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In Heathrow Airport waiting for my connection to Valencia, I came across the new issue of Time. It's their Davos issue. The cover is devoted to what they consider to be one of the (igonored) bright-spots of the global economy - the rise of the global city-states of Ny-Lon-Kong. Here's a snippet.
Go back nearly 30 years, and few would have thought that any of the three cities were about to remake the world for the better. In September of 1982, the Hong Kong stock exchange lost a quarter of its value ... At the same time, London and New York City were bywords of urban decay ... Yet even in the darkest times, the Nylonkong cities had the sort of hidden strengths that would be their salvation. All had a certain adaptability hardwired into their people. All were once centers of manufacturing, but all have been able to shift their economic focus to the service sector ... All are — or have been — great ports ... It has made them open to trade, with all the transformative capacity that trade has to shake up established orders and make the exotic familiar.
Their history as ports has made Nylonkong open to the world in other ways, too ... The network of international trading and personal contacts that shape New York, London and Hong Kong facilitate their key industry. If the 19th century was the age of empire and the 20th one of war, so the 21st century, to date, is an age of finance ...
Great cities, of course, are about more than money and finance. They are messy agglomerations of talent and culture. That is how they attract men and women in the financial sector who could choose to live anywhere ... That's a reason why Nylonkong needs to be careful not to kill the goose that laid its golden egg. These places are not cheap. According to the consultancy ECA International, Hong Kong's high-end apartments last year had the most expensive rents in the world, with New York third and London sixth.
The sheer expense of living in Nylonkong is but one of the challenges facing it — as the next three stories demonstrate. In the case of New York, high real estate prices may squeeze out of town the very people that make a city fun and livable. Globalization may have brought many benefits to those who live in London, New York and Hong Kong, but it has at the same time made the familiar strange, and turned the known world upside down.
More here.
"That is how they attract men and women in the financial sector who could choose to live anywhere"
That might be true for those at the top in the financial sector, but not those at the bottom. If you're joining the financial sector with a hope of moving to the top, a city like NY, Lon, or Kong are the only places you can do it. This has been true for decades. So all the people at the top now first had to make the choice to locate in these centres, and apparently they got used to living there so it's a feedback loop.
Posted by: Jared | January 24, 2008 at 04:25 PM
What happened to Tokyo?
Posted by: Brandon | January 25, 2008 at 12:44 AM