Southern markets have been showing a lot of promise as potential economic powerhouses, but they still have work to do to match legacy cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, according to Kearney's 2024 Global Cities Report.

The report has been published for 16 years and captures the current state of global leadership via the Global Cities Index (GCI) and assesses cities' future prospects through its Global Cities Outlook (GCO). The top 25 leading global cities have been fairly steady for the past decade, but social, geopolitical and technological transformation are disrupting the traditional global and US hierarchy, said the report.

GCO findings highlighted the emergence of a distributed geography of opportunity within the United States, specifically with highly specialized talent and capital attraction no longer confined to the "superstar cities," but instead spreading to a new tier of metropolitan areas, said Kearney. Pandemic-induced migration patterns saw a shift of people, business, and ideas from long-standing leaders such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to other cities in other regions.