The Ten Most Dynamic Cities

Too fast, at times. With growth overtaxing the electric grid, local leaders prohibited the sale of air conditioners last summer (in a city where the heat breaks 40 degrees Celsius). Still, the mood is bright. Known as the birthplace of Chinese communism because the revolutionaries staged one of their first major uprisings here in 1927, Nanchang today sees itself as the future of Chinese capitalism.

Quindlen Krovatin

The Great Pump

Moscow draws all the new arrivals, from babies to fortune seekers.

The economy of Moscow is booming like that of no other city in the developed world, in large part because Russia is still a fringe member of that club. Though it is now one of the G8 group of leading industrial democracies, Russia remains a highly centralized autocracy run out of Moscow, as it has been since Tsarist times. The capital remains the unchallenged magnet for the nation's money and brains. Evidence of the incoming wealth and energy is everywhere, in Soviet-era apartment blocks now draped in garish 15-story-high ads, in skyrocketing apartment prices and in packed restaurants, nightclubs and gyms.

Moscow is an outlier in many other ways, too. It's the booming capital of a shrinking nation, in which the population is falling at a rate of 700,000 people a year. Indeed, it is one of the very few Russian cities that are actually growing, enjoying a wealth-fueled baby boom as the national birthrate hovers below replacement levels. It is also the only Russian city getting a major boost from migration: the official population of nearly 11 million doesn't include some 5 million unregistered newcomers from Russian provinces and former Soviet states, says Igor Kuznetsov, a senior demographer at Moscow's Institute of Sociology.