Australia's next big national focus should be to invest in its cities.
At least that is the view of Greg Clark, Britain-based chairman of the JLL Centre of City Research and author of the new analysis called Globalisation and Competition; The New World of Cities.
"Like other countries with resources booms, Australia is looking at what comes next ... It's the innovation economy, and that means cities," he said on Friday after a presentation sponsored by JLL and the Committee for Sydney. 
"Some cities that enjoyed the resources boom, like Oslo, Aberdeen and Calgary, are using the benefit of the boom to invest in their city. Melbourne and Sydney have not been investing enough, given the scale of the opportunity they face."
Mr Clark's work on the new world of cities, jointly produced by JLL and Mr Clark's separate team at The Business of Cities consultancy, argued that the old global hierarchy, with perhaps six top world cities, like London, New York, Paris and Tokyo, is breaking down.
"Cities increasingly specialised in niche markets enabling more cities than ever to go global", the paper argued.
"This is fundamentally changing the geography of commercial property and has deep implications for real estate formats, assets and opportunities."
Lots of organisations produce global rankings of cities. In fact there are over 200 of them.
Mr Clark said city rankings were important. The footloose mobile organisation of today is guided by global reputation and those global rankings help win big events, not just sporting festivals but summits and conventions.
Moreover, top 10 cities win more investment capital. For Mr Clark, it is a virtuous circle. "The trick is to be adding new supply of good quality," he said. And that comes with a competitive global city.
The new JLL/Business of Cities analysis breaks the world's cities into three groups.
The Established World Cities, now including Hong Kong and Singapore, have the "deepest and most settled concentrations of firms, capital and talent".
Next are the Emerging World Cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Jakarta, which, to varying degrees are investing heavily in fast growing metropolises.
And then there are small or medium-sized cities, which specialise in lifestyle, or innovation or tourist hubs. Melbourne and Brisbane are on the list, along with Boston, Tel Aviv, Vancouver and Copenhagen.
On that typology, Sydney has some of the characteristics of both an established world city and new world city. In fact Sydney, like Seoul, Toronto and eventually Shanghai, has the capacity to capture "spill over demand from the Big Six".
"Sydney has rapidly gained the attributes of a mature, globally respected city," Mr Clark said.
But Sydney's entertainment and tourism brand is much stronger than its business brand, and its innovation brand is weak. But Sydney's biggest failing on global indices is its infrastructure, with low mass-transit coverage, high car-dependency and environmental inefficiencies.
For Mr Clark, the 21st century city is a public transit-managed metropolis with multiple centres.
"Melbourne and Sydney should embrace it," he said.
The Committee for Sydney's chief executive, Tim Williams, said the Turnbull government's new cities policy should create objective rankings of Australian cities.
"At the heart of the new cities policy must be a sense of the comparative performance of Australian cities," he said. "If they are so important, we need to know how well they are doing."
The metrics can include factors like housing affordability and access to jobs.
"As we move towards a more systematic federal investment in cities, people will want to know what they are getting for their investment," Dr Williams said. "At the moment it is not measurable; it's a black box."


Money for cities     
Top 30 cities for direct commercial real estate investment, 3Q 2012 - 2Q 2015     
Rank City  $USb Rank City  $USb
1 London  129 16 San Jose  21
2 New York  110 17 Dallas  20
3 Tokyo  66 18 Atlanta  17
4 Paris  55 19 Houston  17
5 Los Angeles 46 20 Munich  17
6 Chicago  38 21 Toronto  16
7 Washington 34 22 Frankfurt  15
8 Boston  30 23 Stockholm 15
9 Singapore 28 24 Melbourne 15
10 San Francisco 27 25 Beijing  14
11 Seoul  27 26 Phoenix  14
12 Sydney  27 27 Denver  13
13 Hong Kong 26 28 San Diego 13
14 Shanghai  24 29 Berlin  13
15 Seattle  21 30 Moscow  12
     
      SOURCE: JLL