Tier 1 world cities

what about Seoul?

you didn't answer about Seoul! i thought of other possibilites, but you seemed to have them all. Seoul was the only one i didn't dismiss myself, but i'm not really sure

what are the... criteria for this?

it reminds me a tiny bit of when Bonn was the capital of west germany, although obviously dc is a city in the way bonn isn't.

The Randstan is the ring of interconnected key dutch cities; Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam Utrecht and a whole bunch of little places.

kudos

It's never been under Anglophone control tho

you think ole miss has that much pull?

xpost

also, do you think the concept of 'per capita' could apply to the thread at large? that would be an interesting approach, but i can't really see it

Also its not big enough to qualify.

Geneva punches above its weight due to international organisation.

(To be fair I would dump LA from the original list)

its architecture has been said to rank pretty well; and it's a city. i don't see the appeal of mega-cities, like to be able to walk to the country in a morning.

xposts to matt

Does Pyongyang have 'clout'?

Political power? check. Wealth? Check. Cultural currency? Only one of the world's largest art collections. I mean, they have more right to it than Oxford.

Now now, Oxonians, we're not getting ideas above our stations are we? :P

I mean, think about it - if the Vatican reversed its position on, say, birth control or abortion or the like, the rammifications around the world (not just in first world big British influenced cities, but in lots of the poorest parts of the world) would be ENOURMOUS.

OTM LOCK THREAD

(My arguments may be suffering from that 1000 years out of date worldview that I suffer from, (I mean, it's not like they can place entire countries under Interdict any more) but still valid, I think. Especially when you look at the power of the rise of the Religious Right in the US and the like.)

with some of the other rather more...unusual choices in this thread, i'm wondering if perhaps people think there are a great number of tier one cities. i think of there as only really being a handful of tier 1 cities, by definition, otherwise the tier 2 cities must be really lightweight.

i think its possible that really, there are only 3, london, nyc, tokyo, and that mumbai and shanghai are approaching fast

I think Gareth is right about there being only three.

Those pretty girls in the Vatican? They're cardinals, dude.

London = Man Utd
NYC = Chelsea
Tokyo = Arsenal
Everywhere else = not going to win the league lets face it.

xpost hahaha

i wouldn't consider living far from a copyright library -- so oxbridge and edinburgh and (not for long) london, on this island.

xpost

cf love hotels

fixed

far out, i must visit that.

(if Oxf is tier one then so are Cambridge MA, Cambridge UK, Bonn, and other such academically-aligned cities)

Akihabara doesn't render Tokyo tier one at all!

like 'wow i live in a financial capital of the world! hot poop!'

what do you think i'll be doing come october?

That's your opinion, you fucking loser!

i bet it's toys or gadgets.

sorry that was meant for benrique

Or schoolgirl porn

electronics district

(I'm really glad Momus isn't on this thread, for a variety of reasons)

HAhahahahahahahaha awesome

FIXED

None of whom care about the Vatican at all, even as a knee-jerk anti response.

Also suggesting London mightn't make the list = rubbishing it. It is The City.

Then Liverpool = Liverpool!

(i) Data

City

Nylon

Hong Sing

Amsfurt

Boslanta

Manbrum

Cities with HQ functions (values of 5) are emboldened

If history counts, I pick Istanbul.

I imagine a lot of people in asia feel this way about Tokyo, judging from the kids I know from Shanghai.

i knew the last three but i didn't know the first

I remember reading some fifties article on "tokyo, world number one" which justified it thus:
1. population-wise: biggest of the five big cities in japan, bigger even than new york london paris moscow.
2. some twelve years ago it was a bare razed plain and now look at it!
3. we have x thousand lamps burning x million kwatts of electricity: the kanto plain looks like the milky way.
4. we have more cinemas than new york.

and of course the clincher:
5. we have more pachinko machines than anywhere!

UH

"Who you callin' European, you slaaaag"

I don't know the Arab, Latin American, or African worlds well enough to say, although my sense is that they are too fragmented for any of them to be looked to in the same way as these places.

Mumbai, Shanghai = Bolton, Portsmouth. Emerging and punching above their weight.

If so Hills/River2 is Tier 0.

-- Good Dog (methylated-spiri...), Saturday 7:23 AM. (Good Dog)

metropolitan Tokyo is more than double (2.5x?) the size of metropolitan New York area so that's not quite a fair comparison now is it?

i wasn't talking about me specifically.

(kate is the other but she hadn't commited herself either way of the easiness of london money)

vs.

http://www.american-pictures.com/gallery/usa/book230t-a.jpg

(st louis vs. EAST st louis)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/opinion/08judt.html

via gawker via max

pretty interesting article. seems that his primary criteria for a world city is degree of intellectual fervor and cultural output. what are the world cities of today? I have heard berlin is a happening city.

this is a question that I think about a lot because I live in a city that advertises itself as a world city but is clearly not in terms of intellectualism and artistic output.

also I have never lived in NYC but I visited it a bunch of times and could never really see why all my friends moved there after graduation

~shrug~

<3 tony judt

not quite sure about this category. have to be careful with it. feel like it's hard not to express national/transplanted national pride. think it's good to recognize culture as a main criterion though. doubt that singapore has much of a scene, for example (?).

bit strange to have nyrb mainstay big t writing off new york intellectuals -- obvi the New York Intellectuals are a thing of the past. but new york is partly pre-eminent because of its publishing, etc.

have never visited singapore but it's kinda lol for being basically a western sanctioned fascist authoritarian state

it's very mall-y, food culture is the only significant culture there

tiers in heaven

I saw Hercules & Love Affair, Tim Sweeney and Danny Wang on a random night out in Singapore, there is def a scene.

iirc the government censors outre and subversive art there xp

kind of surprised to see sydney only mentioned once itt

its smaller in every way than london or nyc, but like judt says mexico city would be a world city if that's all that mattered.

There is an air of subtle racism in the article, as if non-tier one big cities are filled with too few pasty white people that don't cater to Victorian standards of "lifestyle".

i dunno, he seems pretty ambivalent about world cities, so it's not clear that him saying somewhere isn't one is necessarily an insult

and obviously the standards by which a world city is deemed is, like most things on this board, from a western perspective that privileges some metrics more than others

i guess if one of your criteria is melting pot at all economic levels of society (not just ethnically diverse banking sector), then that does pretty much rule out all non-anglo/non-euro cities.

(with the possible exception of beijing?)

beijing is not really a melting pot

hong kong has a very ethnically diverse banking sector and a small but strong south asian/southeast asian population, but they are still marginalized

no, but i know far more non-banking people who've moved to beijing than to anywhere else in asia.

Singapore is really fucking boring, delicious food aside. Kuala Lumpur is its edgier cousin and way better for a visit.

it's been a few years since I was last there but yeah the expat scene there seems pretty strong. still though that's a drop in the bucket compared to the 13 million han chinese who live there

most of the people i have in mind are "creatives", but beijing is also doing a really good job of recruiting from western academia. admittedly these people are not going to be opening cheap lebanese restaurants, etc.

what are the world blogs of today?

idk, think the whole point of world cities is they attract people from all over, and not only out of economic necessity

london isn't a melting pot, really, but it does attract people from everywhere

though a note on oxbridge's cloisteredness -- living within my own house in the past year there've been people from nigeria, china, the US, and i meet people from all over europe here on the reg. im not claiming it's a world city here, obviously, it's too small, but it's changed quite a bit since '87.

berlin felt like it was headed in the right direction a few years ago but it's kind of stagnated economically. i get the impression it's become a punchline like williamsburg rather than a world city.

How is London not a melting pot? What's your definition of melting pot?

creatives probably move to beijing because it's dirt cheap if you're an expat and can make expat money. my friend lived there for a year and paid for her rent by doing a day of voice recording work each month.

the china university system is kind of a joke but hey it's probably the one place in the world that is hiring professors instead of firing them

How is London not a melting pot? What's your definition of melting pot?

could be my experience, but my cohort of young white middle-class people don't much mix with the turks/bengalis/_____ they live near

"idk, think the whole point of world cities is they attract people from all over, and not only out of economic necessity"

yeah, that's basically my point, which is why i don't think tokyo counts. (or paris, for that matter.)

- attract migrants from all over, not just economic, not just banking sector
- worldwide cultural clout
- regional economic capital

that's really just london and nyc these days, but beijing and sydney on the up and up imo.

the china university system is kind of a joke but hey it's probably the one place in the world that is hiring professors instead of firing them

there's china, australia and germany and that's basically it.

NRQ - you could apply that to every ethnically diverse city in the developed world. And there are middle class Turkish and Bengali people, as well as working class white people who do mix with them. To an extent you're dressing up a class divide as a racial divide.

^^^
Yes

- attract migrants from all over, not just economic, not just banking sector
- worldwide cultural clout
- regional economic capital

you dont think paris fulfills these requirements?

well, i guess london is perhaps slightly less integrated than nyc, but it's not dubai xp

Ed's original criteria seem wrong to me. There's no way that LA qualifies as a tier one world city and Paris doesn't. Berlin too for that matter. You either have a top tier that is just London, NY and maybe Tokyo or you expand it to include Paris, Berlin, Moscow etc.

why tokyo? tokenism?

Paris is culturally a top tier city

tokyo is the only thing that approaches nyc and london as an economic, political and cultural capital, isnt it? the thing that holds it back, if anything, is lack of diversity/immigrant population?

I'd argue London is probably more integrated than New York, it doesn't quite have the same sort of ghettoisation, although give Cameron and friends a few years and it might. That's partly a legacy of colonialism maybe. Obviously Paris is less integrated than both.

Think Hong Kong might have a greater cultural influence over the rest of East Asia than Tokyo TBH.

paris is defo second place in europe, but it's quite a long way behind london on those critera i think. afaict it's only attracted the arts and north african colonial migrants since the war, and nrq's "london is not a melting pot" thing really applies to paris. its cultural influence is local to france these days. like young people will take a weekend there, but it's not like they think about moving there there rest of the year. how many francophiles do you know? banking sector is about as big as brussels, geneva, amsterdam, frankfurt, etc.

tokyo is the only thing that approaches nyc and london as an economic, political and cultural capital, isnt it?

Again, why not Paris? Its GDP is only marginally lower than that of London, culturally it's right up there at the top table, and Sarkozy is no less influential on the global stage than Cameron.

Good point about HK.

nowadays HK gets its culture from tokyo and seoul

yeah i think paris should belong. i mean without much thought i would have said the worlds global cities are nyc, london, paris and tokyo. and then after actually thinking about it, i still think so, with the possible addition of hong kong.

also kind of weird to read that since one of the long running knocks against hk is that its a cultural desert. it had a strong film and music scene in the 80s and 90s but both industries are in pretty dire straits atm

Ed's original criteria seem wrong to me. There's no way that LA qualifies as a tier one world city and Paris doesn't. Berlin too for that matter.

totally.

You either have a top tier that is just London, NY and maybe Tokyo or you expand it to include Paris, Berlin, Moscow etc.

berlin and moscow can gtfo this list. would add beijing and sydney (via olympics, solvent governments, banking/cultural regional capitals) before those two.

not going to quibble over tokyo and paris, but i think both are finding it increasingly difficult to justify their spots, and will be off the list in 20 years.

Tokyo and Paris (and Milan) are the fashion (design/consumer) capitols of the world and that does not appear to be changing anytime soon fwiw.

milan cant be that far from first-tier can it? economically important, right? plus being one of the fashion capitols of the world has got to count for a lot culturally

if sydney is a world city milan is

Italy is kind of third world though isn't it: incredibly corrupt government run by spirtitual and criminal mafia?

(sorry if you're Italian)

yeah i wouldnt argue milan is "first tier" whatever that means. but its gotta be in the mix for the next round.

Historical/Cultural/Religious significance of Rome makes one feel Milan is in some sense not all that, like it's beaten in its own country in significant regards?

unfortunately for rome and istanbul and baghdad "having a lot of old shit" does not a world city make

i had no idea milan as a metropolitan area is ~7million people! strikes against it: fashion is not nothing, but that's really it's only significant cultural influence over the rest of the world in the last couple of centuries, right? bad government is not necessarily a show-stopper, but it does affect its economic influence. does italy even have a banking sector?

i'm pushing sydney because it's on the way up, not on the way down, which i think all the non-london european possibilities are (well, london's on the way down too, but it's not dropping out of the top three any time soon).

strikes against it: fashion is not nothing, but that's really it's only significant cultural influence over the rest of the world in the last couple of centuries, right?

Football, arguably, but that's not significant enough to count really.

haha

Berlin is on the way up, surely? I mean, not in terms of political significance because in those terms it has something of a unique history, but as a city it's better than its ever been. But it's not on a Mumbai/Shanghai/Beijing trajectory.

aren't you going to continue your football parallels from upthread? i reckon chongqing could be the new villarreal

Milan is a major industrial city, a major city for fashion and design but... it's kind of a shithole and it's not even as cosmopolitan as say, Berlin imho.

I feel sorry for whichever city I compared to Pompey.

isn't milan a mid level city with a load of sprawl that pushes up the met area population (see also; manchester)

i don't really understand economics, but i thought berlin's economic recovery post-89 has stalled really badly? like german businesses have stopped moving there, and some are even heading back to bonn/frankfurt/munich.

unfortunately for rome and istanbul and baghdad "having a lot of old shit" does not a world city make

yeah true but not saying it's modern world city in an Economist/Monocle way, just saying Milan looks a bit lightweight because in the same country there's a more famous city that's capital and contains a weird sub-city that rules a billion ppl worldwide.

yeah fair enough. i mean if were doing all-time rankings the only cities that even approach rome are istanbul and beijing, right?

London.

new york
tokyo, london, paris
beijing, shanghai, moscow, seoul, los angeles, hong kong, chicago
madrid, sydney, rome, st petersburg, toronto, sao paulo, buenos aires, istanbul, singapore

i would put san francisco in your tier 4 nakh

considered houston, that's pretty important in oil etc right?

well yes, but dubai or riyadh are probably more important in that sense

my impression of Milan jives with Michael White's - it's dull

the fact that everyone's been priced out of Manhattan has to be a pretty big strike against NYC.. that and the existence of the Gansevoort hotel

Houston???????

tbf i assume he would have put it on a level with st petersburg and toronto, not new york

yeah

the named cities in arabia are important mainly in the sense that a few sheikhs award/rescind contracts, but they could just as easily do that on the phone while sitting in claridges. most of the big exploration/services firms are hq'd elsewhere, with presumably some admin in dubai/qatar/riyadh.....but all of those are some way from the major fields themselves iirc. dubai's attempts to make itself a ~cultural~ playa are by all accounts risiblly overblown, plus the real estate house of cards.

some other cities......philidelphia, melbourne, kuala lumpur, delhi....

lol philly are you for real

historically, maybe, but mpls/st paul has as much of a global cultural influence as philly these days, and that ain't saying much

KL definitely on the rise. It's the main transport hub in SEA now for one thing, and it feels more developed than Bangkok and more vibrant than Singapore.

(xps) no! i don't know much about it apart from it being fairly big, and american, so i wonder if anyone would rep for it (seemingly not)

boston def got a claim tho right?

boston, sure.

What's the second most important UK city? Manchester?

i mean i'm sure a bunch of butthurt philadelphians will take issue with my challop, but for a city of its size and historical significance, philly seems pretty irrelevant to the discussion of Tier 1 cities.

would rank Seattle and Atlanta higher, tbh

the fact that everyone's been priced out of Manhattan has to be a pretty big strike against NYC.. that and the existence of the Gansevoort hotel

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, November 9, 2010 9:06 AM (11 minutes ago)

every city has its high-rent neighborhood though...

edinburgh is probably the next uk city on the world city list, but manchester is more important within the uk imo.

new york
los angeles, chicago
san francisco, boston, houston, seattle, atlanta

right?

If SF were considered (as the post office does) as the greater Bay Area, we'd be second tier in terms of influence. Does Boston count w/o the surrounding urban areas?

KL definitely on the rise. It's the main transport hub in SEA now for one thing, and it feels more developed than Bangkok and more vibrant than Singapore.

― A brownish area with points (chap), Tuesday, November 9, 2010 9:21 AM (2 minutes ago)

What do you mean by transport hub because this seems kinda wrong imo?

Dallas and Miami are way bigger than anything on the 3rd tier there. What is the unit of measurement though?

San Francisco is the future home of Starfleet academy, so that's pretty fucking Tier 1.

kind of quickly a twatty convo

xpost

What do you mean by transport hub because this seems kinda wrong imo?

Definitely the hub for short haul flights around the region. Should've been more specific - Singapore is still the shipping hub.

i didn't consider silicon valley etc when naming sf.....but i suppose they ought to count, in which case it's probably after la and chicago in the second tier

dallas and miami have less international influence, but then i'm not sure if atlanta has that either, and miami does have angry cubans

nb I wasn't suggesting that atlanta is global, just maybe more deserving of consideration than philly

Miami is a fairly big spanish language Media hub.

it's also possibly the world capital of lying around on the beach and getting your dick sucked while listening to hard bumping booty music

beat that, tokyo

Paris is culturally a top tier city

― Oh do come to the mod illuminati conclave chez (Michael White), Tuesday, 9 November 2010 15:58 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the massive intellectual influence of paris after the war illuminates what judt means when he talks about whether imperial decline necessarily presages loss of top-tier-ness. coz a lot of paris's pre-eminence came directly *from* the process of decolonization [via pol pot]. like late-imperial vienna, probably.

is it still culturally top-tier? think they've run out of memes since the 1970s. but the film industry there is actually responsible for a lot of new hottness overseas. it's french dough that keeps the top-rank art-house directors going. that's only one sector, though. and as judt says, people don't learn french nowadays, not like they did.

it's also possibly the world capital of lying around on the beach and getting your dick sucked while listening to hard bumping booty music

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, November 9, 2010 11:56 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

thought that was the entirety of brazil, tbh

how are you guys writing off/ignoring LA especially if one of your main criteria is "cultural influence on the rest of the world"? i mean, LA probably produces more culture than goes global than any other city ever!

it would be my u.s. #2 (far ahead of chicago), but it has no financial sector

yeah i think i agree

(obviously agree that objectively hollywood and the music biz have impacted more people than a bunch of cool shit we call care about in ny or ldn)

xpost

think it makes up for lack of financial sector with the rest

frankfurt has a great financial sector

ya so what

it has tons of people from all over the world - us asia mexico etc

huge

financial sector is obviously not sufficient, but it seems necessary (alongside the inward migration/cultural stuff we talked about)

nyc is the capital of the world, like its the ultimate metropolis, but la has this otherness. it's so unlike anywhere else. almost doesn't belong on the same list as these cities.

la has la port and long beach, which is a pretty big deal

in the u.s. these are kinda like 1 and 1.5

new york
chicago, sf bay area, l.a.

after these i don't really have a clue, but cities like seattle and houston feel like they'd be in the next group.

isnt the nakatomi corporation based in LA

http://www.linkedin.com/companies/nakatomi-corporation

for la:

- culturally maybe the most "important" city on the planet
- huge immigrant population/big destination for migrants
- big transportation and shipping hub

against la:

- not a finance or geopolitics powerhouse
- culture is not the snooty kind of culture we care about
- immigrant population not as diverse as LDN or NYC

xxp yes, and cyberdyne too iirc

tbh i think the fact that LA is the world headquarters of the entertainment industry more than compensates for not having a few investment banks based there or wtv

- immigrant population not as diverse as LDN or NYC

― max, Tuesday, November 9, 2010 1:41 PM (23 seconds ago) Bookmark

is this actually true?

ya i read it in an article

im skept

ny has a bigger foreign born population

sounds right to me slocki

though LAs is higher as a percentage

ny has a bigger foreign born population

― max, Tuesday, November 9, 2010 1:43 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

true but most of them are canadian

toronto has the largest foreign born population of anyone interestingly

only interesting thing about it iirc

there's that tall thing there too

which probably isn't interesting now that there are taller things elsewhere

wait cyberdyne is in the bay area, that pushes sfo over the top for me

this is a "diversity ranking" by county but queens brooklyn manhattan and hudson county NJ all show up before LA county:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2001_July_23/ai_76689304/

is it still culturally top-tier? think they've run out of memes since the 1970s. but the film industry there is actually responsible for a lot of new hottness overseas. it's french dough that keeps the top-rank art-house directors going. that's only one sector, though. and as judt says, people don't learn french nowadays, not like they did.

A lot of people still speak French though and the relationship between Africa and Paris alone tends to make me think of it as top tier, plus people from all over the world live and work there in a variety of sectors though much of their work may not readily be accessible or attractive to les Anglo-Saxons.

if there was a swagger index that was factored in paris would be unquestionably top tier

chicago isn't even a tier 1 city in the USA, why is it being fluffed up ITT?

nah, chicago's up there

the sports teams are tier 14 though

Chicago has the third largest gross metropolitan product in the United States—approximately $506 billion according to 2007 estimates.[68] The city has also been rated as having the most balanced economy in the United States, due to its high level of diversification.[69] Chicago was named the fourth most important business center in the world in the MasterCard Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index.[70] Additionally, the Chicago metropolitan area recorded the greatest number of new or expanded corporate facilities in the United States for six out of the seven years from 2001 to 2008.[71] The Chicago metropolitan area has the third largest science and engineering work force of any metropolitan area in the nation.[72] In 2009, Chicago placed 9th on the UBS list of the world's richest cities.[73] Chicago was the base of commercial operations for industrialists John Crerar, John Whitfield Bunn, Richard Teller Crane, Marshall Field, John Farwell, Morris Selz, Julius Rosenwald and many other commercial visionaries who laid the foundation for Midwestern and global industry.
Chicago is a major world financial center, with the second largest central business district in the U.S.[74] The city is the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (the Seventh District of the Federal Reserve). The city is also home to major financial and futures exchanges, including the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (the "Merc"), which is owned, along with the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) by Chicago's CME Group. The CME Group, in addition, owns the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), the Commodities Exchange Inc. (COMEX) and the Dow Jones Indexes.[75] Perhaps due to the influence of the Chicago school of economics, the city also has markets trading unusual contracts such as emissions (on the Chicago Climate Exchange) and equity style indices (on the U.S. Futures Exchange). Chase Bank has its commercial and retail banking headquarters in Chicago's Chase Tower.[76]

chicago isn't even a tier 1 city in the USA, why is it being fluffed up ITT?

troll

Chicago is the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

I re-read that wiki again, and it's telling me that Chicago is a boring industrialized city allthewhile people are pooh-pooh-ing Milan upthread?

it's true the lake michigan wakeboarding scene totally blows

Ha, well anyway, my opinion is that the "global influence" of present-day chicago is a bit overrated up itt.

Dallas seems far more of "the corporate HQ center of the USA" than Chicago, if you want to talk about global corporatism.

^boy do I!

http://www.thirdcoastsurfshop.com/

chicago isn't even a tier 1 city in the USA, why is it being fluffed up ITT?

― i love you but i have chosen snarkness (Steve Shasta), Tuesday, November 9, 2010 1:53 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Obviously youve never been there. Get out more.

BURN

btw this thread is straight tarded

i know... no one's even mentioned baltimore yet wtf

NO U ARE STRAIGHT TARDED

i mean i'm sure a bunch of butthurt philadelphians will take issue with my challop, but for a city of its size and historical significance, philly seems pretty irrelevant to the discussion of Tier 1 cities.

would rank Seattle and Atlanta higher, tbh

― BIG MUFFIN (gbx), Wednesday, November 10, 2010 1:26 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

I am from philadelphia and wholeheartedly agree

i wonder where detroit would have ranked back in the '50s when its population was close to 2 million people.

next to togliatti and dagenham in its own special tier

I always wanted to poll this actually

yr favorite 'tier 1' world city

but I figured it would be too in character

but since we're talking about it anyway

i wonder where detroit would have ranked back in the '50s when its population was close to 2 million people.

yeah I think about this sometimes. kinda weird that what is now a husk of a town is still more well known int'lally than countless cities in asia that are several times larger and more industrious. not ~really~ weird, obv, but u kno

also: curious about where the nairobis and lagos's of the world will be in oh twenty years.

probably the same place tbh

lagos will presumably still be a huge fucking mess but will have a dozen (mostly oil) billionaires so will get some respect from forbes magazine

it's always weird to see which u.s. cities have these massive populations nowadays b/c some of them just don't register on the radar as major cities or destinations at all.

when the huge motherfucking global influence of silicon valley is factored in as it should be the bay rivals la as #2 us city - chicago got nothing like hollywood or the internet, get thee to tier three, go trade some pork bellies w/seattle or whatever

the massive population thing is usually just a matter of how the urban area is defined

like, the 'biggest cites list' always looks strange, but this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas looks pretty reasonable

tier 1 third world city

^^^more like pier 1 city

who gives a shit what people think not me I'm hungry

so Foreign Policy has it like this:

Rank 2012
1 New York City 6.35
2 London 5.79
3 Paris 5.48
4 Tokyo 4.99
5 Hong Kong 4.56
6 Los Angeles 3.94
7 Chicago 3.66
8 Seoul 3.41
9 Brussels 3.33
10 Washington, D.C. 3.22
11 Singapore 3.20
12 Sydney 3.13
13 Vienna 3.11
14 Beijing 3.05
15 Boston 2.94
16 Toronto 2.92
17 San Francisco 2.89
18 Madrid 2.80
19 Moscow 2.77
20 Berlin

these lists are always stupid but if forbes or foreign policy do another stupid world cities / highest standard of living / most powerful person listicle then i am probably going to click anyway, so they win

http://www.pwc.com/us/en/industry/entertainment-media/publications/consumer-intelligence-series/assets/pwc-citiesarepowerful.pdf

This list comes completely unglued after about #15 imo

1. London
2. Paris
3. New York
4. Amsterdam
5. Sydney
6. Berlin
7. Tokyo
8. Toronto
9. Stockholm
10. Los Angeles
11. San Francisco
12. Dubai
13. Milan
14. Madrid
15. Chicago
16. Hong Kong
17. Singapore
18. Beijing
19. Seoul
20. Rio
21. Shanghai
22. Moscow
23. Johannesburg
24. Kuala Lumpur
25. Mexico City
26. São Paulo
27. Mumbai
28. Jakarta
29. Bogotá
30. Lagos

Oh actually the selection was fixed - that makes more sense

We surveyed a group of 5,200 people from 16 countries, consisting of an equal number of business decision makers, informed elites, and other general population adults over 18 years of age, to find out what and how they think about 30 global cities, the same group researched in PwC’s
Cities of Opportunity.

Gutted that Munich isn't fourth.

Yours is the perceptual list, tombot. This is the "actual" list:

1. London
2. Singapore
3. Toronto
4. Paris
5. Amsterdam
6. New York
7. Stockholm
8. San Francisco
9. Hong Kong
10. Sydney
11. Seoul
12. Berlin
13. Los Angeles
14. Chicago
15. Tokyo
16. Madrid
17. Dubai
18. Milan
19. Beijing
20. Kuala Lumpur
21. Shanghai
22. Moscow
23. Mexico City
24. Johannesburg
25. São Paulo
26. Bogotá
27. Rio
28. Jakarta
29. Mumbai
30. Lagos

business decision makers, informed elites, and other general population adults over 18 years of age

not quite enough options for a poll, but still. who are the uninformed elites and what do they think? what criteria do these business decision makers use and do we need a thread about capitalist paradises?

The business decision makers aren't the ones saying Singapore is the second best city in the world, tbf. The 'objective' rankings are even less human.

saints preserve me from ever being part of an informed elite

"informed elite" just makes me think of ZS's "these terrible people they rule us" threads

these lists are always stupid but if forbes or foreign policy do another stupid world cities / highest standard of living / most powerful person listicle then i am probably going to click anyway, so they win

― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Tuesday, August 13, 2013 9:55 AM

otm as per usual

I don't know anyone who's been to Singapore and hasn't viewed it as fundamentally over-sanitised and a bit dull after more than a few days.

tell me about São Paulo

largest city in the americas and the souther hemisphere

is it still culturally top-tier?

New York, not Paris, is the city this question should really be about

Stockholm is bafflingly high in these.

Hmm:

These are the cities “winning” on key dimensions

Stockholm

-Cares about the environment
-Cares about human rights
-Educated population
-Income equality
-Transparent business practices
-Trustworthy
-Well developed public education system
-Well developed public health system

Los Angeles

- Access to great entertainment
- Good internet accessibility

Amsterdam

-Fun

these rankings are so foreign to my experience and remind me of airports when I just want to buy a magazine, all magazines are bad, and I get MONOCLE and it's all really soft color photos and rankings of cities in every issue. very calming to sit on plane and contemplate how "business chill" some finnish fishing village is

like i'd get esquire or w/e for the 1.5 longform interesting articles but instead I just put one of those longform article apps on ipad and it grabs all the most interesting ones for me lol

but the soft color global pictures look nice on matte paper

Presumably the (apparently) undisputed position of London in the #1 spot won't be the case for much longer.

Amsterdam winning merely in the "fun" department is both sad lol and completely otfm

lol

la may have "access" to internet but it surely has one of the slowest internet speeds in the us

not to mention the few isp choices

top arsehole magnets 2016

dammit, can't believe phoenix didn't make the list, guess i'll have to move

I just thought it was funny they left out DC. Not chill at all! Not as business friendly as they'd have you think! It's all nerds and spies and the administrators who manage the nerd-spy program!

can you expand eephus

FWIW, I really liked DC when I was there. With its broad, pedestrian-friendly streets and low buildings it felt more cosy than the other two big US cities I've been to (NY and Philly). Plus all the awesome free Smithsonian museums and the zoo! That didn't feel very American/capitalist to me, that you don't have to pay anything.

There was one big street near our hotel, a bit away from the centre, which had loads of nightclubs and music joints, a record store or two, and an Ethiopian restaurant where we ate. Can't remember its name, but that was a nice area to spend your night in.

can you expand eephus

Just feel like I grew up in a world (let's say in the 1980s) where New York was very much at the cultural center of things, not just in the US, but in the world. Like, if you cared about a writer that's where you'd expect them to be unless you had some reason to know otherwise. It doesn't feel that way to me anymore, though I don't really have facts and figures. With respect to writers this might just be reflecting the fact that literary fiction and poetry have gotten so much less commercial that the writers are now all professors in order to live, so they live wherever the universities are, which is everywhere. But even successful critically-liked genre writers, where do they live? Where does Charles Stross live? Where does Fifty Shades writer live? Where does Lev Grossman live? (OK, Lev Grossman actually does live in New York, that one I know.) The people we all follow on Twitter, where do they live? Does Mallory Ortberg live in New York? I mean, it's totally possible that she does, the point is that one doesn't have any sense that she does, she just lives on Twitter. Where does Ta-Nehisi Coates live? (Wait, I think I know this one, actually, he lives in DC I think?)

I grew up in a world (let's say in the 1980s) where New York was very much at the cultural center of things, not just in the US

tbf this has always been an opinion of people in NY to the point where the self-regarding loop of the nytimes as "the paper of record" has mostly been true because NYers considered it such, and there were enough people in the city alone that bought into that it had a bit of cultural hegemony, and so it was

not sure if genre writers is a good example (I mean, Steven King and most of the other best-selling writers of the period never lived in NYC but I can almost guarantee their agents and publishing houses were based there)

can someone make a video game out of that list, that would be fun

The Ruhrgebit is the aglomeration of cities in northwest germany including Köln, Dortmund, Essen, Duisberg and Wuppertal.

Coates lives in Paris now I think, but was NY-based before that

Ortberg is Californian IIRC. TNC summers in Paris but he's still NYC

Anyway I kinda can buy eephus' pitch

HEYO

xpost Coates was about to buy a brownstone in a neighborhood in brooklyn. then the ny post got a hold of the story and he backed out.

"Last week, the New York Post, and several other publications, reported on the purchase. They ran pictures of the house. They named my wife. They photoshopped me in the kitchen. They talked to the seller’s broker. The seller’s broker told them when we’d be moving in. The seller’s broker speculated on our plans for renovation. They rummaged through my kid’s Instagram account. They published my home address.

...Within a day of seeing these articles, my wife and I knew that we could never live in Prospect-Lefferts Garden, that we could never go back home. If anything happened to either of us, if anything happened to our son, we’d never forgive ourselves."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/on-homecomings/481818/

What the fuck. I missed that. What the fuck. Needs to be an update on the TNC thread. What the hell, people. That makes me really upset.

Man... I'd missd that. That breaks my heart. Xp

So yeah what tombot said...

Re: LA internet access, I was surprised to read this, because how do all these LA / SD area Twitch streamers (and instagrammers, youtubers, etc) do it, then?
Although if you're everybody else trying to just download a damn movie, I may have just answered my own question. Next time I see one of those smart people from the carrier / ISP world I'll ask if SoCal soaks up new capacity more than elsewhere