Cádiz is a Spanish backwater isolated in Europe’s bottom left corner. But walking the 18th-century streets dripping with gold, you realise: this was once a global city. Then, in 1778, it lost its near-monopoly on trade with the Americas. To quote Hitchcock’s Psycho: “They moved away the highway.” Cádiz froze in time.
Similar shocks did for Babylon and Alexandria. Now some of today’s global cities are under threat. The wrongest prediction of the pandemic was that cities would die. But in this period of historical acceleration, various forces — authoritarianism, remote work and, soon, climate change — are upending the hierarchy of global cities. Hong Kong, San Francisco, Beijing and Moscow are losing, while today’s winners Dubai and Miami are at risk.
The consultancy Kearney defines “global cities” as places that “attract and retain global capital, people, and ideas”. These places are fragile by nature. Ethnic conflicts stripped Constantinople and Beirut of their global status. Quite recently, Islamist terrorism seemed to threaten Paris and London.
But the bigger menace turned out to be nationalist authoritarianism. China’s Communist party distrusts global cities. It’s crushing Hong Kong, and people are fleeing. When a marquee 800-flat project opened last month, zero apartments sold. Hong Kong, fifth on Kearney’s global-city ranking in 2019, is regressing into what some call “just another Chinese city”.
Beijing and Shanghai, among Kearney’s top 10 last year, have also lost access to the world, supposedly because of quarantine restrictions. Last month, China averaged about 100 international flights a day, down 96 per cent since 2020, says Variflight. After this week’s party congress, these cities may become global again, or perhaps those days are over.
Then there’s Moscow, ranked third-most prosperous city by the UN in February, just before Russia invaded Ukraine. Always an imperial capital and, around the year 2010, more than that, Moscow offered what the FT’s Max Seddon calls “hipster totalitarianism”: skateboards and oligarchs. Its goodbye to the world is scattering the hipsters.
The new trendy authoritarian-run global city is Dubai, whose population has grown 165-fold since 1950. It’s currently the last place where Arabs, Russians and westerners still mix. I wouldn’t bet on it long term.
The west’s fastest-shrivelling global city is San Francisco, which has managed the rare feat of becoming simultaneously seedy and unaffordable. Twenty years ago, a friend in tech told me he could find no reason not to move there. Today he probably could. A plutocracy full of homeless people, it is once again the place where I met a friendly mugger in 1990. Even San Francisco’s main newspaper editorialised last month: “This city is broken.”
When remote working arrived, young San Franciscans grabbed the chance to flee. Population, rents and foreign investment have slumped. San Francisco risks becoming the next Detroit: a single-industry town without the industry. Post-Big Tech, it might be more liveable, because global and liveable are different things.
Meanwhile, our era’s four great global cities — New York, London, Paris and Tokyo — thrive. Remote work has improved liveability by reducing commutes. London’s success sometimes irks provincial England, which attempted a revenge through Brexit. That failed, and London’s economy has pulled even further away.
I’m biased, but I suspect Paris, where I live, has the most scope to grow. Overcentralised France is about to centralise further. Sixty-eight metro stations are being dug in Paris’s suburbs. Unlike New York and London, Paris sits on a massive plain without a greenbelt, so it could grow forever, even triple in size, if Tokyo’s 37mn population is the benchmark. Room to grow also favours Berlin, Europe’s fastest-rising global city, and Madrid, where you can drive from downtown to the country in 15 minutes.
The coming threat to global cities is climate change. Once Miami was Havana’s boring little anglophone sister, a backwater dreaming of cheap air-conditioning and jet travel. Today, bilingual Miami tops the US’s rankings for foreign direct investment per capita. The frightening thing about Hurricane Ian, which devastated much of Florida while sparing Miami, is that it was expected. The city is also threatened by rising oceans. Sitting on porous limestone, it couldn’t keep out the waters even if it tried. As home insurance becomes unaffordable, getting a 25-year mortgage there will go from act of faith to act of insanity. Miami may fade like Hong Kong. New global cities will replace it.
Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com
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