network connectedness through surveys of head offices and branch offices of international firms in accountancy, advertising, law and management consultancy, banking/finance and insurance. The Global Cities’ Attractiveness Survey is another example of an interview-based survey of top-end executives, which enables consideration of comparative merits of world cities. The Global Financial Centres Index also obtains the bulk of its information from ongoing online surveys carried out investors and senior bankers worldwide, as does Anholt/GfK Roper’s brand index,

which obtained questionnaire responses from the public in 20 nations. It is notable that Z/Yen considered dropping its quantitative rating in 2010 in order to focus on more qualitative, analytical questions. It is therefore the case that index studies now regularly involve a combination of primary and secondary research. In a further signal of future index development, Sustain Lane directly contacted municipal departments for qualitative information, before tallying the interviews with secondary data from local NGO and academic sources. This has also become common in investment and free zone measurements created by fDi Intelligence. Indexes of global universities have led the way in engaging stakeholders across the world to take part in comparative review surveys, translating surveys into multiple languages to avoid bias in favour of US and UK institutions. This bias is a potential drawback of index surveys that do not take into account issues of accessibility. The effort to carry out interviews and reviews in this fashion represents a departure from the more prominent statistics-led surveys, and offers an alternative richer methodology of comparative city indexes. Several index designers are working on more holistic assessments – not just through internationally agreed accreditations or ratings, but via interactive systems where the user/respondee identifies their own criteria and weightings. Some indexes measure perceptions of city success, whilst others measure performance. Whilst both measures are useful, it is important to recognise that they are not the same. Reports, benchmarks and indexes also rarely draw upon directly comparable data, which sometimes leads to problems when seeking systematic comparison. There is firstly the variation in detail and geography; some indexes draw a comprehensive set of over one hundred world cities, while many more detailed studies limit their analysis to less than 40. A more intractable - although interesting - issue is the differing interpretation of the same (or similar) variables. As explained above, different indexes understand quite different things when thinking about sustainability, quality of life, city ‘power’, infrastructure, accessibility, knowledge economy, and even cost of living. Whether the uniformity of such credentials is either possible or desirable is a point to be openly debated.

(iii) There is a widespread failure to grasp the multiple functional geographies of cities in comparative measures. The authors of Siemens/EIU Green City Index acknowledge that the task of comparing cities in Latin America and Asia was made almost impossible by the varying sizes of administrative units, with some cities government lxii boundaries far exceeding their urbanised form, and many others dwarfed by a swelling conurbation. This not only precludes the accumulation of accurate comparisons, it also leads to distorted results. Accessibility, for example, is sometimes equated with internal commuter transport quality that only applies to a small fraction of the functional economic area, or it is linked to external air connectivity, when only some parts of a large metropolitan area are located close to an international airport. Similarly, the comparison of sustainability often does not factor in the environmental regulations instituted beyond city boundaries, which are often markedly more rigorous or mild than for the city itself. (iv) There remains no obvious link between quality of life performance and brand strength. Many cities – notably London and New York - are among the very best city brands despite comparatively poor liveability. Quality of life indexes relying purely on secondary data sources find major world cities deficient, while survey-led and interview-led studies see the top cities perform much more favourably. This suggests that perceptions of cities remains crucial and emphasises the role city branding can have on business prospects over the course of several business cycles. (v) How can measures of human diversity be gauged? Human diversity is growing as a measure of differentiation between cities, but is still quite conceptually underexplored, and is examined mainly through comparing aspects such as ‘people’, ‘human capital’ and ‘civic life.’ City benchmarking often interprets questions of human capital and talent through the lens of education, rather than through international populations. The Global Cities Index absorbs diversity into a ‘human capital’ measure by assessing the size of the foreign-born population and the number of primary and secondary

international schools. The Anholt/GfK Roper Brands Index includes diversity under the rubric of People. Here cultural diversity is measured alongside surveyed impressions of friendliness and personal encounters. The themes of diversity and integration have, though, emerged in more substantive form as part of some of the new comparative sustainability and smart city studies. Canada’s Sustainable Cities survey is one of the very few to explicitly incorporate diversity into its criteria under its ‘Governance & Empowerment’ metric. This metric considers the representation of ethnic minorities in civic life and on the city council. The survey has also included gender diversity and representation, reflecting the widespread concern in Canada for fair accountability and participation among all stakeholders. Secondly the European Smart Cities project has a subsection on ‘smart people’, where it measures cities’ social and ethnic plurality, cosmopolitanism/openmindedness and participation in public life. This is the first substantial index investigation of what exactly makes diversity function to the benefit of an economy and urban society, as previously diversity has only been linked to the dataset of foreign-born population size. As such it offers a very promising platform for comparative performance science to flesh out what diversity really means in our global economy and how cities can leverage off it. (vi) City investment environments in the post-recession environment are still under-explored Investment remains a remarkably under-studied area in global and regional city indexes. Since Standard & Poor’s published a Top 10 city credit rating centres in 2006, no comparative study of cities’ credit-worthiness has been produced, perhaps due to the flux associated with the 2008 downturn. Similarly there are only small top 10 and top 20 lists of city FDI figures that do not match the 2007 ranking by Locomonitor which published greenfield FDI statistics for the top 50 cities for the period 2003-2006. Comparative business environment and investment measures are among the biggest knowledge gaps in the index family. The most common measure of investment prospects since 2008 has been carried out through investor surveys. ULI and PwC’s global analysis of real estate, Cushman & Wakefield’s European Cities Monitor, and Greater Paris’ Investment Agency’s assessment of global attractiveness all are founded on interviews and online surveys with CEOs, executives and other senior personnel. The use of credit ratings or FDI statistics does not appear to have been used. Many studies instead employ indirect assessments of a city’s soft and hard business environments in order to gauge investment potential. fDi magazine is the most up-to-date and authoritative public source of comparative urban FDI statistics with its Cities of the Future-themed indexes. Its introduction in 2010 of a global ‘Free Zone’ index represents a boost to the knowledge base on comparative multinational investment in emerging cities, complementing the ranking of Global Services and Tholons on outsourcing locations. It is one of the few investment indexes to use a wide range of quantitative and qualitative inputs assessing cost effectiveness, human resources, and business infrastructure. The fDi publication is innovative in its assessment of each city’s and zone’s FDI promotion strategy alongside hard data analysis. The strategy metric is based on how many staff are dedicated to promoting inward investment, which key initiatives are in place to enhance investment, what high-growth sectors are being nurtured, what kind of incentives are offered to investors, and what highprofile, world-class property sites are available for use. Such a holistic strategy evaluation provides a benchmark for future comparative investment work. As far as the cities themselves are concerned, there are indications that the recession began to accelerate the already visible shift of investment focus to East Asian and the Middle Eastern cities, but that the biggest Western cities remain world leaders. By some measures, Dubai became the number one destination for FDI rd th projects worldwide in 2008, with Shanghai and Beijing ranked 3 and 4 just behind London. But IBM’s figures rd from 2009 show London is clearly the most attractive city for investment projects, while Paris (3 ), New York th th (7 ) and Sydney (8 ) are still extremely popular. Thus most of the top Western cities still offer excellent investment potential despite their recent misfortunes, even if the likes of Sao Paulo, Bangalore and Chennai are rising rapidly. More recent indexes from 2009 and 2010 suggest that Chinese cities – especially Shanghai and Beijing - are some way ahead of Indian hubs and that Japanese and South Korean centres remain competitive destinations because of their superior infrastructure and quality of life. In terms of outsourcing destinations, the situation is

somewhat reversed, with Indian cities rated much more developed in this area, although Shanghai is emerging as a key outsourcing hub benefiting from (by one ranking) the world’s most dynamic Free Zone. The Free Zones in the Gulf are considered highly attractive, backed by world-class infrastructure, and as a cluster are second only to the Chinese giants in terms of overall provision according to index results. There is a discernable gap however between these two investment-attracting clusters – China and UAE cities – and other emerging centres in Guatemala, Mexico and Poland. It is also notable that no major urban agglomerations in Latin America or southern Africa feature prominently as world-class Free Zone or outsourcing venues, with strength appearing in smaller hubs, often in non-urban coastal areas. (vii) Benchmarks are often unclear about their target audience and the applicability of findings between different population segments. The most prominent target audience in the most recent set of indexes are mobile knowledge professionals, investors and executives, who have to make relocation decisions on the basis of quality of life and cost of living. Most innovative in the area of multi-actor assessment is the Global Power City Index which considers comparative city strengths from the perspective of different stakeholders - Managers, Researchers, Artists and Visitors, and local Residents. This enables both a more even evaluation of a city’s proposition, while also reaching out to a wider audience. Many studies are explicitly tailored towards urban strategic planners, and aim to enable them to create more effective city strategies and visions with their index. The scale of the economic recession has had two effects in terms of the angle the larger indexes have adopted. It is firstly described as an opportunity for re-assessment at the policy level, and a time for open-mindedness towards forward-looking strategies. It is also said to have generated a wide recognition that world cities – as the home to the highest concentrations of intellectual and economic capital, must be leading the efforts to confront major challenges in the fields of energy, transport, land-use, health and sustainability. Thus the indexes self consciously function as an evidence base for a more proactive urban leadership. This is the case with the GUCP, which intends for its index to help forge a critical mass of research that can provide a platform for executive training and research programmes for urban government. In focusing attention on the strengths and weaknesses of cities, these reports describe themselves as tools for future scenario and visioning efforts. The GPCI’s purpose is to invigorate the evidenceled urban policy debate, and it uses the foundation of its data and ranking list to include a scenario analysis for Tokyo to simulate its future positioning based on potential new urban agendas. This represents a new innovation in the independent city index. Indexes that target investors tend to include finance and economic activity as a key measure, but supplement it with important information on political and economic security, intellectual activity and availability, and liveability. Investment-focused indexes have as their target audience not only multinational firms but also high net worth individuals who have a strong interest in learning about the emergence of secure high-growth hotspots worldwide. An example of such an index is the Citibank-Knight Frank World Cities Survey, which is directly tied to its annual assessment of the global real estate market and examines cities in order to advise the wealthy and influential property elite. Typically these indexes identify a smaller number of cities, tending to include only the most dynamic emerging cities – Singapore, Shanghai, Dubai, Mumbai. This is because the indexes are focused only on cities capable of consistent strength and stability across political, economic, cultural and quality of life parameters, thus excluding many fast-growth but perceived unstable cities such as Sao Paulo, Johannesburg and Istanbul. For indexes designed for property or market investors, anything less than world-class provision is considered a critical barrier to investment. Investment-led reports also tend to have a heavier focus on a city’s political and ideational influence. This is often because long-term investments demand consideration of the city’s ability to shape and adjust to fluctuating global patterns. Cities such as Brussels, Beijing and Washington DC tend to perform well in these indexes because of this accent on political engagement. The Global Cities Index is an example of an index focused on both policymakers and investors – operating in conjunction with the forerunning national Globalization Index. The index is designed track city actions as urban populations grow while the world continues to shrink, and assess city responses to a volatile global economy,

climate change, transnational migration and energy shortages. Its policy insight is in illustrating how small and large cities have much in common in a multipolar globalised environment; namely cities are advised to ensure well educated populations, engage in effective marketing and self-promotion, and develop niches in business lxiii or cultural provision. Some indexes are targeted at providing information or attracting international visitors. Indexes of visitor numbers and experience are catered both for policymakers and for visitors themselves. EuroMonitor’s international travel rankings are designed to provide the public with an idea of new destination trends, while also demonstrating to leadership groups which cities have successfully taken advantage of opportunities to create new strategies and markets. Meanwhile university rankings are usually created with the target audience of the international student population in mind, enabling undecided students to shortlist their favourites in order of key criteria.

(viii) Establishing city leadership at the heart of indexes. Currently there are no indexes that provide a direct measure on city leadership. Quantitative-focused indexes cannot obtain useful figures that can be mapped on a worldwide basis, while qualitative studies have yet to tackle the field of leadership and governance head on. In many cases, indexes carry out studies with indifference to the complexities of governance and strategic management that form the enabling framework for a city’s ‘hard’ data results. That said, many new indexes do attribute success and failure to the role of leadership, and intend for their ranking results to provide an impetus for establishing planning guidance, improving business environments and enhancing models of city management. The Global Urban Competitiveness Report is first among these, making an unequivocal link between successful dynamic cities and increased autonomy for local government, whereby it can foster a diversified economy, entrepreneurialism and the attraction of international populations. The AT Kearney Global Cities Index also identifies significant challenges for urban policy leaders in the phase of accelerating urbanisation and the rise of ‘megacities.’ It argues that the same keys to success exist everywhere, and that city leaders must be capable of attracting and retaining educated people, generating economic opportunity, effective marketing, and developing as cultural, policy, or business hubs. Individual index reports make specific comments about successful and failing leadership. Cities of Opportunity acknowledges New York and London’s exceptional lifestyle offerings as attributable to both cities’ visionary leadership. The Knight Frank World Cities Survey comments on Berlin’s improved economic leadership as critical to its ranking improvement, while the Ethisphere Institute’s Global Sustainability Centers report praises Chicago for its unique city leadership and its ambitious drive for national sustainability leadership. Furthermore, the trend among environmental indexes to assess strategy and environmental stewardship is a significant one for the future assessment of city leadership as a whole. These studies clearly incorporate analysis of city leadership based on a widely accepted idea that city leaders must institute a practical and ambitious programme of actions to map out and implement sustainable futures. As cities become the central battlegrounds for achieving sustainability globally, the spotlight on leadership will increase, and the techniques of measuring leadership already developed by eco-indexes are then transposable to other areas. A next step for global city indexes is to consider to what extent leadership can be considered responsible for the provision (or lack) of high calibre infrastructure, logistics, real estate, digital facilities, and efficient public services. Indeed leadership can also be linked to the presence of global firms and international populations.

9.

What insights do indexes offer about short and long term city success?

After several years where indexes were based on rather crude measures of size and growth, many indexes since 2008 offer more nuanced and creative insight and opinion into the essence of short and long-term urban st success in the 21 century. Indexes tend to acknowledge that globalisation over the past twenty years has allowed for the emergence of an open – if not totally even – playing field whereby BRIC economies are becoming competitive with the developed world. This means that cities anywhere on the globe can achieve success over multiple business cycles if they fulfil particular criteria, or indeed fail if they cannot meet them. The World Cities Survey sums up the prevailing consensus in warning that a shortfall in world-class provision in any one area is now considered a critical barrier to becoming a stable hub. As it states, ‘to matter as a world city you need to score well on all measures; you need a broad base of appeal… *a location+ where the ideas and values that define the global agenda and shape the world are settled.’ While the broad base is not always the same across indices, there are a number of recurrent themes. 

Hosting mobile multinational firms and talent is critical to long term performance. Cities that have high numbers of multinational companies see greater quality of living, higher investment, more tourism and greater recognition. They are able to seek better and grander image making activities and compete for major sporting and cultural events (even if the economic benefit is less than the political benefit). Having headquarters or subsidiary offices of major service firms is important, particularly in the developed world, of driving the knowledge economy and cementing a city into global capital flows. The Global Power City Index begins with a premise that the best cities ‘attract creative people and excellent companies from around the world’ while the Global City Attractiveness Survey identifies the success of San Francisco and Taipei as to a large extent attributable to their attraction of niche world-class firms. The GaWC research cluster maintains its world city rankings purely on the basis of business network connectivity, with adjacent research confirming the significant impact of advanced firms on a city’s skills base, regeneration and image.



Creativity and entrepreneurship. Smaller cities that have embraced a culture of entrepreneurialism and developed strong hard and soft business environments have been especially prominent in city indexes since 2008. Fostering entrepreneurship is an important subject of the Global Cities’ Attractiveness Survey while the Global Power City Index explores the power of cities to ‘attract creative people’. City leaders in Melbourne, Zurich and Seattle encourage business activity and make efforts to encourage investment and are therefore recording strong results in terms of brand, quality of life and economy. Such cities have developed substantial amenities for transnational workers. In some cases, smaller cities have achieved great success in these fields even when the national government is perceived to be an ineffective facilitator. Meanwhile Tokyo’s deficiencies in terms of brand and business dynamism are linked in some indexes to its comparatively restrictive business environment and high corporate tax. Clearly the creation of optimal conditions for corporations and entrepreneurs remains very important to overall city success.



High-tech clusters and a diverse R&D base have emerged as key targets for cities in the index genre, as they are drivers and symptoms of a high knowledge base. Several of the most high-profile and wellresearched reports emphasise the significance of cultivating high-tech clusters and developing a diverse R&D base as a means of curbing over-dependence on volatile finance or manufacturing sectors.



Hosting international events is a theme newly linked as a lever for long-term success. Cities which attract and host dynamic and innovative events – including Barcelona, Sydney, Beijing, Singapore have been big success stories in the medium term.



Equilibrium between low-risk living and wealth creation. Security, from terrorism, social unrest and violence, natural disasters, corruption, and other threats, is increasingly important, particularly in the developed world. The riots in Paris and bombings in London, Madrid and Moscow all demonstrate that the urban is the new battleground of ideas, and hence secure, safe cities are likely to be more successful in the long run



Increased autonomy for local government is linked in some indexes to successful dynamic cities. It is thought to foster a diversified economy, entrepreneurialism and the attraction of international populations.



Visionary city leadership. Indexes point to increased urgent challenges for urban leaders, who must be capable of devising strategies to attract and retain educated people, generate economic opportunity, market effectively, and develop as cultural, policy, or business hubs. City leaders are also responsible for nurturing a city’s exceptional lifestyle offering and sustainability planning.



Domestic and international connectivity. Cities aspiring to optimise achievements clearly need good connections between themselves and their hinterlands, other major urban centres and within the city boundary. The results of the Global Power City Index show how the cities with the most global city interaction are invariably the most successful business cities. The Index found London to have the best air connectivity in Europe, New York the best in North America, and Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo as the key air hubs in Asia. Among non-finance firms, Paris was identified as the key hub in Europe, New York in America, and Tokyo and Seoul in Asia, all of which have strong mutual links. The fact that these cities are the central nodes of the global economy shows the link between connectivity and success. The provision of external connections is not just a response to demand but reflects a successful infrastructural vision and leadership. Elsewhere the Southern US cities such as Houston, Dallas and Austin have performed very well in economic and employment terms since the recession and this is also associated with their privileged regional air connectivity. Cities with better connections perform better on quality of living, knowledge economy, social and environmental indicators and business and governance performance. Ease of movement aids all members of society, and those cities that make transport equitable do well in a number of more people-focused indexes.

Longer-term lessons derived from the indexes include the following: i.

A sustained commitment to openness to international populations can be decisive. The formation of international human capital in a city is both a cause and effect of the location of strong scientific, cultural and quality of life amenities. The opportunities for internationalisation of city populations and culture to feed back positively into the local urban fabric are clear from the strong index results of cities such as Singapore, Toronto, Madrid and Berlin. Successful internationalisation works well in cities where there are leaders who are prepared and able to take charge of their long term destiny and are able to exercise high degree of self reliance.

ii.

A powerful and adaptable city identity and brand maintains consumer and investor confidence even in the bad times. Cities such as Sydney and Barcelona are currently punching above their weight across a range of measurements in large part to their privileged brands. The strong city brand has been critical to attracting tourists, knowledge workers, business, conferences and investments. Cities placed highly in branding and perception-led rankings are often towards the top of the conferencehost and visitor rankings. Businesses desire presence in the most prestigious cities – and it is these cities which have the strongest brands.

iii.

Proximity, access and outreach to growing markets cannot be underestimated. Historically New York and London both grew by serving rapidly expanding markets, taking decisive roles in serving a rapidly growing and integrating global economy, especially, though not solely, with advanced financial and business/professional services. These two cities’ dominant performance in city indexes remains linked to the privilege of the English language, Anglo-American legal systems and capital markets, and electronic trading infrastructure that enables 24 hour trade with any global location. But other cities’ strong index achievements in recent years testifies to the role of strategic location and market access. Singapore and Hong Kong have functioned as the key gateways to the Asian and Chinese economies and have improved dramatically in rankings of finance, accessibility, business network connectivity and real estate as a result. Meanwhile the gateway cities of Mumbai and Buenos Aires have become

GaWC ‘alpha’ cities as they become major entry points to emerging regional markets. Such positioning can be invaluable to a city’s long-term prospects of economic success. One remarkable testament to the role of strategic location and positioning is Miami; although overlooked in many assessments of global reach and size, the city ranks top of AmericaEconomia’s Latin American business cities in 2010, despite being the only urban centre not to be physically lxiv located on the continent. The same study also points to the success of smaller hub Panama City, rd due to its strategic location and infrastructure-led connectivity – the city has the 3 highest number th of direct air links in the region after Miami and Mexico City. Panama City – rated 7 overall despite its small size and GDP - is seen as an example of how a less chaotic city can prove attractive to technology companies and talent by providing optimal gateway services. iv.

Cities with global aspirations need to work on their depth of artistic, architectural and cultural endowment. London, Paris and New York have once again showed remarkable resilience to the economic collapse which originated in their speculative financial industries. They have – contrary to many predictions - preserved their position more or less at the summit of comprehensive city indexes. This is associated with all three cities’ compelling cultural and informational density that provides the seeds of recovery, by harnessing new ideas and continuing to attract large numbers of visitors and creative workers. The Global Urban Competitiveness Project, produced in China, tellingly advises that enduring city dynamism will be achieved only by cultivating diversified cultures and preserving urban history and culture in long-term development plans. Meanwhile the Global Cities Index measure of Cultural Experience was introduced in 2008 to allow more consideration to cultural and quality of life attributes.

v.

Sustainability in terms of climate and environmental sensitivity will grow as distinguishing brand features of world cities. Comprehensive indexes are now including some element of environmental quality as a matter of course. Cities such as Hong Kong and Beijing have been penalised for their inadequate progress in this area, while much of the North American cities’ recent poor index performance is attributable to poor scores in terms of pollution, sprawl and car-dependency. There can be no doubt that efforts in the area of heritage, pollution, sustainable development and carbon footprint will increasingly come to define the differences between top cities, potentially affecting living choices of knowledge workers and location decisions of NGOs and other public institutions. 10. The rise of ‘Smart Cities’?

Alongside the evolution of urban indexes, an important new development is an emerging conversation about the prospect and potential for smart cities. Many leading multinational technology firms – including Siemens, Hewlett Packard and Cisco – have over the last two years laid down the broad vision for dramatically improved urban sustainability. Their research initiatives, partnerships and pioneering urban projects have tapped into the widespread concern of the impact of the recession on city budgets and resources, coupled with the search for improved infrastructure and economic vitality to drive new growth. While the application of such ideas is in the early stages, several remarks can be made on this dynamic new field: Smart city initiatives offer to:  calibrate new technologies to bear upon the management of urban transport, security, telecommunications, banking and energy.  lower city operating expenses, while also helping improve carbon footprint.  provide a more seamless urban environment to meet demands of citizens and mobile knowledge workers.  further implant the positive values of diversity and interconnection among citizenries. The smart city agenda has gained prominence because:  The world is unprecedentedly urban, and urbanising still further up to at least 2030.  The world’s most skilled and entrepreneurial people, capable of the highest productivity and valueadded output, increasingly reside in cities and operate within diverse networks of knowledge.

 

Cities most need and are best equipped to support such innovative networks to solve economic and environmental problems. Intelligent systems can be a critical factor in facilitating short-term cost-saving and long-term embedding of innovation.

A smart city approach is underpinned by:  A search for systematic behaviour patterns, not case-by-case response.  Considering the city holistically rather than on a department-by-department basis.  Transparent pooling and publicisation of information for citizens and providers alike.  Flexible public-private partnerships presiding over the entire urban planning process. The details of the smart city model are not completely thematised:  Some firms present an entire suite of solutions revolutionising all areas of urban management in the pursuit of a comprehensive citizen-centric upgrade of liveability, sustainability, international attractiveness and economic dynamism; others focus purely on environmental improvement within more or less current frameworks.  The connection between smart cities and the global knowledge economy is not fully established; while some approaches identify long-term city success as inextricably defined by the capacity to attract and retain creative professionals, others make a more internal argument based on short-term cost efficiencies for stretched city budgets and the pressure to meet international environmental targets. 11. Implications for City leadership Does a link exist between city success and city leadership? What contribution does effective leadership make to a city? The new economy seems likely to produce sharper divides between ‘winners and losers’, resulting in increased competitiveness and larger returns for successful transition to productivity improvements. This means that the return on good leadership is potentially great, but the penalties for failed leadership are likely to be much greater too. City leadership is riskier than before. There are some important observations to make:    

Successful businesses do not often locate in failing cities Successful cities do not have failing leaders very often either. Successful city development requires influential leadership as well as good management. Successful regions have successful cities, and successful cities strengthen regions.

In a complex, dynamic, and internationally connected world, locating roles and responsibilities for advancing complex city development agendas becomes very important. Although the most successful cities all appear to have been blessed with advantages, realisation of the opportunities these advantages offer does not happen by accident. Leadership provides a key ingredient in cities just as it does in firms. City leaders that are in tune with the needs of international firms and leading sectors can make a big difference if they calibrate local services and infrastructures to support them and actively try to solve the local operating problems such firms face. Of course it is not always easy to achieve this calibration politically; the need to drive citizen behaviour change to make progress on long term goals is regularly jeopardised by citizens failing to vote with long term perspectives in mind. But does the ecosystem of city leadership really add to the performance of firms? What does a city and its leadership do for business? The last cycle saw many informal public-private agreements come unstuck when the crisis began. Master-plans were not always implemented, funding agreements had to be revisited, and job creation did not often materialise. Consequently, local agreements between city governments and businesses will need to be fashioned in a new way in the next cycle, often with much more staged agreements that take stock of progress at defined intervals, before further support is granted. Remaking the relationship with business is therefore a critical goal.

The original core insight about this comes from what the theorists call ‘agglomeration economies’. They recognise that the world is not ‘flat’ (as Thomas Friedman puts it). Although the rules and systems are increasingly flat and ‘open’, the world is in fact ‘spiky’ (as Richard Florida has it) with an open system in fact contriving to encourage large numbers of firms, investments, and activities to concentrate in a smallish number of very dense places (the leading cities). Firms congregate in some cities rather than others for two basic reasons, either or both of which may be present. 



The cities offer high-calibre infrastructure, logistics, real estate, digital facilities, and efficient public services relative to the price paid for them (in taxes and operating costs) because the quality and orientation of those factors are what the business needs, and the costs of providing them is shared appropriately with others who use them. The cities have large numbers of other firms present that offer access to suppliers, services, skilled staff, and capital. The cities are ‘an internal market’ in, often specialised, business inputs that is a competitive advantage in the external competition the firms face.

These are ‘urbanisation’ and ‘localisation’ economies, but they frequently work together, with one reinforcing the other. Madrid’s expansion of transport capability with the award-winning Terminal 4 at Barajas airport and the speed at which it has introduced a metro subway system are key ingredients in an urbanisation economy. Dublin’s success in attracting and building clusters of information and bio-technology firms, underpinned by a rapidly internationalising labour force, is a great example of localisation benefits. But cities like London and New York find the two reinforce each other: in London, a strong lobby of well-organised businesses campaign for a fast cross-city train (CrossRail) to be built and agree to help finance it. In New York, business backs the plan to streamline regulation in financial services to be more successful in the long term. As cities continue to face constraints in public finance, and national leadership does not appear to be willing to embrace urban and metropolitan problems systematically or overtly, leaders have the challenge to find ways to tackle this collectively, as well as individually. So city leaders can encourage and foster these agglomerations, by understanding what businesses need locally and by reinforcing the clustering effects. However, success also brings problems like congestion, price rises, and shortage of amenities (such as housing or office space). How well city leaders solve these ‘growth challenges’ is central to success in the longer term. Should City Leaders Use City Indices? As the conclusions drawn above show, city indices are increasingly helpful sources of insight and useful in the round when indicating where city leadership should focus attention and develop strategy. Unfortunately however, they do not offer ready solutions - these still have to be worked out by city leaders themselves. Indices and benchmarks can assist city leaders and their partners to understand better how the city needs to change but they will have the best impact when their use is guided by clear principles: i.

ii.

iii. iv.

v.

Be clear about purpose and audience. Unless the benchmark’s purpose and target audience is understood, the data cannot be properly contextualised nor can suitable conclusions be drawn. In particular, if the index is produced by a private sector firm it is important to investigate why it was produced and whether it was produced with a set of potential clients in mind. Know the difference between perception and performance. Disparities can exist between the perception of a city’s performance and its actual performance. This not only illustrates the impact of city marketing and the city’s image on individuals, but also can provide an inaccurate picture of a city unless the two are separated. Perception can be best analysed by individuals who live outside the city, whilst actual performance can be investigated by asking city residents and other stakeholders. Basket of measures, not one measure: evaluate input versus output measures. It is important to consider what research and analysis was conducted to produce the final benchmark/index. Reflect on costs and time scale. What is appropriate? Benchmarks and indices can take considerable time and money both to produce and to purchase. The breadth and depth of data required must be considered and a cost-benefit analysis may be conducted. Undertake assessment at the right spatial scale (functionality) and at an efficient scale. Global indices should not be used to look at micro-scale urban variables. Likewise, functional urban regions may not correspond with geo-political boundaries. It is necessary to consider at what

vi.

vii. viii. ix.

x.

scale the data is to be analysed at, and thus what geographical area should be covered by the index. Eschew one-off exercises (review needs to be continuous). Some benchmarks are produced quarterly, some annually and some are a one-off exercise. To maintain an up-to-date impression of the benchmarks, they must be constantly reviewed and once out of date, replaced with newer versions of the same, or similar, reports. Link to review of strategy and investment. Benchmarks can be used to investigate how a city is performing on its strategy and investment trajectories. Interpretation and discussion of results. The findings of benchmarks and indices should be interpreted and discussed with regard to wider contextual issues. Stimulate and build strategic discussion. Benchmarks and indices can be used as a basis from which to launch strategic discussion. They allow the winners and losers in the new global economy to be examined, and they provide insights for city leaders into how to emulate successes and avoid failures. Mix different data and insights. Finally, the best view of a city is produced by investigating a range of benchmarks and indices, together with other academic and practitioner literature.

No city leader can be certain that using indices will help them to their city and its needs, but city leaders can use the city indices to help them observe what other players think about their cities and to be informed about how their perceived performance will be presented and judged.

i

McKinsey Global Institute (2011), ‘Urban world: Mapping the economic power of cities’,p.1 http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/urban_world/pdfs/MGI_urban_world_full_report.pdf ii World Health Organisation (2010), ‘World Health Day 2010’, http://www.who.int/world-health-day/2010/en/index.html iii Saskia Sassen (2001), Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton University Press iv HPEC (2008), ‘Making Mumbai an International Financial Centre’, http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/1182418292/bill128_20070621128_Report_of_the_High_Powered_Expert_Committee_Percy_Mistry.pdf v Derudder et al (2009), ‘Pathways of Growth and Decline: Connectivity Changes in the World City Network, 2000-2008,’ GaWC paper, ww vi Toronto Board of Trade (2011), ‘Scorecard for Prosperity 2011’, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/the-global-city-reportcard/article1957888/?from=1957897 ; 2thinknow(2010), ‘Top 100 city rankings for the innovation economy’, http://www.innovation-cities.com/top-100-cityrankings-for-the-innovation-economy/ vii McKinsey Global Institute (2011), ‘Urban world: Mapping the economic power of cities’,p.4 http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/urban_world/pdfs/MGI_urban_world_full_report.pdf viii Christian Matthiessen, Annette Schwarz and Søren Find (2010), ‘World Cities of Scientific Knowledge’, Urban Studies, August 2010, vol.47 no.9 pp. 18791897 ix AT Kearney (2010), ‘The Urban Elite: Global Cities Index 2010’, p.3; Global Urban Competitiveness Project (2010), ‘2009-2010 Global Urban Competitiveness Report’ x Globalization and World Cities group (2009), ‘The World According to GaWC 2008’, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2008.html xi Institute for Strategic Studies/Mori Memorial Foundation (2010), ‘Global Power City Index 2010’, p.9 xii Z/Yen and Qatar Financial Centres Authority (2011), ‘Global Financial Centres Index: 9’, p.4 xiii Z/Yen and Qatar Financial Centres Authority (2011), ‘Global Financial Centres Index: 9’, p.4 xiv Institute for Strategic Studies/Mori Memorial Foundation (2010), ‘Global Power City Index 2010’, p.9; Z/Yen and Qatar Financial Centres Authority (2011), ‘Global Financial Centres Index: 9’, p.4 xv AT Kearney (2010), ‘The Urban Elite: Global Cities Index 2010’, p.3 xvi Tholons (2010), ‘CEO Spotlight: Top 100 Global Outsourcing Cities 2010’ http://www.tholons.com/nl_pdf/CEO_Spotlight_October2010.pdf ; http://www.tholons.com/TholonsTop100/index.html xvii Institute for Strategic Studies/Mori Memorial Foundation (2010), ‘Global Power City Index 2010’, p.9; Citi/Knight Frank (2010), ‘The Wealth Report 2010’, pp.36-37; AT Kearney (2010), ‘The Urban Elite: Global Cities Index 2010’, p.3 xviii QS (2010), ‘World University Rankings’, pp.4-11 xix Brookings Institution (2010), ‘Global Metro Monitor’ xx Cushman and Wakefield (2010), ‘European Cities Monitor’, pp.4-23 xxi fDi Intelligence (2010), ‘Global Outlook: Global Free Zones of the Future 2010/11’, p.22-26 xxii Tholons (2010), ‘CEO Spotlight: Top 100 Global Outsourcing Cities 2010’ http://www.tholons.com/nl_pdf/CEO_Spotlight_October2010.pdf ; http://www.tholons.com/TholonsTop100/index.html xxiii fDi Intelligence (2010), ‘Locations of the Future: Europe’ xxiv Z/Yen and Qatar Financial Centres Authority (2011), ‘Global Financial Centres Index: 9’, p.4 xxv Brookings Institution (2010), ‘Global Metro Monitor’ xxvi La Salle Investment Management (2010), ‘European Regional Economic Growth Index E-REGI 2010’, p.9; Cushman & Wakefield (2010), ‘Main Streets Across the World’, p.8, p.16-20 xxvii AT Kearney (2010), ‘The Urban Elite: Global Cities Index 2010’, p.3; Cushman and Wakefield (2010), ‘European Cities Monitor’, p.4-23 xxviii Cushman and Wakefield (2010), ‘European Cities Monitor’, p.8 xxix fDi Intelligence (2010), ‘Locations of the Future: Europe’ xxx Euromonitor (2011), ‘Euromonitor International’s Top City Destination ranking’, http://blog.euromonitor.com/2011/01/euromonitor-internationals-topcity-destinations-ranking.html xxxi Institute for Strategic Studies/Mori Memorial Foundation (2010), ‘Global Power City Index 2010’, p.9; Citi/Knight Frank (2010), ‘The Wealth Report 2010’, pp.36-37 xxxii PricewaterhouseCoopers (2009), UK Economic Outlook - September 2009’, p.31-34 xxxiii PricewaterhouseCoopers and Partnership for New York City (2010), ‘Cities of Opportunity’, pp.10-11; PricewaterhouseCoopers (2009), UK Economic Outlook - September 2009’, p.31-34; Robert Huggins Associates/UWIC (2008), ‘World Knowledge Competitiveness Index 2008’, pp.7-8 xxxiv Institute for Strategic Studies/Mori Memorial Foundation (2010), ‘Global Power City Index 2010’, p.9; Economist Intelligence Unit (2011), ‘Liveability ranking and overview’; Mercer (2010), ‘Global Quality of Living Survey’, http://www.mercer.com/articles/quality-of-living-survey-report-2010 ; Z/Yen and Qatar Financial Centres Authority (2011), ‘Global Financial Centres Index: 9’, p.4 xxxv 2thinknow(2010), ‘Top 100 city rankings for the innovation economy’, http://www.innovation-cities.com/top-100-city-rankings-for-the-innovationeconomy/ xxxvi AT Kearney (2010), ‘The Urban Elite: Global Cities Index 2010’, p.3; Globalization and World Cities group (2009), ‘The World According to GaWC 2008’, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2008.html xxxvii Institute for Strategic Studies/Mori Memorial Foundation (2010), ‘Global Power City Index 2010’, p.9 xxxviii Business Courier (2010), ‘Green Cities’, http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/datacenter/green_cities.html ; Sustain Lane (2008), ‘Green City rankings’,http://www.sustainlane.com/us-city-rankings/articles/the-sustainlane-methodology/JXICFDNN7CF9H7MD7P8USMW9Y78J xxxix Farmers Insurance (2010), ‘Safest Cities in the US’, http://www.farmers.com/ xl GUCP (2010), http://www.gucp.org/en/admin/WebEdit/UploadFile/20100623093252216.pdf xli AT Kearney (2010), ‘The Urban Elite: Global Cities Index 2010’, p.3; PricewaterhouseCoopers and Partnership for New York City (2010), ‘Cities of Opportunity’, pp.10-11 xlii AT Kearney (2010), ‘The Urban Elite: Global Cities Index 2010’, p.3; Tholons (2010), ‘CEO Spotlight: Top 100 Global Outsourcing Cities 2010’ http://www.tholons.com/nl_pdf/CEO_Spotlight_October2010.pdf ; http://www.tholons.com/TholonsTop100/index.html; McKinsey Global Institute (2011), ‘Urban world: Mapping the economic power of cities’,p.4 http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/urban_world/pdfs/MGI_urban_world_full_report.pdf xliii Euromonitor (2011), ‘Euromonitor International’s Top City Destination ranking’, http://blog.euromonitor.com/2011/01/euromonitor-internationals-topcity-destinations-ranking.html xliv Mastercard (2008), Emerging Markets Index, p.22 xlv 2thinknow(2010), ‘Top 100 city rankings for the innovation economy’, http://www.innovation-cities.com/top-100-city-rankings-for-the-innovationeconomy/ xlvi Brookings Institution (2010), ‘Global Metro Monitor’; AT Kearney (2010), ‘The Urban Elite: Global Cities Index 2010’, p.3 ; Z/Yen and Qatar Financial Centres Authority (2011), ‘Global Financial Centres Index: 9’, p.4 xlvii Centre for Cities (2011), ‘Cities Outlook 2011’, http://www.centreforcities.org/assets/files/Cities%20Outlook%202011/CITIES%20OUTLOOK_2011.pdf xlviii UN Habitat (2010), ‘Bridging the Urban Divide: Inclusive Cities’, http://www.unhabitat.org/documents/SOWC10/R11.pdf xlix Siemens/Economist Intelligence Unit (2011), ‘Asian Green City Index’,p.15 l McKinsey Global Institute (2011), ‘Urban world: Mapping the economic power of cities’,p.4 http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/urban_world/pdfs/MGI_urban_world_full_report.pdf li IW Consulting (2010), http://www.insm-wiwo-staedteranking.de/downloads/bericht_grossstadt_2009.pdf lii fDi Intelligence (2009), ‘Asian Cities of the Future 2009/10’

liii

EIU (2010), ‘The Global Liveability Report: Press Release’, http://www.eiu.com/site_info.asp?info_name=The_Global_Liveability_Report_Press_Release&rf=0 liv Blog of India (2010), ‘Delhi Tops as the Best City in the Livability Index 2010’, http://www.blogofindia.in/delhi-tops-as-the-best-city-in-the-livability-index2010/ ; Tholons (2010), ‘CEO Spotlight: Top 100 Global Outsourcing Cities 2010’ http://www.tholons.com/nl_pdf/CEO_Spotlight_October2010.pdf ; http://www.tholons.com/TholonsTop100/index.html lv Blog of India (2010), ‘Delhi Tops as the Best City in the Livability Index 2010’, http://www.blogofindia.in/delhi-tops-as-the-best-city-in-the-livability-index2010/ lvi Nature (2010), ‘Cities: Building the best cities for science,’, no.467, pp.906-908, http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101020/full/467906a.html lvii Siemens/EIU (2010), ‘Latin American Green City Index’, pp.28-29 lviii David Dodman (2009), ‘Blaming cities for climate change? An analysis of urban greenhouse gas emissions inventories’, Environment and Urbanization, vol. 21 no. 1, pp.185-201; World Energy Outlook (2008), ‘Energy Use in Cities’, pp.179- 193 http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2008/WEO_2008_Chapter_8.pdf lix Sustain Lane (2009), http://www.sustainlane.com/us-city-rankings/articles/study-overview/LTLZYA787TN23RUSSPNM8CBZR98X lx Forum for the Future (2009), http://www.forumforthefuture.org/files/Sustainable_Cities_Index_2009.pdf lxi Siemens/EIU (2011), ‘Asian Green City Index’, pp.32-35 lxii Siemens/EIU (2010), ‘Latin American Green City Index’, pp.28-29 lxiii Foreign Policy (2008), http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2008/10/15/the_2008_global_cities_index?page=0,1 lxiv AmericaEconomia (2010), ‘Las mejores ciudades para hacer negocios en América Latina’, http://rankings.americaeconomia.com/2010/mejoresciudades/