Abstract
City networks are multiplex and diverse rather than being regarded as part of a single universal model that is valid worldwide. This study contributes to the debate on multiple globalizations by distinguishing multiscale structures of world city networks (WCNs) reflected in the Internet webpage content in English, German, and French. Using big data sets from web crawling, we adopted a complex-network approach with both macroscale and mesoscale analyses to compare global and grouping properties in varying WCNs, by using novel methods such as the weighted stochastic block model (WSBM). The results suggest that at the macro scale, the rankings of city centralities vary across languages due to the uneven geographic distribution of languages and the variant levels of globalization of cities perceived in different languages. At the meso scale, the WSBMs infer different grouping patterns in the WCNs by language, and the specific roles of many world cities vary with language. The probability-based comparative analyses reveal that the English WCN looks more globalized, while the French and German worlds appear more territorial. Using the mesoscale structure detected in the English WCN to comprehend the city networks in other languages may be biased. These findings demonstrate the importance of scrutinizing multiplex WCNs in different cultures and languages as well as discussing mesoscale structures in comparative WCN studies.
Highlights
World cities have been treated as strategic sites in the global economy and society, interlinked by multiplex relations for accumulating wealth, control, and power through the flows of capital, information, people, and knowledge [1,2,3,4]
As most existing world city networks (WCNs) studies only look at the microscale and macroscale features in WCNs but overlook the mesoscale [25,29,38,39], this study focused on the comparison of mesoscale structures in WCNs, which describe the grouping features of city nodes based on intercity relational ties by using the weighted stochastic block model (WSBM) developed by Aicher et al [35] and a comparative mesoscale analysis developed by Zhang and Thill [14]
This study contributes to the debate on multiple globalizations by highlighting the multiscale structures of multiplex WCNs reflected in the Internet webpage content in different languages
Summary
World cities have been treated as strategic sites in the global economy and society, interlinked by multiplex relations for accumulating wealth, control, and power through the flows of capital, information, people, and knowledge [1,2,3,4]. World city network (WCN) studies have become an important approach for understanding globalization, which involves an economic process of global capital accumulation and articulation, and cultural, political, and social processes [5] Facing such ‘multiple globalizations’, the focus of WCN studies has shifted from a singular linkage between cities to multiple types of intercity relations [6]. A thread of research focuses on variant types of economic linkages between world cities by looking at different corporate connections [5,7,8] They survey multiple city-by-firm networks by comparing the multinational companies of advanced product services (APS) or other industries. Few studies investigate and compare the differences of WCNs in the views of varying cultures and languages
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