CityReads│Which Cities Have the Tallest and Most Skyscrapers?
Which Cities Have the Tallest
and Most Skyscrapers?
We present three rankings of the global cities by the height and number of skyscrapers, urban population and the business services, which reveal three different global urban geographies, one with an “eastern” bias, one with a “southern” bias, and one with a “western” bias. Ranking is interesting but ephemeral. It should serve as the starting point of more research.
Source: Hoyler, M. and Taylor, P. 2013. Cities in globalization, in Taylor, P. ed. Global cities: critical concepts in urban studies, vol. 1 , London and New York: Routledge.
Skyscrapers feature as one of the great landmarks of global cities. These huge buildings have been around since the second half of the 19th century and the most famous—New York’s Empire State Building—from the first half of the 20th century but it is our century that has spawned a rapid increase in size and numbers.
Table 1 shows the tallest buildings today. First, 16 of the 20 buildings were/are completed in the first two decades of the 21st century. Second, all but 4 of these buildings are in Asian cities, with 9 being in Chinese cities. The Empire State Building misses out on this list; it is now ranked the 27th highest building.
Table 1 The tallest buildings in the world
Source：http://www.emporis.com/statistics/worlds-tallest-buildings, accessed May 31, 2015.
Individual buildings can perhaps give a misleading picture of contemporary global cities. They show where the recent boom in these buildings is occurring but do not take into account accumulation of such buildings that constitute the full cityscape. This is rectified in the Table 2, showing the number of skyscrapers in cities. A skyscraper is defined as a multi-level building more than 100m high. Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, Chicago and Shanghai are the top five cities. There remains a strong Asian bias, a majority of the cities are still Asian, with five being from China. And still, Western European cities are nowhere to be seen. London is ranked 50th , Frankfurt 75th and Paris 78th.
Asia dominates in terms of the number of skyscrapers, accounting for over half of the world total (58%). North America ranks the second, accounting for 27%. Africa has the least skyscrapers, accounting for 1% (see Table 3).
Table 2 Top 20 Cities With Most Skyscrapers
Source: http://www.emporis.com/statistics/most-skyscraper-cities-worldwide, accessed May 31, 2015
Table 3 Continents with the Most Skyscrapers
Source: http://www.emporis.com/statistics/most-skyscrapers, accessed May 31, 2015
Let us use a different take on listing global cities. Table 4 shows the leading mega-cities (cities with over ten million inhabitants). There is still an Asian majority but it is quite different than Table 1 &2. Tokyo, New York-Newark,Osaka, and Los Angeles- Long Beach-Santa Ana feature as prosperous cities but the remainder are relatively poor. In Asia five cities from the Indian subcontinent are featured: Delhi, Mumbai,Karachi, Dhaka and Calcutta. Beyond Asia there are four Latin American cities: Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro. Two cities are from Africa: Cairo and Lagos. Mega-cities are mainly a feature of the poor “South”—what used to be called the “developing world”. Again there is no sign of Western European cities in this table. But two do qualify among the 27 mega-cities: Paris ranks 25th and London 27th.
Table 4 Top 20 Urban Agglomerations With the Most Population
Source: WorldUrbanization Prospect, 2014
For a third take on listing global cities we turn to the business services (financial, professional, and creative) that are concentrated in cities that act as global service centers. Cities are ranked by the overall network connectivity. Here we have a very different set of cities dominated by London and New York. Western European cities (6) and North American cities (4) constitute half the list thereby outnumbering Asian cities (7). This result suggests that you do not need skyscrapers to be a major economic player in the contemporary world economy.
Table 5 Top 20 Cities With The Most Business Service Connectivity
Source: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/gawcworlds.html,accessed May 31,2015
Summary
The above rankings present three different global urban geographies, one with an “eastern” bias, one with a “southern” bias, and one with a “western” bias. However, the fact that there are multiple overlaps between cities in the tables show that contemporary globalization is not creating neat separate world regions. The tables feature all continents—globalization does appear to be global.
Rankings are interesting, but they should not be the end of a conversation. Real curiosity leads to asking why the ranking is how it is, what has it changed from? And where might it change in the future? Globalization is inherently dynamic, cities are essentially dynamic, and therefore global cities are double dynamic, making lists ephemeral.