For the past 16 years, Kearney’s Global Cities Report has been exploring the developments that most profoundly influence the trajectories of the world’s most connected and prominent cities—and their ability to attract, generate, and retain global flows of people, capital, and ideas. It’s based on two different measures: the Global Cities Index (GCI), which examines the current performance of these metropolitan areas; and the Global Cities Outlook (GCO), which assesses cities’ future prospects.

While the GCI captures the current state of global leadership for cities, the GCO aims to identify those cities most likely to achieve global prominence in the future. Although some of the high-ranking cities from the GCI—such as London and Paris—appear in the top 10 on both lists, the GCO sheds a light on the up-and-coming cities that are positioning themselves to challenge the leaders. The top 25 leading global cities have been mostly steady since 2015, but social, geopolitical, and technological transformations are starting to disrupt the traditional global and US hierarchy. Figures 1 and 2 list the top 10 global cities in the GCI and GCO, respectively, according to our most recent research.

The GCI measures cities’ performance across five dimensions, while the GCO assesses cities’ future potential on four.

• Business activity (30 percent): attracts a variety of global businesses
• Human capital (30 percent): acts as a magnet for diverse groups of people and talent
• Information exchange (15 percent): facilitates exchange of global news and information
• Cultural experience (15 percent): boasts a diverse set of attractions for international residents and visitors
• Political engagement (10 percent): influences global policymaking and political dialogue

• Personal well-being (25 percent): safety, healthcare, equality, and environmental performance
• Innovation (25 percent): entrepreneurship through patents, private investments, and incubators
• Economics (25 percent): long-term investments and gross domestic product
• Governance (25 percent): proxy for long-term stability through transparency, quality of bureaucracy, and ease of doing business

Both the GCI and GCO are based entirely on publicly available data.

The upshot of this year’s research is this: although the top cities, measured in terms of their openness to global flows, have remained the same, data from this year’s GCI indicates a growing prominence of newer, less-established hubs whose balanced geopolitical and geoeconomic positioning makes them attractive to capital, trade, and people from an increasingly fragmented world. Consequently, there is an ongoing power shift among global cities, as those with a wider array of noneconomic advantages pull in increasingly mobile global talent and capital.

Our GCO findings also highlighted the emergence of a distributed geography of opportunity within the United States, specifically with highly specialized talent and capital attraction no longer confined to the “superstar cities,” but instead spreading to a new tier of metropolitan areas. Pandemic-induced migration patterns saw a shift of people, business, and ideas from long-standing leaders such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to other cities in other regions.

To be sure, during the past two decades, Southern US cities (Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, D.C., and Charlotte) have been getting bigger, as people and companies decamped from legacy cities. For example, the South drives 87 percent of US population growth and 66 percent of job growth, and the region’s high-tech industry is thriving. Three Southern cities rank among Business Insider’s top 11 high-tech US cities. Furthermore, the South’s political influence continues to grow, with Washington, D.C., at its core and Texas cities dominating the top 10 in the Financial Times-Nikkei ranking of best cities for foreign companies. In contrast, negative news about how crime and quality-of-life issues are driving people and companies to move out of legacy cities continues to dominate the headlines.

But do these trends mean legacy cities are losing their leadership crowns to the South? We dug into the Global Cities research from 2015 to 2023 and found that’s definitely not the case. As shown in figure 3, while key Southern cities are, indeed, getting bigger, they achieved mixed GCI results (especially Houston and Washington, D.C.), and all have dropped significantly against the GCO (with Houston suffering the greatest decrease). In contrast, tier 1 cities are shrinking and while they also posted mixed GCI results, they outperformed Southern cities on the GCO (see figure 4). The main reason is that Southern cities fared “less-worse” than tier 1 cities in the GCO’s personal well-being, economics, and governance dimensions, but faltered in innovation, where tier 1 legacy cities remain strong and have improved their performance.

To further illustrate where Southern cities stand, we looked at the data through a hierarchy of needs framework—assigning each of the metrics included in the GCI and GCO to one of three ascending categories:

• Security: Do people generally feel safe where they live and work?
• Stability: Is it a place where the current generation has a good quality of life and thinks they can make a living and raise a family?
• Inspiration: Does the city offer an inspirational story, a promise to future generations, as a place that’s in a position to attract the best talent, companies, ideas, and capital for years to come?

Mapping the data in this way made clear the strengths and weakness of the respective cohorts.

For example, legacy cities’ performance on security and stability took a major hit, dropping 150 to 200 percent faster than Southern cities’ performance (which isn’t without its warts, but is still better). This essentially confirms the stories in the media about people fleeing legacy cities over security and stability concerns, and seeing Southern cities as being a place, if not of solace, at least where they believe they can have a better overall quality of life.

On the other hand, a major gap for Southern cities is inspiration. While these cities certainly have continued to grow their population, they dropped 50 percent faster than legacy cities on the economic growth-related metrics we tracked (examples of which include capital markets, foreign direct investment inflow, patents per capita, and “unicorn” companies)—and now rank nearly two times behind tier 1 cities. This means the jury is out on whether Southern cities are a long-term inspirational option for people and companies looking for a sustainable growth environment. So while people have been running from tier 1 cities due to security and stability concerns, they may return if Southern cities don’t foster inspirational growth to keep them there.

In the past two decades, Southern US cities have been on a tear, boosting by leaps and bounds their populations and the numbers of businesses that call them home. And to be sure, they have much to be proud of. They’ve become growing, thriving cities that continue to build on their momentum year after year. The question remains: Do they have what it takes to provide growth to future generations and position themselves to supplant legacy cities as the location of choice for the world’s top talent, ideas, businesses, and investment?

Based on our research, it will take a good deal of concerted effort, by both city government and those in charge of the cities’ leading enterprises, to create an inspirational growth story. Governments, for instance, can’t rest on their laurels, content that all the good publicity their city has gotten will continue and be enough to sustain their success. They should develop and scale not-for-profit, civic/business organizations that channel public–private resources and residents toward civic improvement, such as the Partnership for New York City, the Chicago Commercial Club and Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and the Bay Area Partnership. They should prioritize and scale venture funding and start-up incubators such as Chicago 1871. And they should create specific teams whose mission is to attract outside investment and corporate relocations, à la World Business Chicago.

For their part, business leaders in Southern cities shouldn’t rely on government to figure things out. Instead, they should look to add their voice to help shape and influence local investment and policy decisions that ultimately make the city a magnet for the kind of talent their businesses need to compete and grow. This could mean investigating how they can pool their resources together—for example, in some type of civic/business organization—to find creative solutions to the issues our research raised that could hold the city back.

At the end of the day, Southern cities should take a page from legacy cities’ playbook and deploy the best practices that can create a win for the city, its companies, and its people.