10 cities which are making history

Which of today’s metropolises will define the 2020s for future historians and travellers?

Dubai. Ahmed Aldaie on Unsplash

A couple of weeks ago, inspired by a podcast about Babylon, I wrote a list of my all-time favourite cities – the only proviso being you’d need a time machine to get to them.

Like a lot of spontaneous ideas, it was fun to write and created a bit of a follow-on debate. 

But as I said then, and had better say again, this is a travel blog, not a history one. The point of the exercise was to extrapolate from the past in order to work out what makes a city so compelling now. That led to this question: which metropolises in 2022 will best qualify as ‘great’ to the historians of the future – and for the travellers of today?

This isn’t just another of those predictable ‘MUST-SEE’ cities lists – New York, London, Barcelona, Beijing blah blah. I’m much more interested in places that say something about the times, their region and the world. That’s why you won’t find Venice, Kyoto and Prague on here. They are cities that are beautifully preserved. But this is about the now, not the then.

10. Lisbon, Portugal

Photo by Michiel Annaert on Unsplash

Something has happened to Lisbon in the past decade. Maybe it’s new developments like MAAT (above); maybe it’s the relaxed visa laws that have won it legions of followers and not a few new citizens from North America and Asia; maybe it’s the arts festivals and the whole digital nomad thing; maybe it’s because Portugal seems bent on becoming a kind of honorary Scandinavian state in southern Europe; or maybe it’s because people like pastéis de nata. Whatever it – it – is Lisbon is having a limelight moment the likes of which it hasn’t seen in 500 years or so.

9. Tbilisi, Georgia

There’s a fair bit of jeopardy in these choices – the sense that you need to get there now before something dreadful happens to the place. ‘Something dreadful’ is Russia, of course, whose leader cannot bear the prospect of Georgia becoming ever more free-spirited and comfortable in its own skin. Tbilisi has an eclectic and sometimes eccentric collection of building types, great food and national parks on the doorstep. Its very individuality is a rebuke to empire builders and nation-destroyers. 

8. Accra, Ghana

Which African city to choose? Countries take it in turns to be the poster child for a brighter, more prosperous and harmonious future on the continent. Just now, it’s Ghana’s. I haven’t been, but you read that arts, design and commerce are flourishing. But one thing that has taken a huge step backwards is tolerance for the LGBT community. That makes me not want to go out of solidarity. Any city that persecutes any of its fellow humans is on the wrong side of history.

7. Tel Aviv, Israel

Photo by Shai Pal on Unsplash

There’s jeopardy here too. Maybe that’s one of the reasons Tel Aviv has embraced hedonism and epicurean approach to life so wholeheartedly.  It’s a modernist city with ancient roots; and for future historians, a place that made its fortune on tolerance and cosmopolitanism in a region where both can be in short supply. 

6. Copenhagen, Denmark

Photo by Maksym Potapenko on Unsplash

Scandinavia offers an alternative model for living, though future writers might find it hard to figure out why theirs wasn’t the model all cities wanted to  follow: healthy, sane, safe, clean, a place that allows its citizens space to think freely and live a good life. It’s worth seeing how Oprah described the place to an aghast US audience (they leave their prams outside coffee shops! They don't go to church! They have small and tidy apartments! They are happy!)

Which is too dull for some people: but the home of scandi-noir books and films, new Nordic cuisine and the Christiania free town certainly ain’t that. And an aesthetic footnote: brightly-coloured buildings were huge in the 2020s.

5. Bordeaux, France

Photograph: Mark Jones

The southern French city has seen one of the most cheerful urban transformations in recent years. For all the benefits of its location on the Garonne, the city used to feel somewhat  provincial and morose. Enter an ambitious mayor, Alain Juppé, who used the city as a springboard for his national ambitions (and returned there once his national career bellyflopped). Seldom has a city been better used. The fine, mercantile houses have been cleaned up, the waterfront opened up and daring architecture has sprung up – the Cité du Vin centre devoted to the region's greatest gift to humanity and the Chaban Dalmas – Tower Bridge without the fussy bits. 

In 2007,  Bordeaux made the UNESCO list. Before that time, the Bordelais couldn't wait to get on a train to Paris. Now the traffic is going in the opposite direction.

4. Bangkok, Thailand

I used to live in Hong Kong among some of the most active and enthusiastic travellers on the planet. You soon worked out which were on the list of Top Cities in the region. Tokyo, naturally, Taipei, increasingly – but Bangkok, consistently. If food and shopping are your thing  (and they are definitely Hong Konger things) the Thai capital is as inventive and varied as anywhere. The rise of the Asian mega-city will be a good subject for our future historians. All Bangkok needs to be truly great is the end of the internal combustion engine.  

3. Portland, USA

Portlandia: historically hipster

The history of cities is size-ist. We gawp at the historical extent of Edo or Chang’an, feel awed by the uncontained sprawl of a Sao Paulo or Shanghai. But the history of cities is also the history of the second- or third-tier places, the provincial capitals that out of almost nowhere shape tastes and trends way beyond their borders. Such a place today is Portland – so zeitgeisty they named a TV series after it. But as well as its prominent place in the history of hipster – itself the dominant cultural trend of the 21st century’s second and maybe third decades – Portland has become a role model for small cities. All over the world, these big towns are being depopulated as a Tokyo or Paris sucks in ever more people, and talent. How the 26th biggest city in the USA got to have such an outsize reputation is something they’d dearly like to know. 

2. Vancouver, Canada

Photo by Mike Benna on Unsplash

Hong Kong once boasted it was ‘Asia’s world city’, a place where east and western civilisations happily collided and sparks flew. That’s over now. The strategy is to make it just one of nine population centres in the the Greater Bay Area, biggest urban linkage project on the planet. At school, Hong Kongers won’t even learn that they were once part of an entirely different empire. 

So it’s over to its sister city, Vancouver to show how you do a western city with Asian characteristics. This is Vancouver’s time: it gets to be urban and outdoorsy, a food and culture capital, a place where everyone’s star sign from whatever galaxy they come from says, ‘you will be healthy and prosperous’. 

1. Dubai, UAE

I resisted Dubai for a long time. The epiphany came as I sped past the latest made-up landmark – big picture frame (top of the page), which has no function other than to draw attention to itself. I thought, this really is the 21st century city: a place not many people could have placed on a map barely two decades ago, now thrusting higher, glitzier and more instagrammably than anywhere else on Earth.

Only in Dubai can you get in a taxi and ask for the Old Quarter only to be told ‘it’s not finished yet’. (This genuinely happened to me).

And in terms of Muslim countries, Dubai is the other 21st century narrative, the one that sped outwards and forwards, not back to a deep, imagined, pious past.

Dubai is emblematic in another way, too. This is a surveillance city. As in Xi Jinping’s China, the creepy paranoia of the rulers means that everything you do or say is monitored and checked. Come over and shop and party to your heart’s content. You don't mind if we watch, do you?

Nearly made it:

Singapore, Melbourne, Montevideo, Edinburgh, Shenzhen, Mexico City.

What makes a great city, ancient and modern: a checklist

YES Experimental

NO Construction-mad

YES Just liberated

NO Too busy making money

YES Multicultural and liberal

NO Bossy and authoritarian

YES Great music and food

NO Oppressive religiosity and/or human sacrifice.