Regionality in the world city network

Abstract

Recent research on measuring world city network formation has shown a mixture of hierarchical and regional tendencies. Using specially created data, the relative importance of these tendencies, and different regional sets of world cities, are evaluated using a discriminant analysis research model. It is found that regionality is at least as important as hierarchy amongst world cities. This contradicts the world city literature where the concept of a “world city hierarchy” dominates and regional patterning of world cities is relatively neglected. As well as suggesting a reorientation in world cities research, these findings have wider implications for globalisation in general. The latter is not, and I argue cannot, produce a homogeneous global space, which is what a single global hierarchy implies. Rather, it is always the case that globalisation processes simultaneously create more than one large scale of social activity.