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While national governments may shape the broad outlines of globalization, its impact is felt most profoundly in the world's cities. Urban areas are the hubs of global integration, engines of growth for their countries, and gateways to the resources of their regions.
The inaugural Global Cities Index is published in the November/December 2008 issue of FOREIGN POLICY. It is a uniquely comprehensive ranking of how 60 cities from 40 countries are powering integration, interaction, and influence on a global scale.
While most other city rankings limit their focus to business or quality of life measures, the Global Cities Index incorporates business activity, human capital, information exchange, as well as two additional dimensions of what makes cities global: cultural experience and political engagement. Cultural experience measures the number and diversity of attractions for residents and visitors, and political engagement examines the degree to which a city influences global policymaking and dialogue. The result is a holistic look at what differentiates cities in generating, attracting, and retaining global capital, people, and ideas.
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, a leading theorist on global cities and author of The Global Citysays:
"The new Global Cities Index measures unique dimensions that define today's global cities. Cities can be global in different ways as globalization boosts the strength of urban areas. Some powerhouse cities, like Chicago, rank highly because the index looks at more than just business and finance — it's important to look at the whole city."
The leading cities demonstrate different strengths across each of the five dimensions of the index.
Other high-ranking cities combined their own unique attributes to assume their place on the global stage. Toronto, for example, performs well in Human Capital and Cultural Experience, while Sydney leverages its natural endowments to attract international residents and earn a high Human Capital score. Mexico City, Istanbul, and Cairo also achieved top-10 status in Cultural Experience and Political Engagement - showing that major cities in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa are playing increasingly important global roles.
This index focuses on cities' role in globalization in part because in 2008, for the first time in history, more people live in cities than rural areas. The world's increasing urbanization is reflected in the index: 19 of the 60 cities are "megacities" of more than 10 million people. The index also reveals the differences between cities in wealthy countries, which tend to use urbanization to enhance their global integration, and many in the developing world, where the challenges of increasing urbanization make it more difficult for cities to reap globalization's rewards.
Still, the index shows that global cities - regardless of income levels or location - have much in common: they attract and retain educated people, generate economic opportunity, market themselves to the world, and become centers of culture, policy, or business.
"This new index shows that there is no perfect global city because no city is tops in all dimensions — there is sharp variability and a clear, ongoing shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world," says Columbia's Saskia Sassen.
The Global Cities Index is a complement to the Globalization Index, which A.T. Kearney and Foreign Policy have produced since 2001 to measure global integration among nations.
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Posted by Rana Mesbah
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