Anchors and Catalysts: How transient populations shape city life
Optimising the balance between visitors and long-term residents.
Walk through Venice on a July afternoon and you’ll wade through tourists crowding narrow alleys, cafés spilling into the square, gondolas queuing like taxis. Come back in February and the canals go quiet as gondoliers drift lazily and the Piazza San Marco lies half asleep. Cross the globe to Dubai, where glass towers rise above a highly dynamic population, where 92% are migrants and 8% are permanent citizens[1]. Copenhagen, by contrasts, pulses steadily year-round with a stable blend of locals deepening cultural roots with skilled expats participating in co-working hubs and creative initiatives.
So, what gives a city its personality?
Cities are living systems, and their character is defined by the balance between two kins of people: Anchors and Catalysts. Anchors are your permanent residents, who sustain the city. They preserve memory, deepen roots, build infrastructure, invest in civic life, and maintain continuity. Catalysts are your transient visitors — tourists, students, migrants, business travellers — who inject novelty, challenge assumptions, open networks, and therefore spark innovative activity. Without an Anchor to capture it, the Catalyst’s impact tends to be fleeting. Without a Catalyst, the Anchor risks its culture stagnating.
Herein lies a tricky balance: the transient-to-permanent ratio is decisive. Too few transients and a city remains insular and slow to adapt. Too many, and social cohesion unravels, culture churns, and economies grow brittle. Within the sweet spot, vibrancy ignites from the exchange of two peoples.
You can see it through a few lenses:
Innovation thrives when passing visitors spend enough time in a place for their ideas to propagate into real social or economic output. If their presence is minimal or too fleeting, ideas vanish before gaining traction. If there are too few visitors, circulation dries up. Berlin illustrates the balance at work. After the fall of the Wall, the city drew an influx of transient artists, students, and entrepreneurs who brough fresh perspectives and networks. Because costs were low and local communities open, these newcomers embedded long enough for their ideas to fuse with the city’s fabric, seeding today’s thriving creative and startup community.
Social cohesion holds when permanent residents anchor the civic fabric, while a healthy flow of transients add dynamism and diversity. Cohesion hardens into insularity without enough visitors, and yet too high an influx results in disparate communities. Perth, for example, demonstrates a stable, long-term resident base, strong networks, civic engagement, and safe neighbourhoods — thanks to its grounded community base. But its relative isolation and economic concentration on one sector, mining and resources, means cross-sector innovation is limited compared with more diverse, vibrant economies. Which brings us to…
Economic resilience strengthens when transience broadens opportunity without hollowing out the base. When an economy skews too heavily on visiting populations, cities risk over dependence on high-churn industries. Las Vegas is a case in point, in that its reliance on tourism leaves it vulnerable to shocks. As transient numbers dip, entire sectors contract.
Civic engagement depends on residents with long-term stakes in a place, and it is enriched when newcomers introduce fresh practices and perspectives. Where the balance is right, transients are more naturally compelled to contribute to a city, beyond consuming from it. Toronto, for instance, has a strong permanent base that anchors civic institutions, yet its large immigrant population actively shapes neighbourhood associations, cultural events, and local politics. By contrast, in Singapore, a high proportion of skilled expats who live on fixed-term contracts have limited incentive to participate in local civic initiatives, leaving long-term governance largely in the hands of a smaller sect of permanent residents.
The right ratio is not universal. It flexes with density, industry mix, infrastructure, and culture. Some cities thrive with 10% transience, others need 40%. In all cases, it is this interplay between Anchors and Catalysts that deeply influences how a city might stagnate, evolve, fragment, or flourish.
[1] Pagès-El Karoui, D., & Yeoh, B. S. A. (2020). Migration and non-integration in two non-western cities: Dubai and Singapore. Asian Population Studies, 16(2), 119–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441730.2020.1752031