Amoral cities are flourishing in a turbulent geopolitical era

Singapore’s immaculate Changi airport is the perfect place to witness a shift in the balance of power between global cities. Since the city-state’s final covid-19 border restrictions were lifted last year, it has welcomed crowds of bankers, consultants and lawyers, fresh off a four-hour flight from Hong Kong or Shanghai, and often arriving without a return ticket. Singapore’s neutrality is pivotal in a region where the rupture between America and China feels especially immediate.In most cities the twin blows of covid and geopolitical tension have proved more of a problem. In order to assess which are thriving in this new era, has compiled a rough-and-ready index. It scrutinises a sample of ten locations, looking at changes in four measures—population, economic growth, office vacancies and house prices—over the past three years. We rank each city by how it has performed on the measures to create an overall score.