San Antonio, Texas, definitely can't help but be compared against Austin, especially as that younger city has surpassed the older and larger San Antonio in many metrics within the past decade. The relationship might be akin to an older, poorer, overweight sibling seeing the younger, prettier, smarter, taller, and happier sister now attracting all the popular attention, leaving a complicated mix of both admiration and jealousy as the social position shifts away. Residents might tell themselves that we still have a more historic core and that being wealthier just brings more arrogant coastal yuppies, gentrification, and traffic, but what has really happened are decisions made over many decades embracing diffusive sprawl have diluted and forfeited opportunities such that now those with means, skills, and drive instead relocate north. There will remain fondness for families left behind and nostalgia for fun times in San Antonio, but serious educational, business, and career advancement is by necessity found elsewhere and most conveniently in Austin. San Antonio still hasn't fully looked into the mirror and faced why it has fallen behind its younger sister, but sometimes she peeks into her hot sibling's closet and wonders if she could someday wear the same dresses. The hope now is for San Antonio to somehow piggyback onto Austin's recent success, either through direct commuter rail linkages, a shared regional airports or sports complexes, or urban growth into a twin-city like Dallas-Ft. Worth, but Austin has realized it now no longer needs such hand holding, especially with an urban backwater version of a social wallflower.
Far bigger sisters Dallas and Houston don't quite get that same family love-hate, for they are simply rivals and are never discussed as role models. San Antonio's current size peers in the U.S. are probably Tampa, Orlando, or Cleveland, but its peers and references as a colonial heritage and preservationist city are often cited as New Orleans, Savannah, or Charleston. Mark Twain once equated San Antonio with Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco for uniqueness on the American grand tour, but the city definitely is no longer in that league.
San Antonio's actual Sister City and Friendship City agreements include Monterrey, Guadalajara, Kumamoto, Suzhou, and most recently Darmstadt. These are all cities either larger or more economically and educationally advanced than San Antonio, and they have much to offer not only in cultural connections and economic opportunities, but in basic urban design and planning. Naturally, however, the dominant international influence comes from Mexico, the city's former mother country. In the Spanish and Mexican colonial eras, Mexico City, Monterrey, and Veracruz were the principal cities to which San Antonio turned, and in a later modern era, the luxury Aztec Eagle still directly connected San Antonio to Mexico City via Monterrey by rail. During the Obama years there was talk of someday rekindling such a link with high-speed rail to Monterrey and eventually to Mexico City, Mexico's top two wealthiest and most urban cities, but that probably won't happen now for a very long time. Laredo may be the nearest border port of entry, but the strength of economic ties saw that NAFTA was ceremonially signed in San Antonio. San Antonio's Riverwalk and river boats actually draw design inspiration directly from Xochimilco and as a curious sign of the historical shift in outlook from south to north after Texas was broken away from Mexico and annexed into the U.S., San Antonio's Spanish colonial plazas shifted from looking like those of Old Mexico into looking like courthouse squares of the Old South, and with modern redesigns they are starting to once again draw inspiration from the famous public squares of current Mexico.
That's a bit of urban planning whiplash: Austin...Mexico City...Austin...Mexico City...
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