Today’s global city must have bike paths and sunny restaurant terraces, says former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt. It needs pretty neighbourhoods and great art. A strong urban economy is not enough to attract talent. “People will choose where to live,” says Ajay Banga, president and chief executive of MasterCard. “Capital will follow where people go. I’m not sure that talent follows capital as easily.”
Fun as well as rich: this is the consensus picture of the successful global city that emerged from last week’s Chicago Forum on Global Cities. By this description, for decades to come most great cities will be western ones. The US and western Europe combined have less than 10 per cent of the world’s population, yet rankings of world cities tend to begin with New York, London and Paris before passing on to Tokyo, perhaps Hong Kong, says Richard Longworth, author of On Global Cities. Since these are the cities where power and wealth are increasingly concentrated, the west may continue to outcompete the rest.
Most big developing-world cities mushroomed after about 1950, in the automobile age. But the roads of Beijing, Rio, Istanbul and others are gridlocked. Many Chinese cities have unsafe air, and Latin American ones have unsafe streets. As Hank Paulson, former US Treasury secretary who chairs the Paulson Institute, points out: “Nowhere in the developing world do you see a successful urbanisation model.”