The Great Streets
A street earns this collection when people come for the street itself — to walk its length, to shop it, to live on it — and when its name does work its city's name cannot. Eleven of them here, each with a page of its own.
A retail street can be ranked, which is unusual among the things this atlas describes. Cushman & Wakefield have published Main Streets Across the World annually since 1988, measuring prime retail rent per square metre, and the result is a list of addresses ordered by what a tenant will pay to stand on them. That is the criterion here. Not taste, not reputation — rent, audited, and revised every year.
The top of it barely moves. Milan's Via Montenapoleone took first place from Fifth Avenue in 2024, and the two have traded the position with New Bond Street, Avenue des Champs-Élysées and Tsim Sha Tsui's Canton Road for a generation. What changes is the order, not the membership, and a street that has held a place on this list for thirty years is describing something more durable than fashion.
The streets divide by how they were made. Some were laid out for the purpose: Via Montenapoleone follows a Roman wall and became a fashion address only in the 1950s, when the Quadrilatero d'Oro was assembled around it by tenants rather than planners. Others inherited it. New Bond Street was a speculative Georgian development that never lost its clientele; Ginza was rebuilt in brick after the fire of 1872 by an English engineer and has been Tokyo's expensive ground ever since. Rodeo Drive is the youngest and the most deliberate — three blocks that were ordinary until the 1960s and are now the shortest street in the world with an international reputation.
A third group belongs to cities that concentrated their money on one axis because the geography allowed nothing else. Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse runs from the station to the lake on the line of a filled-in moat. Hong Kong's Canton Road faces the harbour on reclaimed ground. Seoul's Cheongdam and Shanghai's Nanjing Road are recent by comparison and behave the same way: one street doing the work that four would do in a flatter, older city.
And one entry here has no street at all. Dubai's highest-value retail address is The Dubai Mall, which is why the city appears in this collection through a building rather than an avenue. It is the clearest evidence that the collection is about concentration rather than about pavement — the question is where a city puts its most expensive square metre, and Dubai answered it indoors.
What the twenty-eight have in common is not luxury, which is available everywhere, but the decision to gather it. Each of these cities could have spread its expensive shops across a district. Each chose an address instead, and then defended it long enough for the rent to prove the point.