Life in world class cities vs. everywhere else

[Mr. Clean]

Originally Posted by StephenHero

Has anyone lived in Munich? Is it as great as it looks? I was surprised it wasn't more alpha.

Depends what you are looking for. It is a good place to live, but it is also a fairly small city and certainly in a much different, lower league.

 

[changy]

Originally Posted by Dashaansafin

Lawl. Shanghai and Beijing Alpha???? Have you been to shanghai and beijing????

Relative to the rest of the list, I think they are in the right spot. Not as "World class" as New York and London, but more so than Buenos and KL

 

[Joe Camel]

Originally Posted by MikeDT

I lived in London once for about 6 months. Not sure if London qualifies as a 'world class city' or not, but I didn't enjoy it at all and wouldn't do it again.

Is this a joke?

London is one of the few cities in the world that is truly world class.

 

[Dashaansafin]

^Defiantly unbiased.

 

[SD1]

Originally Posted by GQgeek

There are definitely other places I could live where I'd be happy, however, they're places with some charm of their own and a different set of advantages, not ****** cities with pops of 200-300k, no culture, and nothing but strip malls and chain restaurants.

I live in a city of 250K that has emerged from the very chain restaurant/strip mall hell to have quite a nice collection of museums, galleries, nightlife, restaurants, people under 85, and proximity to the best fishing in the US. And it has some crime, homeless, urban grit, and, like everywhere else in Florida, white trash.

 

[globetrotter]

I think Chicago is about as great as a city can be, without really being a "world class" city. there really are tiers of cities - Paris, rome, London, NY, are among cities that are really unique in the world and really provide a service to the world. chicago has great stuff, but if it dissapeared tomorrow the world wouldn't be a substantially poorer place.

 

[Fuuma]

Originally Posted by impolyt_one

I was gonna say this about Chicago, and then expect every single poster from Chicago to burn me in effigy and dip me in whichever Great Lake they have there, but I don't really like Chicago. I am typing this from Tokyo, my favorite city in the world. The girls are beautiful, the city is clean, everything is well-made, people are courteous, and the food and drink are beyond words. There is no better city.
Every large city in Asia is a cesspool of bad taste and near barbaric people. The culture is stressful and the architecture vomit inducing. Putting cities in tiers is fine if you're writing the mercer report but for everyone else there is what has the vibe you're looking for and what doesn't. While I'm at it London is worse, bunch of people vomiting on themselves and each others, awful dentition, sucky restaurants, culture not as much diverse as fragmented, bling bling art scene frequented by soulless marsupials. Don't even get me started on Paris and its Haussmann architecture with stupid shops on the bottom making for a never-ending visual nightmare, its "n.1 nightlife in the world" consisting of three decent places that you can't get in anyway so don't even try loser and it's food that sucks compared to Lyon (populated by fat bastards with smelly breath). I could piss all over the city I'm currently living in but its not as well known so no one will get it. I'm probably the most well-traveled here beside globetrotter (we're top tier world travelers ) and I can tell you most places are imminently hate-able. For information my year: couple months in Montreal, couple months in Paris, couple months traveling. I find that most places have interesting aspects but that they are closely related to your own experience and expectations and not that much by the objective reality/ranking of a place. A human being simply lacks the means to experience to many things at once anyway. In other words if you coalesce the multiplicity of experience people live in a certain place NYC might rank very high but on an individual level it really isn't that simple.

 

[holymadness]

Your vitriol is really fun to read. As far as classifications go, I agree that there is little objective basis in trying to rank places, but there is an interest in trying to group them according to structural commonalities. The four cities I mentioned are unique by virtue of having more in common (particularly in terms of interests) with one another than with other cities in their own countries. They manage this through a combination of political, economic, and cultural importance, as well as the size of their population.

 

[in stitches]

to answer op's question. i live in baltimore, which is a **** hole. but even if stumbled upon a gold mine i dont think i would move to a "world class city." a few vacations homes no doubt, but move i dont think so.

 

[Eason]

Originally Posted by Fuuma

Every large city in Asia is a cesspool of bad taste and near barbaric people. The culture is stressful and the architecture vomit inducing. Putting cities in tiers is fine if you're writing the mercer report but for everyone else there is what has the vibe you're looking for and what doesn't.

While I'm at it London is worse, bunch of people vomiting on themselves and each others, awful dentition, sucky restaurants, culture not as much diverse as fragmented, bling bling art scene frequented by soulless marsupials. Don't even get me started on Paris and its Haussmann architecture with stupid shops on the bottom making for a never-ending visual nightmare, its "n.1 nightlife in the world" consisting of three decent places that you can't get in anyway so don't even try loser and it's food that sucks compared to Lyon (populated by fat bastards with smelly breath). I could piss all over the city I'm currently living in but its not as well known so no one will get it.

I'm probably the most well-traveled here beside globetrotter (we're top tier world travelers ) and I can tell you most places are imminently hate-able.

For information my year: couple months in Montreal, couple months in Paris, couple months traveling. I find that most places have interesting aspects but that they are closely related to your own experience and expectations and not that much by the objective reality/ranking of a place. A human being simply lacks the means to experience to many things at once anyway. In other words if you coalesce the multiplicity of experience people live in a certain place NYC might rank very high but on an individual level it really isn't that simple.

There's a lot of hate in here, I'm starting to like you.

 

[Fuuma]

Originally Posted by holymadness

Your vitriol is really fun to read. As far as classifications go, I agree that there is little objective basis in trying to rank places, but there is an interest in trying to group them according to structural commonalities. The four cities I mentioned are unique by virtue of having more in common (particularly in terms of interests) with one another than with other cities in their own countries. They manage this through a combination of political, economic, and cultural importance, as well as the size of their population.
I really don't think they manage to become some sort of extra-national entities as their essential national character is simply not sublimed by them being incarnations of supermodernity. Remains a familiarity common to even those who have never set foot in their streets, a large network of public transportation and cultural landmarks and a large mass of people. I personally think that a factor often overlooked in how people experience a city is the degrees to which it is in a state of flux; places like Hanoi and Mumbai probably provide a greater sense of dynamism and even scale simply by virtue of having the characteristic movement of modernity being constantly re inscribed into their geography, something a place like Paris or London simply lacks in comparison. If you're a metropolis addict you might do better in developing Asian capitals, hell even Casablanca, prob at 11 million by now so will soon be bigger than Paris if it isn't already -a fact hidden by feeble census structures-, gives a more proper sense of disorientation although it may seem quite quaint. Of course when it comes to evaluating cities western ethnocentrism either reigns supreme or is hidden under ridiculous exoticization by printed toilet paper like Monocle with its airline magazine brand of journalism. Now there is the internationalisation of certain taste, I mean young urban dwellers and their sudden cult of a good coffee and the ensuing trite representations is exemplary of the brand of bland Monocle-isation of young morons with disposable incomes and very limited conceptions that mainly congregate to large cities to realize and maintain a certain image of themselves that is, to be honest, not very location dependent but rather representation about location dependent. I am currently smoking Japanese cigarettes (Mild Seven) and using a Chinese computer (Lenovo from the producer formerly known as IBM) to chat with people from all around the world (well mainly americans) about our interest in (French, Italian, English, Japanese and American) brands distributed globally.

 

[Dashaansafin]

Originally Posted by Fuuma

Every large city in Asia is a cesspool of bad taste and near barbaric people. The culture is stressful and the architecture vomit inducing. Putting cities in tiers is fine if you're writing the mercer report but for everyone else there is what has the vibe you're looking for and what doesn't.

While I'm at it London is worse, bunch of people vomiting on themselves and each others, awful dentition, sucky restaurants, culture not as much diverse as fragmented, bling bling art scene frequented by soulless marsupials. Don't even get me started on Paris and its Haussmann architecture with stupid shops on the bottom making for a never-ending visual nightmare, its "n.1 nightlife in the world" consisting of three decent places that you can't get in anyway so don't even try loser and it's food that sucks compared to Lyon (populated by fat bastards with smelly breath). I could piss all over the city I'm currently living in but its not as well known so no one will get it.

I'm probably the most well-traveled here beside globetrotter (we're top tier world travelers ) and I can tell you most places are imminently hate-able.

For information my year: couple months in Montreal, couple months in Paris, couple months traveling. I find that most places have interesting aspects but that they are closely related to your own experience and expectations and not that much by the objective reality/ranking of a place. A human being simply lacks the means to experience to many things at once anyway. In other words if you coalesce the multiplicity of experience people live in a certain place NYC might rank very high but on an individual level it really isn't that simple.

I would change that from every city in Asia to every city in China. Korea, Taiwan, Japan arent bad.

 

[Manton]

The food in Lyon is great.

 

[texas_jack]

Originally Posted by Eason

There's a lot of hate in here, I'm starting to like you.

First two lines read exactly like you.

 

[clee1982]

You don't have to be rich to enjoy things in large cities, my take

NYC - Good all arounder, it's not the best in everything, but it's great in everything, especially if you're single. Food is good if you look around, people from all over the places, and a lot people to stay rather than people who just show up than go (guess due to American immigrant culture?). If you're in finance, NYC is the place to be in the US (you can still go to Chicago and SF I suppose, but no the same thing).

London - Depends on what you like, if you're really young or if you have family, not sure about everything in between. To me it's still over priced compare to NYC (except cultural/art/music, etc., those are cheap by any standard). Food is way below NYC on average. Don't get me wrong, there are rich people here, so you can definitely find the best food here, but it's so much easier to run into disgusting uneatable crap while still cost you way over NYC. London is also diverse in terms of ethnicity, but it just doesn't feel the same way compare to NYC, not sure why. The diversity seems somehow more muted.

Tokyo/HK/Singapore - all good, but never lived there so can't comment

Shanghai/Beijing - great to be in Shanghai if you speak Chinese, lots of expat in Shanghai that doesn't speak Chinese, but if you speak Chinese you can see something else that lots of people missed. Shanghai is more wild wild west than any of the cities list here is my impression.

Taipei - my hometown, definitely a lot more "local" than any of the above, but it's a comfort city if you're used to here. It's what "Chinese" is in certain way. HK/Singapore are too westernized. China is well, somewhat changed from what a Chinese society used to be...