Having reviewed Richard Florida’s Whose Your City the other day, I am unusually alert to stories about people flocking to cities from suburbs and the countryside.

So this FT story this morning caught my eye. It is about a McKinsey Global Institute study of urbanisation in China and includes this paragraph:

On top of the existing 103m urban migrants, Chinese cities will face an influx of another 243m migrants by 2025, taking the urban population up to nearly 1bn people. In the medium and large cities, about half the population will be migrants, which is almost three times the current level.

And I thought that Shanghai and Beijing looked crowded already.

I am going to Davos for the World Economic Forum this week and will be blogging from there. If you see me, say hello.

Prompted by Jason Kottke, Steven Johnson and Richard Florida, who have all posted the list of cities they visited in 2007, I looked back to identify my own list. It is as follows:

London
Zurich
Detroit
Cancun
Fort Lauderdale
Beverly Hills
Paris
Santa Monica
Dubai
Abu Dhabi

A couple of thoughts on my list. I was far less well travelled than Mr Florida or Mr Johnson although I gave Mr Kottke a run for his money (he has the excuse of a new baby). I also neglected to go to Asia, which is quite an oversight given the new shape of the world.

But I still like my list. Small, but full of interest. The photo above, by the way, is a shot I took of sunset in the desert outside Dubai.

A final thought (for now) following my visit to the Gulf. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of that strange and unconvincing region, Emea?

Emea stands for Europe, Middle East and Africa. It was popularised by US companies, which tended until recently to lump everything in the time zone around London and Paris together for the sake of geographical and managerial convenience.

Thus, a glance at Google discloses that AT&T, Microsoft and others still count Norway, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe as part of the same place.

This makes bureaucratic sense, in an Orwellian kind of way. I don’t mean totalitarianism but the fact that the world in 1984 was divided into Oceania, Eastasia and Eurania. Emea similarly allows multinational corporations to categorise the world into the Americas, Asia and that bit in between.

Continue reading "Goodbye Emea, hello Mena"

My epiphany about the Gulf state of Dubai came one night last week in the Souk Madinat Jumeirah. I was standing in the local franchise of Trader Vic’s, the Californian Hawaiian-themed bar, with a Mai Tai cocktail in hand, watching people dance to a salsa band.

I was with a bunch of visitors and locals, some of them consultants at McKinsey & Co, which has a large office in Dubai, as have many European and US banks and legal firms. One of the group was from Spain, another from Venezuela and a third from South Africa. Rounding it out were Americans whose parents were variously born in Jordan, Pakistan and Taiwan.

It felt as if I had died and gone to expatriate heaven.

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I am in Dubai this week to attend two conferences. This week is McKinsey’s annual strategy conference and next week is the FT/DIFC conference on world financial centres.

I have not been to Dubai before so I have the usual reactions of visitors to the place. It is an extraordinary accomplishment, but also a bizarre one. The rash of skyscrapers and beach hotels, including the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab, where I had dinner tonight, is an astonishing sight.

Continue reading "To Dubai with astonishment"