Love Our Arts & Culture Coverage?
You can help fund it!
The story comes down to this: Asia is growing; Europe is dying. But here is an interesting detail: Seattle stands at 12 in the list of the richest metropolitan economies (per-capita GDP) in the world. We do not have much more room to grow. We have reached the region of Utopia.
Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory... More by Charles Mudede
Comments are closed.
Sign up for our newsletter for news recaps, updates, and more!
Then so, apparently, has the US if 12 of those top 20 cities are here.
Europe is terminal.
Killed by Socialist Welfare State economic and social policies.
The same policies homoliberals want the USA to ape.
no thanks.
That’s great news! Time to cut taxes to the bone and get that economy really growing! Just think: maybe when you crack the top 10, you’ll finally be able to put city and state budget crises behind you. You’d finally have the public money to spend on education and health care and buses and art and hippy bullshit like that. Because obviously, #12 in the world isn’t wealthy enough to properly fund a city. Let’s not be crazy here.
Where is that photo taken from?
Notice that all the cities “in decline” are all under austerity measures?
And really…who wants to live in any of those fastest growing cities? China? Saudi Arabia? No thanks.
@6, it’s not really a question of what they’ve got now. It’s what they’re going to do in the next century. And it’s not about tourism. Europe isn’t really “dead”, but none of the energy of the future is there, or here. Paris and London are terrific places to sit and have a coffee, but if you want to see a million minds inventing the future, go to Mexico City or Sao Paolo or Kuala Lumpur. You can’t see it now, but you will.
In other news, Seattle is one of the best cities in the world to be rich in — high incomes and you won’t have to pay hardly any taxes.
@5, the dr jose rizal bridge on 12th ave S between the international district and north beacon hill
Fnarf, You have a point there, and I get that innovation is happening in a lot of new, different places than it used to. That’s cool. I can dig it. But…I still don’t want to live in Shenzen, Hangzhou, Jeddah, Riyadh, Izmir, or any of the other heavily polluted industrial cities that are growing.
There’s still plenty of innovation going on in the “old” “dying” cities that have already built themselves up with that innovation over the centuries.