![]() In North America the best urban prospects-Raleigh-Durham, N.C. The other leading candidates in the region hail from the United Arab Emirates, notably oil-rich Abu Dhabi and perhaps its now weakened neighbor, Dubai. Tel Aviv, whose total metropolitan area is no larger than 3 million, has emerged as a major center for technology as well as one of the world's premier diamond centers. This is clear in the Middle East, where the emerging stars tend to be smaller cities. Today, he asserts, it is the ability to network long-distance-not girth-that makes the critical difference. This shift to smaller-scaled cities, as Michigan State's Zachary Neal points out, has been conditioned by massive improvements in telecommunications and transportation infrastructure throughout the urban world. The best economic prospects in this region lie in more modestly sized cities like Santiago, the capital of resource-rich Chile, and even Campinas, Brazil, a growing smaller city-with 3 million residents-that lies outside the congested Sao Paolo region. Latin America, too, has a plethora of huge and growing cities, but it's hard to nominate the likes of Mexico City or Sao Paulo as likely hot spots for future sustainable growth. One exception may well be Cape Town, the beautiful South African coastal city that shone so well during the recent World Cup. Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur-with its rising financial sector-also displays considerable promise.Īfrica also boasts many huge, rapidly growing cities, but it's hard to identify many of these places-like Lagos, Nigeria, Luanda, Angola or Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo-as bright prospects. Potential hot spots include places like Hanoi, Vietnam, which is attracting greater interest from Japanese, American and European multi-national firms upset with China's often bullying trade practices and rising costs. The growth of India and China also creates opportunity for other emerging players, particularly in Southeast Asia by creating markets for goods and services as well as investment capital. Many of India's key industries-auto manufacturing, software and entertainment-are establishing themselves in these cities. Its rising urban centers include Bangalore (home of Infosys and Wipro ), Ahmedabad (whose per-capita incomes are twice that of the rest of India) and Chennai (which has created 100,000 jobs this year). India, although not by plan, also is experiencing a boom in once relatively obscure cities. And the city is abuzz with new construction, including an increasing concentration of high-tech firms such as Dell and Cisco. For example, in Chengdu, capital of the Sichuan province, new plane, road and rail connections are tying the city to both coastal China and the rest of the world. China's bold urban diversification strategy hinges both on forging new transportation links and nurturing businesses in these interior cities. These interior Chinese cities, notes architect Adam Mayer, offer a healthy alternative to coastal megacities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzen and Guangzhou, which suffer from congestion, high prices and increasingly wide class disparities. Instead, our list focuses on emerging powerhouses like Chongqing, China, (population: 9 million), which Christina Larson in Foreign Policy recently described as "the biggest city you never heard of."Ĭhongqing sits in the world's most important new region for important cities: interior China. Nor does our list include the massive, largely dysfunctional megacities-Mumbai, Mexico City, Dhaka, Bangladesh-that are among planet's most populous today. We have also passed over cities that have achieved prominence in the past 20 years such as Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Beijing, Delhi, Sydney, Toronto, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth. Our list of the cities of the future does not focus on established global centers like New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong or Tokyo, which have dominated urban rankings for a generation. With over 50% of people living in metropolitan areas there have never been so many rapidly rising urban areas-or so many declining ones. The evolution of cities is a protean process-and never more so than now.
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