Conceptualising and Mapping the Structure of the World System's City System

Abstract

For the past 20 years, researches using the lens of world system theory (and other global political economy perspectives) have come to a better understanding of many of the anomalies in urbanisation patterns across more and less developed countries that had befuddled researchers whose assumptions left out global sources of social change. Recently this line of research has moved beyond regarding cities as mere objects of global forces, also theorising about their importance as lynchpins in the spatial organisation of the world economy. In this paper we review some of the scholarship that emphasises large cities' roles as important modes of production, consumption, exchange and control at the global level; we develop the argument that systematic tinkages—economic, cultural, political or social-retational—among global cities are likely to reveal the spatial organisation of the world-system; we review our position that formal network analysis provides a most promising methodological framework for analysing and mapping global intercity linkages; and we present a map of the current world city system based on our network analysis of recent air travel among many of the world's great cities. We point out that our analysis is very preliminary and provides only a rough chart of the world city system at one point in time, and the data requirements for more detailed world city system maps for several periods of time are imposing, to say the least. Nevertheless, such a project holds the promise of revealing much about the spatial structure of our world system, how it has changed; how it is likely to change in the future; and how cities' populations are affected by these changes. Completing the project will probably require collaboration among researchers in different countries.