HBR Staff/Yevhenii Dubinko
Summary.
In today’s era defined by demographic scarcity and environmental volatility, geography is no longer a backdrop for strategy. It directly shapes resilience, cost structure, and long-term value creation. Where an organization locates operations, buildsFor much of the 20th century and well into the 21st, corporate strategy rested on stable assumptions about place. Populations would grow, talent would be replenished, and climate risk would be marginal and insurable. Technology diffused gradually, giving organizations time to adapt. Geography mattered, but in familiar ways: New York meant finance. Silicon Valley meant technology. The Midwest meant manufacturing. Growth followed people, and people followed jobs.
That world is changing.
Prosperity is now increasingly about alignment between systems: people, place, technology, and institutions. What leaders need isn’t another ranking of “best cities,” but a way to see how these systems interact across places over time. To address this challenge, we developed a place-based framework to evaluate long-term civic viability, known as The Geography of Prosperity Index.
When we set out to build the index, which covers 250 U.S. metro areas, we expected it to confirm what most people already believed: that the familiar hubs—Austin, Nashville, Denver—would dominate, and that the places outside the national conversation would stay there for good reason.
The data told a different story. Cities like Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Frederick, Maryland, ranked in the top 10. The question we hear most often when we share the findings, regardless of industry, is some version of: How did Frederick make the top 10? That reaction—genuine surprise, not polite skepticism—is itself data. It tells us how poorly calibrated most leaders’ geographic intuitions have become.
Today, several foundational systems that once anchored long-term planning are eroding simultaneously. Birthrates are at historic lows across the United States. Workforces are aging faster than institutions can adapt. Climate volatility is destabilizing insurance markets, infrastructure, and supply chains. Artificial intelligence is concentrating its advantages in cities with deep technical capacity—such as San Jose, Seattle, and Boston—while smaller metros with high shares of administrative, clerical, and routine white-collar work face growing displacement risk with fewer pathways to adapt.
It isn’t just the scale of disruption that’s changed, but also the way disruptions interact. Demographic decline tightens labor markets and slows consumer growth. Climate stress raises operating costs, strains infrastructure, and reshapes migration patterns. AI and automation reward regions with strong digital infrastructure, technical talent, and adaptive institutions. Each force on its own is manageable. Together, they produce nonlinear outcomes, accelerating growth in some places while compounding decline in others. Austin and San Jose, for instance, are drawing investment and talent as AI hubs, while midsized administrative centers—such as Springfield, Illinois, and Carson City, Nevada—face concentrated workforce vulnerability with limited capacity to retrain or pivot.
In our work with leadership teams across industries, we’ve found that most organizations still analyze these risks in silos. Human resources teams focus on hiring and retention, risk officers track climate exposure, and technology leaders plan for automation. Real estate and location strategy are often treated as downstream execution problems rather than board-level strategic questions.
That separation is increasingly dangerous.
In an era defined by demographic scarcity and environmental volatility, geography is no longer a backdrop for strategy. It directly shapes resilience, cost structure, and long-term value creation. Where an organization locates operations, builds supply chains, recruits talent, and invests capital now determines its ability to withstand shocks as much as its pricing or product mix.
Seeing the Landscape as a System
Rather than focusing on short-term growth metrics like GDP or job creation alone, the index examines five interconnected systems that increasingly determine whether a region can sustain prosperity:
- Population renewal, including birthrates, migration patterns, and aging dynamics.
- Climate resilience, measuring exposure to heat, flooding, wildfire, and insurance risk alongside adaptive capacity.
- Automation readiness, capturing digital infrastructure, technical talent, and the ability to translate AI into productivity gains.
- Social cohesion, reflecting trust, civic engagement, inclusion, and belonging—factors critical to talent retention and institutional effectiveness.
- Governance and foresight, assessing fiscal stability, long-term planning, and the capacity to adapt rather than react.
Each system, individually, tells an important story. Together, they explain why some regions absorb shocks and compound advantage while others struggle to recover. The goal isn’t to predict winners and losers, but to surface where risk is concentrated, where opportunity is durable, and where strategic intervention is most likely to pay off. The index’s top-ranked metro is New York–Jersey City–Newark, which was lifted to first place largely by an unmatched Social Cohesion score (0.95, ranked first nationally), despite having a less-than-stellar Governance and Foresight score.
