Nordic cities nip at London and Paris’s heels in LaSalle index

While London and Paris have again come top in LaSalle Investment Management’s annual European Cities Growth Index owing, chiefly, to their size and competitiveness, Nordic cities including Stockholm and Copenhagen are nipping at their heels.

“They have good growth potential, they have the edge that most other European cities don’t have,” said LaSalle Investment Management’s Europe head of core and core-plus research and strategy Petra Blazkova.

Blazkova explained that the investment these cities have made in green industries, wind farms, pharmaceuticals such as obesity drugs, and in life sciences has helped place them high in the league table.

Smaller European cities are the ones that are not performing so well. “Mostly in Central and Eastern Europe , which struggle with the cost of living, high inflation and interest rates. But most importantly,  they haven’t managed to recover as well post covid, so the post-pandemic aftermath is is there and it is affecting them,” Blazkova explained.

Also, CEE cities are relatively small so their competitiveness innovation is not there, she said.

“Two exceptions would be Warsaw and Prague where we saw the reversal of the brain drain of the early 2000s and people coming back in the middle income gap,” Blazkova added. “That’s actually giving a bit of a boost to both Warsaw and Prague.”

This year the index has also included more sustainability elements in order to compare the liveability of cities. These include ability to cope with heat waves.

“The cities affected the most are obviously being penalised in the index, Rome for instance and other smaller regional Italian cities.”