Why London is beating America’s cities The capital still draws on its imperial origins

Crucial to London’s success is its prospering technology and media industries, which, notes Tony Travers, a visiting professor at LSE, increasingly drive the capital’s economy. Its creative sector, for instance, now accounts for almost 15% of jobs in London, up from 11% in 2010. In the realm of tech, one recent study suggested that London beats New York and San Francisco. Indeed, Microsoft plans to open an AI hub in the city, part of a $2.5-billion investment strategy, following other firms such as OpenAI. According to the Harvard Business Review, this makes London both first in the world for talent attraction and the top destination for foreign investment in financial and professional services.

None of this is to say that London’s streets are paved with gold. Flick through the capital’s Evening Standard and you’ll find report after report about surges in crime. Even so, notes Munira Mirza, who served as policy director for former prime minister and London mayor Boris Johnson: “London is doing better in many ways than a lot of US cities… But for Londoners, the perception is that crime, street cleanliness, housing costs, road congestion, etc, have been getting worse because public services and infrastructure have not expanded to match the growing population.”

And yet, she observes, overall crime rates have fallen under London’s last three mayors and, in terms of crime and anti-social behaviour, levels are well below the national average. Travers partly credits this to the fact that the UK has not experienced an American-style “opioid crisis” or “defund-the-police moment”. As a result, London saw 104 homicides last year, equivalent to 12 per million people, compared to 45.4 per million in New York, one of America’s safer cities.

A similar story is playing out in London’s classrooms, particularly when it comes to ethnic-minority performance. In one diverse district in Chicago, not one student can do grade-level math. According to data from the Illinois State Board of Education, 30 schools last year, 22 of which are in the Chicago area, failed to lift even one student to grade-level reading.

In London, by contrast, state schools are consistently improving, particularly in recently developed free schools. Moreover, immigrants are actually lifting the performance of London’s state schools above their counterparts in the rest of the country. “London’s schools are better now because of the immigrants,” suggests Mirza. The proximity of world-class universities — in London, Cambridge and Oxford — not only helps jumpstart elite industries such as tech and media, but has also attracted generations of ambitious foreigners who then choose to stay in London.

It is difficult to imagine how any rival city-states — including Singapore — could operate so successfully without the interference of a powerful central bureaucracy. In Dubai, there is no real recourse from the wrath of Sheikh Mohammed. In India, corruption, pollution and lower life expectancy make Mumbai or Delhi less than likely locales for rich investors and skilled professionals. Beirut was once promising, but is now largely a sectarian ruin. As for Latin America, even business-friendly Sao Paolo is now in poor repute.

Similarly, none of the other huge Asian cities — Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei — are likely to become sufficiently cosmopolitan to compete with London or New York. All remain essentially insular, with few migrants and a culture that is less than welcoming to outsiders. During the Eighties, it was possible to imagine Tokyo, driven by the rapid expansion of the Japanese economy, to claim a top spot — but today, despite its wealth and size, few would consider it a dominant international capital. Worse yet are the prospects for China’s cities, as well as CCP-strangled Hong Kong, arguably the most likely hotspot for Asian capital and once among the most valued office markets in the world.

Perhaps the least appreciated advantage of London lies in its historical inertia. “London,” wrote Ford Madox Ford in 1905, “is the world town, not because of its immense size but its assimilative powers.” In just one generation, the French Huguenot, the eastern European Jew, the Hindu brahmin, Muslim merchant, the Sikh soldier, the Caribbean or African can all become Londoners, all attracted, as Ford put it, “a glamour like that of a great and green gaming table”.

This stems from two foundational factors: the legacy of Empire and, more importantly, the notions of due process, privacy and property. It is here that London particularly diverges from its offspring in the developing world, and even, to some extent, in North America. London, whose origins lie in Roman Britain, simply projects the old Latin concept of civitas better than any of its rivals.

In the past, the capital, like many other older cities, pushed its version of modernity, with high-rise towers and the promotion of “swinging London” deployed as a rebuke to its stiffer imperial past. Yet it also fostered a web of relations and open attitudes, making London a natural home for migrants, rich and poor. Although some ethnic communities still cluster, largely in Britain’s north, London’s newcomers are now part of the municipal fabric. There are few of the banlieues one sees in Paris. “You don’t get a lot of the ghetto vibe here,” observes Mirza.

Mayor Sadiq Khan, himself the son of an immigrant bus driver, may be less than competent, but he is no Bill de Blasio, who worked overtime to destroy New York, or Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, America’s leading urban arsonist. The capital has its problems, but it continues to prosper: a city whose past paradoxically guarantees its future. London, as the saying goes, is a bad habit to lose.

---

Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.

joelkotkin