S14 E07: The London Problem

London is, according to research by Loughborough University and their Globalisation and World Cities project, one of only two alpha plus plus cities.

What on earth does that mean? Sounds very nice, doesn't it? Sounds very positive.

Who wouldn't want to be an alpha plus plus city? What does it mean? It means that we are incredibly interconnected.

Our economy or aspects of London's economy are incredibly interconnected and successful in the sense of a modern global city.

Once the most competitive cities in the world were centres of empire and they were centres of trade.

We were founded, this city, by the Romans on a river and up and down that river would go goods and those goods would be traded with the rest of the world.

Now, increasingly, post-80s and 90s, the global city is a centre of trade which survives not on the river, on ships, but via underwater cables.

It's trade in services and ideas and financial services.

And London is one of the most competitive global cities in that definition.

I show you this because it just illustrates two points.

Firstly, that only London and New York were ranked in this particular project.

And there are many similar projects ranking cities across different indices.

But in this particular case, we are ranked up there with only London and New York as the Alpha++ super-connected, very successful global cities.

The other thing I want you to notice is that the list features only one city, and I believe this is true, I realise now as I say it, but I haven't looked at this properly, but in the United Kingdom, London is competing with international cities.

The sort of business that is involved in a global, a modern global city, multinational corporations, where they choose to put their headquarters, this sort of stuff is something that London competes with Tokyo and New York and Singapore and Hong Kong for.

It doesn't compete with Manchester or Birmingham for this sort of business.

So it's a global level city and it is competing with the world, not necessarily with its nation.

There are a million different indices put together for what makes a good or successful city.

I like this one from the Mori Memorial Foundation in Tokyo, which looks at the economy, yes, But how strong is your research and development offer? How strong is your innovation? How well do cultures interact and mix? How liveable is your city? How green is it? Lots of different indices, all of them subjective, none of them definitive.

But London does well across all of these measures.

London was featured, was coming up top.

in these measures as well again we're looking slightly beyond just a simple how interconnected is your economy how successful are you as a global city this is also including a little bit of how pleasant is it to live there how what is your cultural offering like london coming up top london came up top again in this wonderfully named best cities project Nice and straightforward, that one.

This is a consultancy, but they worked with Ipsos, the pollsters, spoke to thousands, I think 21,000 people across something like 31 different countries to gain a sense of what people thought, particularly highly mobile, highly skilled people thought about different world cities.

They combined that with some hard data.

What's the air quality like? How much green space do you have? How much employment do you have in a city? Across all these indices put together, again, it's imperfect, but there is a theme here.