"Cities have become the basic platforms for global innovation and economic growth, supplanting the corporation as the fundamental organizing unit of the contemporary economy." -Richard Florida

Richard Florida and Patrick Adler of the Martin Prosperity Institute here in Toronto have been doing some research on what they are calling "urban tech." They define it as encompassing the following industry sectors: co-living and co-working; mobility; delivery; smart cities; construction tech; and real estate tech.

Here are the largest urban tech startups based on the amount of VC investment they have received:

Below is how the space breaks down by sector. Mobility / ride hailing is the behemoth, receiving 61% of all VC investment. Food delivery is next. And "proptech" is at the bottom.

Finally, here are the top "urban tech" cities. Beijing is right up there with San Francisco.

For more information on the study, click here.

Tables: CityLab

Below is a mapping (by Taylor Blake of the Martin Prosperity Institute) of the top 10 metro economies in the world by GDP at purchasing power parity. In brackets, is a country with a comparable GDP.

Tokyo is the world’s largest metro economy with ~$1.6 trillion in GDP. This is greater than the GDP of all of Canada. New York City is number 2 with ~$1.5 trillion in GDP, which is only slightly less than Canada.

The point of all of this – which Richard Florida argues here – is that the global economy is, today, powered by metropolitan areas. And yet our governance structures do not reflect this new reality.

Here’s an excerpt from Florida’s article:

“Cities really are the new power centers of the global economy—the platforms for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. But when it comes to fiscal and political power, they remain beholden to increasingly anachronistic and backward-looking nation-states, which has become distressingly obvious with the rise of Trumpism in the United States and populism around the world.”

Florida has been arguing this for years and I’ve really gotten behind it. The above chart is a good reminder just how big and wealthy some cities have become in today’s economy. 

The Martin Prosperity Institute here in Toronto recently published an interesting report called The Geography of the Global Super-Rich.

What they did was use the Forbes 2015 Billionaire List to chart billionaires and billionaire wealth by location and by industry. They also looked at the wealth gap in each location and whether the wealth was self-made or inherited.

A correlation analysis was also done to see what key variables – such as population, density, economic output, global city standing, VC investment, and so on – were positively correlated with a greater concentration of super rich people.

There are 1,826 billionaires across the world according to Forbes. The researchers were able to match 99% of them to a specific metro area / primary residence.

Here are the top 20 metro areas in terms of the number of billionaires:

Look at Miami at #9. 

I suspect that this may surprise some of you. But Miami has grown into a significant global city. As one of my friends from Miami likes to tell me: “The best thing about Miami is that it’s a Latin American city that’s so close to the United States.”

Here are the top 20 metro areas in terms of total billionaire wealth: 

A bunch of changes on this list because of extremely wealthly people and families in places like Bentonville (Arkansas) and Omaha.

One of the conclusions of the report is that the size of the city generally matters:

“The geography of the super-rich is a function of larger cities. Both the number of billionaires and their net worth are positively associated with the population of global cities, with correlations of 0.56 for the number of billionaires and 0.44 to their net worth.”

Here is a chart comparing population to the number of billionaires:

Cities such as New York, Moscow, and Hong kong, which sit far above the blue line, have more billionaires than their population size would predict.

Here is a similar chart comparing venture capital investment to the number of billionaires:

Once again, there is a positive association.

Finally, here are a two charts that show which industries have produced the most billionaires:

If you’re interested in this study, you can download the full report here. All of the charts were sourced from the report.