A city’s influence can be measured in many ways: financial flow, population, number of large companies, media influence, etc. I decided to take a personal approach and record every time I heard about a city for one month from September 24 to November 24, 2016. Many cities came up as the location for aerospace engineering companies since I was searching for internships during that time. Other cities were in the news for things happening there, or in articles I read online. I also attended the MiCities conference where many cities were brought up as examples of smart cities.
Over the 31 days, I saw 260 cities mentioned 658 times, or 21 times a day.
As I suspected, New York City had by far the most appearances with 11% of the total. That’s over twice a day. The big three of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago are #1, #3, and #4, respectively. Of my top 20, 12 were in the top 20 Metropolitan Statistical Areas. London was the only foreign city in the top 20 which makes sense, given it’s #1 ranking in Forbes’ World’s Most Influential Cities 2014.
These maps were created with the 3D Map feature in Excel.
A look at southern Michigan shows that the northern suburbs of Detroit had more of an influence than the western suburbs did. Cities like Southfield, Auburn Hills, and Rochester Hills showed up a couple of times, but the more working class suburbs like Livonia and Westland did not.
Keeping track of what I saw for a month was tedious, but it was good to quantify the influences cities had on me. If many people did this for a month or so, we could get a crowdsourced view on which cities are the most popular.