New York, London top Kearney’s Global Cities Report, Dubai ranked top city in MENA

New York, London, Paris and Tokyo topped Kearney’s Global Cities Report, while Dubai was ranked 23 on a list constituting the world’s most connected and prominent cities over the past year.

Kearney – a global management consulting firm – examined the current performance of metropolitan areas in the Global Cities Index (GCI). The report was released on Thursday.

New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Beijing retained their positions as the top five cities from 2022. They were followed by Brussels, Singapore, Los Angeles, Melbourne and Hong Kong.

Dubai dropped one place to 23 as the report contended that it remains the highest ranked of all Middle East cities on the GCI. It maintained that its presence in the top 25 for the third consecutive year is further proof of its profile as a rising city in the region.

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This year’s GCI examined 156 cities around the world, ranking them across five categories: business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and political engagement.

The results were quantified by assessing the degree to which a city can attract, retain, and generate global flows of capital, people and ideas.

The report maintained how the cities ranked are “microcosms of the world”, and that these cities serve as centers of social, political, and economic vibrancy that reflect the dynamic global environment.

The index also noted that there is now a movement within emerging cities that are challenging the existing hierarchy of leading economies. Among those include capitals of Gulf nations that have made major improvements in their overall scores this year. For perspective, Abu Dhabi rose by 10 places, Riyadh by nine, Doha by seven, and Muscat by eight.

According to the index, these Gulf cities had variable outcomes in the business activity dimension, but the primary driver of their success was a substantial increase in their human capital scores, thus considerably improving their GCI rankings.

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The report further contended that leading US cities such as Washington, Chicago, and Boston, fell in this year’s rankings, while Chinese cities also experienced a general decline.

This year’s report centered on the social, geopolitical and technological transformations that are actively disrupting the traditional hierarchy of global cities and casting a wider geographical net in regards to opportunity.

This year, while the top five retained their status, there was plenty movement noted within the top 30 cities ranked.

Established leading cities faced steeper competition from emerging hubs as a result of the remote working revolution; the fragmentation of the global geopolitical environment and the acceleration in the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies. Goldman Sachs projects that global investment into generative AI may reach $200 billion by 2025, added the report.

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The index also released a Global Cities Outlook (GCO) which examined the cities best positioned for global leadership in the future.

San Francisco, Copenhagen, London, Luxembourg and Paris made the top five cities that are elevating their status for the future.

This index functions as a predictive tool, identifying which cities may potentially rival the dominance of established leaders, added the report.

This year, the four broad indicators of urban potential were described as: personal well-being, economics, innovation, and governance.

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