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What measures, feelings or indicators would guide your choice? Would it be Berlin for the music, Barcelona for the clubs, Rome for its beauty, Paris for its romance? Quite possibly it would be none of these, but if you had almost unlimited money then where?
Today cities like Frankfurt, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Taipei and Hong Kong are top choices for the world’s super rich. There are around 200,000 in this group and their number continues to expand. For the super rich, one of the pre-eminent cities to relocate to is London. What does the city offer that others do not? The obvious ingredients are wonderful streetscapes, historic residential districts and a financial beating heart that beats as hard as any other around the planet.
However, these qualities are only the beginning. Much of the property-led boom in London over the past decade has been driven by the expansion of the numbers of the rich themselves. Much of this has come about as shifts in the global economy have occurred, producing new winners at the apex of finance and technology, alongside older sectors like energy and property.
For the rich, the lure of London is the offer of a ticket to the party at which so many of the world’s wealthy and emerging elite are at. This feeling has driven thousands of sales to overseas buyers where money is no object. While prices have fallen in recent years, primarily as a result of market uncertainties generated by Brexit, the city’s West, inner North and outer West, beyond the city’s fringe, are what we can think of as ‘alphahoods’.
These are essentially global addresses advertised and traded, either by estate agents, or by new residents on the city’s dynamic social circuits. In this sense the city arguably operates much as it always has – by giving national and international elites a place where their social standing can be cemented. This has been the story of London’s West End for at least two centuries.
Despite the growing interest in London’s rich, the point of my new book, Alpha City, is not simply to look in awe at these processes, but instead to offer a critical analysis that asks: what does alpha status deliver for the city’s ordinary residents? My argument is that the dark side of such a city is all around us. It can be seen in the quarter of households living in material poverty, and in the thousands displaced by demolitions to make way for ‘better’ houses at market prices that few can afford. It also resides in the broader treatment of the city’s less well-off by a more or less cosseted and ignorant political system and property lobby that has had the effect of worsening the conditions of the poor through austerity programmes.
When we ask which is the best city in the world, we should be wary of claims to ‘alpha’ status. We must consider how such cities become engines of ignorance and antagonism to the losers in their economies, and we must hope a kinder and more inclusive urbanism will be found.