Some of Miami's most striking features as a world city include its putative role in the international drug trade, the role of foreigners and recent immigrants in the running of the city, and the odd combination of a relatively low rank in the national urban hierarchy with a high rank in the international urban hierarchy.
It is not easy to find another city like this - at least, not in the present.
From the second half of the 19th century, Shanghai was known as the "Whore of the Orient."
It was a cosmopolitan and glamorous city, in ways not unlike Berlin or Paris at the time. The difference was that it was controlled for the most part by foreigners.
Since the British enforcement of the Treaty of Nanjing in the 1840s, the Chinese government allowed considerable freedoms to foreign residents and traders in Shanghai.
Today, there are still parts of the city known as the French Concession or the International Concession. These are the areas where the Western expatriates lived and worked, without interference and with considerable freedoms.
They were the newly rich, and most viewed Shanghai as a business opportunity, rather than calling it home.
The reason for this disproportionate role of foreigners in the city was that Chinese emperors during the 19th century were pre-occupied with their own survival and with their control of the core of the mainland. To them, Shanghai was something of a foreign affair.
Around the turn of the century, Shanghai had become a major global city. But within China it remained a rather peripheral place.
The raison d'etre of Shanghai was its terrific harbor and location at the head of the Yangtze River and its tributaries.
The city's economic backbone was trade, and much of it was illegal.
Since the late 18th century, the British had been pushing opium on the Chinese as a way to balance their trade books.
There was some resistance to the drug trade from the Chinese government. One emperor even appointed a "drug czar" by the name of Lin Zexu.
You can find a recently erected statue of Commissioner Lin in New York's Chinatown, a clever gesture by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to reach out to that city's Chinese population and to co-opt them in the current war against drugs. But that is another story.
Then, too, drug czars were not terribly successful. Shanghai became a city of drugs, organized crime, shady real estate deals, money laundering (in as far as that was even necessary), and a refuge for anyone who had something to hide.
At the turn of the century, the city boasted some 1,500 opium dens. The drug trade financed much of the property development in Shanghai, including the grandiose architecture that was built on the Bund.
This was Shanghai's Wall Street or, perhaps more pointedly, Shanghai's Brickell Avenue.
All of this came to an end with the communist takeover in 1949. With foreigners expelled and trade curtailed, the city's fate was now in the hands solely of the Chinese government.
Almost overnight, Shanghai tumbled down the urban hierarchy and was a world city no more. For about four decades, Shanghai remained in a state of neglect, stagnation and decay
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And now, this turbulent city is back with a roar.
In what many consider a strategic decision by the Chinese government to counter Hong Kong's monopolistic role as China's global gateway city, the government has for the past 10 years been pouring money into the development of Shanghai.
With cranes dotting the skyline, old structures are being torn down and modern high-rise buildings are being put in their place.
Between 1991 and 1995, foreign investment in Shanghai increased twenty-fold. China is in control, but the foreigners are back. And Shanghai is reclaiming its place as a world city.
If there were similarities between the old Shanghai and present-day Miami, they came to an abrupt end in 1949.
In the past century, Shanghai has had at least three lives. It is the kind of city that you cannot keep down for too long, if only because of its superb geographic location.
That last observation should be reassuring to Miami. Politics may change, yet geography endures.
But let's not take the comparison too far. And I never said "Whore of the Americas."
Jan Nijman is a professor of Geography and Regional Studies at the University of Miami.