foreign policy The Global Cities Index 2010

Indian journalist Barkha Dutt has reported extensively from Manipur this year. What is actually going on in Manipur? What should New Delhi do? What are the ramifications for India, Myanmar, and the world? The conflict has largely been ignored by Western media, despite global attention focused on India, which is the rotating host of the G-20 this year. Mobs have burned hundreds of homes and churches, and tens of thousands of people have fled. Show more ll state bordering Myanmar in India’s northeast. Since May, violence between the Meitei ethnic majority and the Kuki minority has torn through the sma. Is the world standing by as ethnic cleansing takes place in the Indian state of Manipur? Only FP subscribers can submit questions for FP Live interviews. Can it become a city that is culturally of the world, in the way that London, Paris, and even New York are? Beijing is a world city: It is a city in the world. One question I have is whether the large Chinese cities, which are inevitably going to be dominated by Chinese residents, can produce enough diversity to ensure the productive mix that leads to urban knowledge capital. And I happen to think that some of this is good - if it aims at rebalancing the strong inequalities created by the current economy. They are too government-controlled to be equivalent to Miami. These conditions do not exist in Chinese cities. There was also real estate development, often spurred by wealthy individuals from South America, and the establishment in Miami of Latin American bases for firms from Europe and Asia. Why? One factor was the infrastructure of international trade that the Cubans in Miami developed. That’s not to say that newer-world cities cannot reinvent themselves as global cities. Like London and Istanbul, they already had enormous complexity and diversity. Many if not most of today’s global cities are Old World cities that reinvented themselves. The emerging megacities of Asia are not necessarily truly global, at least not in the way we currently understand the term. In determining whether a city can become global, size matters, of course - because it represents the possibility for diversity and complexity - but it is not the only important factor. Not all cities can become global cities, nor should they all want to (“ The Global Cities Index,” September/October 2010).

Foreign policy The Global Cities Index 2010