r/Cities

Bit of a random vibe — reminds me of Marseille or Algiers somehow.

I'm unemployed atm, so with all my spare time, I decided to make an index ranking the most powerful and influential urban areas on the planet. Sure, there's already several "global city" rankings out there, but the problem I have with most of them is is that they focus heavily on economics, finance, and corporate strength, while under-representing cultural, political, and other forms of power.

GUPPI is an attempt to address that and create a more balanced index, that considers not only financial/economic strength, but also global connectivity, institutional prestige, cultural influence, academic output, political strength, and diplomatic presence. Scores are normalised so that NYC=100.

The urban-area definitions are mostly based on Demographia’s urban agglomeration definitions. The one major exception is that Demographia lists Guangzhou-Shenzhen as a single agglomeration, while I separated them here because most source datasets treat them separately, and I'm pretty sure that most people still think of them as distinct cities, anyways.

I actually have fully calculated the scores of 143 cities. I've only included the top 100 here because, besides being a nice round number, it's roughly around the limit where I'm certain that I'm not missing any cities, and that any cities that I have not yet calculated would fall outside the top 100. (There's a sizable drop off in the scores between #99-#102). If anyone wants though, I can post the rest of the cities beyond #100 in the comments below.

I am not a professional graphic designer or geographer/economist, so I'm open to feedback the presentation, or if any cities might be missing or misplaced.

EDIT: I've posted the full list of cities after #100 in the comments.

While the distance between east coast cities isn't so great now, when they were founded centuries ago, the gap between Philly and Baltimore (~90 miles) would have been huge. How come there didn't come to be a port city on par with Baltimore or Philadelphia that spanned the 30-mile gap between the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River?

Given that they put a canal there in modern times, it seems at the very least it would have save significant overlanding and sailing around the peninsula to move goods between the two cities.