Cádiz is a Spanish backwater isolated in Europe’s bottom left corner. But walking the 18th-century streets dripping with gold, you realise: this was once a global city. Then, in 1778, it lost its near-monopoly on trade with the Americas. To quote Hitchcock’s Psycho: “They moved away the highway.” Cádiz froze in time.
Similar shocks did for Babylon and Alexandria. Now some of today’s global cities are under threat. The wrongest prediction of the pandemic was that cities would die. But in this period of historical acceleration, various forces — authoritarianism, remote work and, soon, climate change — are upending the hierarchy of global cities. Hong Kong, San Francisco, Beijing and Moscow are losing, while today’s winners Dubai and Miami are at risk.
