Urbis Think Tank
London – the Capital of the World?
If an official Capital City of the World were to be designated there would undoubtedly be a tremendous amount of lobbying and jockeying (and probably attempted corruption!) of the judging panel.
While there is no such move to annoint a world capital there is a growing range of annual indexes that attempt to rank and score the world’s cities on various metrics of relevance for assessing a worthy title holder i.e. quality of life, cost of living, economic and political influence, innovation, globalisation and sustainability.
The latest contribution to this arena comes from the Intelligent Life magazine. Setting out with the express intention to announce a capital of the world, the author, John Parker sets out five key criteria. These are:
- Power and Influence (mostly political);
- Income and wealth (GDP per capita);
- Educational standards (universities and graduates);
- Cultural life (theatre, publishing, an art scene)
- Global connections (foreign residents, airports, tourists, foreign languages taught at school, phone calls, internet connections and so on).
Through a range of qualifying criteria the final list of contenders is narrowed down to a familiar list of nine “pre-eminent world cities”. Like other city ranking indexes the methodology for deriving category scores is fairly opaque, as underscored by Parker’s comment: “We have tried to make the scores impartial but some, such as those for power and culture, are inevitably subjective.”
The table below sets out the ‘Parker Scale’ for the cities across the five scoring categories, with London emerging as the unofficial captial of the world – just shading New York.
While these results suggest the dominant cities are still overwhelmingly in the ‘rich world’, the pace of growth and industrialisation underway in emerging markets suggests that a similar analysis undertaken in 15 or 20 years may well yield a far closer gap (between the developed and developing cities) and indeed potentially a new unofficial Capital of the World.
Source: WHAT’S THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD? | More Intelligent Life