The World's Fastest-Growing CitiesJoel Kotkin, 10.07.10, 06:00 PM EDT
The urban powerhouses of the next decade aren't behemoths like New York or Mumbai, but smaller cities like Chongqing, China; Santiago, Chile; and Austin, Texas.
In Pictures: The Next Decade's Fastest-Growing Cities
The evolution of cities is a protean process--and never more so than now. With over 50% of people living in metropolitan areas there have never been so many rapidly rising urban areas--or so many declining ones.
Our list of the cities of the future does not focus on established global centers like New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong or Tokyo , which have dominated urban rankings for a generation. We have also passed over cities that have achieved prominence in the past 20 years such as Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Beijing, Delhi, Sydney, Toronto, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
Nor does our list include the massive, largely dysfunctional megacities--Mumbai, Mexico City, Dhaka, Bangladesh--that are among planet's most populous today. Bigger often does not mean better.
Instead, our list focuses on emerging powerhouses like Chongqing, China, (population: 9 million), which Christina Larson in Foreign Policy recently described as "the biggest city you never heard of."
Chongqing sits in the world's most important new region for important cities: interior China. These interior Chinese cities, notes architect Adam Mayer, offer a healthy alternative to coastal megacities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzen and Guangzhou, which suffer from congestion, high prices and increasingly wide class disparities. China's bold urban diversification strategy hinges both on forging new transportation links and nurturing businesses in these interior cities. For example, in Chengdu, capital of the Sichuan province, new plane, road and rail connections are tying the city to both coastal China and the rest of the world. And the city is abuzz with new construction, including an increasing concentration of high-tech firms such as Dell ( DELL - news - people ) and Cisco ( CSCO - news - people ).
India, although not by plan, also is experiencing a boom in once relatively obscure cities. Its rising urban centers include Bangalore (home of Infosys and Wipro ( WIT - news - people )), Ahmedabad (whose per-capita incomes are twice that of the rest of India) and Chennai (which has created 100,000 jobs this year). Many of India's key industries--auto manufacturing, software and entertainment--are establishing themselves in these cities.
The growth of India and China also creates opportunity for other emerging players, particularly in Southeast Asia by creating markets for goods and services as well as investment capital. Potential hot spots include places like Hanoi, Vietnam, which is attracting greater interest from Japanese, American and European multi-national firms upset with China's often bullying trade practices and rising costs. Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur--with its rising financial sector--also displays considerable promise.
Africa also boasts many huge, rapidly growing cities, but it's hard to identify many of these places--like Lagos, Nigeria, Luanda, Angola or Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo--as bright prospects. One exception may well be Cape Town, the beautiful South African coastal city that shone so well during the recent World Cup.
Latin America, too, has a plethora of huge and growing cities, but it's hard to nominate the likes of Mexico City or Sao Paulo as likely hot spots for future sustainable growth.
The best economic prospects in this region lie in more modestly sized cities like Santiago, the capital of resource-rich Chile, and even Campinas, Brazil, a growing smaller city--with 3 million residents--that lies outside the congested Sao Paolo region. This shift to smaller-scaled cities, as Michigan State's Zachary Neal points out, has been conditioned by massive improvements in telecommunications and transportation infrastructure throughout the urban world. Today, he asserts, it is the ability to network long-distance--not girth--that makes the critical difference.