Global Cities 2015 comprises two indices:
Global Cities Index (GCI): an examination of a city’s current performance based on five dimensions: business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and political engagement. The Appendix on page 7 lists 27 metrics and their weightings within each dimension.
Global Cities Outlook (GCO): a projection of a city’s future potential based on four dimensions: rate of change in personal well-being, economics, innovation, and governance. The Appendix on page 7 lists 13 metrics and their weightings within each dimension.
The two indices provide a unique look at the top-performing cities today and those primed to make an impact in the future
Sixteen Cities Make Up a “Global Elite” For the first time, the review identifies a set of elite cities that rank in the top 25 on both the Global Cities Index and the Global Cities Outlook. These 16 “Global Elite” cities are well-known hubs of commerce, culture, and politics, and are likely to exert their global influence well into the future (see figure 2).
Leading the Global Elite are New York City and London, which are also the only cities featured on both top 10 lists. New York is the leading country in the Index in two of the five dimensions, business activity and human capital, and tops six of the 27 metrics used. London (second place in both indices) ranks high on the Index based largely on its strong cultural experience, including sporting events and international travelers. Paris (third in the Index, 19th in the Outlook) is fueled by its top performance in information exchange and culture. San Francisco ranks first in the Outlook, thanks to its unparalleled strength in innovation, while Boston’s third-place Outlook ranking is based largely on the significant number of patents it generates per capita. Perhaps counterintuitively, these Global Elite do not have a lock on global leadership. The top cities in both the Index and the Outlook have scores of roughly 60 out of a possible 100, which indicates substantial room for improvement and change. Clearly, the race for leadership remains wide open.
In Search of the “Perfect” City and Leadership In the Index, creating the “perfect performance” city requires the attributes of 19 cities across four regions—North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East (see figure 3). Admittedly, there are no surprises among the leaders in the five dimensions, as New York, Paris, London, and Washington all appear on the list. There is far more variety when comparing cities against all 27 metrics in the Index. New to the list of metric leaders are Abu Dhabi and Dubai (access to TV news), Amsterdam (freedom of expression), Beijing (Fortune Global 500 companies), Geneva (international organizations), and Singapore (online presence).