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Over the last few decades professional service firms have increasingly expanded their activities beyond national borders and established international offices throughout the world. This paper describes and analyses spatial patterns of internationalisation within the engineering consulting sector. By mapping expansion biographies of European engineering consulting firms and conducting dynamic Cox regression models, external factors influencing international market selection are examined. It is shown that current spatial patterns are only partly shaped by the declining importance of cross-national distance. Instead, market seeking motivations and the exploitation of time-critical opportunities appear to be of more significance. Further, changing patterns of market selection are observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that there is a European‘system of cities’ or‘urban hierarchy’ has been an attractive idea, since it appears to provide a coherent subset of cities to study within a regional context. Under conditions of contemporary globalisation, however, the spatial order of European cities can only be properly understood as a‘porous Europe’. That is, it is impossible to sensibly discuss European intercity relations separate from an encompassing world city network. This paper therefore analyses 88 European cities in the context of a global urban analysis of 234 cities around the world. The main conclusion is that leading European world cities are specifically distinguished through their forming of global urban arenas. They should therefore not be thought of as being un-European, but as a special kind of world city that is highly cosmopolitan in its intercity relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]