New York: a world financial power
Sorry, London: New York Is the World's Most Economically Powerful City
Our new ranking puts the Big Apple firmly on top.
Richard Florida, Mar 3, 2015 
New York and London are both powerhouse cities, competitive in everything from fashion, music, and finance, to now even start-ups and high tech. In recent years, the long debate over which is the world’s most economically powerful city has reached something of a fever pitch. In 2012, London Mayor Boris Johnson (who was born in New York City and is, for now, still a dual citizen) debated members of the Bloomberg administration on this score. And earlier this month in London, Harvard economist and native New Yorker Edward Glaeser suggested his hometown is fast losing its status to London. Indeed, London should be congratulated for its remarkable run over the past couple of decades, even as the U.K.’s economy has sputtered.
But the newest ranking of the world’s most economically powerful cities put together by my Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) research team finds New York to be the clear winner.
Rank Global Metro Monitor Map (Brookings) Global Financial Centres Index (Z/Yen) Global City Competitiveness Index (The Economist) Global Cities Index (A.T. Kearney) City Prosperity Index (United Nations) 1 Tokyo New York New York New York Vienna 2 New York London London London New York 3 Los Angeles Hong Kong Singapore Paris Toronto 4 Seoul Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo London 5 London Zurich Tokyo Hong Kong Stockholm 6 Paris Tokyo Sydney Los Angeles Helsinki 7 Osaka-Kobe Seoul Paris Chicago Dublin 8 Shanghai Boston Stockholm Beijing Oslo 9 Chicago Geneva Chicago Singapore Paris 10 Moscow San Francisco Toronto Washington Tokyo

http://www.citylab.com/work/2015/03/sorry-london-new-york-is-the-worlds-most-economically-powerful-city/386315/
Where is the financial power in NYC ? Let's study the New Yorkese local scale power: 
Manhattan

The diplomatic world power of NY: The Headquarters of the UNO
The Headquarters of the United Nations is a complex in New York City. The complex has served as the official headquarters of the United Nations since its completion in 1952. It is located in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, on spacious grounds overlooking the East River. Its borders are First Avenue on the west, East 42nd Street to the south, East 48th Street on the north and the East River to the east.[2] The term "Turtle Bay" is occasionally used as a metonym for the UN headquarters or for the United Nations as a whole.
The United Nations has three additional, subsidiary, regional headquarters, or headquarters districts. These were opened in Geneva (Switzerland) in 1946, Vienna (Austria) in 1980, and Nairobi (Kenya) in 2011. 
Although it is situated in New York City, the land occupied by the United Nations Headquarters and the spaces of buildings that it rents are under the sole administration of the United Nations and not the US government. They are technically extraterritorial through a treaty agreement with the U.S. government. However, in exchange for local police, fire protection and other services, the United Nations agrees to acknowledge most local, state, and federal laws. 

Transportation: a key system to remain connected
Subway map
How to remain the 1st global city ?

The new World Trade Center: "One World Trade Center"
Standing as a shining beacon for the new Downtown, and a bold addition the skyline, One World Trade Center is safe, sustainable, and artistically dynamic. Soaring to a symbolic 1,776 feet — it is the Western Hemisphere’s tallest building, and already an iconic New York landmark.
Building Facts 
•	Opened October 2014 
•	Architect: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (David M. Childs) 
•	Tallest of new WTC Complex 
•	104 Stories / 1776 feet high 
•	3 million rentable square feet of space 
•	55 foot high office lobby 
•	54 High-speed destination dispatch passenger elevators 
•	Life-safety systems far exceed NYC building code 
•	Bound by West, Fulton, Washington and Vesey Streets
 (2013)
Remain at the top of global cities thanks to Science Parks: 

AN INTERNATIONAL HUB FOR COLLABORATION AND INNOVATION 
The Alexandria Center for Life Science – New York City is designed to foster unique and innovative collaborations among New York’s world-renowned academic and medical institutions, preeminent scientific talent, top-tier investment capital, and the broad and diverse commercial life science industry and to speed the translation of promising new life science discoveries “from bench to bedside.” It is New York’s first and only premier life science park in New York City. 
 ** Proposed Science Park Hopes to Lure Biotech to New York 
By THOMAS J. LUECK and JIM RUTENBERG 
Published: August 11, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/11/nyregion/11bio.html?_r=0
A California real estate company has agreed to build a $700 million complex of commercial health care laboratories on the campus of Bellevue Hospital Center, a venture that city officials hope will spur the growth of the biotechnology industry in New York. The East River Science Park, as the complex would be named, would cover four and a half acres owned by the city's Health and Hospitals Corporation between 28th and 29th Streets and First Avenue and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. Officials said it was being created to attract the kind of the small start-up companies that are routinely spun off from academic research projects at the city's universities and hospitals and to appeal to established biotechnology companies now clustered in places like Silicon Valley.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who announced the deal yesterday, said Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a real estate investment trust in Pasadena, Calif., that specializes in medical laboratories, had agreed to build the complex even before it had lined up commercial tenants.
Mr. Bloomberg said the city was already a leading center of bioscience research, and could become "one of the nation's primary bioscience clusters as well" with the new East Side complex. 

Gentrification: the case of Harlem

No Longer Majority Black, Harlem Is in Transition
By SAM ROBERTSJAN. 5, 2010 

For nearly a century, Harlem has been synonymous with black urban America. Given its magnetic and growing appeal to younger black professionals and its historic residential enclaves and cultural institutions, the neighborhood’s reputation as the capital of black America seems unlikely to change soon.
But the neighborhood is in the midst of a profound and accelerating shift. In greater Harlem, which runs river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street, blacks are no longer a majority of the population — a shift that actually occurred a decade ago, but was largely overlooked.
Change has been even more pronounced in the narrow north-south corridor defined as central Harlem, which planners roughly define as north of 110th Street between Fifth and St. Nicholas Avenues.
There, blacks account for 6 in 10 residents, but those born in the United States make up barely half of all residents. Since 2000, the proportion of whites living there has more than doubled, to more than one in 10 residents — the highest since the 1940s. The Hispanic population, which was concentrated in East Harlem, is now at an all-time high in central Harlem, up 27 percent since 2000.
Harlem, said Michael Henry Adams, a historian of the neighborhood and a resident, “is poised again at a point of pivotal transition.” Harlem is hardly the only ethnic neighborhood to have metamorphosed because of inroads by housing pioneers seeking bargains and more space — Little Italy, for instance, has been largely gobbled up by immigrants expanding the boundaries of Chinatown and by creeping gentrification from SoHo. But Harlem has evolved uniquely.
Because so much of the community was devastated by demolition for urban renewal, arson and abandonment beginning in the 1960s, many newcomers have not so much dislodged existing residents as succeeded them. In the 1970s alone, the black population of central Harlem declined by more than 30 percent.
“There are people who would like to maintain Harlem as a ‘black enclave,’ but the only way to do that is to own it,” Mr. Dodson said. “That having been said, you can’t have it both ways: You can’t on the one hand say you oppose being discriminated against by others who prevent you from living where you want to, and say out of the other side of your mouth that nobody but black people can live in Harlem.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/nyregion/06harlem.html?pagewanted=all

NYC: AN URBAN MYTH