In recent years, cities such as Amsterdam have used the term hub city to define themselves in a global context. Hub cities are cities that play – or aspire to – a crucial role in the international and globalising economy. As such they form a hub, a ‘node’ of relevant traffic. What exactly is meant by this is open to different interpretations.

Port City 2.0

In the beginning, the term hub city appeared to be primarily intended to indicate an upgrade of old international port cities with their booming open economies. The main difference was that today's hub not only referred to the physical connections with other important hubs but also the virtual ones. Tangible signs of this shift were the old commercial areas and industrial zones in Western cities that had been largely rehabilitated as legacies and serviceable for more high-quality manufacturing industries and services in accordance with the digital age. These places received names with symbols such as @ or # as a reference to their upgrade to new urban economies. Hub cities can also be recognised by their metropolitan character: they are cities with an important, appealing and advanced spatial and functional infrastructure; an international look and feel; a certain grandeur; and a concentration of a cosmopolitan populace and culture.

Competition

To be able to compete, hub cities must have a differentiated and communicable identity as its brand. Many cities in the Western world have presented this identity with symbols related to ports of which the hallmarks are openness, prosperity, tolerance, hospitality, a melting pot of cultures, inventiveness, freedom and safety, and a port of connectivity. This also fits perfectly the classic definition of port cities as prosperous commercial enclaves whose success was mainly due to their ability to transform primary goods and ideas into commercial value. Port cities were seen as places where needs and trends could be identified more quickly, where diversity was a guarantee for plenty of ideas, and where commerce yielded an inexhaustible source of industriousness and prosperity. Since the 1970s, Amsterdam has often used this image to define an important part of its character as a progressive city. This allowed Amsterdam to recover its image of openness, entrepreneurship and tolerance that had characterised the city, not only because of its tradition of trade but also due to the ideas of philosophers such as Spinoza.