New Comprehensive Ranking of 60 Most Global Cities

Emerging Cities Challenging Long-Established Leaders for Global Status

While national governments may shape the broad outlines of globalization, its impact is felt most profoundly in the world’s cities. Urban areas are the hubs of global integration, engines of growth for their countries, and gateways to the resources of their regions.

The inaugural Global Cities Index is published in the November/December 2008 issue of Foreign Policy and is available at http://ForeignPolicy.com/extras/globalcities. It is a uniquely comprehensive ranking of how 60 cities from 40 countries are powering integration, interaction, and influence on a global scale. While most other city rankings limit their focus to business or quality of life measures, the Global Cities Index measures cultural experience and political engagement in addition to business activity, human capital, and information exchange. The result is a holistic look at what differentiates cities in generating, attracting, and retaining global capital, people, and ideas.

“The new Global Cities Index measures unique dimensions that define today’s global cities,” says Columbia University's Saskia Sassen, the leading theorist on global cities and author of The Global City. “Cities can be global in different ways as globalization boosts the strength of urban areas, so some powerhouse cities, like Chicago, rank highly because the index looks at more than just business and finance — it's important to take care of the whole city.”

In addition to Business Activity, Human Capital, and Information Exchange, two unique dimensions of global city status are incorporated into the Global Cities Index: Cultural Experience and Political Engagement. Cultural Experience measures the number and diversity of attractions for residents and visitors, and Political Engagement examines the degree to which a city influences global policymaking and dialogue.

The leading cities demonstrate different strengths across each of the five dimensions of the index:

Other high-ranking cities combined their own unique attributes to assume their place on the global stage.  Toronto, for example, performs well in Human Capital and Cultural Experience, while Sydney leverages its natural endowments to attract international residents and earn a high Human Capital score. Mexico City, Istanbul, and Cairo also achieved top-10 status in Cultural Experience and Political Engagement – showing that major cities in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa are playing increasingly important global roles.

This index focuses on cities’ role in globalization in part because in 2008, for the first time, more people live in cities than rural areas. The world’s increasing urbanization is reflected in the index: 19 of the 60 cities are “megacities” of more than 10 million people. The index also reveals the differences between cities in wealthy countries, which tend to use urbanization to enhance their global integration, and many in the developing world, where the challenges of increasing urbanization make it more difficult for cities to reap globalization’s rewards.

Still, the index shows that global cities – regardless of income levels or location – have much in common: the need to attract and retain educated people, generate economic opportunity, market themselves to the world, and become centers of culture, policy, or business. And many cities that rank lower in the index are rapidly gaining on established leaders – so the rankings are likely to change. “This new index shows that there is no perfect global city because no city is tops in all dimensions — there is sharp variability and a clear, ongoing shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world,” says Columbia’s Saskia Sassen.

The Global Cities Index is a complement to the Globalization Index, which A.T. Kearney and Foreign Policy have produced since 2001 to measure global integration among nations.

About the Global Cities Index
The Global Cities Index ranks 60 diverse cities from around the globe, based on 24 metrics grouped in five categories: business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience and policy engagement. Business activity is measured by counting the number of Fortune Global 500 headquarters and Top 40 business service firms located in the city, the size of the city’s stock and commodities markets, the flow of goods through the city and finally, the number of industry conferences that take place in the city. The human capital dimension combines data on the number of top universities, the number of international students attracted by stellar educational institutions, the number of inhabitants with university degrees, the size of the foreign-born population and finally, the number of international schools available at the primary and secondary level. Information exchange charts the city’s location in the international flow of ideas by counting the number of bureaus of global publications found there, the coverage of international news in the local broadsheet with the highest circulation and adds these two measures to the national rate of broadband penetration. Cultural experience includes the number of international travelers coming to the city, performing arts venues and international shows that utilize the venues, museums, international sporting events and the diversity and quality of the culinary scene. Policy engagement is assessed not only by counting embassies and consulates, international organizations, think tanks and international political conferences held in the city, but also by quantifying other ways in which cities are connected to the international policy realm such as through sister city arrangements and the sponsorship of local organizations with international reach, including investment promotion agencies and NGOs.

About A.T. Kearney
A.T. Kearney is a global strategic management consulting firm known for helping clients gain lasting results through a unique combination of strategic insight and collaborative working style. The firm was established in 1926 to provide management advice concerning issues on the CEO’s agenda. Today, we serve the largest global clients in all major industries. A.T. Kearney’s offices are located in major business centers in 34 countries.