Metropolitan Miami is an exceptionally blessed city in terms of location, climate and natural amenities.
It has enormous potential for global, or at least hemispheric, business. At the same time it has all the qualities to make it a great place to live.
Many other aspiring world cities are not so fortunate. But, even though they are not as well endowed by nature and geography, some of them are competitive, sometimes very competitive.
Think of Dublin, or Milan, or Stockholm. Those cities owe a great deal not to nature or geography, but to human intervention or what is sometimes called "policy-created comparative advantage."
In contrast, when considering Miami's rise to world city status, it is striking how much this city owes to nature, and how little it owes to deliberate planning.
What Miami needs, and what could propel its development to unprecedented heights, is a Coherent World City Strategy.
The main pillars of such a Strategy can be briefly summarized as follows:
The first concerns transportation and technological infrastructure. This is an area that offers considerable opportunities for public-private enterprise and it is of vital importance in attracting business.
For example, with a Coherent World City Strategy, we would have figured out a long time ago the appropriate structural system for overseeing and guiding the development of Miami International Airport.
Another example: In many other cities, local government has been strongly involved for many years in the construction of teleports, business areas to accommodate high-tech information industries.
For example, Amsterdam's Teleport was initiated around 1990 and Tokyo's elaborate Teleport Town was designed in the late '80s. Miami's Network Access Point that is planned to be inaugurated later this summer is about 10 years late compared to similar projects in other cities and government involvement appears to have been minimal.
The second pillar of a Coherent World City Strategy is education, a vital and effective tool in so many other world cities.
In that context, it is simply unacceptable that Miami's elementary and secondary schools score below the Florida State average (not that impressive to begin with) on the FCATs.
Good schools are basic to the formation of a highly skilled workforce and they are also essential in the decision-making of corporations to locate here, when they consider the needs of their employees' families.
Finally, in Miami, there are too many public and private schools where Spanish is insufficiently taught.
Third is the cultivation of a service-oriented corporate culture in the public and private sector.
This is in part a matter of facilities and in part a matter of people's attitudes. Government has an opportunity to set the standard in the public sector and to induce the private sector to follow.
In a city that depends on international business and tourists, friendliness counts. Singapore provides an impressive model, even if it is a tough act to follow.
Fourth, in order to forge a common urban spirit and a collective local identity, metropolitan Miami needs the kind of urban and social planning that transcends private interests and that emphasizes collective interests. Otherwise, Miami is at the risk of becoming a model of the global city as a "hotel." And nobody wants to live permanently in a hotel.
This means, for example, that there should be limits to the ongoing privatization of land-use by way of gated communities; that there should be more support for the building of inclusive public places and spaces; that local government should give greater support to the arts and cultural events in the metro area; that local government should be more involved in building bridges among the various sections of our ethnically diverse and transient population.
The fifth pillar of a Coherent World City Strategy has to do with marketing. Miami is undersold, especially inside the United States. Outstanding examples of successfully marketed world cities are Dublin and New York.
It is hard to say (even doubtful) if the Irish workforce is really so skilled in foreign languages, but that is what the corporate world has been made to believe.
Similarly, it is hard to know if New York's "revivial" owes so much to Rudy Giuliani, but that is the news that everybody has been getting.
These cities are carefully and relentlessly marketed. Miami's marketing should emphasize its nature as a serious, efficient, cosmopolitan and highly dynamic city of international business, and a wonderful place to live.
Sixth, and perhaps most fundamental, a Coherent World City Strategy implies that policy prevails over politics.
This means that unity must be stronger than divisiveness, in terms of class, ethnicity and municipal fragmentation.
For example, a decision to host the World Economic Forum in metropolitan Miami (a huge marketing opportunity, to say the least) should not be in the hands of one municipality or one interest group. A Coherent World City Strategy should be guided at the Miami-Dade County level and higher up.
That seems to be understood perfectly well by the Florida Secretary of State, but less so by a number of mayors and commissioners locally.
It is sometimes said that Miami is a very young city, still in its infancy. Maybe so, but in the global economy, time goes fast, a lot faster than it did even only 50 years ago.
These days, there are many more world cities than in previous times and competition is harder. Cities rise faster, and they decline faster as well. From that perspective, Miami is not that young anymore. It is time to get serious.
Jan Nijman is professor of Geography and Regional Studies at the University of Miami.