World Cities Research Research Articles

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.

Migrating up the World City Hierarchy: Seoul as a World City of ‘Transfer’ for the Latin American Creative Class

This paper focuses on the world city of Seoul as an alternative, temporary destination for creative class migrants from Latin America. The creative class is a concept developed by Richard Florida to describe, "creative individuals whose economic function is to create new ideas, technology and/or creative content." In this research, world city of ‘transfer’ refers to world cities ranked by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) that are of high middle (Alpha) to lower ranking and that become ‘temporary stops’ for the migrating creative classes, whose ultimate destinations are the Alpha+ and Alpha++ world cities. This research namely asks: (1) From the perspective of creative migrants from developing countries, what causes them to leave world ‘transfer’ cities, such as Seoul, and not settle there long term? and (2) What kind of policies can be applied to help creative migrants stay in these cities permanently? Social integration policies should be implemented when trying to further develop a world city’s quality of place. Qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviews with Latin American creative people were employed to demonstrate Seoul’s need for social integration policies aimed at retaining global talent and not just attracting it.

Local Demand, Quality of Place, and Urban Tourism Competitiveness.

Most studies on tourism destination competitiveness examined the direct relationships of destination attributes and destination competitiveness. Few studies explored the intervening mechanisms between destination attributes and competitiveness. This study selected cities above the “alpha” level in the Globalization and World Cities Research Network rankings as samples to examine the relationship between local demand and urban tourism competitiveness mediated by the quality of place. Results showed that the relationship between urban wealth and tourist arrivals was completely mediated by the quality of place, while the mediating effect was not significant in the relationship between urban wealth and per capita tourism spending, though per capita tourism spending was directly and positively associated with urban wealth. In other words, richer cities had a higher quality of place, and a higher quality of place attracted more tourists but did not increase tourism per capita spending. Furthermore, the study found that there were two opposite influence paths of city size on urban tourism competitiveness. Although urban tourism competitiveness was directly and positively affected by population, the population had a significant negative effect on urban tourism competitiveness mediated by the quality of place. Through the quality of place, we can be aware of the indirect negative effect suppressed by the direct positive effect. This study revealed that the quality of place helped to better understand the competitiveness of urban tourism.

Role of Advanced Producer Services Shaping Globalization Processes in a Post-Industrial Region: The Case of the Górnośląsko-Zagłębiowska Metropolis

The paper discusses the emergence of a new regional network of connectivities in the area of advanced producer services in a formerly industrial region in southern Poland. Changes in the region’s job market and the influx of foreign firm centers suggest the presence of globalization processes in the economy. Advanced producer service companies tend to cluster around the regional capital of Katowice and use the city as a gateway to other parts of the studied region. This process leads to the replacement of jobs characterized by lower qualifications with jobs requiring more advanced knowledge, new technologies, and a variety of forms of innovation. International economic networks play an increasingly large role in the entrenchment of economic globalization in the Górnośląsko-Zagłebiowska Metropolis, which has helped the city join other Polish cities in the classification of the World Cities Research Network.

The network boundary specification problem in the global and world city research: investigation of the reliability of empirical results from sampled networks

Despite the well-known dependence of vertex and network structural parameters on network boundary specification employed by researchers, there has so far been effectively no discussion of this methodological caveat in the global and world city literature. Given the reliance of empirical studies of urban networks on the sampling of underlying actors that form these networks by their interactions, we consider it of key importance to examine the dependence of network centralities of cities on network boundary specification. We consider three distinctive modelling approaches based on: (a) office networks, (b) ownership ties and (c) inter-organisational projects. Our results indicate that city network centralities obtained from sampled networks are highly consistent with those obtained from whole network analysis for samples featuring as little as 4% (office networks), 10% (ownership ties) and 25% (inter-organisational projects) of the underlying actors.

Comparisons of the City Brand Influence of Global Cities: Word-Embedding Based Semantic Mining and Clustering Analysis on the Big Data of GDELT Global News Knowledge Graph

Global cities act as influential hubs in the networked world. Their city brands, which are projected by the global news media, are becoming sustainable resources in various global competitions and cooperations. This study adopts the research paradigm of computational social science to assess and compare the city brand attention, positivity, and influence of ten Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) Alpha+ global cities, along with their dimensional structures, based on combining the cognitive and affective theoretical perspectives on the frameworks of the Anholt global city brand dimension system, the big data of global news knowledge graph in Google’s Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), and the technologies of word-embedding semantic mining and clustering analysis. The empirical results show that the overall values and dimensional structures of city brand influence of global cities form distinct levels and clusters, respectively. Although global cities share a common structural characteristic of city brand influence of the dimensions of presence and potential being most prominent, Western and Eastern global cities differentiate in the clustering of dimensional structures of city brand attention, positivity, and influence. City brand attention is more important than city brand positivity in improving the city brand influence of global cities. The preferences of the global news media over global city brands fits the nature of global cities.

Logistics global network connectivity and its determinants. A European City network analysis

The Globalization and World City Research Network classifies global cities according to their connectivity through advanced producer service activities. Recent studies have suggested there is scope to develop a new classification of cities based on advanced logistics services. Within this framework, the aim of this paper is twofold: (i) to develop an interlocking Logistics Global Network for advanced logistics in Europe and measure the Logistics Global Network Connectivity (LGNC) of the host cities; (ii) to explore the variables explaining each the cities' score on the LGNC. The aim is achieved by means of a mixed methodological approach based on Taylor's Interlocking Network Model and via econometric analysis through Ordinary Least Square regression (OLS).

Construct Validity in World City Network Research: From Office Location Networks to Inter-Organisational Projects in the Analysis of Intercity Business Flows

The Interlocking World City Network Model (IWCNM) and other office location approaches (OLAs) have become the most widely used empirical models of the world city network (WCN) over the last two decades. Despite numerous methodological improvements, they still rely on Taylor’s (2001) legacy of using data on office locations of firms to indirectly estimate intercity business flows. Notwithstanding criticism from both within the mainstream of the global and world cities research as well as postcolonial and poststructuralist geographers, OLAs maintain their dominant position in recently published research. To advance the dialogue on the appropriateness of OLAs as empirical models of WCN, we consider their construct validity by examining the link between theory and empirical models. We uncover evidence that calls into question the validity of OLAs for empirical modelling of intercity business flows. In the spirit of no deconstruction without reconstruction, we develop a new model based on directly observable business flows, which we call the inter-organisational project approach (IOPA). We deductively argue for IOPA’s construct validity as an empirical model of the WCN and offer empirical evidence for its structural validity. We demonstrate it using a global sample of 161,114 investment bank syndicates in the 2000 – 2015 period.

The Africa Problem of Global Urban Theory: Re-conceptualising Planetary Urbanisation

This paper works to address what I consider the enduring ‘Africa problem’ in global urban theory. I engage and critique selected relevant urban thought from the Globalization and World Cities research group, from Henri Lefebvre and from the new wave of urban theorisation inspired by Lefebvre’s (1970) idea of ‘complete, planetary urbanisation.’ I argue that urbanisation in Africa, largely absent from Lefebvre’s works, presents new twists that are better understood from outside a Eurocentric framework. I propose the possibilities of urban comparativism built from theories and conceptualisations that emerge from the global South and that can be utilised to compare non-Western cities’ urbanisation processes. I use case studies from Dakar and Zanzibar to examine the production of what Chinese urbanists detail as a ‘village’ in the city, on the edge of the city, and in the suburbs over the last half-century and the complexities and comparability of urbanisation processes in these settings. I end with reflections on the implications of these cases for any claims for universalising the twenty-first century’s processes of urbanisation and urbanism across the planet. My main finding for urban policy and planning practice is the documentation of the relevance and value of South–South comparisons of urbanisation processes for development.

Changing Connectivities of Chinese Cities in the World City Network, 2010–2016

Against the backdrop of the sizable economic growth of China in recent years, this paper uses the most recent data gathering of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research network to update and supplement earlier research on the shifting global connectivity of Chinese cities. The update consists of an evaluation of the connectivity of Chinese cities in 2016, the supplement of an analysis of the changing position of Chinese cities in the world city network between 2010 and 2016. To this end, we build on a specification of the world city network as an ‘interlocking network’ in which producer services firms play the crucial role in city network formation. Information about the presence of leading producer services firms in cities in 2010 and 2016 is used as the input to a bipartite network projection algorithm in order to measure cities’ network connectivity. The first set of results discusses the geographies of urban connectivity in the world city network in 2016. The second set of results discusses standardized measures of change to reveal the major dimensions of the transformations between 2010 and 2016. We find that, with the exception of Hong Kong, Macau and Kaohsiung of Taiwan, all Chinese cities record connectivity gains. This wholesale rise in connectivity is nonetheless geographically uneven, with above all Beijing, Chengdu/Chongqing and Changsha/Wuhan becoming more connected. We conclude that the wholesale rise of Chinese cities in the world city network and their changing trajectories in the post-crisis era are embedded in shifting external and internal political economies.

Former Soviet cities in globalization: an intraregional perspective on interurban relations through networks of global service firms

ABSTRACTThis paper presents an empirical study of the globalizing urban landscape in the post-Soviet region. In order to understand the position of cities in relation to each other in the context of economic globalization, the study considers the transnational city network in the post-Soviet region. At the center of analysis are the locational strategies of global service firms operating in the former Soviet cities. We adapt the interlocking network model proposed by the Globalization and World Cities research (GaWC) network to the regional level to uncover the interurban relations. Unlike the classical studies of the GaWC, this study focuses on the analysis of intraregional spatial patterns of globalization. The research shows that the globalizing regional city system is in the midst of substantial restructuring and that the state of former Soviet Union (FSU) cities in relation to Moscow is altering. The integration of FSU cities into the global economy mostly occurs through capital cities. However, under the current political and economic circumstances, the position of each capital city within the region has become diversified. The analysis indicates that the globalization of cities within a particular region reproduces similar processes on a world scale, which are characterized by spatial concentration and hierarchical relations. However, our research has shown that patterns of urban globalization at the regional level significantly depend on the historical context and national economic and political tendencies, thus creating conditions for the penetration of the world economy into cities.

The world city network: Evaluating top-down versus bottom-up approaches

The growth of the knowledge economy has led to new forms of business networks linking cities and towns across different spatial scales. Various attempts have been made to analyse these networks empirically using the interlocking network model of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research network. Two approaches can be distinguished from a spatial perspective: a global ‘top-down’ approach that studies the world city network from the perspective of the largest advanced producer service firms, and a macro-regional ‘bottom-up’ approach that starts with the most important knowledge-intensive firms located within specific territorial boundaries. This paper compares and critically assesses the methodological implications and empirical outcomes of both approaches with reference to case studies of the German space economy. Both approaches pursue similar objectives: to investigate external relations of cities, both transnationally and on the national scale. Differences exist in the theoretical argumentation: the top-down approach is grounded in world city research; the bottom-up approach is anchored in debates in regional science and economic geography. In this paper, we argue for the need of scale-sensitive interpretations of connectivity patterns resulting from different approaches to the interlocking network model and conclude with some tentative recommendations for the methodological direction of future research in world city network studies.

Post-Soviet urban environment: the experience of St. Petersburg

Cities form the backbone of human civilization, but only 600 of them become centers of world development. A special elite club consists of 183 world cities (according to Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) methodology), which represent the network substance of the globalized geoeconomic space. It is cities that lay down the global policy agenda, determine guidelines of economic management, and generate innovations and technological or consumer impulses. Intensive transformations take place in million-plus cities that affect the structure of the economy, urban space, and public realms. Most of these trends reflect processes that have affected most of the modern urbanized world. Study of the millionplus cities yields great opportunities for geographers. St. Petersburg, which is one of the world cities (gamma+), is experiencing a period of internal transformation within the paradigm change of economic development. Like other world cities, St. Petersburg has entered the postindustrial stage of development. This paper studies and interprets St. Petersburg’s main economic, territorial, and spatial transformation trends. In fact, the city is a testing ground for studying global urban trends in Russian practice. Particular attention is devoted to the remaining old post-Soviet features and the those of a new world city.

Theorizing the global urban with ‘global and world cities research’

The new generation of global and world city research has expanded the range of cities and the kinds of firms and economic circuits explored, with interesting insights for global urban studies. I raise a few issues for debate: why synechdoche continues to be invoked; why power hierarchies are still proposed, in the face of a more network-oriented form of power; and where alternatives to the powerful (and usually negative) real-world political effects of the ‘global city’ term might come from?

World Cities and the Uneven Geographies of Financialization: Unveiling Stratification and Hierarchy in the World City Archipelago

AbstractThis article critically evaluates the network‐centrism of much of contemporary world cities research and queries its capacity to unveil key accumulation processes under financialized globalization. Our object of inquiry is the world city archipelago (WCA), a material yet non‐contiguous space of world city ‘islands', which is (re)produced through the socio‐spatial practices of advanced producer services (APS) firms as they assist in constructing (financial) accumulation strategies for their clients. Scrutinizing the WCA with a singular focus on networks can veil dynamics that lead to internal stratification and hierarchy between world cities and their constitutive outside. Alternatively, these veiled dimensions are better grasped by territorial, scalar and place‐based abstractions. As an example, we unveil WCA space by studying the space of APS practices in three recent cases of Eurobond issuance. By comparing these three instances through an encompassing approach, a bounded geography of a financialized accumulation space is identified, which contains London and other world cities as a necessary space of dependence but also stretches out to various contingent spaces of engagement at the fringes of the WCA network: offshore jurisdictions and places of debt origination. We conclude by making the case for a heightened sensitivity in respect of core–periphery structures that exist between the WCA and its outside, but also within the WCA itself.

Mapping producer services networks in mainland Chinese cities

We analyse the geographies of urban networks created by leading producer services (PS) firms in China. Because of the national regulation of the Chinese state-led economy and the location strategies of global advanced producer services (APS) firms, the geography of global APS in China as examined by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) cannot be studied as a subnetwork of GaWC’s global network, but needs an empirical study based on a wide range of leading PS in the Chinese market. We explore the spatial differentiation in the connectivity of Chinese cities based on the location strategies of 323 APS firms in 287 Chinese cities. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen emerge as the primary nodes. The spatial distribution of banking, securities, and insurance services networks appears to be more even than those of non-financial PS firms. Regional disparity exists in terms of polycentric urban development in coastal China, as well as in the centralisation model in central and western areas. We suggest that owing to the continued tight regulation of China’s state-led economy and the nature of the location strategies of ‘globalised’ PS firms, the urban networks created by Chinese PS firms are not only an extension of urban networks at a global scale but also an embodiment of economic activities at other scales.

Introduction: The Interlocking Network Model for Studying Urban Networks: Outline, Potential, Critiques, and Ways Forward

AbstractThe paper begins with an introduction into the interlocking network model (INM) initially specified by Peter Taylor in the context of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research network. For that purpose, the intellectual background, purpose, key principles and subsequent applications of the INM are presented. Since the overall purpose of the Special Issue is to take research inspired by the INM further, this paper gives, second, an overview of some of the main critiques raised against the INM. Third, the relevance of the different papers of the Special Issue is framed within these critiques. The papers in the Special Issue can be divided in two groups: while the first set discusses the measurement framework, the second focuses on the conceptual remit of the INM.

Network or Hierarchical Relations? A Plea for Redirecting Attention to the Control Functions of Global Cities

AbstractThe paper discusses in a personal appreciation of the literature whether the ‘interlocking world city network model’ (IWCNM) has contributed to overcoming the evidential crisis of world or global city research. After a brief summary of the main arguments made by John Friedmann and Saskia Sassen, the paper deduces methodological implications that follow from their economic‐geographical conceptualisation of global cities. In the third and fourth sections of the paper I recapitulate the rationale(s) given by Peter Taylor for the IWCNM and assess the model's contribution to empirically corroborating the global city concept. The paper's main claim is that the IWCNM bypasses the theoretical core of the global city paradigm, for which reason an evidential crisis continues to undermine the strength of the global city argument. Accordingly, in the last section of the paper a research strategy is proposed that is apt to take global city studies a step forward.

Global Centrality and Income Inequality in U.S. Metropolitan Areas: A Test of Two Hypotheses

This article provides a quantitative assessment of two global city hypotheses: Sassen’s polarization and Hamnett’s professionalization claims. We conduct our analysis by using a continuous measure of global city status developed by researchers at the Global and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) and examining its correlation with the Gini index of household income inequality with relevant controls across a large sample of U.S. metropolitan areas in 2008. We examine industrial employment distribution as a causal pathway by which global city formation may influence urban income structures, as per Sassen and Hamnett’s original hypotheses. Results show that global city status is consistently associated with higher levels of inequality, but neither theorist’s claims about causal mechanisms are supported. This begs the question: What explains the correlation? We suggest an alternative hypothesis relating global city status to the distribution of educational credentialing.

A világgazdaság irányító és ellenőrző központjai 2012-ben

Napjainkban a városokkal foglalkozó társadalomtudományi kutatások tekintélyes része fókuszál azokra a városokra, amelyek a globális gazdaságban meghatározó irányító és ellenőrző funkciókkal rendelkeznek. Az 1980-as évek közepétől ezekben a kutatásokban sokszor világvárosokként vagy globális városokként azonosítják a gazdaságirányítás csomópontjait (John Friedmann és Saskia Sassen hatására), elsősorban a „fejlett termelést segítő szolgáltatások” mennyiségi koncentrációja alapján. A tanulmányban visszatérek a világvárosok meghatározásának 1960/1970-es évekre jellemző, Peter Hall nevével fémjelzett irányzatához, és a multinacionális/transznacionális vállalatok, regionális nagyvállalatok, bankok és egyéb pénzpiaci szervezetek koncentrációja alapján definiálom a világgazdaság vezető csomópontjait. Az elemzésben a Forbes „The Global 2000” rangsorát, vagyis a világ 2000 legnagyobb tőzsdei cégét és azok főbb adatait (forgalom, piaci érték, profit, eszközállomány) tartalmazó adatbázist dolgozom fel. A globális irányító és ellenőrző központok rangsorát egy komplex mutató, az irányítás és ellenőrzés index segítségével vizsgálom meg. Alapvető célom egyrészt azt bemutatni, hogy 2012-ben mely városok voltak a világgazdaság irányító és ellenőrző központjai, másrészt azt megvizsgálni, hogy a feltörekvő gazdaságok, különösen a BRIC-országok vezető városai milyen viszonyban állnak a fejlett országok tradicionális gazdaságirányító központjaival.