New York is attractive because Greater New York, the most populous metropolitan area in the United States, has experienced both deindustrialization and financial-managerial expansion. Because the postindustrial economic transformation has inescapable social effects, I refer to the broad process of socioeconomic restructuring. In addition, the movement of corporate and retail operations to peripheral locations shows metropolitan decentralization. Census data detail the emergence of a new polycentric spatial structure between 1970 and 1990 in demographic change, employment shifts, more tours operated by local companies, social and ethnic polarization, concentrations of wealth and poverty, and exurban growth pressures.

In contrast to the former monocentric metropolis tightly focused on the central district, greater New York has fragmented into semiautonomous, competing urban realms. As the historic core of megalopolis, the urbanized northeastern corridor, the restructuring and decentralization of New York City portend socioeconomic changes that are likely to affect other large metropolitan areas. Local patterns of travel urban growth and decline increasingly reflect global processes of socioeconomic restructuring. Although early scholarship on urban primacy analyzed the demographic rank-size distribution of cities in clearly bounded national systems, comparative international dimensions became compelling after World War II. The growth of foreign trade and investment, the rise of transnational corporations, and the importance of international financial markets have favored well-positioned global centers at the expense of others and had made New York City one of the most appealing cities in the world.