Well it was at least a good election night in South Manchester. Our MP, Afzal Kahn, increased his majority to more than 30,000 and on election day it seems that every third house in our street was displaying a Labour poster. Looking at the world from our south Manchester bubble, and living our professional lives with others who live in similar bubbles (see Building Design’s survey of architects’ voting intentions), the election result can seem incomprehensible.

The papers have been full of analysis of the reasons for the result but few people have discussed the role of urbanism. In an article entitled How the Megacities of Europe stole a continent’s wealth for the Observer, written before the election, Julian Coman describes what’s happening. Writing largely about Milan, a city that is booming to an even greater extent than Manchester, he quotes a resident who told him: “It’s a kind of natural selection that goes on, creating a community which is much more European, open and tolerant in its mindset. Milan is not Italy.”

Milan’s skyline is bristling with towers and its economy is booming. Because of this, it attracts talented and ambitious young people from all over Europe who go to its universities and stay on to live and work in the city. This young educated workforce is a magnet for companies who relocate to the city to access this labour pool. The Centre for European Reform described this process in a report in May this year called the The Big European Sort? The Diverging Fortunes of Europe’s Regions. It describes a “sorting” of population and business as industrial production declines everywhere to be replaced by knowledge, tech and services that are concentrated in the larger cities.

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