Good luck trying to actually build another one of those. There's a reason why there's only 3-4 in the world and they haven't changed in centuries.
Cities exist because of people/trade/geography, occasionally humans miss a place, or something about the above changes and centrally planning one works.
And the reverse happens too, climate change, technology, and movement of people can all *end a city.
England has this in a microcosm in the north. Huge great cities sprung and died on the change in technology. America is going through the same process with Detroit and rust belt.
> Welcome to Yujiapu Financial District, which promotes itself as China’s Manhattan...
And I'm guessing the reason is valuable geographical position (in NYC's case it's a major shipping hub for both the Atlantic and the Hudson River) and the network effect. But valuable geography can change over time, and who knows how long the network effect of cities is going to last when we finally start making more jobs remote instead of wasting space and other resources on offices and people are free to live wherever they want.
London obviously, but they might be turning inwards with Brexit and losing that status.
The next tier is Tokyo, maybe another Asian capital soon. Paris, Vienna, etc. were part of a Euro-centric world but don't have much relevancy beyond a holiday destination.
London and NYC both create culture from aspects of people from around the world, then export it. I don't see China being able to do this.
edit: anyone downvoting, feel free to defend what makes SF the cultural hub for western civilization.
That's what makes SF a financial capital. What are its cultural contributions? Hoodies and overpriced coffee?
> SV owns the west's attention and behavior right now
Tech acts to capture and reflect culture, it doesn't create any. Even if it did, having companies based in SF wouldn't make the city itself a cultural capital. Just economic.
Then your argument is for LA creating culture, which it does, not SF. "Tech" distributes art created in Hollywood.
> Society is having huge, diffuse discussions around overuse of phones, internet addiction, political problems of connectivity.
Again not culture, digital addiction if anything. The cigarettes of our generation.
> Culture is not paintings and sculptures, it's the way we behave and interact.
Communication tools are just that, tools. Speech, performance, art, music, all creations that have nothing to do with the tech that distributes it.
> SV is currently the center of technology-based culture, for better or worse.
SF/SV captures, repackages, and distributes art/speech in order to sell ads over the top of it all. Why you think that qualifies as creating culture itself, I don't know.
You think i'm wrong? Try watching a Youtube or Facebook original series. When SV tries to actually create something, it's terrible.
Ngrams of the most-frequently-mentioned cities in print (skewed by an English-heavy corpus) are interesting. An arbitrary listing here, with long-tem smothing (20 years) due to pre-1750 data variaability:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=London%2CParis...
The list actually seems fairly small.
Hrm: listing of largest European cities through history 9sortable tables):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_citie...
And worldwide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_urban_community_siz...