On our first day in Sao Paulo, we met with Guilherme Mattar, the Deputy Secretary for International Relations of the State of Sao Paulo, and his team bidding for the Expo 2020. It was during this meeting that my perceptions of Sao Paulo as a cosmopolitan city were not only confirmed, but solidified. I was shown this video for their bid for Expo 2020, where the theme of cosmopolitanism and diversity leads their marketing platform

Sao Paulo has a profound and distinct cultural heritage. The city is a compilation of people from various international backgrounds, giving the city its vibrant energy. Despite this diversity, there is a shared sentiment of unity across the population. They are united by the feeling of belonging, identifying themselves as Paulistano. Sao Paulo has the unusual gift to accept and integrate foreigners very quickly, independent of ethnicity or race.

Behind this integration is a massive immigration programme developed in the late 1950s, which brought thousands of Europeans to the country to work in its industries. A study in 2002 by the University of Sao Paulo demonstrates this diversity. According to the study, over 80%  of the students descend from foreign immigrants- the majority of which are Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese or German. These origins are demonstrated in the surnames of Paulistanos. At Global Cities we have been developing a number of indicators of what makes a Global City. Our great interest is in cosmopolitanism – one measure of which is ‘foreign-born workforce’. But as our time in Sao Paulo progressed it became increasingly apparent that this indicator had little relevance. Sao Paulo is so cosmopolitan, so integrated, that the concept of foreign-born barely seems to have meaning.

Sao Paulo has an advanced ability to not only integrate foreigners, but embrace them as a cornerstone of its society. I walked away from my trip in Brazil with a new appreciation and understanding of cosmopolitanism. Sao Paulo is a model for attracting the best and brightest in order to drive its flourishing economy, while creating a distinct culture all Paulistanos have come to enjoy. Brazil is much more to it than just Samba, Carnival, and pristine beach. The Fifa World Cup 2014, the 2016 Olympics, and the promise of the 2020 Expo, not only demonstrate the cultural and economic prowess that Brazil has come to stand for, but may also outline something of how future global cities may shape up – cosmopolitan hubs which are welcoming to all and inherently international in character.

A few weeks ago, I ventured to Brazil along with my colleagues David and Neil, exploring new business opportunities, cultural connections, and potential partners focussing on the upcoming 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Our team arrived in Rio de Janeiro on the evening, expecting mild, favourable, weather. But, with what would become the defining theme of Rio, my preconceptions were challenged. We were met with a massive storm. Clearly, this was not what I had expected, but with the winter approaching in the southern hemisphere, I accepted the fact that even in Rio de Janeiro the sun does not shine 365 days a year.

The next day, the clouds lifted. Rio de Janeiro revealed itself as a breathtaking city, located alongside the Atlantic Ocean and shaped by beautiful mountains and beaches. I was amazed by the dramatic landscape, particularly how the city is built amidst these mountains, appearing as though someone randomly dropped massive stones from the sky. Cidade Maravilhosa is indeed the right description for Rio.

                                                                                                                                 Photo: Hector Garcia

Despite its beauty, I did have concerns about safety in Rio. Having lived in Portugal for many years, I had heard many stories depicting crime in Rio. Like many other Portuguese, I looked on at the rapid development of Brazil with some scepticism. Perhaps, I had let speculation become my reality. I was expecting threats, robberies, and theft, often associated with many large cities of the developing world. To my surprise, however, I felt remarkably safe throughout Rio, even finding myself enjoying the energy of the city.

My feelings of safety were only furthered, when our team met with a number of businesses, public bodies, and government agencies, including the UK government, the Mayor of Rio, and official Tourism and investment bodies. During the various meetings, the sentiment was the same- security improvements have indeed made Rio safer. I discovered that even the Cariocas, themselves, have felt the effectiveness of safety improvements. The majority of people told me they noticed a reduction in crimes and that the city’s safety challenges have been met with sweeping reform by Governor Sérgio Cabral. Rio is showing remarkable improvement. Cabral’s tough stance on crippling crime has become a clear message in Brazil.

I left Rio perplexed. The safety I had felt in the heart of Rio alongside the positive sentiment of various leaders and the public, left me curious. Upon my return, I researched crime statistics to see if such claims were substantiated.  As shown below, the number of robberies and murders has drastically dropped since Cabral’s bold campaign against crime since 2009.

(Victims of murder in the State of Rio de Janeiro between 2000 and 2010 – absolute numbers and percentages; Published by ISP)

          (Total number of robberies in the state of Rio 2000-2010- absolute numbers and percentages, published by ISP)

It is clear that the numbers mirror the positive sentiment over safety improvements in Rio. This left me wondering- why has this message remained confined to Brazil? In a globalised age, an outdated preconception like the one I had before my arrival has the potential to damage a countries investment and growth opportunities. Rio has much to offer through business, culture, and beauty. It is a global city. Rio has shown its determination to demonstrate its “global city” status in bidding for the 2016 Olympics. The message of safety and security must get out if Rio is to host a successful Games but also to assist in continuing to attract international attention and sustain a reputation as a successful global city.

Some of these tensions can be highlighted by comparing the data from two well-established rankings: Mercer’s Quality of Living Survey, which measures such factors as law and order, environmental quality, public services and transport, health and education and cultural life, and Zyen’s Global Financial Centres Index, which ranks the world’s major financial centres on the basis of their competitiveness – the factors that distinguish them as a business friendly location.

As to be expected, of the top 50 world financial centres, no fewer than 30 are also in the top 50 most liveable cities. So it is clear that, to a large degree, the things that people and international businesses want are much the same. But the evidence also suggests that this correlation only holds up to a point, for there is but a single city in the world, Zurich, which manages to be in the top 10 on both indices. Achieving the very highest levels for both quality of living and business competitiveness is clearly not easy, and it may well be that in order to provide the kind of fiscal and regulatory environment most desired by international capital, it becomes very challenging indeed to also provide the highest quality of life for citizens.

Six of the top 10 for quality of living also feature among the 50 leading financial centres and all of these, except for Vancouver, are to be found in Northern Europe, in developed countries that have undertaken investment in infrastructure and public services to match private capital accumulation. By contrast, the entire Asian continent has just four cities that make the top 50 for liveability, three of which are in Japan, while at the same time it now has (including the Middle East) no fewer than 13 of the top 50 financial centres. One of the great challenges for Asian city leaders over the next decades will therefore be their ability to adequately address public needs and the well-being of their citizens alongside private gains. The benefits of doing so are not only enhanced liveability, but also to ensure that they have the infrastructure and human capital in place that will define the leading cities of the future.

Authors: Natasha Hilton & Tom Campbell

I posed the question ‘Do actions speak louder than logos? My view is that if place-branding is to be meaningful, campaigns and brands have greatest impact when they are delivered through policy actions rather than just relying on logos and clever strap-lines. Businesses and policymakers at the conference were keen to ensure that Moscow projects global city status internationally; many felt that external perceptions of Moscow were outdated – there was a clear consensus amongst the 600+ participants in the final interactive voting session that Moscow had to develop the promotional infrastructure to manage its reputation.

This is the right approach but the most significant steps towards developing Moscow’s international brand profile will grow from developing the policy actions that demonstrate its global city status. In the advisory panel’s recommendations to the Mayor, we emphasised that achieving global city status required Moscow to prioritise liveability and governance as well as developing international influence.

Policies which encourage transparency will ultimately improve the attractiveness of Moscow as an investment opportunity, the strength of its visitor appeal and as a home for talent. In developing its strategy for growth Moscow might begin by setting out what kind of global city it wants to be and what role it will play in the international economy. Will it be another global financial centre like London? Will it focus on issues of global citizenship like Copenhagen? Or will it compete with Istanbul for international hub status as an aviation and logistics bridge between Europe and Asia?

There can be no doubt that Moscow is a city with a great wealth of culture and a keeper of many elements of European culture – indeed a significant contributor to world culture – in the form of the arts, architecture and literature. This story also has to be unlocked.

But perhaps ultimately our mental images of Moscow are out-of-date; Russia has been experiencing rapid economic growth and the recent demonstrations following the Duma elections are a clear signal to the world as well as to the Kremlin that many Muscovites want reform and transparency – their actions will do more to help people around the world understand that Moscow is changing and that it may be beginning to re-emerge to claim status as a truly global city.

It was a great pleasure to return to Lingang in November and participate in the Healthy Cities Roundtable as facilitator. The city is an extraordinary development and its ambition is without parallel. The vision for the city is to become many things, including a major tourist destination, a high-tech and creative industries specialist, a home of international culture to name but a few. China is a dynamic economy in which almost always the apparently impossible can come to pass. One of the reasons for this is that China recognises that if it is to compete in the long-term it cannot consider itself a developing economy, but it must move to address the issues that many major industrialised countries are trying to address. Hence the focus on ‘Healthy Cities’. There are many terms being developed here: Policy-makers and business leaders the world-over are discussing:

Smart Cities, Future Cities, Green Cities, Intelligent Cities, Sustainable Cities, Planet Cities, Eco-Cities, Healthy Cities and Liveable Cities.

The term is not of great importance the significant point about the Lingang Healthy Cities roundtable is that it takes account of the extraordinary pace of China’s development – e.g. according to McKinsey, China will have 221 cities with a population of 1 million people by 2030 – Lingang New City is a reflection of these urbanising trends and in policy terms it has the opportunity to lead the way for many Chinese cities.

We know that China can inspire awe in terms of its investment in infrastructure but this policy development in Lingang suggests that China is moving towards the understanding that prioritising the softer elements of urban development are now of greatest importance.

Perhaps in the first instance the ‘healthy city’ might be the liveable city which prizes all the attributes of liveability, walkability, work-life balance, cultural celebration, of being international and cosmopolitan.

In their recent book Two Dragon Heads – reviewing the future for Chinese cities – Shahid Yusuf and Kaoru Nabeshima noted that “the innovativeness of the megacities will depend in part on their openness to ideas and people, and on liveability”. This is the priority for every city in the 21st century – can China take the lead?

But there’s much more to what is happening, or about to happen, than what is popular right now. Being caught up in the moment can confuse the picture.

As a teenager I was friends with James Truman and we’d both been blown away firstly by progressive rock and then by punk and we were gripped by the energy of the music and we thought there was nothing else out there that mattered. At least I thought so. But James knew otherwise.

One time in his Sheffield flat he kept playing to me the Abba song :”Money, money, money” over and over and saying “Listen to it; it’s got impact. It’s burlesque. It’s got style.” I never understood then what he meant but I do now.

James could see beyond the immediate popularity of the current and that style would follow in the wake of raw rock. He went on to be one of the most significant publishers in the USA and became Editorial Director for Conde Nast, heading up such titles as New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair. As for me…well, I went in a different direction.

So, I was interested recently to catch a broadcast interview with James in which he laid out his vision of the future for magazines and sees them re-emerge, after a period of decline, as luxury items, rather like coffee-table books with the highest quality imagery, while books will move further from text to “colourful works of art with exquisite bindings and accessories”.

It is difficult to see how traditional newspapers may evolve. As the character Malcolm Tucker told a group of journalists in the satirical political comedy The Thick Of It: “No one reads your newspapers any more, I read that on the internet somewhere!” It is far to early to write off newspapers just yet, they are resilient. But the anticipated switch from printed newspapers to newspapers via iPad (and Kindle Fire!) has not happened in overwhelming fashion, yet.

Clearly digital media, web and social, has great force and I find it astonishing that so many communicators and marketers still rely on the old-style printed press release rather than DNRs or think that slapping up a Twitter feed is job done.

Within digital there’s a pulling together of features through social media sites. Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the introduction of Timeline which will give us all the opportunity to put our lives literally online..posting everything from pics of us as babies and our school reports on to our profile page and allowing our friends and contacts varying degrees of access. This, coupled with IM and voice and video calls will make Facebook, and Skype (now acquired by Microsoft), one stop shops for communication and tops for stickability.

Over time this will see the decrease in the importance of web-sites. As the UK Government’s Digital Tsar, Martha Lane Fox tweeted: “Facebook is the internet.”

Sir Bob Scott, Chair of the Liverpool Culture Company, shared with me an idea he was developing around just what ignites the spark of creativity within a city. Bob had been following the work of Professor Franco Bianchini who’d noted there were places that had faced a range of urban challenges yet were considered innovative, original and surprising. The contention was that a city was not creative in spite of its dark side but because of it.

From this Bob delivered the “Cities on the Edge” conference which drew together speakers from Marseille, Gdansk, Bremen, Istanbul and Naples, as well as Liverpool, and which formed one of the centre-pieces of the European Capital of Culture activities.

Bob told the delegates their cities all had cheekiness, unruliness, talent, creativity, humour and edginess. They were all sea-ports and had suffered economic decline throughout the 20th century leading to upheaval, social problems and crime. None were capital cities, indeed they were often troublesome to those in national power, and they were geographically on the edge. It was this edginess that made them places welcoming to risk takers, where the push against conventionality was embraced and where creativity flourished.

The word edgy could be defined as irritable, sharp, daring and trend-setting. Liverpool is all of these and surely this was at the heart of what made Liverpool’s most famous sons, the Beatles, what they were and gave rise to their creativity which shook the world and changed all of our lives forever.

A few days ago, I met several designers from the city of Shenzhen which could be described as China’s most creative city. I think their evident great pride in their city prevented them from acknowledging to me that perhaps creativity could emerge from social difficulties but they did point to upheaval (Shenzhen has grown from being a village to an economic jewel and a design powerhouse in just 30 years) along with its geographical location, close to the sea, in producing a place that is naturally open to new ideas and this helps to drive their creativity.

Also this week I came across an article by Robert Neuwirth in “Scientific American” in which he takes issue with the view that those living on the edges of some of the world’s greatest cities do not contribute economically. He illustrates his arguments with example after example of the innovation and productivity shown by those living in the Makoko area of Lagos, the global trade links built from Mumbai’s Dharavi community, and the successful entrepreneurs coming out of the Kibera in Nairobi.

Truly, you need the grit in the oyster in order to make the pearl.

The brand positioning that we developed for Aarhus reflects their city-wide approach to taking and making progressive steps both in business and policy. We were struck by the consistently pragmatic approach across the city to making things better and to taking on big challenges. Globalisation presents many challenges for cities – whether in producing sustainable energy or managing economic transition – and Aarhus has been quietly researching the solutions.

The next step is to take the Aarhus story internationally and to really begin to make the trade and investment links that will continue to ensure its growth.