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It seems like every few days on C-D another "Which is World Class" thread is up and I don't understand the obsession. There is world class cities all over the world struggling. Athens, Barcelona, Madrid, Rio, Mumbai, etc, all cities that have significant problems though many wish our cities would strive towards there "excellence". Now I will admit i'm not the world's most traveled individual (I'm just a young adult) but I have talk to enough foreigners and exchange students to know that the american culture maybe the most sawed after culture in the world. When a lot of us look at cities around the world we see the History, glitz, and glamour, but for a lot of places that's only skin deep. Extreme poverty, economic collapses, corruption, violence, poor government services, etc happen all around the world but we always consider those places a tier ahead of most of American and Canadian cities (obviously with exceptions of New York and a few others). Just looking for some opinions. Why do you think we try so hard to make a lot of our already amazing cities "World Class" when they already have so much more to offer then a lot of other cities world wide can do?
Because people are insecure and it makes them feel better if they live in a World Class city even though it should not matter and nobody really and honestly gives a crap. So basically it's just a bunch of insecure BS.
While there are problems everywhere, the world class cities have tremendous assets that other cities can only dream about. Places like NYC, London, Hong Kong, Mumbai, etc., are centers of intellectual and business talent, repositories of the arts, entertainment production centers, transportation hubs, and wield outsize political influence in their nations. That combination won't be attractive for everyone, but it's not too hard to understand why it's attractive to a whole lot.
Most of the "World Class" cities are in Australia, and Finland
Where??
Anyway, 'World Class' is meaningless. (Tangentially, so is a city's GDP -- another club that gets waved around in these parts.)
I'm a native resident of a supposed World City. What an effing joke. A pretty harbour, a tiny urban core and a sahara of horrific suburbia stretching into infinity. Tiny, tiny patches of actual nightlife that won't evaporate at 12. God forbid we don't get up in time to pay our bubble-buoyed mortgages. And the biggest indictment: a city of employees, not creators.
When I look for a city, I want:
- Commercial and social activity around the clock.
- Density, density, density
- A culture that sparks and pressure-cooks creativity
- A culture of entrepaneurship
- Fine architecture and careful curation of public space
- A drive to keep up the supply of housing in the urban core, which is seen as a basic necessity, not the du jour means of wealth creation. (A city needs poor people amongst the rich, and lots of them.)
The 'World Class' tag means nothing to me.
Last edited by compactspace; 07-27-2013 at 05:36 AM..
World class is code for what city is most like Europe.
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