The City of London Corporation recently published a report called “The City as a Place for People”, which talks primarily about itself and how great London is as a magnet for talent. 

But as self-serving as it may be – the report is timed to be ahead of this year’s MIPIM – there appears to be some data and interviews backing up the claims.

58% of “institutional investors” said that London is the best European city for business. Dublin was next at 22%. 

A separate survey of 2,568 “corporate decision makers” in Europe revealed that 21% of respondents felt that London was the best European city for business, followed by Paris (13%) and Frankfurt (7%). When asked which city had the best talent pool, the responses were fairly similar.

Also included in the report is a rendering of the City’s skyline by 2026. These are always fun to see. Here is a screen grab:

It is showing all towers under construction and all towers with their planning permissions in place. If you’d like to download the full report, you can do that here.

Jennifer Keesmaat – the former chief planner of Toronto – recently published an article in Maclean’s called: Toronto’s unaffordable. Why can’t Halifax or Saskatoon take advantage? Her argument: 

“The hard truth is that many mid-sized cities won’t win the future because they are stuck on a suburban growth model. If the future is green and walkable, they will be left behind.”

The model city that is held up is Portland – a terrific mid-sized city of only 640,000 people that has used progressive land use policies to build a livable and dense urban center. (In all fairness, the Portland MSA has over 2.4 million people.)

Now, if you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I have a penchant for dense urban centers. I live and I work downtown. And I would happily trade square footage for a more sensible commute and lower transportation costs.

But after I read the article, I couldn’t help but think that progressive land use policies, alone, aren’t enough. Cities, like social networks, experience network effects. That’s why there’s so much talk these days of winner-take-all urbanism.

All of this is not to say that progressive urban policies are a bad thing. Quite the opposite. I just think there are many other factors at play if we’re talking about taming the hegemony of our global cities.

Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Karen M. King have a new working paper out called Winner-Take-All Cities.

It is about the phenomenon of “winner-take-all urbanism” and how a select number of alpha cities seem to overrepresent when it comes to talent, economic activity, innovation, and wealth creation.

In this study they look at economic output, innovation (venture capital-backed startups), and billionaire wealth in each city. They then compare these factors to the distribution of the population.

Here are the Alpha cities they looked at:

In some cases the above concentrations were multiples of what the city’s population would lead you to predict. Their conclusion: “We find clear evidence of a winner-take-all urbanism across the global economy and the world’s cities.”