No city better exemplifies this than London, which after more than a century of imperial decline still ranks No. Inertia and smart use of it is a key theme that emerged in our evaluation of the top global cities. (Click here for a more detailed description of our methodology.) We found those factors particularly important in identifying rising stars that, someday, might challenge the current hegemony of our two top-ranked global cities, London and New York. In order to quantify cities’ global influence, we looked at eight factors: the amount of foreign direct investment they have attracted the concentration of corporate headquarters how many particular business niches they dominate air connectivity (ease of travel to other global cities) strength of producer services financial services technology and media power and racial diversity. Efficiency and access to capital and information, we believe, is more critical to being an important global city than number of jobs, and regional GDP is a false measure, since it doesn’t reflect whether the source is domestic or global economic activity.
We have attempted to go beyond some of the standard methods of evaluating the global importance of cities, which include assessing the concentration of support services available for multinationals, such as financial and accounting firms, or the size of the overall economy. To rank the world’s global cities, I worked with urban geographer Ali Modarres, former Accenture analyst Aaron Renn and demographer Wendell Cox. Instead, what matters today is influence.
Today size is not so important: Of the world’s 10 most populous cities, only Tokyo, New York and Beijing are in the top 10 of our ranking of the world’s most important cities. In the past century, the greatest global cities were generally the largest and centers of the world’s great empires: London, Paris, New York and Tokyo.
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