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2011
Marked by Influx of Beta Cities New to Top 25 | Bad Data on the Internet | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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After a review of the 2005 ranking data, it was determined that two
towers, the Al Fattan Towers, reported as completed in Dubai by December
31, 2005, were actually not finished until February 2006, resulting
in incorrect scoring for Dubai for 2005 (now corrected). A broader
review exposed additional bad data in a few of the cities ranked.
Another major correction to the information we had was the removal
of the Grand Duta Hyatt in Kuala Lumpur, a building still reported
as completed in 2004 by various sources, but that was never actually
built. A subsequent investigation determined that many of the most respected websites and hard-copy sources publishing skyscraper and other building information had incorrect information, which was often repeated by different sources, or published data in an inconsistent manner. |
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2011 turned out, to our own surprise, to have the most radical changes in the Ultrapolis World’s Twenty-Five Tallest Cities rankings since we started the survey; and we confidently say that in no other year since skyscrapers started being built at the end of the 19th century in the United States, has there been such a change in the statuses of the world’s tallest cities, or so many records being broken in so many different urban areas. For a century New York City stood as the world’s tallest city by a wide margin, with its fellow American cities of Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles reigning alongside it for decades in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th places respectively, and American cities dominated the top for just as long. In the 1990’s we started seeing the first signs of the disturbance of that order, which was then largely overturned in the first decade of the 21st century. |
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Our procedures now call for verification
of the existence and completion of buildings not previously reviewed
or documented, after we complete the initial review of all 1,400-plus
buildings and towers in our growing database. This database includes
the name, built date, roof and spire height, and existence documentation
when deemed necessary. New buildings for which evidence of their completion
cannot be found will be excluded. In order to rank skyline heights, several methods were reviewed, and the following one was determined to reflect most closely what one would see with the naked eye if the city skylines were placed against each other; that is, which would appear taller. Most methods yielded similar results. For each city, a review of the tallest 25-30 buildings is conducted, depending on the level of new construction, to determine which buildings are new and which are complete, and to verify in which year they can start being ranked. Because some buildings will rank differently depending on the inclusion of their spire, some buildings may not be included in one calculated score of its city's top ten, but are included in another. This also occurs when including towers. To track any corrections to height information, and prevent duplication of data for the same building, alternative building names are tracked for each city's top 30. |
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Where the Buildings Are
The Beta Five
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| It’s not just that more skyscrapers are being built than ever before, although that is certainly true at a record of 88 buildings of at least 656 feet (200m) having been reported completed by the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH Journal, Issue 1), with ten of those close to 1000 feet or more (300m); and it’s not just that the pace of new construction is accelerating, as it has dramatically since the middle of the aughts, probably as an echo of new projects started prior to the world economic recession. What is more remarkable is that in 2011 the skyscraper construction was concentrated in a few cities, not scattered throughout the world, and that these cities are not so-called “Alpha” cities like Shanghai or Hong Kong. Instead, cities hardly prominent on the world stage have followed Dubai’s lead, a city which itself was a village just sixty years ago, and have engaged in the construction of not one or two of their first true skyscrapers, but dozens at once, upending our rankings virtually overnight. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The New
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The
cities that pushed their way into the Ultrapolis World’s Twenty-Five
Tallest Cities, in rank order, are: Busan, South Korea; Abu Dhabi,
U.A.E.; Panama City, Panama; Kuwait City, Kuwait; and Doha, Qatar. None of these were among the top 25 last year, and just ten years
ago would not have been among the top 100. Busan made the most
stunning gain, moving up to tenth place from a position far too low
last year to accurately place (below 50th), and pushing Houston out
of the top ten for the first time since the 1970’s (Houston was 3rd at
its highest rank in the mid-1980’s and early 1990’s). Meanwhile,
Panama City, which completed the most 200-meter-plus buildings in
2011 (ten), moved from 33rd in 2010 to 16th, just above Los Angeles,
and way above all the biggest metropolises of Latin America, becoming
the first and only Latin American city to make the top 25. |
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| Three separate scores are compiled for each city: The sum of the heights of its ten tallest buildings up to the roof (spire not counted); the sum of the heights of its ten tallest buildings and towers, including the spires; and, the sum of the heights of its ten tallest towers and buildings (up to roof only). We do not consider the number of stories since they are not a good indicator of a building's actual height. The scores are added together and then divided by three.The result of this is to give more weight to actual floor space (100% value) than to spires (33% value) that are often little more than needles in the air, or towers that also do not occupy much space in the air (67% value). | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In keeping
with standard practice as established by the Council on Tall Buildings
and Urban Habitat, antennas are not counted.
We refer to this
method as the Calculated Average Height of the Ten Tallest, or CAHTT.
In ranking, categories became apparent, thus the tiers. Tier 1 are those five cities with skylines significantly higher than all others. The sub-categories of A and B note the clumping of the scores with Tier 1B cities' composite scores closely clump around 950-1000 in 2011, while both 1A cities have notably higher scores, currently above 1030. Tier 2 cities' scores are significantly lower than the five Tier 1 cities, and, between 2000 and 2007,closely clumped between 700 and 810. Between 2000 and 2007,Tier 3 are those below 700. For 2008-2011, the 730 is the new minimum score for a Tier 2 classification. The survey reviews the statistics of over 1,400 buildings and towers in 40 cities, and does an annual cursory review of a dozen more potential qualifiers for the top 25. |
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From Moscow to
Tokyo, to Chinese Village |
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In other developments, Moscow is completing
a new complex of towers that already includes the tallest building
in Europe, the 72-story, 989-foot (301.6m) City of Capitals Moscow;
and will add an even taller one in 2012, the 1089-foot (332m) Mercury
Tower. Moscow, the first and only city of Europe to rank in the Ultrapolis
Top 25, moved up to 14th in 2011. In a 2012 landmark development, Tokyo just completed the world’s newest tallest tower (as opposed to building - think Seattle’s Space Needle or San Antonio’s Tower of the Americas, but much bigger). At 2,080 feet to its pinnacle, the Tokyo Sky Tree surpassed the previous, brief record-holder, the Canton Tower in Guangzhou, which overtook Toronto’s CN tower just in 2009, itself built in 1976. For those in Texas, think three Towers of the Americas stacked on top of each other. If the Asian building boom’s Middle East front has just moved beyond Dubai, in China it continues its spread beyond its first and second tier cities, with thirty-three Chinese cities now sporting at least one 200m+ tower. In an extreme case, the village of Huaxi, home to 30,000, has just completed a tower just slightly taller than the Chrysler building in New York (see New York Times article). Perhaps Lufkin or Nacogdoches should be so inspired. Still, the bigger Chinese cities still hold the edge, with Tianjin now embarked on a 117-story, 1,957-foot building that will become the world’s fourth (not first or second) tallest building when completed in 2015. |
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American Cities Continue Exit from Top 25
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The above approach,
of course is not is not about determining which skyline is more
aesthetic, or which appears more imposing when seen by itself, as
other skyline ranking sites aim to do. It is merely an objective measurement
of actual vertical dimension.
Some visitors have pointed out
to us (some boosters of Hong Kong and some of New York City) that
their city should be on top because their city has more tall buildings. The
problem with the approach of counting buildings is that one is no
longer measuring actual height, but quantity of buildings. Certainly,
a larger quantity of buildings may make a skyline appear more impressive,
even if all the buildings are less than 500 feet tall, but it does
not make it taller. This is why sites such as Emporis.com and Egbert
Gramsbergen and Paul Kazmierczak's "The World's Best Skylines" rank
Sao Paulo relatively high on their lists even though it has few buildings
above 500 feet, and none above 1,000 feet. Those rankings do not focus
solely on height (nor do they claim to) as we aim to do here.
Why this ranking? We believe it is one measure of the changing balance of power in our world. |
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The CTBUH report points
out that in 1990, the U.S. accounted for 66% of all the 200m+ buildings
completed that year. In 2011, that number was 2.3%. The
world may be in recession, but the construction industry is still
creating more jobs than ever in many places outside the U.S., in part
due to economic bets placed by American corporations that see more
profits in lower-paid, less-protected employees elsewhere. As
recently as 2000, eleven American Cities were among the tallest 25,
and four were in the top ten. With the departure in 2011 of
Dallas and Philadelphia from the top 25, and Houston from the top
ten, it is now five and two, respectively. By contrast, only
four Chinese cities were in the top 25 in 2000, two of them in the
top ten. In 2011, with a lot more competition, the Chinese now
have six and four respectively. As part of that trend, Guangzhou squeezed past New York City, pushing the former number one world’s tallest city for a century, further down, now to 6th place. New York City's rapid fall from its long-held first place, abruptly initiated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, may see a brief halt, perhaps even partial reversal, if the full slate of new World Trade Center towers are completed in the next three years as planned (which is not a certainty), along with the One 57 skyscraper in the Midtown area, possibly securing even a third or fourth place in 2015 (even if they had all been completed in 2011, New York would still rank only second). One measure in which New York does and will always lead is in its richness of monumental skyscrapers of an earlier era that feature massive, yet intricate and beautiful masonry work. |
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And,
any visitor to any of the cities in these rankings will find that
New York's skyline is still the most impressive to see, perhaps because
of its vast number of great buildings - just as the city remains
the most cosmopolitan and exciting city to visit in the world.
In any case, as American cities recede in prominence in this realm,
as they are in others, and Arabian and Chinese cities take their place,
it will be interesting to discover how well the new skylines are maintained
by their newly rich owners. In particular, visitors to China
may notice that skyscrapers that in the West would look new for
decades, already look weathered within only a few years of being built
in China. Will they learn that these buildings require rigorous
and constant maintenance, year after year? Or will we see structural
incidents as they have in China with their gleaming bullet trains? We predict that after a few more mishaps, they will learn.
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| © The Ultrapolis Project, 2004- 2012. All Rights Reserved. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| World's Tallest Skylines - World's Tallest Cities - Tallest Buildings of the World - Tallest Skylines of the World - Tallest Cities of the World - Ultrapolis Project 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||