COOL in the EU

The world is going through a largely unseen revolution at the moment -- and an important historical watershed. For the first time ever, more people live in cities and towns than in the countryside. The 21st century is the first truly urban era.
Monster-sized cities in the developing world are growing like cancerous tumors. But it's a trend that can be misleading. Even if the big cities are getting bigger, it's the mid-sized ones that are growing even faster. Half of all city dwellers live in metropolitan areas with 500,000 inhabitants or less. Especially in the Western world it's the so-called "second cities" rather than the overpopulated metropolises that are growing and are often culturally more interesting: San Francisco instead of Los Angeles, Barcelona not Madrid, and Hamburg instead of Berlin.
Companies and their employees try to avoid mega-cities, if at all possible. In a world increasingly tied together by globalization and technology, second cities have an easier time flourishing away from larger urban areas. "As soon as a city reaches a certain size, its economic productivity starts to sink," says Mario Pezzini, a deputy director at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. An expert on regional competitiveness, he believes the turning point comes once a metropolitan area reaches 6 million inhabitants. After that, higher rents, commuter distances and general urban chaos begin to drag a city down and "create a situation where at best the center remains a desirable place -- but only for the rich."
Enormous urban agglomerations like Lagos, Mumbai, São Paulo, or Mexico City are pretty much ungovernable. The plight of the poor engenders a standing army of foot soldiers for organized crime. The wealthy protect themselves since they can no longer depend on the state authorities to do so. In such situations the drug trade starts to flourish.
But the crisis hitting megalopolises is an opportunity for second cities. Few would contend that Manila is a cool city. To be cool a city needs to have a manageable size, be safe, offer chances to improve one's lot in life, and have an identifiable elite innovative enough to ensure progress and prosperity. San Francisco is cool. Barcelona is cool.
More than anything, such cities are cool because they are magnets for "creative classes" of people that inspire and stimulate each other. Both the British sociologist Charles Landry and the US urban researcher Richard Florida have helped develop the concept of such a class of workers, including graphic and fashion designers, computer freaks and software developers, musicians, scientists, engineers, poets, analysts, journalists, actors. It's a diverse and colorful group, exemplified by the ability to create ideas that can flow into companies -- that will in turn attract return-hungry investors with plenty of start-up capital