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As cities develop more and longer‐range external relations, some have challenged the long‐standing notion that population size indicates a city's power in its urban system. But are population size and network centrality really independent properties in practice, or do larger cities tend to be more central in urban networks? To answer this question, we conducted a systematic literature search and meta‐analysed 41 reported correlations between city size and degree centrality. The results show that population size and degree centrality are significantly and positively correlated for cities across various urban systems (r = 0.77), but the correlation varies by network scale and type. The size‐centrality association is weaker for global economic and transportation networks (r = 0.43), and stronger for non‐global social and communication networks (r = 0.91). This clarifies seemingly contradictory predictions in the literature regarding the association betweensize and centrality for cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City-regions are conferred economic advantage through their brokerage roles, which close structural holes between other city-regions that would otherwise not be connected within firm networks. Here, we identify city-regions whose brokerage roles are defined by their network positionality as intermediaries using flows based on ownership relations between headquarters and subsidiary locations. Applying Gould and Fernandez's framework of five potential brokerage types, we find city-regions play one or more brokerage roles characterized by both global and domestic flows. Moving beyond understandings of brokerage as a position, we explain diversity in brokerage as defined by economic processes underlying urban networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns about the negative externalities of air transport suggest it is important to consider the sustainability of growth in demand for air transport. However, there is little agreement on how the sustainability of demand should be evaluated. In this paper, I draw on the extensive literature on allometric scaling in biology, which examines animals’ demand for calories, to provide a novel framework for evaluating the sustainability of cities’ demand for air transport service. Viewing cities as analogous to organisms and airline passengers as analogous to life-sustaining resources, I focus on two questions. First, at what rate do cities metabolise passengers, that is, how many airline passengers does it take to fuel a city of a given size? Second, does this metabolic rate differ for business and leisure passengers, which represent different kinds of urban resources? Using data on airline passenger movement between 103 US metropolitan areas in each year from 1993 through 2011, I find that cities demand airline passengers in proportion to their population size, but when viewed separately, demand for business passengers as a function of city size is much lower than for leisure passengers. Moreover, I find that these patterns have remained relatively stable over the last two decades. The findings suggest that considering passenger type is important in evaluating the sustainability of air transport and the capacity of the air transport system to support cities’ continued growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Individuals' satisfaction with their community can play an important role in urban politics, and the quality of public schools is a key predictor of community satisfaction. However, most discussions of public schools focus only on their educational and social benefits for children, although others expand the scope to consider benefits to their parents as well. In this paper, we take a broader view, arguing that local public schools are providers of public goods that potentially benefit all members of a community, including those without school-aged children. Using data from the Soul of the Community survey, we examine the relationship between public school quality and community satisfaction in 26 U.S. communities, and find no differences between individuals with and without school-aged children at home. Furthermore, for those without children, we find that the effect of schools on community satisfaction is partially mediated by community-based social capital, suggesting that public schools provide both direct and indirect pathways to community satisfaction. We conclude with a discussion of these findings, focusing on their implications for the maintenance and structure of public schools in American cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars from a range of disciplines have long recognized that a city's economic fortunes are closely tied to its position in networks of interurban exchanges. However, it remains unclear whether cities occupy a central position in the network because they are sites of significant economic activity (i.e., a flow generation hypothesis), or whether they experience greater economic growth because they occupy a central position in the network (i.e., a structural advantage hypothesis). This article tests these complementary hypotheses by examining the total nonfarm employment in, and air travel patterns of business passengers among, 128 U.S. metropolitan areas from 1993 to 2008 using a series of lagged regression models. Results lend support to the structural advantage hypothesis, but not for the flow generation hypothesis: centrality drives employment, but not vice versa. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for infrastructure-focused approaches to economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]