Global Capitals
A handful of cities run the world's money, taste and traffic at once, and rearrange the visitor's sense of scale within an hour of arrival. Come not for a single sight but for the sensation of standing where decisions, fashions and fortunes are made.
A global capital is a city that functions as infrastructure for the rest of the world, and the portrait's job is to find the part that is local underneath.
The city is a system. These places run stock exchanges, treaty organisations, container terminals and hub airports, and their working population arrives daily from somewhere else. The scale defeats a survey, so each portrait chooses one mechanism.
Layers, not landmarks. London, Tokyo, New York and Istanbul are older than their present function and the earlier city is still there under it — a Roman wall, an Edo street grid, a Dutch land grant, a Byzantine cistern.
Whose capital. Several of these cities are capitals of something they do not govern: The Hague holds the parliament and the court but is not the Dutch capital; Geneva runs a treaty system for states that are not it.
Concentration has costs. Housing, water, commuting distance and the displacement of the people who service the centre belong in the portrait where they shape it.
Pick one district and one mechanism; the survey is not possible.