Winner-Take-All Cities

This chapter examines the phenomenon “winner-take-all cities.” Large segments of the modern economy have been shown to conform to a “winner-take-all” pattern as superstar talent draws a disproportionate share of economic rewards (Rosen 1981; Adler 1985; Frank and Cook, 1996). But cities also conform to a winner-take-all pattern in which a small group of global “superstar cities” (Gyourko et al., 2013) account for a disproportionate share of talent, economic activity, innovation, and wealth (Florida, 2017). We track the distribution of several key factors to identify and describe this pattern of winner-take-all urbanism in global cities, using novel data on venture capital-backed startups and billionaire wealth, which we compare to the distribution of economic activity and population. Following the literature on global cities (Beaverstock et al., 1999; Taylor and Walker, 2001), we also examine the disproportionate share of these activities that are concentrated in so-called “alpha” global cities. We find clear evidence of a winner-take-all urbanism across the global economy and the world’s cities.