NY-LON

38  NY-­LON

Richard G. Smith

London and New York are very special cities and in this sense they represent the two poles of a transatlantic metropolis. Sir Peter Hall (2003, p. 31)

The term ‘NY-­LON’ is a descriptor, a simple (and simplifying) label, for how – through globalization – New York and London have become increasingly linked by a shared economic culture despite being separated by a distance of more than 3400 miles. The compound abbreviation ‘NY-­LON’ was deployed by journalists around the turn of the millennium to capture the sense that, in many ways, the world’s two premier ‘global cities’ are coming together, increasingly working hand in hand, to become not just one type of city (be it a global city, a post-­industrial city, a creative city, a mega-­city, a meta-­ city, or so on), but one city: a transatlantic metropolis that is the heart-­beat of the global economy. The notion of NY-­LON as a trans-­maritime ‘unicity’, an elite transnational urban network, was first coined by journalists writing in Newsweek magazine who observed a new trend whereby some of New York’s and London’s wealthiest people, entrepreneurs and financial ‘whizz-­kids’ were ‘resident of a place called NY-­LON, a single city inconveniently separated by an ocean’ (McGuire and Chan, 2000, p. 41). Observing the lifestyles of some of the two cities’ ‘rich and famous’, they noted how an increasing number are ‘working and playing in New York and London as if they were one city’ (McGuire and Chan, 2000, p. 41). As two of the world’s leading centres of culture and economy – Broadway and the West End, Manhattan/Wall Street and the City/Canary Wharf, NYSE and the LSE, and so on – the journalists noted how a number of high-­earning ‘yuppie’ individuals are darting back and forth: residing, socializing, working and doing business across both metropolises to be in step with globalization. The journalists noted the working lives of several high-­income individuals that stride both New York and London. A middle-­aged businessman, who owns both an apartment in the East Village and a flat in Wilton Crescent in Belgravia (London’s wealthiest neighbourhood), is cited as evidence of ‘how joined up New York and London have become’. He ‘flies between the two cities up to five times a month’ both through his capacity as a theatrical producer, ‘he takes shows between Broadway and the West End, the twin capitals of the theater world’, and the demands of his company that does specialized printing for investment banks, which ‘quite naturally takes him to both Wall Street and the City, the world’s two great financial centers’ (McGuire and Chan, 2000, p. 41). Further anecdotal evidence for the NY-­LON trend, a kind of ‘transnationalism from above’, was provided by a journalist writing in the London Evening Standard. In an article entitled ‘We’re the Nylons’ she contends that ‘Nowadays, every businessman, model, actress or young entrepreneur worth their salt wants the best of both worlds – a pad in New York and a pied-­à-­terre in London’ (Johnson, 2003, p. 25). Through three brief biographical 421

422   International handbook of globalization and world cities vignettes of the nomadic elite – the working lives of an investment banker, an entrepreneur and a newspaper journalist – Johnson gives a flavour, a fleeting sketch, of how a privileged few span both cities through their work and lifestyle. In addition to the privileged urban lifestyles of a rich minority the Newsweek journalists also noted a larger analytical picture; namely, a certain hierarchy amongst the world’s most famous great cities: ‘In a world dominated by money and English-­language-­based information technology, NY-­LON stands atop a lesser tier of second cities. Tokyo and Hong Kong are not in the same league’ (McGuire and Chan, 2000, p. 43). However, journalists writing in 2008, in Time Magazine, suggest that as ‘Asia’s World City’ Hong Kong has now joined New York City and London to stand apart from the world’s other leading cities – such as Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Beijing, Berlin, and so on – with regard to their importance as examples and explanations of globalization as a whole: ‘Connected by long-­haul jets and fiber-­optic cable, and spaced neatly around the globe, the three cities have (by accident – nobody planned this) created a financial network that has been able to lubricate the global economy, and, critically, ease the entry into the modern world of China, the giant child of our century. Understand this network of cities – Nylonkong, we call it – and you understand our time’ (Elliott, 2008, unpaginated). Indeed, the validity of the claims in Time Magazine of a transition from a bipolar to a tripolar urban order has been lent some credence. A Chairman of HSBC gave a speech confirming Time Magazine’s vision of Hong Kong as China’s Wall Street, joining New York and London to form the dominant axis across the global economy; a joining which he speculates will perhaps in the future lead to Hong Kong becoming first amongst equals in that triad of cities that rule the world: ‘Hongnylon’ (Cheng, 2008, unpaginated). What is more, the Hindustan Times (2009) also tacitly confirms the triad of cities as atop a hierarchy of the world’s business cities. The journalist speculates as to whether one day, with the problems facing its regional rival Dubai following the global ‘credit crunch’, Mumbai might grow to such significance that it would be locatable on the same axis as New York, London and Hong Kong, ‘with competition reducing between the London–Hong Kong time zone, the end of Ny-­Lon-­Kong-­Dub could mean the rebirth of Ny-­Lon-­Kong-­Mum’ (2009, unpaginated). Indeed, a common opinion amongst many business commentators and economic experts is that the axis of power in the global economy is shifting from West to East, and more specifically toward the high-­growth economies and cities of the so-­called BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China. The journalists – writing in such publications as Newsweek the London Evening Standard, Time Magazine and the Hindustan Times – who have coined these hyphenated contractions have all noted, if only anecdotally, that a network of great cities is an increasingly important geographical fact that functions to bind together the fortunes of people living across the world’s most wealthy economic zones: North America, Europe and Asia. Indeed, the term ‘NY-­LON’ has been deployed by some urban researchers (Hall, 2003; Smith, 2003a, 2003b, 2005; Pain, 2009) precisely because it is an invented latitude that chimes with a shift in urban studies, one that began in the late 1990s, toward trying to understand how some cities can be increasingly described and identified by their links to one another, rather than just through their internal characteristics – as had been the focus of virtually all previous urban scholarship, radical or otherwise. To further approach the idea of NY-­LON the chapter is in two more parts. First, some

NY-­LON  ­423 writings on urban networks, published over the last decade, are discussed to demonstrate how they lend further empirical support for the NY-­LON phenomenon that so many journalists have observed. Secondly, NY-­LON’s asymmetry with regard to the mega-­ and meta-­cities of the developing world is noted to point to a certain irony with regard to the wider issue of the global development of transnational urbanism as a whole. For, whilst many settlements in the developing world are also coming together through globalization, they are not doing so to form cultural and financial transnational spaces like NY-­LON or NY-­LON-­KONG with their comparable economies, cultures and ‘circulating’ high-­earning elite migrants, but rather to become hugely populous metropolises that are ‘transnational’ in a completely different sense: because of their rapidly expanding slum settlements that sprawl across national boundaries paying scant attention to the boundaries of political geography.

NY-­LON: the academic evidence Studies of global cities are generally replete with information that facilitates evaluations of individual cities and comparative analyses of two or more cities. The data upon which such studies are based are overwhelmingly derived from measures of attributes. Such information is useful for estimating the general importance of cities and for studying intra-­city processes but it tells us nothing directly about relations between cities, with how they are, for example, connected together through globalization (Beaverstock et al., 2000). Thus, there is very little publicly available information on the connections between New York and London because such networks are not researched and consequently not reported on. For example, published at the turn of the millennium a Corporation of London (2000) report on New York and London is typical in that it only highlights the two cities ‘common themes and issues. The study compared the general characteristics of the two cities with regard to: demography, labour force and income; major economic trends in the 1980s and 1990s; the metropolitan region; financial services; business and professional services; visitors and hotels; media; transport; economic development; and governance. Thus, the finding of the report that ‘London and New York, despite striking differences in their historic past and with very contrasting forms of local governance, have developed economies that, at the century’s turn, are at an extraordinary point of symmetry’ (p. 8), is sound but also partial because the issue of how the two cities are joined together is not considered. An oversight that is important because the symmetry between the two cities may not be because the cities are in competition and therefore duplicate one another, but rather because the cities are in sync as they complement and collaborate with one another. Decades of published research based on measures of city attributes has confirmed that both New York and London are the world’s pre-­eminent international financial centres; both are the world’s leading centres for the provision of legal services; both dominate the market for international advertising; both are the leading centres for international accountancy and management consultancy (cemented over the years through Anglo-­ American mergers). Indeed, both cities have higher concentrations of international business services than art found in any other cities anywhere in the world. Furthermore, we know that in terms of cultural industries both cities are the twin capitals of the theatre

424   International handbook of globalization and world cities world (buoyed by the successes of so-­called ‘mega-­musicals’); both have significant fashion industries (aligned with Paris, Tokyo and Milan in this sphere of economic activity); both have significant film industries; and both are leading centres for the global publishing industry. Thus, it was in the face of such overwhelming attributional evidence as to the importance of New York and London that Taylor (2003, p. 31) could declare that, ‘there is no publicly available information about the most important inter-­city relation [between New York and London] – the most significant geographical connection – in the world today.’ The NY-­LON phenomenon was first presented in Newsweek as a lifestyle adopted by some of New York’s and London’s elite migrants. According to journalists increasing numbers of people were flying between New York and London. This an observation is confirmed by subsequent research on international airline passenger data which show that in the period January to August 2001 some 1,609,337 passengers flew between London and New York, making it by far – if one considers passenger traffic between Hong Kong and Taipei as a national route – the busiest international passenger route in the world (Witlox and Derudder, 2007). In identifying the NY-­LON phenomenon Newsweek and Evening Standard journalists identified investment bankers as a key group of elite migrants making NY-­LON a reality: ‘“In terms of our business,” says Richard Corrigan of Merrill Lynch in London, “the cities are beginning to meld into one massive whole”’ (McGuire and Chan, 2000, p. 42). This observation is confirmed by the research of Beaverstock (2007), whose empirical study of international mobility within the global investment banking industry ‘unearthed a world city network characterized by . . . a New York–London dyad’ (p. 69). Beaverstock found that movement (high-­frequency business travel and commuting) of investment bankers between New York and London is the dominant global urban axis within that corporate service sector: ‘the inter-­connected high-­value service economies of cities in globalization are founded upon highly-­professional and knowledge rich expert staff, who are world city hyper-­mobile . . . the “NYLONers”’ (2007, pp. 68–69). The wider picture of a global economy articulated through three financial centres, the joining of Hong Kong to NY-­LON, proposed by Time Magazine in 2008 and confirmed by a Chairman of HSBC, is an observation that is not lent credence by Taylor’s (2004) research on global services. Through a quantitative analysis of a data set of the ‘worldwide’ office locations of 100 firms across 6 business services (accountancy, advertising, banking/finance, insurance, law, management consultancy) Taylor identifies London and New York as by far the most important and connected ‘global service centres’ out of a macro-­geography of some 316 centres. Taylor classifies those centres into ranked types – Mega, Major, Medium and Minor – showing that as a whole New York and London are potentially the most massively connected across these business service sectors, statistically way ahead even of those few cities ranked as ‘major’: Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo, Chicago, Frankfurt and Miami. Support for the NY-­LON phenomenon has also been evidenced through the identification of a coming together of the two cities through the formation of a cross-­continental office market (Jackson et al., 2008). The economic specialization of both cities through an inter-­linked financial service sector produces two of the largest and most liquid international office markets in the world, a liquidity that attracts a substantial strategic international investment behaviour that has the consequence of binding the real estate

NY-­LON  ­425 fortunes of both cities together. In other words, the performance of the NYSE and the LSE stock markets play such a disproportionate role in the real estate markets of both cities that an investment portfolio spread across both cities is, whilst liquid, nevertheless a risk because it is not diverse: any investor is not spreading his bets because NY-­LON is one market. Overall, the academic evidence supports those suggestions in the popular press that New York and London are both highly symmetrical and increasingly connected together and interchangeable. However, this is viable only when the two cities are focused on through very particular lenses: as financial centres, producer service centres, gentrification ‘hotspots’, commercial real estate markets, and so on. In other words, NY-­LON, in nuce, is an accurate descriptor only when it is referring to quite particular connections across New York and London; when it is identifying the dual urban geography of a wealthy elites: ‘Even New York and London are not like each other. The only way you can think of these cities as being interchangeable is to focus on parts of the city – finance or commerce – at the expense of everything else’ (Frug, 2005, p. 2).

A/Symmetry: the parallel worlds of transnational urbanism Some of them call me London, I’m also known as New York. Anywhere in the world you find me.

Faithless (1996)

It is the symmetry, the harmony, the synchronicity, of New York’s and London’s economies and business cultures which make ‘NY-­LON’ (as a conflation of the two cities) a most viable descriptor of how these two cities mirror one another in striving to place themselves as the powerhouses at the centre of neoliberal globalization. In the financial and business press New York and London are often presented as an inter-­urban connection that has a certain ‘special relationship’ and economic symmetry, and consequently as two ‘sister cities’ or ‘sibling-­cities’ with a shared fortune and future that are based on collaboration as much as competition. Three examples from the business press will suffice to make my point. First, in 2006 the Financial Times pointed to how the quotidian movement of money and financial products between the two centres is the source of their mutual wealth: ‘New York need not fear London. The competition spurs both of them on, and activity migrates between them during the trading day. They are the world’s great financial capitals. Both of them can and will prosper’ (2006, unpaginated). Secondly, in 2007 the Financial Times noted that the two cities must ‘hang-­together’ through difficult economic conditions: ‘the credit squeeze, and the fear not only of a US recession but also of a downturn in the financial services industry, has brought back into focus their [New York’s and London’s] close similarities – indeed their symbiotic relationship. There is nothing like a spot of common adversity to bring people together and that is what NyLon, as the twin cities are sometimes known, faces’ (Gapper, 2007, unpaginated). Finally, Newsweek magazine in 2009 shunned all speculation about an eastern challenge to NY-­LON’s hegemony, to point to how their symmetrical dominance of globalization will continue: ‘Financial crises tend to trigger overwrought predictions of major

426   International handbook of globalization and world cities economic shifts – and then debunk them . . . it has become popular to predict that New York and London (or NyLon, as they’re together known) will soon lose market share as cities in the emerging world use the crisis to wrest away dominance. But history suggests that the opposite is more likely: that New York and London will actually increase in importance over the decade to come’ (Pettis, 2009, unpaginated). The idea of a world economy articulated through certain ‘super-­star’ or ‘heavyweight’ cities – such as Rome, Venice, Amsterdam, London or New York – is a longstanding one (Braudel, 1984; Hall, 1998). However, the present obsession with identifying and confirming the world’s ‘leading cities’ is undoubtedly the defining characteristic of the academic and policy literature on global and world cities as a whole. Ever since Peter Hall (1966) singled out seven world cities, and Sassen (1991) three global cities, numerous authors working in all kinds of public and private institutions have advanced urban balance sheets for globalization of one kind or another. Little surprise, then, that there is a seemingly constant speculative interest, especially in the popular press and in policy circles, with foretelling those up-­and-­coming cities that might become like, or even surpass, New York and London as the ‘upper crust’ of contemporary globalization. Thus, and especially with the global financial crisis, there has been on-­going speculation as to whether the ‘gravity’ of the global economy will shift in the twenty-­first century away from the core cities of New York and London to cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai. However, whilst journalists, business commentators, think-­tanks, consultants, academics, city mayors, and no-­doubt most importantly, urban marketing professionals, have concerned themselves with identifying those cities that may match and join New York and London as the world’s premium spaces of centrality (viewing NY-­LON as a kind of urban prototype for advanced countries in the twenty-­first century), the other ‘transnational’ urban story of the coming decades is not about whether this or that city will become economically symmetrical with NY-­LON through growth, development and internationalization, but rather with how an increasing number of cities across the world – often because of their geographical propinquity – are literally joining together through a kind of ‘transnationalism from below’ to form mega-­or even meta-­cities that sprawl across international boundaries. In other words, whilst some residents of New York and London are treating the two cities as one place, elsewhere in the world a quite different story of transnational urbanism is unfolding. In the twenty-­first century globalization is shaking itself out, in an urban sense at least, as a series of horizontal axes or plateaus, urban transects of different and distinct intensities, that whilst co-­existent, are nevertheless parallel universes with alternate economic realities. Around the world it is evident that a number of different ‘circulations’ are producing quite different forms of urbanization. In the developed world, ‘elite migration’ is a key factor in producing the NY-­LON phenomenon, and is undoubtedly also bringing Paris and London (PAR-­LON), London and Frankfurt (LONFURT) and Hong Kong and London, to name but a few cities, into closer symmetry – if only for the benefit of a limited, although still quite sizeable, elite. However, at the other extreme, in what used to be called the Third World, ‘economic migration’ often manifests itself as mass movement for little more than bare economic survival. The associated massive urban population growth means a lack of living space with basic infrastructure, so that even the most marginal spaces become occupied. For example, in Lagos more than a thousand people live in houses made of scrap on top of the Olusosun rubbish dump. Consequently, urban

NY-­LON  ­427 settlements are forever spreading out and joining up, coming together like spilt blobs of mercury, amalgamating into ‘endless cities’. Sprawling across national borders as they grow together, self-­organizing into a combination of extreme underdevelopment and development, to form the new trans-­national ‘mega-­city regions’ of the developing world. Along the western coast of Africa the cities of Accra, Ibadan, Lagos and Lomé are becoming a vast meta-­city that stretches some 600 kilometres. A massively populated band of seemingly contiguous and never-­ending urbanization that whilst driving a transnational regional economy, not only challenges the national integrities of Benin, Ghana, Togo and Nigeria, but also serves to feed the economies of global cities such as New York and London. Indeed, the unsettling truth of global capitalism and neoliberal globalization is that the raison d’être of NY-­LON as a ‘luxury city’, as a place of blessed living, is to feed off the wealth generated ‘elsewhere’, to provide a luxurious gentrified stage that extends from Smith Street in Cobble Hill to Broadway Market in Hackney, an urban playground (‘I ♥ NY-­LON’), across which a privileged few (including the world’s most influential citizens) can enjoy globalization’s surplus.

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