Hong Kong
I thought about adding HK to the list but first of all I wasn’t quite sure about whether it’s technically a city or a region or what. But also, more importantly, it does have significant slum areas.
Even in the centre you have buildings like Chungking mansions which…look kinda cool to my eyes, but do detract from its world capitalness.
London
Little surprised by the high standing for London here. Sure, they did a great job on the olympics but I lived there for 4 years and it just felt like a sprawling village to me. I loved it, but it just didn’t have the big city feel.
In the OP I did try to steer away from concerns like uncontroversial, English-speaking, good existing ties etc because those will inevitably lead you to London or New York, no matter how impressive and uber some cities in the far east become.
If the aliens come from a world like Coruscant, maybe they’d be much more impressed at the green-and-blueness of our planet and enjoy a stay in Costa Rica.
Either way, it’s pretty likely that the aliens are going to be pissed with us at some point and blow that capital city clean off the planet, so we should probably pick one that’s easy to evacuate. Or one we don’t care much about.
In the OP, I said it’s OK for the city to be in a poor country as long as there is not significant slums within the city itself. But I’m curious…which three countries are you considering genuinely impoverished?
Maybe, but who knows what they’d like? All I know is: my OP
I like the idea of Dubai. Not because I want it to be there, but because if you want something like Dubai, you might as well build a modern city from scratch just like they did.The only question is, where?
Chungking mansions?! They just look a little run down. Seriously, there are waaaaaaay worse places - and many more of them - in New York, Chicago, DC, Paris…
That’s because people are ignoring your OP and voting on the overall merits of the city rather than strictly on its hyper-modern visual impressiveness. Plus, as others have said, it’s a hugely American - and then to a lesser extent British - board.
Er Re The World, have you been on this board long? It’s miracle London is on the list. Provincialism thrives here.
That would be Islamabad. And as a proud Islooite I say, no fucking way.
Meh, Singapore is run by by humorless bureaucrats.
As it is if a world capital is ever selected it will probably have to be far away from major centers of power, otherwise you will piss of most people. Somewhere in the C Asian steppes. I mean you will probably piss off the US still. But, hey even money they will not join anyway.
I think we should build a whole new city entirely for this purpose. Where to put it, I’m not sure, but it should be somewhere in the complete middle of useless-wasteland nowhere, just to prove that we can. Antarctica, maybe?
OK, forget Chungking, the main issue is the actual slums.
Although, as I alluded I’m still not quite sure about the whole thing of HK being a city and a region. For all I know, the slums are a 20 mile drive out of the city.
Yeah, it’s gone a bit wrong. I think talking about world capital suggests to people questions like “where should the leadership, administrative, etc centre be”? Or “what’s the world’s most important city”? And so on.
I should have just asked something like “What’s the world’s #1 super-city?” where people will still disagree on what “super-ness” is, but they will be less likely to be thinking of rich history or whatever.
I’m not sure that modernism is the way to go, here. My first thought was for Vienna. I was there once and it struck me as a sort of Disneyfied ideal of a European city; churches and palaces, a few opera houses, the perfectly manicured lawns in the parks, etc. But that was playing into a stereotype I had which the aliens wouldn’t.
But those sorts of places are still impressive in a way that skyscrapers aren’t. A steel-and-glass skyscraper goes up in months, with the help of modern machines and techniques. Compare that the Cologne Cathedral, which was started in 1248 and finished in 1880; all carved and fitted into place by hand. The aliens take one look at that and say to themselves “persistent little buggers, ain’t they?”
If you require the world agree on one, then Toronto would be the only contender. American enough to suit them, multicultural enough to please most everyone else, no serious PR issues on the world stage, Canada is widely respected and we’re polite, how can that not be a plus?
I don’t think you could single out one Asian city without a shit fight breaking out, ditto Europe, America is never going into buy something ‘foreign’, and the entire rest of the world would refuse to go with any place American, I suspect.
Seriously, I didn’t vote because how can Toronto not make the list?
