Olifante's Lair

Map of Global Cities

I found a thought-provoking interactive map of 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-tier global cities produced by the Globalization and World Cities Study Group of Loughborough University:

The GaWC group uses the term World City, but I prefer the term Global City -- it's less prone to confusion. Besides the list of alpha, beta and gamma global cities, the GaWC group also provides a secondary ranking of cities possibly on their way to Global City status:

• Relatively strong evidence: Athens, Auckland, Dublin, Helsinki, Luxembourg, Lyon, Mumbai, New Delhi, Philadelphia, Rio de Janeiro, Tel Aviv, Vienna
• Some evidence: Abu Dhabi, Almaty, Birmingham, Bogota, Bratislava, Brisbane, Bucharest, Cairo, Cleveland, Cologne, Detroit, Dubai, Ho Chi Minh City, Kiev, Lima, Lisbon, Manchester, Montevideo, Oslo, Riyadh, Rotterdam, Seattle, Stuttgart, The Hague, Vancouver
• Minimal evidence: Adelaide, Antwerp, Arhus, Baltimore, Bangalore, Bologna, Brasilia, Calgary, Cape Town, Colombo, Columbus, Dresden, Edinburgh, Genoa, Glasgow, Gothenburg, Guangzhou, Hanoi, Kansas City, Leeds, Lille, Marseille, Richmond, St Petersburg, Tashkent, Tehran, Tijuana, Turin, Utrecht, Wellington

I find their positioning of Lisbon in the "Some evidence" category quite puzzling. Ranking Lisbon at the same global-city level as Oslo, Birmingham and Brisbane seems questionable, to say nothing of bundling it with cities such as Brisbane, Bucharest, Bratislava(!), Montevideo(!!) and Almaty(!!!??).

Lisbon is no Manhattan, but it is not exactly a backwater either. According to Euro Monitor's list of Top 150 City Destinations in the world, Lisbon is placed at a respectable 47th place, with 1.7 million arrivals per year, higher than Zurich's 1.4 million and São Paulo's 1.1 million, two cities classified by the GaWC group as beta global cities.

Lisbon is also the 7th most popular city in Europe for meetings and conventions, according to the International Association Meetings Market 2006 survey of the International Congress & Convention Association:

1. Vienna - 147 meetings during 2006
2. Paris - 130
3. Barcelona - 103
4. Berlin - 91
5. Budapest - 86
6. Prague - 82
7. Lisbon & Copenhagen - 69 each

Portugal itself ranks 15th out of 130 in the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index for 2008, and Lisbon must surely be one of the two major travel destinations within the country (the other being the beaches of Algarve).

Of course, tourism and conventions alone do not a Global City make, but I would still expect a stronger correlation. I don't know all the criteria the GaWC group uses for their classification, but it seems to me they need to revisit some of them.

Firefox 3 beta 5: the SunSpider verdict

I just installed the newly released Firefox 3 beta 5, replacing beta 4 in my Macbook Pro's XP partition (a budding addiction to Oblivion has been making me boot into Windows more than I should). The main highlight of this released compared to the previous beta 4 is the enhanced Javascript performance.

To see how much of a boost Javascript got, I ran the SunSpider Javascript Benchmark with several current browsers. Here are the results I got on my machine, with a Core 2 Duo CPU @ 2.40 GHz and 2 GB RAM:

• Firefox 3 beta 5: 5000.6ms +/- 2.8%
• Firefox 3 beta 4: 5593.8ms +/- 1.7% - FF3b5 is 12% faster
• Safari 3.1 (525.13): 6111.4ms +/- 2.5% - FF3b5 is 22% faster
• Opera 9.50 beta: 10252.4ms +/- 18.8% - FF3b5 is 105% faster
• Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13: 29836.0ms +/- 15.0% - FF3b5 is a whopping 497% faster (I had no idea IE had fallen so far behind in the Javascript race).

To test the Javascript abilities of you browser, here's a couple of jewels from the past reimplemented in Javascript: Manic Miner and Donkey Kong. Both are surprisingly hard -- where's all my muscle memory gone?