Financial Centres
Where banks and exchanges cluster, so do the hotels, tables and galleries that serve them: the financial centre is corporate travel's natural capital. Between meetings these cities offer the world's most polished conveniences.
A financial capital is a city where money is the industry, and the atlas is interested in what that does to the streets.
Discretion is the house style. Zurich manages a large share of the world's cross-border private wealth from a compact old town, and the Bahnhofstrasse looks like a shopping street because the offices above prefer not to be noticed.
The instrument has a birthplace. Bruges gave finance the word bourse, from the family whose square hosted the merchants; Osaka opened the world's first futures market at Dojima in 1697; Pingyao's dye merchant invented the draft bank in 1823 and made a small walled town China's financial centre for a century.
The consequences are visible. Housing costs, the commute of the people who service the centre, and what happens when the industry leaves belong in the portrait.
There is usually something else. Zurich's lake is clean enough to swim in from the middle of the city, and Dada was invented in a bar on Spiegelgasse in 1916.
Look at what the money built, and what it did not.