From the Globe:
Does beta city have what it takes to be an alpha?
JEFF GRAY
Toronto has the potential over the coming decades to join the ranks of the world's leading cities, such as London, Paris or Tokyo, the British government's lead adviser on city development says.
And Toronto could do it, he adds, without another penny from senior governments.
Greg Clark, who advises British Prime Minister Tony Blair and London Mayor Ken Livingstone as well as city leaders around the world, said yesterday that Toronto has the makings of what is known as an "alpha city," or key centre in the global economy.
Toronto, at the moment, is considered a "beta city'' for its globalized business credentials, in the same league as San Francisco and Zurich.
"Can Toronto be an alpha city? Yes it can, in my opinion," Mr. Clark said after addressing city council's economic development committee yesterday. But Toronto will have to better co-ordinate all that it does with an aim to competing for business investment with cities around the world, he said.
And to transform Toronto into a major player on the world stage, Mr. Clark said, Mayor David Miller doesn't necessarily need to win his fight for more money from the provincial and federal governments.
"There is a huge amount of capital that is out there available to invest in many of the things the city wants to invest in," he said. "And if the city didn't get a penny more, a cent more, from the provincial and federal governments, which obviously I hope it will, there are still are mechanisms" that it could use, such as public-private partnerships, tax-incentive financing and other "innovative tools."
". . . Nearly every city that made real progress in the last 10 years has done it using innovative finance in as much as using transfer payments from higher tiers of government," Mr. Clark said.
Critics on council and in the business world have argued that the city has been too reluctant to explore joint initiatives with the private sector or other new ways to deliver public services, such as public transit.
Mr. Clark, in Toronto as part of his duties as a paid strategy adviser to the Toronto Economic Development Corp., a city agency, laid out his vision for cities in the globalized economy yesterday in a speech attended by about 100 city bureaucrats and other guests.
He said leading cities in the world are strong in four key areas: creative industries, tourism, the financial sector and "power and influence."
Toronto has some other key advantages, being located in North America but not in the United States, and in its extraordinary diversity, he added, which attracts global companies. He praised the MaRS innovation centre, which aims to turn new ideas into commercial businesses, as an example of something Toronto does well but needs to do on much larger scale.
Ranking world cities
This ranking is part of the work of the Globalization and World Cities Study Group, a research network centred at Loughborough University in Britain.
It measures status as a "command point in the world economy" by assessing the comparative level of services in accountancy, advertising, banking/finance and law, which researchers believe are distinctive features of world cities.
Alpha: Full-service world cities
First tier: London, New York, Paris, Tokyo
Second tier: Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Milan, Singapore
Beta: Major world cities
First tier: San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto, Zurich
Second tier: Brussels, Madrid, Mexico City, Sao Paulo
Third tier: Moscow, Seoul
Gamma: Minor world cities
First tier: Amsterdam, Boston, Caracas, Dallas, Dusseldorf, Geneva, Houston, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Melbourne, Osaka, Prague, Santiago, Taipei, Washington
Second tier: Bangkok, Beijing, Montreal, Rome, Stockholm, Warsaw
Third tier: Atlanta, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Miami, Minneapolis, Munich, Shanghai
AoD
