Social, geopolitical and technological transformations are actively disrupting the traditional hierarchy of global cities, creating a more widely distributed geography of opportunity, global management consulting firm Kearney’s recently released ‘2023 Global Cities Report’ shows.

The report highlights that established global city leaders face ever-greater competition from emerging hubs, with those taking a regenerative approach poised to lead in the attraction of talent, innovation and investment.

The Global Cities Index (GCI) seeks to quantify the extent to which a city can attract, retain and generate global flows of capital, people and ideas. Cities are measured against five key dimensions: human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, political engagement and business activity.

Average GCI scores across all cities remained steady in 2023 following several years of decline. The human capital dimension witnessed a significant rise owing to the return of the international movement of people to pre-pandemic levels, counter-balancing the continued decline of the business activity dimension as a result of persistent economic challenges.

The average score for African cities, however, increased this year.  

On the whole, Africa’s average rank rose one spot this year to 104th, primarily driven by an improvement in the business activity dimension, where the average rank rose three spots to 107th.

The continent’s strongest performing dimension remains political engagement, where the average is 52.

Johannesburg held on to the fifty-eighth spot in the overall GCI ranking this year.

Its improvements in the human capital and political engagement dimensions (where it scores highly at fifteenth position) were offset by declines in the information exchange and cultural experience dimensions.

Cape Town slipped two places in the GCI this year, taking it to eighty-fourth overall in 2023. It witnessed a decline in three of the GCI dimensions, namely human capital, business activity and cultural experience, in large part owing to heightened global competition for talent and shifting business dynamics and disruptive economic forces in the continent and beyond, Kearney avers.

It did improve four spots, however, in the information exchange dimension, including through an improved online presence.

Lagos, Nigeria, rose three spots to 109th in the overall GCI ranking, continuing a steady trend upwards in recent years.

This rise was driven by robust improvements in the business activity and human capital dimensions, where it sits closer to the middle of the pack overall (eighty-fifth and ninety-second, respectively).

Accra, Ghana, also witnessed an improvement in its overall GCI rank to 104th (up from 106th in 2022 and 117th in 2021).

Nairobi, Kenya, meanwhile, fell four spots to eighty-sixth position, as a result of a drop in the information exchange dimension, driven by a worse Freedom of Expression Rating score and a slight decline in the business activity dimension.

INTERNATIONAL 

New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Beijing retained the top five spots, respectively. Brussels ranked sixth, entering the top ten for the first time, benefiting from its status as a central European Union hub and from increased private sector attention in light of the nearby conflict.

Further down the Index, traditionally leading US and Chinese cities fell in the ranking, while Middle Eastern cities, in particular the Gulf capitals, made major improvements in their overall scores.

“This year, our study indicates that the world has entered a phase of globalisation that is less uniform and more networked. The resilience of overall scores highlights the perennial significance of global cities as essential hubs of flexible connectivity and concentrated global diversity in a shifting global geopolitical landscape.

“But this year in particular, we can see how balanced geopolitical and geo-economic positioning has made emerging hubs increasingly attractive to capital, trade and people from an increasingly fragmented world – narrowing the gap between these cities and more established global city leaders,” Kearney National Transformation partner Rudolph Lohmeyer says.

GLOBAL CITIES OUTLOOK
While the GCI captures the current state of global city performance, the Global Cities Outlook aims to identify those cities most likely to achieve global prominence in the future.

Here, the emergence of a distributed geography of opportunity was also present.

European cities maintained a strong presence in the top 30 rankings, while Asia’s global hubs including Seoul, Osaka, and Chennai made significant strides.

In the US, second-tier metropolitan areas performed particularly well, having successfully attracted talent and capital over the turbulent past few years, positioning themselves as notable rivals to more established global cities.

As the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and related technologies continues, the intersection of this trend with the already under way shift toward remote work is expected to further reduce the significance of physical proximity in domains traditionally linked to major cities, potentially causing even greater disruption to global cities, Kearney points out.