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WHAT'S THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD?

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In the first of a new series of big questions, John Parker works out what makes a capital of the world and draws up a shortlist. You can give your view by voting in our poll ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September/October, 2011

When politicians were debating where to put the headquarters of the new United Nations in war-torn 1946, one place stood out as a potential unofficial capital of the world. New York (pictured above) was then the world’s biggest city, with 12m people. It was the largest and most influential metropolis in the richest, most successful economy. It was a hotbed of ideas about how to make cities better. It was a cultural magnet, home of skyscrapers and abstract expressionists, bebop and jazz. Joan Didion, the writer, describes arriving in New York in 1954: “it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already…and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that [life] would never be quite the same again.”

Six decades later, the cold-war order is gone; America’s economic dominance is under challenge from China and others; the UN is in need of an overhaul. Over the years, there have been many proposals to uproot the general assembly, recently by Russia to move it to St Petersburg (2001), by Canada to Montreal (2007), by Singapore (2008) and Dubai (2010) to those city-states. So it is not a stretch to imagine the UN might move. And it is not a stretch to ask the bigger question, what might be the world’s next unofficial capital? 

If global panjandrums were to pick the world’s largest city, as they did in 1946, the choice would fall on Tokyo, which overtook New York in the pecking order soon after the UN settled there, and now has a population over 30m. But size, as they say, isn’t everything. Power, economic connections, culture, education—all these things matter, too. Throughout history, the world’s largest cities have been dominant not just because of their numbers but because they were capitals of international empires. This was true of Rome in the first century (the first city to reach a million people); of Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the fifth; of Chang’an (now Xi’an), China’s capital in the seventh; of Baghdad in the tenth century; of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, at the end of the 15th century; and of 19th-century London (the first city to reach 5m). Huge though it is, Tokyo is not in the same category. It is not very international and is home to comparatively few foreign residents for a city of its size.  

Power is important, but the capitals of the world’s two most powerful countries—the nearest things to imperial cities today—do not quite fit the bill either. Beijing is a non-starter as a global city and will continue to be so as long as the Communist Party maintains its iron grip. In New York and London, between a quarter and a third of residents were born abroad. In Beijing the share is below 1%. Outsiders have to have a stake in a city if it is to get global status. 

Washington, DC, looks a more plausible candidate for that. It contains more people who take the rest of the world seriously than any other place. The IMF and World Bank—the two prime international financial institutions—are based there. Washington takes itself seriously too, but so it should: as in 19th-century London, decisions made there matter more to the rest of the world than those taken elsewhere. Powertown has the capacity to make and unmake wars, to rescue or cripple economies. Yet there is more to being a dominant city than political authority or a multitude of think-tanks. Washington—a city of “northern charm and southern efficiency”, as John F. Kennedy said—has little going for it except the authority of the United States, and that is slipping. It is international without being cosmopolitan; it inspires respect but not imitation; it has political power, but not the power of example. 

In 1957, five years after the UN moved into its headquarters on East 42nd Street, Jack Kerouac was finishing his book “On the Road” a few blocks away in Times Square. After returning from a trip round America, he found himself at rush hour amid “the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair [sic] of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck amongst themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying.” Kerouac was criticising 1950s consumerism, of course, but his description captures what makes a city thrive: millions hustling for a buck. And the more things people have to hustle over—the more occasions they have for grabbing, taking and giving—the more their city becomes truly international.  

Cities are products of trade. Market towns trade crops; second cities trade manufactures; international cities design and trade everything, especially services; and global cities—a category comprising only New York, London and Tokyo—specialise in international financial services. Over the past 50 years, the world has seen a trading revolution. Cities used to send each other finished goods (cars, say, or computers). Now they trade services and parts as well (spark plugs, or recording heads for hard drives). Every step in the production process is broken down; parts are made separately and shipped for assembly. The result is that trade around the world has boomed, the number of international cities has boomed with it—and more are vying to join this select global club.  

Hence any shortlist of potential capitals of the world ought to include not just the established trio, plus Washington, but the fast-growing metropolises of the fastest-growing economies: Shanghai and Beijing, Mumbai and Delhi, São Paulo, Mexico City. This means excluding places which are great cities in their own right—Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles—but do not quite fit our definition. (Sorry, continental Europe.) Of those that do, all except London and Washington have populations of 15m or more. Unless you want your global capital to trade exclusively in government services—to be a glorified Canberra, in short—then this emerges as a threshold of sorts.

But, as with population, so with economics and trade: size still isn’t everything. Over the centuries, cities such as Baghdad and Constantinople waxed great upon their reputation for learning, the fame of their educational establishments, their openness to new ideas and their ability to attract the best minds to teach and think in their schools and courts. Some of these attributes can be measured, by looking at how many universities a city has, how many of its residents were born abroad, how many languages are spoken there.  

So Intelligent Life has subjected the contenders to a scoring system that rates them on five attributes (see table below). These are: power and influence (mostly political); income and wealth; educational standards (universities and graduates); cultural life (theatre, publishing, an art scene) and global connections (foreign residents, airports, tourists, foreign languages taught at school, phone calls, internet connections and so on). We have tried to make the scores impartial but some, such as those for power and culture, are inevitably subjective.  

Parker scale

The results suggest the dominant cities are still those of the rich world, not yet the up-and-coming one. On our list, four cities are in industrialised countries, five in emerging markets. The rich-country four take all the top four places, perhaps reflecting the weight the marking system gives to education and connections. It turns into a two-horse race, with London and New York well in front, scoring highly on almost every measure. We have given each measure equal weight. Giving more to, say, power and influence and less to education, would change the results and benefit emerging-market capitals accordingly.  

So London is our unofficial global capital, the new New York. And if you think that conclusion wrong, your scepticism has a distinguished lineage. New York may seem the obvious choice for the UN headquarters now, but it did not look that way to everyone at the time: among those voting against it were Britain, France and the Netherlands. 

John Parker is the globalisation editor of The Economist.

If you don't agree that London is the capital of the world, you're in good company. Over the next five days we will publish five pieces by other Economist writers, each arguing for a different city.

But which city do you think is the capital of the world in 2011? Have your say by voting in our poll.

 

Photo credit: United Nations Photo (via Flickr)