The Migration of Technological Centers
−3000 / 2100 · bilingual archive
Index

All 21 cities.

◇ Antiquity
−3000 → 500 CE
  1. c. 3500 BCE — 1600 BCE· Tigris–Euphrates basin
    Mesopotamia (Uruk · Ur · Nippur)
    Where civilization first wrote itself down.
  2. c. 1800 BCE — 539 BCE· Lower Mesopotamia
    Babylon
    The first scientific bureaucracy.
  3. c. 500 BCE — 320 BCE· Aegean
    Athens
    The institutional invention of public reason.
  4. 331 BCE — c. 640 CE· Egyptian Mediterranean
    Alexandria
    The first state-funded research city.
  5. c. 100 BCE — 476 CE (West)· Italian peninsula
    Rome
    Civil engineering as a form of empire.
  6. 202 BCE — 907 CE (Han · Tang peaks)· Wei River basin
    Chang'an (Xi'an)
    The eastern terminus of antiquity's longest network.
  7. c. 1000 BCE — 600 CE (multiple capital periods)· Yellow River basin
    Luoyang
    The cosmological center of the Middle Kingdom.
◇ Medieval
500 → 1450
  1. 330 — 1453· Bosphorus
    Constantinople
    The hinge between East and West, for a thousand years.
  2. 762 — c. 1258· Mesopotamia
    Baghdad
    The first systematic translation civilization.
  3. 969 — c. 1500· Nile delta
    Cairo
    The second translation capital and the medieval Mediterranean's largest market.
◇ Mercantile
1450 → 1700
  1. c. 1000 — c. 1600 (peak)· Adriatic
    Venice
    The republic that invented modern finance.
  2. c. 1300 — c. 1600· Tuscany
    Florence
    The patron-driven research city.
  3. c. 1585 — c. 1720· North Sea
    Amsterdam
    The first capital-market city.
  4. c. 1490 — 1576· Scheldt estuary
    Antwerp
    The first global commodity exchange.
◇ Industrial
1700 → 1900
  1. c. 1700 — c. 1914· Thames estuary
    London
    The empire that printed money for two centuries.
  2. c. 1780 — c. 1900· Northwest England
    Manchester
    The first city built by industry rather than for it.
  3. c. 1750 — c. 1914· Seine basin
    Paris
    The capital of state-rationalist science.
  4. c. 1810 — 1933· Brandenburg plain
    Berlin
    The world's leading research university, until it wasn't.
◇ Atomic & Digital
1900 → 2000
  1. c. 1900 — present· Hudson estuary
    New York
    The 20th century's clearing-house.
  2. c. 1860 — present· New England
    Boston
    The university-as-economy city.
  3. 1943 — 1946 (Manhattan Project) · ongoing· New Mexico
    Los Alamos
    The first compute-civilization city.
  4. 1925 — c. 1984 (peak)· New Jersey
    Bell Labs (Murray Hill)
    The most productive research lab in human history.
  5. c. 1955 — present· San Francisco Bay
    Silicon Valley
    The first venture-funded research region.
  6. c. 1975 — present· Pacific Northwest
    Seattle
    The platform-software capital.
  7. c. 1950 — present· Kanto Plain
    Tokyo
    The postwar engineering city that almost replaced America.
◇ Networked
2000 → 2030
  1. 1980 — present· Pearl River Delta
    Shenzhen
    The fastest urban civilization in history.
  2. c. 2000 — present· North China Plain
    Beijing
    The political-AI center of the second-largest research economy on earth.
  3. 1980 — present· Taiwan
    Hsinchu (TSMC)
    The most strategically important small city on earth.
  4. c. 1970 — present· Korean peninsula
    Seoul
    The memory and display capital.
  5. c. 1965 — present· Strait of Malacca
    Singapore
    The neutral node of the Pacific century.
  6. c. 2000 — present· Persian Gulf
    Dubai
    The first sovereign-AI city of the 2020s.
◇ Post-Geography
2030 →
  1. 2030 — ?· Distributed
    The Compute Empire
    The first center that is not a city.
  2. 2040 — ?· Off-Earth
    Mars Engineering Civilization
    The first center beyond Earth.