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- With remote work, white-collar workers are moving around the globe.
- Urban planner Richard Florida argues that cities can no longer be defined purely by geography.
- When New York talent moves to Miami or San Franciscans move to Austin, new cities are being formed.
Many of the most vital global business and talent hubs aren't the biggest or most economically powerful in the new world of remote work. As white collar, or so-called "knowledge workers," choose to work outside of traditional offices, the world's best talent is migrating from superstar cities like New York and London to places like Miami and Dubai.
This is leading to a network of so-called "meta cities," according to a new report authored by urban planner Richard Florida and several Boston Consulting Group associates in the Harvard Business Review. Florida and his co-authors describe meta cities as "a web of cities that operate as a distinct unit and are attached to a major — often global — economic hub." Rather than being defined by geography, a meta city is defined by the connections between hubs.
Using LinkedIn data between August 2022 and July 2023, the report looked particularly closely at the talent moving to and leaving New York, London, and San Francisco. When it came to New York, Miami both sent the most talent and received the most talent from the Big Apple, when adjusted for population size.
Similarly, Austin, Texas received more talent — dominated by tech —from San Francisco than from any other city.
"Austin's rise is best understood as a satellite of San Francisco's long-established tech hub," the authors wrote. "Miami is enmeshed in New York City's finance and real estate complex."
Remote and hybrid work now allows workers to move to more affordable or otherwise attractive locations that better fit their lifestyles and desires. But even as people leave the most expensive cities, like New York, London, and San Francisco, those cities build connections to the new places their workers end up.
"The rise of the Meta City informs a counterintuitive logic: Leading superstar cities are seeing their role as economic hub expand, even as some talent and some industry disperse to satellite centers," the authors write.
New York lost more talent to Los Angeles, Miami, and Austin than it gained between August 2022 and July 2023, while the Big Apple attracted more talent from San Francisco, Boston, Washington, DC, Chicago, London, Philadelphia, and Atlanta than it lost.
Meanwhile, London lost more talent to the United Arab Emirates, New York City, Dublin, and Paris than it gained. And it attracted more talent from Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Lagos, Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Bengaluru than it lost.
The report ranked global cities in three categories — global superstar hubs, global talent hubs, significant hubs, and regional hubs — based on how much talent flowed there. London and New York were the only two global superstar hubs.
Seven cities, largely in Asia and Europe — including Dubai, Singapore, Dublin, and Los Angeles — were put in the global talent hub category. These cities aren't the largest or most economically powerful, but they "have leveraged cost, business friendliness, and — in the cases of Dublin and Dubai — affordable lifestyle advantages to emerge as major talent hubs," the authors wrote. Also in the category was Bengaluru, the South Indian tech capital where Goldman Sachs recently opened its largest office outside of New York.
Florida, who's also a professor at the University of Toronto, and his co-authors argue that business leaders need to adjust their understanding of the office and remote work based on the new geography of talent and economic connections. Businesses should use this new information to figure out where to find talent, where to set up new offices, and where to hold gatherings, the authors argue.
Rather than either forcing workers back to the office, or giving up on offices entirely, businesses should create places for their employees to connect and collaborate in their flagship offices as well as smaller satellite spaces in secondary cities in their network. The traditional office will likely give way to spaces designed primarily for meeting and collaboration, they argue.
"The companies that will be most successful are the ones that enable talent to do their job from where they are," Florida recently told Fortune. "And that doesn't mean giving up a physical platform."