Sinatra would disagree, but the answer is not New York. Despite the Olympic hoopla, London is not calling and neither is Paris, whatever the pleasures of the Champs Elysees.
Shanghai and Delhi are nowhere close and probably never will be. For the foreseeable future Tokyo will have no serious competitor as the world’s number one city.
There are several definitions of what constitutes a city, and by population Tokyo is by far the largest in nearly all of them. This is nothing new – Edo was probably the world’s largest city between 1700 and 1800
Likewise, greatness can be assessed in any number of ways, numerical and anecdotal. The classification below has the virtue of simplicity.
City = urban agglomeration (continuous urban area).
Greatness = economic scale (GDP at market exchange rates).
POPULATION ECONOMIC VALUE
million $ bn
Tokyo 37.1 2,150
Jakarta 26.1 261
Seoul 22.5 681
Delhi 22.2 50
Manila 21.9 150
Shanghai 20.8 255
New York 20.4 1,265
Sao Paulo 20.2 388
Paris 10.7 720
London 8.6 611
Economically Tokyo is larger than New York and London put together. If Tokyo were to grow at 1.5% Shanghai would need to grow at 12% to create the same amount of new economic value.
Even during the two “lost decades” from 1990-2010, Japan’s growth in real GDP per head averaged 0.9% and Tokyo’s population growth has been around 0.7% p.a. So it is quite feasible – likely, in fact – that Tokyo will generate more wealth than Shanghai and Delhi combined over the next five years.
Tokyo looks even more Godzilla-like in terms of its share of Japan’s total population – up from 13% in 1945 to 28% in 2010,
For the first half of the period Japan was urbanizing rapidly, rather as China is today, and people from the countryside poured into the cities to find work in offices and factories. From 1970 until 1990 the very largest cities – Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka and Nagoya – continued to boom. But since the bubble burst in 1990 only Tokyo has continued to attract migrants.
As everyone knows, Japan’s population has peaked out and is on the cusp of long-term shrinkage. Yet in the first decade of this century the Tokyo population grew by 2.2 million – an amount equivalent to the population of Kansas City or Amsterdam.
There is little reason for the trend to reverse. Second and third tier cities are locked into a self-reinforcing cycle of decline , as young people leave, businesses close, everything gets older and duller and shabbier, causing yet more young people to leave.
By contrast, scale is what makes Tokyo so attractive, allowing it to support all kinds of sub-cultures, minority interests and specialist businesses that would not be viable elsewhere.
Scale would be meaningless without the ease of access guaranteed by the cheap and efficient transportation system, a sprawling network of private and public railways that developed haphazardly and organically over the past century.
In New York, America’s largest commuter city, the daytime population in the central districts exceeds the nighttime population by 560,000. The equivalent number for Tokyo’s central 23 wards is 3.3 million.
The biggest risk to Tokyo’s ascendancy is one that seemed remote until the triple disaster of last year. Now we are told – by scientists at Tokyo University, no less – that there is a 70% probability that a large-scale earthquake will hit Tokyo over the next 4 years.
The problem is that earthquake prediction has a pitiful track record, despite the vast amount of resources devoted to it in Japan. The two most destructive seismic events of the post-war period – the Kobe earthquake of 1995 and the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami – were predicted by no-one. Indeed the devastated areas were classified as low risk on the government’s hazard map.
In terms of risk, how does an M8 Tokyo earthquake stack up against political upheaval in China or an outbreak of hostilities between India and Pakistan? Common sense would say favourably, since the historical frequency has been of the order of three in the last six hundred years, as opposed to one every few decades. Even so, since the events of 3/11 you cannot help feeling a frisson of tension every time window-frames start shaking and lamps swaying, followed by grateful relief that Tokyo is still Tokyo.
Unsurprisingly there has been more talk of decentralization in the last year. Toru Hashimoto, the 43 year old mayor of Osaka, won a landslide victory last November for his Osaka Restoration party. The philoprogenitive populist with the early Beatles haircut wants to establish his city as “the second capital” and indeed it might be a good idea to shift some corporate and governmental functions out of Tokyo as a way of hedging the tectonic bets.
For obvious reasons the old bubble-era plan to make Sendai Japan’s political capital, on the lines of Canberra or Brazilia, is now off the menu.
Whether government ordained decentralization is enough to offset Tokyo’s magnetic power to attract people and commerce (it hosts the HQs of more Fortune Global 500 companies than London & New York combined) is doubtful. Even in the year following the 3/11 disasters, the city has continued to grow.
As Richard Lloyd-Parry put it in a thoughtful recent article, “You could build an exact replica of Tokyo, but if you populated it with Britons, Americans or Swiss it would quickly cease to function. The ideal city, in the future or the past, comes from within.”
In other words, Tokyo is a state of mind, one that has survived the worst that history and nature have thrown its way. Osaka is a state of mind too, of course, but a very different one.