Noting that “cities bear the brunt of the world’s financial meltdowns, crime waves, and climate crises in ways national governments never will,” Foreign Policy has just unveiled its inaugural Global Cities Index of the “the 60 cities that shape our lives the most.” Developed in collaboration with the the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the management consultancy A. T. Kearny, the index ranks Chicago eighth among the world’s cities, according to its strengths in areas that include business activity, cultural experience, and political engagement. (Crain’s Chicago Business handily sums up the criteria.)
Of course, UCP has chronicled Chicago’s significance—globally and locally—for decades. In addition to publishing the first major history of Chicago ever written, we’ve produced an entire library’s worth of books about our hometown’s countless angles. From Nelson Algren’s prose poem Chicago: City on the Make to Paul D’Amato’s photographs of Pilsen and Little Village, from the definitive history of Millennium Park to the definitive history of the AACM, from a guide to Chicago’s murals to the story of the Plan of Chicago, our local and regional titles paint an idiosyncratic portrait-in-books of one of the world’s most significant cities.
Our newest addition to this growing list, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, resurrects a Chicago counterpart to the New Yorker that mysteriously had slipped through the cracks of history and memory. We’re so excited about its publication next month that we’re offering a preview (PDF) of some of its beautiful pages.