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Posted Oct 9, 2010, 12:28 AM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
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The World's Fastest-Growing Cities
10.07.10
By Joel Kotkin
Read More: http://www.forbes.com/2010/10/07/cit...mepagelighttop
Quote:
The urban powerhouses of the next decade aren't behemoths like New York or Mumbai, but smaller cities like Chongqing, China; Santiago, Chile; and Austin, Texas.
- 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. 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.
- Nor does our list include the massive, largely dysfunctional megacities--Mumbai, Mexico City, Dhaka, Bangladesh--that are among planet's most populous today. Bigger often does not mean better.
- Chongqing sits in the world's most important new region for important cities: interior China. 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.
- China's bold urban diversification strategy hinges both on forging new transportation links and nurturing businesses in these interior cities. 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. And the city is abuzz with new construction, including an increasing concentration of high-tech firms such as Dell and Cisco.
- 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. 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. Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur--with its rising financial sector--also displays considerable promise.
- 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. 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.
- Other leading cities all over the world may also be in the early stages of fading from predominance. In the United States, according to analysis by the California Lutheran University forecast, Los Angeles and Chicago, America's second and third cities, respectively, have fallen behind not only fast-comers like Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, but even historically dominant New York in such key indicators as job generation and population growth.
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