World City Network Research Articles

Analyzing world city network by graph convolutional networks

British scholar Peter Taylor constructed the World City Network by analyzing the office networks of multinational companies, enabling a network perspective on world cities. However, this method has long been hindered by data deficiencies and update delays. In this study, we utilized publicly available, real-time updated data on global routes to construct the World City Network, thereby addressing the issues of data insufficiency and delayed updates in the existing model. For the first time, advanced Graph Convolutional Networks were employed to analyze the World City Network, and we introduced GCNRank. Finally, we compared GCNRank with other centrality measures and found that GCNRank provides a more detailed representation of city rankings and effectively avoids local optima.

Which ‘globalisations’ explain the overseas expansion of Chinese multinational enterprises through city-networks?

This paper analyses the overseas expansion of Chinese multinational enterprises using city-network analysis, with the focus on identifying the ‘globalisations’ that influence Chinese firm expansion. Applying a stepwise regression model to explain the world city networks of Chinese multinational enterprises (CMNEs), we find that variables linked to political, infrastructural, economic and cultural attributes explain the overall network. We then analyse in detail the connectivities produced by CMNEs in four main economic sectors: advanced producer services (APS), general services (GS), manufacturing (MF) and building, energy and mining industry (BEM), finding evidence of multiple, overlapping globalisations across sectors. This conforms to intensive globalisation in APS, extensive globalisation in GS and MF, and politically oriented globalisation in BEM, driven largely by Belt and Road, and related initiatives. The state presence in CMNEs’ overseas expansions suggests that globalisation by firms is tied to state-led globalisation objectives in some contexts, which complements the narratives that cast firm-led globalisation as market-oriented and stateless.

Assessment of network structure characteristics and factors of corporate flows in Guangdong Province.

With the rapid development of the world city network, the traditional location theory has gradually been disproven, and the advantages of the flow space over the traditional vertical organizational structure are gradually being revealed. Therefore, from corporate branch networks and corporate investment networks, 21 cities in urban agglomerations of Guangdong are taken as case studies for this paper. Furthermore, in this paper, 5 representative types of corporate contact data (catering service, financial service, life service, sports and leisure and accommodation service) are selected, the social network analysis (SNA) method is used to quantitatively analyze the network structure characteristics of urban agglomerations, and a spatial interaction model is constructed to explore the factors influencing. The results indicate that secondary networks have developed in Guangdong. The financial service network is the most complex, followed by the life services, sports and leisure and catering networks. The accommodation service network structure is the simplest. Among all kinds of networks, Guangzhou and Shenzhen have the highest status. The catering and accommodation corporations in Yangjiang in the west have a relatively major external development. Shantou in the east has many branches of various types, while most of the capital exchange in the region is concentrated in Heyuan and Qingyuan in the north. The coefficients of geographical proximity and the urban development level play a significant role in promoting the development of networks. However, administrative capacity limits the attractiveness of origin cities to a certain extent.

World city networks: Theories, methodology, and research topics

World city networks: Theories, methodology, and research topics

Connecting world cities through sports events: Insights from international sports tours

ABSTRACT This paper tried to advance the theory of world city networks (WCNs) by uncovering the distinct spatial patterns and network structures of WCNs based on three common types of international sports tours (ISTs), namely the Tours of Tennis, Athletics and Marathon. We identify the distinct spatial trend of the “universalization of particularism.” The spatial features range from regional/domestic for ISTs in which everyone can participate, to global Northern for highly professional ISTs, and global for ISTs in which athletes represent their countries. The spatial pattern indicates that particularism takes place at the regional/global scale due to sports diversity. Also, our exploration reveals a unique city network composed of three subnetworks with both stable and unstable structures because of the domination of multiple actors. The pluralized spatial pattern and complicated network structure expand the research field of WCNs and provide a multiscale perspective for global-local interaction studies in the sports context.

Economic hubs and the domination of inter-regional ties in world city networks

Economic hubs and the domination of inter-regional ties in world city networks

Global Connectivity, Spatial Proximity, Multimodal Transport, and Polycentric Urban Regions: UAE Urban Development 2020 - 2030

At a current world city scale, conurbations interweave complex multimodal systems of logistics, transport, and communications. As this process evolves into a global network of interconnected urban nodes. While diffusing globally, China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) proposal creates an infrastructural framework for global exchange, analogous to the Ancient TransAsian links of Silk Road and Indian Ocean. Linked spatial dimensions and functional regions have always existed at different scales without any synchronized nomenclature for a grid with exact dimensional measurements. The global surface exists as a topological phenomenon of multi scalar dimensions covered by varied surface phenomena from earth to vegetation with fluid elements alternating in liquidity and flows. increasingly the world cities trend divides more advanced urban regions from less well viably connected territories, governments, industries, and commerce. Thus, the world has been experiencing an unequal distribution of trade and associated transport, logistics and handling facilities. In relation to global trade and transport tends to focus on the post-industrialized West and East and so underplays the role of other parts of the world system, including the MENASA (Middle East–North Africa–South Asia) region. In doing so, scholars discount a variety of spatial, morphological, environmental, historical, and socio-political urban patterns particular to these other regions and cities. This article addresses this oversight by examining the United Arab Emirates coastal conurbation (U.A.E.–CC, including Dubai–Abu Dhabi–Sharjah–Ajman), with its unique global positioning and political and economic conditions. The U.A.E.–CC is explored in relation to theories of the world/global city, the airport city or aerotropolis, and the polycentric urban region (PUR). The article demonstrates the emerging formation and potential of the U.A.E.–CC PUR, a member of a world-city network specializing as a transport hub and tourist destination and a global logistics center.

City networks and clusters as expressed in Chinese and Japanese languages: A multiscale network analysis with language-sensitive webpage big data

There is considerable research on world city networks (WCNs) and on their cluster properties, yet, few have compared these properties as they appear in different languages and cultures. This study introduces language-sensitive webpage big data in English, Chinese and Japanese, and develops a novel multiscale analytical framework including the weighted stochastic block model (WSBM) to detect and compare the global and grouping features in WCNs by language. The results suggest the properties of city networks and clusters are differently viewed in different languages or cultures, with a more globalized multi-cores-periphery structure in the English WCN, a more localized spiky structure in the Japanese WCN, and a double-cores-periphery structure in the Chinese WCN. This research demonstrates the importance of recognizing the differences in WCN structures as shown in different languages and the significance of mesoscale network analysis in city network comparisons.

Digital transformation in the world city networks’ advanced producer services complex: A technology space analysis

The Advanced Producer Services (APS) sector, long considered to be the vanguard of the knowledge economy and world-city formation, is undergoing a digital transformation. Digital transformation entails an increased engagement with digital technologies in the operation, product offerings and strategies of APS firms, with potentially transformative implications. Such digitization processes are well-established in the morphing of finance into FinTech, with the other APS sub-sectors now allegedly catching-up as evidenced by the arrival of LegalTech, AccountTech, RegTech, PropTech, and AdTech. Moreover, the digital transformation could imply that Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) services are again becoming central to the APS complex after two decades of being largely omitted from world city research. Adopting an evolutionary economic geography perspective, we introduce a new approach that utilizes near real-time data sources to compare local technology spaces with the global picture of digital transformation in world cities. Building a dataset containing information from 40,754 APS start-ups and scale-ups derived from Dealroom.co, this paper explores the geographically uneven digital transformation of the APS sector across European and North American world cities. This allows gauging the extent of digital transformation within APS sectors for each selected city, develop new understandings of the division of labour between world cities, and highlight where sector coalescence between APS sectors is occurring and is more likely to occur. In the process we develop new technological indicators of world-cityness that can be used alongside the classic world city connectivity indicators.

Visualizing the pattern of origin of international visitors to Beijing and Shanghai based on mobile phone data

There is a long tradition of understanding globalization by measuring the “world city-ness”, and there are two distinctive frameworks concerning the interrelations of the “world city network”, one of which builds upon the notion of worldwide corporate organizations and the other on the infrastructure of transport. Despite that, more studies on a single city are still required, since most cities participated in the globalization process on their own terms. Thus, the aim of this study is to visualize the patterns of origins of foreign visitors using data from mobile phones in order to better understand how China's global cities contribute to globalization in a cartogram. It is found that the strength of Shanghai’s global connections are concentrated overtly in the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, but Beijing still has the dominant role in sustaining China’s global links.

City connectivity via global intra‐firm linkages: An analysis of Indian cities

AbstractThis paper analyses the global connectivity of Indian cities to understand the varying pace of city growth in the context of Indian Urban Development. Using Globalisation and World City (GaWC) network's 2016 data, this paper examines each city's connectivity via their intra‐firm–office transactions. First, Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore were identified as the top‐most group strongly linked with the advanced economies in North America and Europe. Second, India's second category cities—Chennai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Pune and Ahmedabad—had dominant connectedness with South Asian cities growing at a moderate pace. Third, the lowest‐tier cities—Allahabad, Nagpur and Nashik—were fast catching up with their global service activities, demonstrating India's emerging South–South multilateral cooperation. Confirming to the global urban literature, the above pattern reflects those greater intra‐firm linkages that contributed to higher connectivity between cities, being leveraged through the ICT infrastructure growing beyond the primary (X) citiesto engage smart (Y) cities. This finding provides evidence against postcolonial critiques that argued for place‐specific history of colonial cities explaining emerging geographies.

The Impact of Changes in Globalization of Life in Indonesia

Globalization is the linkage and dependence between nations and between people around the world through trade, investment, travel, popular culture, and other forms of interaction so that the boundaries of a country become increasingly narrow. The formulation of the problem in writing this scientific paper is, "How is the impact of globalization on the life of the Indonesian people? The purpose of writing this scientific paper is to describe the impact of globalization on the life of the Indonesian people. The approach is qualitatively descriptive. Globalization is physically marked by the development of cities that are part of the world city network. This can be seen from the telecommunications infrastructure, transportation network, international scale companies and their branches. The positive impact of globalization is a change in values and attitudes, the development of science and technology, a better level of life.

Intercity connections and a world city network based on international sport events: Empirical studies on the Beijing, London, and Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games

Intercity connections and a world city network based on international sport events: Empirical studies on the Beijing, London, and Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games

NY‐LON 2020: The changing relations between London and New York in corporate globalisation

AbstractLondon and New York are the leading cities in the world of corporate globalisation: their financial, professional, and creative services are at the centre of the commercial connections that constitute the world city network. The relations between the two cities are more complementary than competitive, commonly indicated by the concept of NY‐LON as a trans‐oceanic service conglomerate for facilitating economic globalisation. However, world city network analysis shows London growing its overall servicing connectivity more than New York. This change in the inter‐city relation is investigated through focus on the service connectivity and agglomeration capacities of the two cities. It is found that they share a very similar connectivity regional profile while simultaneously showing stark differences in their service agglomeration sector profiles. This is shown to be the result of London gaining the rapidly growing super‐rich servicing market. Thus while New York continues its long‐term production of financial innovations, London has grown an offshore platform for global capital specifically in the form of the world’s money management centre.

Comparing World City Networks by Language: A Complex-Network Approach

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.

Analysis of Spatial Networks From Bipartite Projections Using the R Backbone Package

Bipartite projections have become a common way to measure spatial networks. They are now used in many subfields of geography, and are among the most common ways to measure the world city network, where intercity links are inferred from firm co‐location patterns. Bipartite projections are attractive because a network can be indirectly inferred from readily available data. However, spatial bipartite projections are difficult to analyze because the links in these networks are weighted, and larger weights do not necessarily indicate stronger or more important connections. Methods for extracting the backbone of bipartite projections offer a solution by using statistical models for identifying the links that have statistically significant weights. In this article, we introduce the open‐source backbone R package, which implements several backbone models, and demonstrate its key features by using it to measure a world city network.

Explaining the emergence of complex networks through log-normal fitness in a Euclidean node similarity space

Networks of disparate phenomena—be it the global ecology, human social institutions, within the human brain, or in micro-scale protein interactions—exhibit broadly consistent architectural features. To explain this, we propose a new theory where link probability is modelled by a log-normal node fitness (surface) factor and a latent Euclidean space-embedded node similarity (depth) factor. Building on recurring trends in the literature, the theory asserts that links arise due to individualistic as well as dyadic information and that important dyadic information making up the so-called depth factor is obscured by this essentially non-dyadic information making up the surface factor. Modelling based on this theory considerably outperforms popular power-law fitness and hyperbolic geometry explanations across 110 networks. Importantly, the degree distributions of the model resemble power-laws at small densities and log-normal distributions at larger densities, posing a reconciliatory solution to the long-standing debate on the nature and existence of scale-free networks. Validating this theory, a surface factor inversion approach on an economic world city network and an fMRI connectome results in considerably more geometrically aligned nearest neighbour networks, as is hypothesised to be the case for the depth factor. This establishes new foundations from which to understand, analyse, deconstruct and interpret network phenomena.

Spatial Differentiation of Variegated Capitalisms: A Comparative Analysis of Russian and Australian Oil and Gas Corporate City Networks

The globalization of firms is shaped at multiple scales by interdependencies and connections between places. The degree to which firm strategic behavior is global depends on capitalist variegation that reflects national particularity and path dependence linked to underlying global industry restructuring. This article develops an analytical framework for studying spatial differentiation of sectoral modes of variegated capitalism by applying a world city networks (WCN) approach to a highly globalized economic sector. It applies social network analysis to 24,299 intrafirm ties of 2,121 oil and gas firms in Russia and Australia linking 1,339 cities. An analysis of national networks, as they were in 2019, showed an introverted and centralized city network structure in Russia. Ties to domestic production centers and strategic geopolitical partners were strongly focused on Moscow, reflecting Russia’s state capitalism and the Soviet legacy of the state-led planning. In contrast, the liberal market orientation of Australia showed an extroverted and decentralized network, with strong links between Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and international energy hubs, global cities, and tax havens. We conclude that studying sectoral city network structures provides a more nuanced appreciation of economic processes as artifacts of embedded politico-territorial relations as they reflect the underlying role of the state affecting the strategic behavior of firms, essentially profiling sectoral modes of variegated capitalisms. This article seeks to enhance engagement by economic geographers with WCN research, by providing a novel comparative framework for capturing and interpreting uneven (variegated) spatial outcomes of diverse political–institutional contexts vis-à-vis specialized economic activity. By establishing a dialogue with variegated capitalisms literature, we extend the ongoing debates over how politico-territorial and sectoral relations contribute to city networks formation.

Not Chicago: voids in world city network formation

ABSTRACT This paper addresses some of the putative limitations of world city network research, which has often focused on producing “maps” of cities that are well-connected in the office networks of globalized producer services firms. We retain the data and model, but extend the conceptual focus and methodological toolkit by (1) disaggregating the network in its key geographical components and (2) focusing on notable absences in some of these geographies. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to discuss some of the notable voids in the myriad processes that constitute world city network formation. Using data on the office networks of 175 producer services firms across 707 cities, we first focus on the surprising case of Chicago and subsequently deal with a total of 21 world city network voids. The paper is concluded with a discussion of theoretical implications and the relevance for the broader literature on global urban studies.

Inter- and intra-city networks: how networks are shaping China’s film industry

ABSTRACT While existing studies have mapped out various networks with some visualization techniques, we move one step forward by examining if city/firm performance is dependent not only on intra-city networks, as proposed by the clustering literature, but also on inter-city networks, the core concept in the world city network literature. Our second contribution is to investigate the complementarity between inter- and intra-city networks, and how it could affect the performance of firms and cities. In doing so, we provide some preliminary evidence that studies on clustering and the world city network could benefit from having more dialogues with each other.