2023 World's Most Important Cities Ranked

[dave8721]

Originally Posted by 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.

Are you suggesting that Sunny Isles Beach isn't one the US' most important cities?

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by 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.

The exterior staircases of Sao Paolo buildings scare the hell outta me
"8 billion 30-story people storage boxes"

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by 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.

Yes, this is the point I was making. São Paulo's skyline pretty clearly signals its standing in Brazil, and Rio's does as well. But when comparing them globally you have to look at more factors than just that. This doesn't mean that skyscrapers and transit is irrelevant, though. Because if those things are irrelevant then you might get a ranking with Washington ahead of New York, which I think we all agree is borderline absurd.

[ocman]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

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

It has zero to do with importance. Skyscrapers serve as places for people to live and work. Transit lines are simply one of many forms of transportation for people to get around their city. They don’t serve any higher purpose than to simply meet the needs of their denizens.

With that, it’s ranking on cliched markers and confusing it with importance. Like using one’s designer clothes and brand of car to deem their significance.

[Nouvellecosse]

I think a lot of this comes down to one's conception of importance. Importance in terms of being instrumental to some other process or outcome vs importance for its inherent value vs correlations with or signifiers to one or the other. A business might say a particular client is extremely important because they're a major source of revenue that funds its ongoing growth. While an individual might say their annual vacation is extremely important because... they really enjoy it. It enriches their life. Or someone might consider something to be an extremely important national historic site because it's the site of a famous historic event. Or that a burial site is extremely important because of its spiritual significance to a particular culture.

Importance is similar to terms like greatness or valuable. They sound like clear and objective terms, but until people agree on a specific definition, they're based on subjective impressions of what people consider to be important, great, or valuable. All you can really do when trying to make a "most" list based on the degree of such attributes is try to understand the prevailing views on the matter and try to find metrics that measure things based on those views. But "most prevalent" does not mean a consensus. You'll always have disagreements between people saying things are valuable because of the price they fetch on the open market vs things like a healthy environment or time with friends and family. Or that things are important because of GDP figures vs cultural significance etc. Unless everyone agrees on common definitions, you just can't say "X has nothing to do with it because it only pertains to Y".

[Razor]

I think that this a good list as well. Hong Kong slipped compared to previous lists that I saw in the past few years..It was practically placed in the same weight class as NYC and London from what I recall..The past list(s) were based on different criteria I think.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by Wigs

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)

Toronto lacks the supremacy over Canada that Moscow enjoys over Russia or Seoul does with South Korea. There is another large metro a few hundred miles to the east that was Canada's dominant city for a long time.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by ocman

It has zero to do with importance. Skyscrapers serve as places for people to live and work. Transit lines are simply one of many forms of transportation for people to get around their city. They don’t serve any higher purpose than to simply meet the needs of their denizens.

With that, it’s ranking on cliched markers and confusing it with importance. Like using one’s designer clothes and brand of car to deem their significance.

A sprawling low-rise metropolis that is entirely auto-dependent could conceivably be the most important city in the world if enough power (economic, political, cultural, etc.) was concentrated there.

Though to most people in the world, skyscrapers have come to equal urban power and prominence, and are associated with economic heft especially.

Transit being this pivotal marker of a city's importance is more of an SSP thing, at least when it comes to being close to the top of the list.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by ocman

It has zero to do with importance. Skyscrapers serve as places for people to live and work. Transit lines are simply one of many forms of transportation for people to get around their city. They don’t serve any higher purpose than to simply meet the needs of their denizens.

With that, it’s ranking on cliched markers and confusing it with importance. Like using one’s designer clothes and brand of car to deem their significance.

I think you're being a bit naive about the connection between skyscrapers and the importance of a city. Although not linear, there is definitely a strong connection. As I said above, it does get tricky when you compare across international borders but within a single country the relationship is nearly linear.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by JManc

Toronto lacks the supremacy over Canada that Moscow enjoys over Russia or Seoul does with South Korea. There is another large metro a few hundred miles to the east that was Canada's dominant city for a long time.

Canada is more like Australia or Brazil in this respect.

If anything, Toronto and Montreal probably intrude less on each other's turf than Sydney and Melbourne, or Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro do.

[Gantz]

Originally Posted by JManc

Toronto lacks the supremacy over Canada that Moscow enjoys over Russia or Seoul does with South Korea. There is another large metro a few hundred miles to the east that was Canada's dominant city for a long time.

The people who try to rank Moscow or Seoul lower have never been to either I would guess. Just being there in real life, you can see a significant "step-up" in terms of the amount of urban city you're in. Honestly, if you're there visiting, you do not even need to look at any charts or statistics. For people who have never been, I think the metro/subway map of cities is actually a good proxy of how it feels in real life. These are giant cities with 10+ million people living in city non-suburban area. Both Seoul and Moscow make Singapore look like a quaint seaside resort town.

Its like visiting Chicago and Cleveland, you can see which city is where just by visiting, don't really need to look at the stats.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by Acajack

If anything, Toronto and Montreal probably intrude less on each other's turf than Sydney and Melbourne, or Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro do.

probably

[ocman]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I think you're being a bit naive about the connection between skyscrapers and the importance of a city. Although not linear, there is definitely a strong connection. As I said above, it does get tricky when you compare across international borders but within a single country the relationship is nearly linear.

The more the GDP -the more the buying power of a city.
The more embassies/capitals -the more the city has in interactions and relationships with world.
The more population -the more a city can steer the direction of the country/world through the influence by numbers.
The more skyscrapers? Nothing. Having more skyscrapers has zero effect on anything. Because it doesn’t affect things. It’s the result of things. That’s why it doesn’t belong as a criteria on a list where most everything else satisfies that.

[ocman]

Originally Posted by Acajack

A sprawling low-rise metropolis that is entirely auto-dependent could conceivably be the most important city in the world if enough power (economic, political, cultural, etc.) was concentrated there.

Though to most people in the world, skyscrapers have come to equal urban power and prominence, and are associated with economic heft especially.

Transit being this pivotal marker of a city's importance is more of an SSP thing, at least when it comes to being close to the top of the list.

Skyscrapers are associated with economic heft, because they’re often afforded by economic heft. But they’re not the cause of economic heft. That’s why skycrapers doesn’t belong on that list. It’s more of an image issue. I made the analogy of how most people associate wealthy people with how they dress. If there was a wealth rank, and rich people choose not to wear designer labels, are they lower on the list because they don’t? Because that’s similar to what this criteria is essentially doing.

If cities like San Francisco have their most powerful companies in office parks and suburbs rather than skyscrapers, the criteria disadvantages them despite their abilities to set up different but equally effective urban models. So is it really convincing that they be deemed less powerful because Apple and Google aren’t set up in skyscrapers?

And then you have Paris, which has one of the most storied histories of power, and they choose not to build many skyscrapers due to aesthetic opposition, not because they lack power.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by ocman

The more the GDP -the more the buying power of a city.
The more embassies/capitals -the more the city has in interactions and relationships with world.
The more population -the more a city can steer the direction of the country/world through the influence by numbers.
The more skyscrapers? Nothing. Having more skyscrapers has zero effect on anything. Because it doesn’t affect things. It’s the result of things. That’s why it doesn’t belong as a criteria on a list where most everything else satisfies that.

Everything you listed is a result, just like skyscrapers. Embassies and consulates locate to places where people and/or state power is located. Population locates places with opportunity. Skyscrapers are built in places with high land values. These can all be defended as metrics to gauge a city's "importance".

[montréaliste]

Originally Posted by ocman

Skyscrapers are associated with economic heft, because they’re often afforded by economic heft. But they’re not the cause of economic heft. That’s why skycrapers doesn’t belong on that list. It’s more of an image issue. I made the analogy of how most people associate wealthy people with how they dress. If there was a wealth rank, and rich people choose not to wear designer labels, are they lower on the list because they don’t? Because that’s similar to what this criteria is essentially doing.

If cities like San Francisco have their most powerful companies in office parks and suburbs rather than skyscrapers, the criteria disadvantages them despite their abilities to set up different but equally effective urban models. So is it really convincing that they be deemed less powerful because Apple and Google aren’t set up in skyscrapers?

And then you have Paris, which has one of the most storied histories of power, and they choose not to build many skyscrapers due to aesthetic opposition, not because they lack power.

Agreed.

Your last paragraph in particular, what you mention can be applied to Washington, since the planners decided on the "luxury" of not allowing very tall buildings in D.C. The monumental effect is preserved, despite the lack of verticality.

[Nouvellecosse]

If everyone agrees that "importance" means "economic heft" then that's a start of a perfectly fine definition (one of many potentially fine definitions). We'd just need to define economic heft, whether it's total wealth, total GDP, GDP per capita, GDP by PPP, number of ultra wealthy people etc. Of course if we define it by saying it's interchangeable with some other existing concept, then what's the point in assigning another term like importance as opposed to one like wealthiest, most economically powerful, or highest GDP cities for instance. In order to be useful, the term importance has to add something not already covered by another term. But then you're prevented from using the terms interchangeably and you're back to needing to define a unique definition.

But it also raises the question of whether this is a potential category error. If we define importance in terms of wealth but we value wealth for its own merit, then it's subjective and we could value anything else for its own merit. So the implication is that economic heft equates to power - the ability of an agent to carry out its will. But while a municipal government may act as an agent carrying out a singular will, entire cities do not. So the ability of an entire city to carry out its will lacks coherence. You could say an important city is where socially impactful decisions are made by the people in them. But then you have to decide which impactful decisions to consider important. There are many things that shape society. Education, religion, technology, politics, transportation, media, etc. So you need to decide which of these things count as important, how to measure them, and how much importance to assign to each.

It very much reminds me of when I was a kid and someone explained how extremely expensive things like precious metals, gems, fine art, etc. have little to no actual value. By that they meant value in terms of practical, instrumental utility. They're mostly just valuable because people just agreed on their high value (assigned value to them). Importance (which is sometimes used in a similar way as terms like value, significance, etc.) sometimes works like this. Something such as rarity or just a cultural fluke prompts people to place a high value or importance on a thing. Gold for instance is very rare. It might not seem rare since millions of people possess some, but it is in terms of the proportion of earth's crust made of it. It's very similar to metro systems and skyscrapers as well. There are lots of skyscrapers around the world, but they're a tiny proportion of all buildings. And metro systems are a tiny proportion of transportation infrastructure. So it would be consistent that people would assign value or importance to them. So a discussion of importance in the descriptive rather than prescriptive sense (what people do rather than should consider important) will reflect this.

[badrunner]

Originally Posted by ocman

Skyscrapers are associated with economic heft, because they’re often afforded by economic heft. But they’re not the cause of economic heft. That’s why skycrapers doesn’t belong on that list. It’s more of an image issue.

Skyscrapers used to say a lot more about a city's economic heft. But with the increasing share of residential towers and less office towers being built, they are no longer the symbols of wealth and power they used to be.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by badrunner

Skyscrapers used to say a lot more about a city's economic heft. But with the increasing share of residential towers and less office towers being built, they are no longer the symbols of wealth and power they used to be.

Skyscrapers were/ are a symbol of a country asserting itself as a rising power which is why most of the construction has shifted east. The US invented the skyscraper and built them like crazy when it was a rising power 80 years ago but now it has nothing to prove and our power is unquestioned and some of the biggest companies in the world are content with sprawling office parks.

[MAC123]

Originally Posted by JManc

Skyscrapers were/ are a symbol of a country asserting itself as a rising power which is why most of the construction has shifted east. The US invented the skyscraper and built them like crazy when it was a rising power 80 years ago but now it has nothing to prove and our power is unquestioned and some of the biggest companies in the world are content with sprawling office parks.

I know we like to say things like "The US built this" or "China built that", but I'd like to remind that the vast, vast majority of skyscrapers are built by developers, not countries. Their construction had absolutely nothing to do with whether a country wanted to prove itself or not. (Besides the exceptions of course, buildings like the Burj and whatnot.p