10 Wealthiest Cities in the World

8/11/2019 10 Wealthiest Cities in the World

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10 WEALTHIEST CITIES IN THE WORLD: ITS NOT NEW YORK OR LONDON AT THE TOP

Robin Renfordhttp://financesonline.com/10-wealthiest-cities-in-the-world-its-not-new-york-or-london-at-the-top/

5. London, EnglandGDP: $731.2 billionArea: 1,570 square kilometersPopulation: 8,173,194

London started out as a Roman settlement called Londinium and soon grew to be ahuge city even after the collapse of the Roman Empire. London suffered muchthroughout the history. There was the Great Fire in 1666, which was then followed by theBlack Plague a century after. London also figured as an immensely important cityduring the two World Wars. The city was a dream destination for many people fromdifferent races, cultures, and religions, making London a vital melting pot of the world.

Tourist spots worth going when in London are the Buckingham Palace, the Tower Bridge,the London Eye and the world-famous Big Ben clock tower. As far as commerce goes,the city thrives on finance and banking.TOP 10 RICHEST CITIES IN THE WORLD IN 2014

Nida Zaidi on 2014/01/07http://www.richincomeways.com/richlist/top-10-richest-cities-world-2014/London has been the gem of eye since the inception of tourist industry. Filled with lifelights and yes cameras London city has no doubt proved to be golden spoon forEngland. Its the amalgamation of different cultures and ethnicities and thats what

makes this city unique and successful.THE RISE AND RISE OF LONDON

By Jasper Gerard12:01AM GMT 17 Feb 2007http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1542934/The-rise-and-rise-of-London.htmlWhile building St Paul's Cathedral, Sir Christopher Wren uncovered a broken stoneinscribed "Resurgam". With the extraordinary rebirth of London at the start of the 21stcentury, no architect should be lost for an inscription for the dazzling cathedrals tocapitalism currently springing up across the skyline: "I will arise" seems more than fittingfor today.

To have been in London these past few weeks has seemed, at times, like residing in thecapital of the universe. It might lack a little of the pomp of 1900 when the City Imperial

Volunteers, back from the Boer war, marched spectacularly through crowds 100-deepin Hyde Park as "hysterical shrieks of women mingled with the deep-throated huzzas ofthe crowd". But with the Baftas, Brits and London Fashion Week, London has just bornewitness to a cavalcade that reinforces its economic and cultural resurgence.Today, London stands on the brink of surpassing New York as the world's financialcentre; a week of art sales earlier this month has raked in a record 392 million, andFrance's likely future president has been electioneering - in London. There is a palpablesense that something big is going on. It is a phenomenon much more important than
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Cool Britannia, embraced by New Labour a decade ago. It is about sheer power, andit renders all other cities faintly provincial.Once, the world sang New York, New York with Frank Sinatra. Now, as we prepare forthe Olympics, it is London calling. And this time it is in merriment, not anger. To me itseems an almost miraculous resurrection. My impression of London on childhood

excursions in the 1970s was of a city broken by disappointment and bad plumbing. Lossof Empire and economic collapse glowered over the capital. The cars were knackered,the people more so. Everywhere there was dog muck. It wasn't that we were tired ofLondon so much as that London was tired. There was a feeling that history had flowndown the Thames and far away, just as inexorably as the life blood drained fromBabylon, Samarkand and Constantinople.Related ArticlesA gem of a show from royal jeweller 17 Feb 2007As funky new restaurants now open daily, I look back in wonder at a visit circa 1976 toone of London's smartest restaurants. My sister asked for something vegetarian; afterlong stares and consultations it was agreed an omelette might be possible. At the time,the very survival of London could even be questioned. As late as 1989, Martin Amis

wrote: "I must go to London Fields, before it is too late."Amis-land - stale ashtrays, darts, squalor - already seems as period as "Greeneland",Graham Greene's evocation of seedy bed-sits, coin-operated electricity meters andchipped whisky glasses somewhere off the Edgware Road. That is not to paint modernLondon as paradise: not with a spate of shootings, congestion, dirty streets andexpensive housing. But while announcing at a party that one worked abroad onceelicited coos of envy, now it merely provokes bafflement: why would you live anywhereelse than London?If this sounds jingoistic, London's rebirth is not a singularly British triumph, for the capitaloften appears to be in opposition to its country. The slick metropolitanism of Tony Blairand David Cameron can jar with Middle England. London is Athens, the city state

making decrees that the surrounding countryside obeys sulkily.And like Athens once did, London sucks in all talent. Look at its two finest football teams,Arsenal and Chelsea: both have fielded sides entirely bereft of Englishmen. A Brit canfeel like a foreigner in his own capital. Once New York was the world's melting pot, nowit is London: 36 per cent of New Yorkers are foreign-born, against 40 per cent ofLondoners. While bidding for the Olympics, New York boasted 200 languages could beheard on the streets of the Big Bagel. It went silent when it learnt London echoes to 300.How much immigration drives our economic revival is a moot point, but immigration is,incontrovertibly, a response to that revival. As well as the super-rich of Russia, the super-poor of Eastern Europe dream of the Thames Gateway as the promised land; hard tofathom, but the London Eye has taken on the iconography of the Statue of Liberty.

The M25 - the nearest we now have to a city wall - encircles the largest professionalpopulation on the planet, with more flying in every day via our five airports than to anyother city. With such an educated workforce, no wonder more books are publishedhere than in any other city.London might look like Paris's plain friend across the water, but when presidentialcandidate Nicolas Sarkozy sought support from the French elite he came to London,the seventh-largest French city. More than 300,000 French people live in Britain, withSouth Kensington resembling a mini-Paris. Sarkozy praised London to the clouds,promising Thatcherite tax cuts and urged Frenchies to return to Paris - to make it like


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London. To appreciate the change, imagine Jacques Chirac doing that when he ranfor president seven years ago.Russian plutocrats are just the latest out-of-towners to like the country so much theybought it. It was made possible by Gordon Brown's decidedly un-socialist, un-Presbyterian decision to exempt foreign swanks from the inconvenience of paying tax

on income earned abroad. Lakshmi Mittal (worth 14.8 billion) and Roman Abramovich(a mere 9.1 billion) are among 11 foreign-born London billionaires, augmenting our 12native billionaires.It is this openness to outsiders that many think has enabled London to eclipse New York.After 9/11, America turned inwards, reducing immigration that for so long had stoked itseconomy. It also introduced humiliating airport checks that outrage foreignbusinessmen. Not that we can be smug in "Londonistan": it would be futile to put upsuch security blankets here - we know that the terrorists are already among us.The rise of London at New York's expense cannot be attributed to immigration alone.London has been helped by a lighter regulatory framework, which attracts jealousglances from across the pond. While Wall Street once swarmed with ticker tape, now itis red tape - a response to the Enron and WorldCom scandals.

New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, so fears that London is "rapidly gaining ground"that he has commissioned a report: London, he suggests, threatens the very future ofAmerica. If we really can become the dominant power of world finance, then imperialLondon will be reborn; and every indication is that it can.A 2005 survey of financial types scored international cities and London won easily,beating New York in all bar one category. The City employs a smidgeon under WallStreet's 328,000 souls but is gaining fast. Some 367 companies floated in London overthe past year, raising 29 billion - against 270 in New York, yielding 28 billion. Londonhas the most foreign banks, 70 per cent of the world's secondary bond market and halfthe derivatives market. It is home to foreign-exchange trading and 80 per cent ofEurope's hedge funds.

Our private equity firms raised 20 billion last year, and our law firms - the world's biggest- contributed 11 billion. If last year's record 9 billion bonus celebrations seemed mutedafter the cork-popping excess of the 1980s it is because then wealth was novelty, now itis normality. Even the head of Goldman Sachs spends half his time in the identicalLondon office he has had built to match his New York one. Such are the tremors theworld still feels 20 years after the Big Bang set the City free.A decade ago, it would have seemed fanciful that we could usurp New York as theworld financial capital, when the smart money was predicting London's eclipse byFrankfurt as Europe's financial capital. Instead, Deutsche Bank moved the globalheadquarters of its investment banking division to London and Frankfurt is a smallerfinancial centre than Canary Wharf. Britain's refusal to join the Euro prompted many to

write London's obituary, but even that has proved another opportunity, with 80 per centof trade in the currency occurring here. With plummy Brits dominating the burgeoningasset management business for the world's super-rich, we are becoming Zurich-on-Thames.And boy, is all that felicitous, filthy lucre affecting London life. It has fed a salivatingatavism that makes the Beckhams' lifestyle look positively spiritual. And there is muchmore than City money sloshing around Bond Street and Burlington Arcade. Sotheby'shas sold 167 million of paintings in the past week, including a record 94.9 million for asingle sale, while Christie's sold Francis Bacon's Study for Portrait II for 14 million. The


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same big money is being paid for anything that smacks of luxury. Theo Fennell, jewellerto Elizabeth Hurley and Elton John, reports a seven-fold increase in pre-tax profits.All this loot has achieved the impossible and turned London into a world gastronomiccentre, too. In his novel Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd described foul meals of eels, the"noise and the vapours of the Ale House"; now London exports food. And how: Gordon

Ramsay opens a restaurant in Manhattan - called "London". Even our cocktails arebetter, apparently. Audrey Saunders of Manhattan's great Pegu Club sighs: "I hate toadmit it, but London is the best cocktail city in the world."Our splurge on fripperies is trifling against money being sunk into property: a pied--terreoff Knightsbridge is rapidly becoming pricier than some spaciously appointed Africanstate in need of modernisation. With London's population rising to 7.5 million and thehousing stock almost static, prices are heading so far north they are positively Arctic.Four flats in Hyde Park are up for 84 million each, and folk are fighting for them.Apartments around Central Park can be snaffled for 1,400 per sq ft, but Belgravia padsoften exceed 3,000 a sq ft, up 35 per cent in a year. Here, natives with a couple ofmillion who would be called rich anywhere else can't compete against foreigners whothink nothing of upping a bid by a million. In London the average home costs 500,000,

after rising 11.3 per cent in 2006.The easiest way to spot a city's vitality is to look for cranes, and the City is creaking withthem. Exciting new edifices will include London Bridge's 72-storey "shard of glass". Butwhile money underpins London's resurgence, its attraction also rests on much that atleast starts as anti-commercial. For a city superficially conservative, London is a havenfor quirky, anarcho-weirdos. That was evident at London Fashion Week. Anna Wintour,editor of American Vogue, flew in declaring: "I come to London for ideas, not forclothes to wear." Even American-owned Vanity Fair concedes: "London producesthree-quarters of the fashion ideas for the rest of the world."Paul Smith, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and SophiaKokosalaki all shot to prominence at LFW. And now the big boys are seeking a bit of

that credibility. For the first time, the man they call the designers' designer, MarcJacobs, sashayed into collections that used to be the ugly duckling of internationalstyle, following in the footsteps of Giorgio Armani last season. Once, such an eventseemed as likely as the Duke of Westminster settling in Wigan.If anything, the eccentric London art scene is even more thriving. You don't have toadore everything in Tate Modern - which, with the Gilbert and George retrospective,literally includes excrement - to realise it is the world's most vital showcase forcontemporary art, just as New York's Museum of Modern Art once was. And as fortheatre, we started to fear that, dominated by sickly musicals, it would never make arecovery. Now it bursts with challenging news plays. Hollywood actors - from KevinSpacey down - make their bucks Stateside, but in some curious way feel validation

requires critical approval on our boards. David Hare's experience of opening TheVertical Hour in New York left him reflecting that Manhattan was "artistically much moreconservative. There is a definite feeling of being bored with the old, yet even moreterrified of the new." Not so London.There was little left of British film to revive, so the burgeoning celluloid industry isessentially new. In 2005, a record 12,655 days of shooting took place in London, manywith that quintessential New Yorker Woody Allen mooning over Scarlett Johansson inMatch Point under the leaden London skies he has fallen in love with. Even the Baftas -once mildly less significant than a Blackpool wet T-shirt contest - now set the agenda for


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David Leppan, the chairman of Wealth-X which helped to compile the data for theWealth Report Global Cities Survey, said London was the most important hub for hisUHNWI clients. London [is] the Wests only truly international city, he said.

Russians are clustered along the banks of the Thames in West London, while Arab

investors have poured billions into central London districts like Mayfair. Asian propertydevelopers, like the Malaysian SP Setia group, have invested in huge new projects allover the city including the redevelopment of the Battersea power station into luxurycondos, which they have largely sold to clients back home.

"Baalbek, Palmyra, Pompeii, Rome, Liverpool. New York can now beaded to thatmelancholy list of lustrous metropolises gone dull.

Bailey said the sales of premium property, worth more than $3 million, rose 34 percent inLondon last year. On average, you can buy 270 square feet of luxury London propertyfor $1 million. Only Monaco and Hong Kong are more expensive, according to KnightFranks research, New York limps in at sixth place.

For Jonathan Miller, one of Manhattans leading luxury real-estate consultants, all thistalk of Londons dominance is overblown. In my view New York is still number one, he

said.

Like London, Miller said New York was experiencing a surge in interest from foreigninvestors. In 28 years of real estate appraisals, he said the property market had onlyseen a similar explosion in foreign interest in 2007. In the last three years, theres been a

tremendous amount of European, Chinese and South American investorsVenezuelansand Brazilians, he said. We are seeing investors from the Middle East and Russia but

nothing like London. Not even close. I think its a pragmatic decision, a practical

decision because of travel.Bullish Miller insisted London should still be in second place but he said the newoccupant of City Hall could be a cause for concern. Im not saying De Blasio is the

reason London has overtaken New York, he said. But theres a new mayor and a newparty after 12 years of the most pro-development mayor in New York history. Investorsare not excited about uncertainty.

Indeed, its the security of investing in property in both New York and London that has

helped to transform both into international hubs. Many UHNWIs see the luxury propertymarket in these cities as a kind of global reserve currency that offers safety fromfluctuating markets and unstable governments at home.

As Vladimir Putin sends troops into Crimea, attracting international condemnation anda tanking Russian stock market, the Wealth Report suggests that 37 percent of UHNWIsin Russia are considering a move abroad. London is their most likely destination for anumber of reasons. In the 1990s, the British government introduced an investment visa,which substantially improved work permit chances if a foreign national invested $1.5million in the country; none of the oligarchs who subsequently moved to London hasbeen extradited back to Russia; and off-shore incomes are rarely scrutinized by theBritish taxman.


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Dr. Pippa Malmgren, a former White House economic advisor, explained in the reportthat tax advantages had benefitted the wealthy moving to London. I would argue

that the UK has now emerged as the worlds most attractive residence fornondomiciles, she said. The crackdown on tax havens in Switzerland has removed

these old options for new capital. As a result, there has been a huge influx of globalcapital into the UK.

Citizens from fellow members of the European Union also have virtually unlimited abilityto live and work in Britain. The result has been a recent influx of foreigners into London,making it a thriving multi-national conglomeration of the global super-rich, andEuropean adventurers.

Stephen Bayley, cultural critic and Londoner, said the fresh, foreign impetus had leftLondon unrivaled. Baalbek, Palmyra, Pompeii, Rome, Liverpool. New York can now be

added to that melancholy list of lustrous metropolises gone dull, he said. My son often

goes to what he calls New York, but he means Brooklyn. Williamsburg means to himwhat SoHo once meant to me. He never goes to Manhattan because Manhattanmeans old money, old values. It seems to have lost the sense of urgency and organicvitality that made it great. Meanwhile, the strange thing about London, as the capitalof a conservative nation, is that its a city positively addicted to change.

Its an old truism that you dont finish a city, you start it. New York, a magnificent

catastrophe, was finished some time ago.

CITIES AS SYSTEMS: LONDON CASE STUDY

http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/learning_modules/geography/04.TU.01/?section=3

2004, The Science Museum, all rights reserved. Making the Modern World is sponsoredby the ISB fund of the Treasury and the Cabinet Office.Produced in partnership with mwr and Peter Symonds College, Winchester.

London has experienced great changes in its population which in turn has hadimplications for the land area occupied and needs for inputs and outputsthe basis forany system. Sustainability depends on the nature and balance of the system. If thesystem grows in total numbers, it will require more inputs and inevitably produce more

outputs. If the system reduces or increases in numbers of working age group, otherissues will ensue.

London comprises the following areas:

Inner LondonBoth inner and outer boroughs are within the administrative and political area ofLondon. Inner London includes the boroughs of the City, Greenwich, Westminster and
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Camden. Between 1901 and 1981 inner London's population declined in the form ofdecentralisation to outer suburbs and people seeking lower density housing and acleaner environment. This was encouraged by government policy to disperse peopleand jobs beyond the green belt, established in the 1930s to contain sprawl. After 1991this trend has reversed as regeneration schemes have encouraged more investment

and better quality of environment, especially in central and inner London.

Outer LondonOuter London includes the suburban developments such as the boroughs of Bromley,Richmond and Barnet. Outer London developed with the growth of the railways andthe underground, which subsumed rural areas around London as the conurbationdeveloped. Between 1941 and 1991, the population of outer London declined aspeople moved further out into the southeast.

Greater LondonGreater London is the sum total of inner and outer London. It is the main administrativearea now presided over by the Mayor.

Metropolitan AreaThis extends beyond the green belt and is the functional area of London. MetropolitanLondon is the main geographical region based on the 'travel to work' area.

The graph below illustrates the changes in total population in these areas, whichLondon has experienced since 1891.

It is critical for a sustainable city to reach a positive balance. Inputs into a city includepeople and goods, water and energy. Outputs again include people, and goods aswell as unwanted products such as sewage, air pollution and refuse.

Sustainability can be measured by having fewer outputs than inputsfor examplewhen efficient recycling and waste reduction is achieved.

The following diagram shows how the spatial area of London, and hence its demandsvia inputs and outputs, have increased dramatically over time.

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10 Wealthiest Cities in the World