Completely agree.

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.

From TFA:

> Welcome to Yujiapu Financial District, which promotes itself as China’s Manhattan...

I see... about 20 skyscrapers? More like China's downtown Cincinnati...

It's also 30 miles away from the city center of Tianjin. I can see why no one wants to live there.

What do you consider the other ones?

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.

It was the Erie Canal that really made New York -- it allowed shipping into the Great Lakes.

> What do you consider the other ones?

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.

I've heard people unironically refer to Frankfurt as 'Frankhattan' and it makes me cringe. Be your own identity.

I've heard the name "Mainhattan" being used, because it's located on the river named "Main"

NYC only became a cultural and financial center in the last century. The core Western cultural hub has been moving around over the last couple centuries - Vienna, Paris, NYC, now arguably SF. It's not impossible for another to rise in this century. I could easily see two world cultural centers reflecting the divide in underlying cultural polarities (conformism vs. individualism, etc). China as the epicenter for a new pole makes sense, though stifled speech may affect it. Maybe a diverse satellite, like Hong Kong or Bangkok. (I haven't visited Asia so I don't have a good grasp of dynamics there).

San Francisco is not a cultural hub. Cultural products still largely come out of two places: LA and NYC.

edit: anyone downvoting, feel free to defend what makes SF the cultural hub for western civilization.

Juicero was invented there, if that doesn't qualify it as a cultural hub, I don't know what will ! /s

Technological and social impact. SV owns the west's attention and behavior right now. I do not consider art to be the only cultural artifact. OP in this thread actually included financial impact in its consideration of NYC. Technology is as much a cultural factor as finance.

> Technological and social impact.

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.

I feel that you are being overly reductive. My midwestern parents spend half their evenings on Facebook with Netflix on in the background now instead of simply watching cable TV. Society is having huge, diffuse discussions around overuse of phones, internet addiction, political problems of connectivity. Most of the popular personal entertainment apps are based in SV (as is Pixar, if you want to discuss influential art). Culture is not paintings and sculptures, it's the way we behave and interact. Consider that prior to Da Vinci's era, painting primarily was seen as a trade and not an art. With technology uprooting our society piece by piece, I see no reason to consider technology anything but a core cultural driver. SV is currently the center of technology-based culture, for better or worse.

> My midwestern parents spend half their evenings on Facebook with Netflix on in the background now instead of simply watching cable TV.

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.

I totally disagree with your perspective on this but do not that think we will reach an agreement with further discussion.

Is seems we disagree about what culture actually is, so agreed.

It's an ironic claim given how tech has driven out all the creative types out of SF

Add Rome to your list.

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...

Had Rome in the list but removed it because I felt I was missing one or two in between it and Vienna. Rome and Florence dominated for a long time. Culture also used to be more distributed and heterogeneous prior to industrialization.

Depending on how far back you want to go: Rome, Byzantium and other near-east locations, Cordova and Teledo, Florence and the Italian City-States, Vienna, Paris, London, Amsterdam, ...

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...