2023 World's Most Important Cities Ranked

[Gantz]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

How does Moscow above DC make sense? If cities are tied to their countries' importance, Russia isn't really doing that well in importance economically or culturally in 2023, the year of this ranking (I suppose currently as it stands, maybe things were different in different times).

I guess you could say Russia's capital/largest city has clout by being the dominant city in a way the US doesn't have a single dominant city (e.g. political, economic, cultural, educational, etc. with different cities playing different roles). And also legacy effects from being the capital of former 1 of 2 superpowers over much of the last century. Yeah, but then, if legacy effects of past superpower status were that important, then Rome should shoot to the top, since we're ranking year-by-year past glories shouldn't matter too much unless it's contemporary.

But would you consider Moscow a "A city of global importance, with outsized impact on the world" while say Toronto is "A city of very high importance, with significance impact outside of it's country"?

Also, China seems to dominate the list in terms of importance (I get it's big, but part of global influence is internationalism and some much smaller population countries are still much more international than big Chinese ones -- in terms of people traveling internationally, tourists, visitors, expats, cosmopolitan outlook etc.).

For instance, Shanghai, one of the most important cities according to the list is just behind Las Vegas (not a fair comparison, true), but also cities like Prague, Istanbul, Miami etc in international visitors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ional_visitors

China and Russia do seem a big inward-focused (if you say, well, the US is too, that's fair, but the US is still culturally/economically much more influential, not just pound-for-pound but still, despite stories about China's rise, currently the #1 economic, military power etc. with more global reach).

Moscow, as a city, makes DC look like a sleepy podunk village. Political power alone does not determine rankings. I've been to Moscow (albeit over a decade ago) and even then it felt like a megacity. Its comparable to NYC, Tokyo, Seoul, etc. It felt noticably bigger than Singapore or Hong Kong for example.

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by Wigs

Honestly, from my POV, this is right on the money. You’d have to go down to the 5th tier of cities (lightest shade of yellow) before I’d find any placements that are even the slightest bit contentious.

Even the scores are plausible.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

One of the first lists that doesn't give Sydney and Melbourne disproportionately stratospheric ratings.

A lot of these lists seem to give bonus points to Sydney and Melbourne (and likely Vancouver too) presumably because the people putting the list together would like to live there!

[SteveD]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

Honestly, from my POV, this is right on the money. You’d have to go down to the 5th tier of cities (lightest shade of yellow) before I’d find any placements that are even the slightest bit contentious.

Even the scores are plausible.

Agreed. My initial take, and my continued take, is that the list appears reasonable, and the US/Canada placements and rankings make sense.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Gantz

Moscow, as a city, makes DC look like a sleepy podunk village. Political power alone does not determine rankings. I've been to Moscow (albeit over a decade ago) and even then it felt like a megacity. Its comparable to NYC, Tokyo, Seoul, etc. It felt noticably bigger than Singapore or Hong Kong for example.

I don't think that has much to do with city importance, though.

Bogota makes San Francisco look like a sleepy podunk village. San Francisco is roughly 1 billion times more important.

[Gantz]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I don't think that has much to do with city importance, though.

Bogota makes San Francisco look like a sleepy podunk village. San Francisco is roughly 1 billion times more important.

Correct, but Moscow is no slouch in other categories. They have most domestic and foreign regional HQs there as well. And a lot of those conglomerates are globally important in agriculture/fertilizers, oil & gas, chemicals, shipping, and mining & minerals sectors especially. Big corps that Bogota lacks. At least pre-2022, a foreigner would've seen a lot of familiar international corporate logos there (not just western). For some reason, even companies that do business elsewhere have the HQ in Moscow. Its way more concentrated even compared to Paris. I think the only other comparison would be Seoul compared to the rest of South Korea.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Gantz

Correct, but Moscow is no slouch in other categories. They have most domestic and foreign regional HQs there as well. And a lot of those conglomerates are globally important in agriculture/fertilizers, oil & gas, chemicals, shipping, and mining & minerals sectors especially. Big corps that Bogota lacks. At least pre-2022, a foreigner would've seen a lot of familiar international corporate logos there (not just western). For some reason, even companies that do business elsewhere have the HQ in Moscow. Its way more concentrated even compared to Paris. I think the only other comparison would be Seoul compared to the rest of South Korea.

Moscow also had world-class shopping, arts, culture, etc. typical of a major global metropolis.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Moscow also had world-class shopping, arts, culture, etc. typical of a major global metropolis.

Not to mention 13 million people in the city and 17 million plus in the urban area. People tend to forget (or not realize) how HUGE Moscow is.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

Honestly, from my POV, this is right on the money. You’d have to go down to the 5th tier of cities (lightest shade of yellow) before I’d find any placements that are even the slightest bit contentious.

Even the scores are plausible.

I think Toronto's and Montreal's score should be slightly higher. Toronto is the largest city and power centre of Canada, a rapidly growing country of almost 40 million that is the 9th largest economy in the world, larger than Russia, Brazil and South Korea. Before the mass tech sector look layoffs, Toronto was the new darling of the tech economy in North America.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List...y_GDP_(nominal)

[bilbao58]

Deleted

[nito]

Without seeing the methodology it is pretty hard to provide a detailed critique one way or the other as there are plenty of conversation points, such as what is meant by a metro area, the relevance of a country’s GDP (e.g. Shanghai v Singapore), skyscraper counts as modern urban characteristics (e.g. Dubai v Barcelona), what counts as an airport or metro transit for a city?...

Originally Posted by Crawford

Paris usually seems to be slightly underperforming on these lists, and almost always lower than London. I'm not sure it makes sense. Paris has similar or greater population, wealth and corporate heft. Its cultural capital is possibly unsurpassed. It shouldn't be #1, but it should almost always be Top 5 in any comparative measure of global importance.

How do you define cultural capital? Sports venues? Olympic host city? City icons? Theatres? Museums and art galleries? Number of castles, palaces and other protected buildings? University rankings? Some other undefined measure?

[Antares41]

I think it a pretty good snapshot of the important cities for 2023. What would be another interesting bit of information ,if obtainable, is whether (based on the criteria established) are each of the respective cities either trending upward or downward . We all know 10, 20 or 30 years from now we could be looking at a different ranking of these cities. And, there may be new cities on the verge of entering the conversation.

[Wigs]

Overall it's definitely a better ranking than the GaWC was

[ocman]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Can you give an example where one of those criteria might have skewed the list to create a ridiculous ordering?

Skyscraper count. Metro length. Station count. The whole category of Modern Urban Characteristics is dubious.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by Wigs

Overall it's definitely a better ranking than the GaWC was

I'll agree with that.

That said, I wonder if DC's ranking was negged because of "skyscraper count."

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by ocman

Skyscraper count. Metro length. Station count. The whole category of Modern Urban Characteristics is dubious.

Why shouldn't skyscrapers and size of the transit system be a criteria in how important a city is?

[Nouvellecosse]

They're certainly things people associate with important cities, and DC probably gets a big enough boost from having such a large metro system to offset its lack of skyscrapers. Besides, the urban characteristics section is worth a maximum of 10% so I doubt it changes the overall ranking much. If it did change the order of any two cities, their overall scores would still be very close either way.

[Crawford]

I don't think skyscrapers mean anything for a city's relative importance. Not sure that size of transit system means anything either. Yes, these are unabashedly good things (especially transit network), but they don't make a city more or less important. They may make a city better, however.

However, the relative weight is so small, I don't think it makes much of a difference.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I don't think skyscrapers mean anything for a city's relative importance. Not sure that size of transit system means anything either. Yes, these are unabashedly good things (especially transit network), but they don't make a city more or less important. They may make a city better, however.

However, the relative weight is so small, I don't think it makes much of a difference.

There is definitely a correlation between skyscraper counts and a city's importance. Within any country the city with the most skyscrapers is almost certainly the most important city in that country. Same for transit length. Within any particular country the correlation holds pretty strong until at least the 3rd city.

Now when you get to international comparisons the domestic ordering has to be normalized against global factors: global importance of the national government (including economic and military), location, nexus point potential, media influence, number of globally wealthy or influential citizens, etc. But the domestic factors still matter.

[Steely Dan]

Skyscrapers* are almost always markers of importance, but in and of themselves don't necessarily make a city important.

(*) We also need a caveat about the type of "skyscraper" we're talking about. Sao Paolo's 8 billion 30-story people storage boxes do not make the city more important than DC, which derives is power and importance from aspects entirely outside its built form.