What makes super cities?

The urban analyst Joel Kotkin at newgeography.com teamed up recently with Praxis Strategy Group to identify metro areas “with the most momentum going into 2014.” They examined a trove of data from 2007 through 2012 or 2013 (depending on available statistics) for the 52 largest U.S. metro areas.

“To gauge economic vitality,” Kotkin said, “we used four metrics: GDP growth, job growth, real median household income growth and current unemployment. To measure demographic strength, we looked at population growth, birth rate, domestic migration and the change in educational attainment.”