Why do so few cities have everything?

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A reader gets in touch with a quibble. I wrote last month about the profusion of Michelin stars among restaurants that serve the (once-patronised) food of India, China and Nigeria. I’d connected this to the story of our times: the seepage of power and prestige from the west and its allies. Their cuisines used to hog the Guide, as their economies used to hog world GDP. 

The Michelin trend is real enough, said this informed reader. In London. Elsewhere, even in cities of general open-mindedness, the Euro-Japanese grip on the finest end of fine dining hasn’t budged. 

I could counter-quibble, but not much. Instead, the email set off a broader thought. Why, in a growing world, can so few cities make a plausible claim to contain everything? 

The global population has doubled over the past 50 years to 8bn. Our species now produces over $100 trillion of output per annum in current prices. And this stuff sloshes around with an ease that was unknown in the middle of the last century. Thanks to shipping containers, successive tariff-cutting rounds and the mutation of once-communist countries into prolific exporters, almost anything can get almost anywhere. So, albeit with more friction, can people. Migrants constitute a larger share of the world’s population than in 1960. 

Given all this, there should be a multitude of what I am going to call “total cities”. A total city is one in which a person can find almost literally anything: any cuisine, at low, middle and extortionate price points; any art form, exhibited or performed to world-class standard; any language spoken, not in scattered households but in communities of appreciable size. If you are dating in a total city, you might go out with someone from each continent in one calendar year without pausing to notice the fact. (I grant that Antarctica requires work.) 

As soon as cities outside of London and New York are named, arguments kick off. Paris? I’d include it. Others wouldn’t. Tokyo?

In an 8bn world, there should be lots of cities that readers agree are total. Instead, well, would it take more than one hand to count them off? Would you get past the index finger before starting a fight among ourselves? As soon as cities outside of London and New York are named, arguments kick off. Paris? I’d include it. Others wouldn’t. Tokyo? Not heterogeneous enough for some. Dubai? You can eat almost anything, meet almost anyone but not yet see a Vermeer on a whim. Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Sydney, Bangkok, Toronto: each incurs dissent. Is the number of cities who meet the criteria much higher than when the world held 4bn souls? 

Now, a few disclaimers. I don’t suggest “total” means “better”. Houston, with its abundance and range of migrants, and no lack of art, has a stronger claim to total-ness than most European capitals. You can still favour Rome, though. Total needn’t even mean good. The average person doesn’t become, as I do, a claustrophobic diva when denied immediate access to everything (“I can’t believe there are just four Uzbek-Galician wine bars in this dump”) or the ambient sound of foreign voices. As various elections over the past decade have shown, wanting the world on one’s doorstep isn’t a universal taste. 

It is strange, though, that the world can grow and grow while the agreed-upon world cities remain more or less consistent. True, some things, such as access to visual art, are naturally constrained. Canonical paintings are few, and one in the Met is one that can’t at the same time be in the São Paulo Museum of Art. But most things that make urban life great are, as economists put it, non-rivalrous.  

We are left with a puzzle, then. In the end, a total city relies on three things: raw numbers of people (nearer 10mn than 5mn, I suggest), openness (a foreign-born share of perhaps a third), and enough wealth to sustain all those amenities. It follows that a world that has undergone steep population growth, mass migration and steady enrichment throughout my life should have thrown up, I don’t know, a dozen or so uncontested total cities by now. Instead, consensus falls apart after one or two. Given the present reversals of globalisation, it is conceivable that no one reading this will live to see another.

Email Janan at [email protected]

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