False Economy - Alan Beattie [36]
Once a city achieves a dominant position in a growing and highly skilled industry like international financial services, it is hard to shift. Highly skilled workers move to cities that already have a preponderance of people like them. A little like medieval city-states, places like London and New York already look at least semidetached from their surrounding economies. They are more international, more ethnically mixed, and more liberal about social and sexual mores. (Try to imagine the mayor of an American city other than New York living for a while, as did Rudy Giuliani, with a gay couple, or moving a girlfriend, not his wife, into the mayoral residence.)
Becoming a cluster is a keenly sought achievement, but there are few examples of one successfully being built straight from scratch. An interesting experiment (which Singapore, among others, is watching anxiously) is being undertaken in Dubai, which is pouring billions of dollars of the Emirates' oil money into the city to try to create clusters, like one in biotechnology research.
Another, related, reason for the revival of cities is as places to live. People like to hang out with similar people for play as well as work. It is not just the financial but also the dating markets of London and New York that are much deeper and more liquid than in the provinces. Cities are not just good places to produce services but the best places to consume them. The marginal income of consumers in rich economies is spent mainly not on more stuff—computers, TVs, even clothes, all of whose prices are in any case dropping—but on personal services: eating out, gyms, facials, movies, and theater. This gives a natural advantage to cities, because the more other people there are, the more likely such services will be provided.
And this is true particularly as demand becomes ever more specialized and exclusive. Metropolitan consumers don't just want to see the same movies that everyone can see in provincial towns but also obscure art films, and world-class theater and music, and they want to dine not just at chain restaurants but at world-class restaurants. Selfridges, the long-established London department store, ran an advertising campaign a few years ago designed, it would appear, to infuriate visitors from the provinces. "It's Worth Living in London," the legend ran, above a series of photographs depicting rural tedium. The iconic screen representation of New York in the 1970s was Taxi Driver, which showed the city as a violent, amoral dystopia; that of a later decade—Sex and the City—shows it as a safe, indulgent adult playground.
In America, the ratio of housing costs to real wages in cities has risen sharply in recent decades. People, it appears, are choosing to live in cities for reasons other than employment. Cities like New York and London—and even Washington, D.C., never high on anyone's list of buzzing metropolises—have managed to rehabilitate no-go areas close to the city center. Often this has more to do with leisure than with work. The south bank of the Thames, for example, a vibrant if seedy area back when Parliament was in revolt against the king, has recently been revitalized by the opening of the Tate Modern art gallery and the enormous success of Borough Market, now one of London's hippest food markets. Back in the 1970s, at the nadir of its existence, New York's Times Square was a derelict, crime-ridden wasteland; it has since been reborn. Even if the populations of these cities are stagnant, as they sometimes are, it does not necessarily