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Originally Posted by Manitopiaaa
There have been tons of discussions on SSC about GaWC over 15 years. The methodology is very outdated and it's largely considered a very poor ranking since it is essentially based on (a) ties to London through global capital, and (b) importance in accountancy, advertising, banking/finance, insurance, law, and management consultancy:
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A recurring issue with the GaWC alpha-beta-gamma ranking isn’t the methodology or the ranking itself, it is the crude interpretation and discussion around it. The initial project did indeed focus on London, but the idea that it still is or a PR exercise is laughably inaccurate. As it says on the tin, the research is around cataloguing connectivity of world cities based on financial and professional service firms. Seeing people devolve into Neanderthals when they see city X is above/below city Y is amusing.
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Originally Posted by Crawford
Per GaWC, which is crap. But GaWC and other UK-based entities are always trying to push this ridiculous narrative.
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What an embarrassing piece of drivel which probably does more to underline your bias and lack of critical thinking. The GaWC might have been established at a British university, but if you had bothered to undertake some rudimentary research, you would quickly note that it is an umbrella organisation for the leading urban geographers and researchers from across the world.
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Originally Posted by Crawford
Airport traffic is a function of location and hub terminals, nothing more. London is very well-located, like Dubai, so will always have heavy air traffic. Also it has crappier rail than the Continent so more domestic traffic. Amsterdam is a huge intl. air hub, but isn't a particularly important city. But it's well located and has an airline hub.
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The UK doesn’t yet (not counting HS1) possess a domestic HSR system, but its intercity network moves more people than the intercity networks of France and Germany because it operates a high-frequency competitive service. I struggled to source domestic aviation figures for France, but both the UK and Germany have broadly the same number of domestic air passengers (c.22mn), figures dwarfed by their respective intercity train networks. I was surprised that the UK figure is not higher due to its island and elongated geography. Outside of flights to islands, Northern Ireland and geographical extremities of the mainland, domestic aviation has been suppressed by the competitive intercity rail market and the extreme price of landing slots, which makes domestic trips far less viable.
London’s geographical location certainly helps, and like New York and other international cities, it operates hub facilities. However, if your assumption is that the bulk of arrivals at London’s airports are merely transfers, this would not tally with the volume of leisure and business travellers departing for the city and elsewhere in the UK. If large numbers of people were merely transferring, there wouldn’t be sufficient demand for so many airport train services to multiple airports.
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Originally Posted by iheartthed
New York didn't decline. London improved. But, to reiterate, that coincides with the U.K. joining the EU in the 1970s. The EU was for a long time the second largest economy in the world, and now is the third largest.
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The rise of London correlated not with EU membership, but with the end of a post-war policy to deliberately hinder development in London (an ill-thought policy to redistribute economic growth to the regions) and market liberalisation. The big winners from EU membership were the regions that were left behind that required regeneration. London in contrast – whilst being a Remain stronghold – is a post-industrial city focused on services which would still today, face barriers to access across the continent. It is part of the reason why non-EU business activity was so strong relative to EU activity across so many sectors.
There are of course issues with leaving the EU that should not be dismissed, but by far the biggest threat to London isn’t Brexit, or Covid-19, it is the persistent undersupply of new housing and infrastructure to support its growing population. Between 2000-18, a staggering 343,436 homes were not built in London, with a further 166,471 not built over the same period in the South East and East of England regions surrounding London.