Foreign Policy magazine has published its 2010 Global Cities Index. The methodology is difficult to discern, but the editors claim:
the index aims to measure how much sway a city has over what happens beyond its own borders — its influence on and integration with global markets, culture, and innovation. To create this year’s rankings, we analyzed 65 cities with more than 1 million people across every region of the globe, using definitive sources to tally everything from a city’s business activity, human capital, and information exchange to its cultural experience and political engagement. Data ranged from how many Fortune Global 500 company headquarters were in a city to the size of its capital markets and the flow of goods through its airports and ports, as well as factors such as the number of embassies, think tanks, political organizations, and museums. Taken together, a city’s performance on this slate of indicators tells us how worldly — or provincial — it really is.
Only three sub-Saharan African cities make the list of 65: Johannesburg (52), Nairobi (56) and Lagos (59). I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s hard for me to take seriously a list that does not have Cape Town on it. The Parliament of the most powerful, affluent, and influential country in Africa is located in Cape Town. Culturally Cape Town’s influence is almost surely second only to Joburg in all of sub-Saharan Africa. Cape Town is surely more affluent than any number of cities on this list. All exercises such as this one start off from a dubious framework, so arguing against them is a fool’s errand, but there is no way that Cape Town does not belong on this list.
