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This article advances research on external urban relations by drawing attention to the role of temporary project-based economic organisation in the formation of inter-firm links between cities. Through a novel empirical examination of (trans)national co-production in the motion picture industry, we reveal how such projects transcend the boundaries of individual production clusters and link urban centres within specific network configurations. Stripping away the ‘top layer’ of Hollywood’s commercially successful feature films, we undertake a social network analysis of film productions in four markets across three continents – China, Germany, France and Brazil – to provide a unique comparative analysis of networked urban geographies. Our findings show that film production networks are grounded in existing structural relations between cities. The spatial forms of these networks range from monocentric in the case of the French film market, to dyadic in the case of China and Brazil, to polycentric in the case of the German film market. Conceptually, we argue that adopting an inter-firm project-based approach can account for the ways in which complex patterns of inter-firm production relations accumulate to form (trans)national city networks. Viewing city networks in this way provides an important alternative perspective to dominant conceptualisations of global urban networks as formed through corporate intra-firm relations.

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.

Ongoing splintering and siloification in urban studies require alternative approaches to bring the major theoretical and epistemological perspectives into constructive dialogue. Reflecting growing calls for engaged pluralism, we analyse the extent to which different perspectives can come together as complementary alternatives in understanding cities and present a framework for overcoming the key theoretical and methodological challenges caused by fragmentation. Using Istanbul as our illustrative case, we do this in three steps. Theoretically, we stress-test the potentials and limits of four dominant perspectives in urban theory making – global cities, state rescaling, developmental and postcolonial – revealing how each can only ever generate a partial, one-dimensional, explanation. Methodologically, we proceed to make the case for doing comparative urbanism differently by developing a conjunctural approach. Finally, and conceptually, we identify ‘conjunctural cities’ as a distinctive type of city and as a new approach to analysing cities. Our contention is that approaching all cities conjuncturally provides a significant step towards putting engaged pluralism into action, as well as indicating new terrain on which the future of urban theory/urban studies can be constructively debated WOS:000649156000001 Q1 Q2

Global City Makers provides an in-depth account of the role of powerful economic actors in making and un-making global cities. Engaging critically and constructively with global urban studies from a relational economic geography perspective, the book outlines a renewed agenda for global cities research. Focusing on financial services, management consultancy, real estate, commodity trading and maritime industries, the detailed studies in this volume are located across the globe to incorporate major world cities such as London, New York and Tokyo as well as globalizing cities including Mexico City, Hamburg and Mumbai.

This is a draft chapter / article. The final version is available in Global City Makers: Economic Actors and Practices in the World City Network edited by Michael Hoyler, Christof Parnreiter and Allan Watson, published in 2018, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781785368950. The material cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher, and is for private use only.

This article reports an experiment in world city network analysis focusing on city-dyads. Results are derived from an unusual principal components analysis of 27,966 city-dyads across 5 advanced producer service sectors. A 2-component solution is found that identifies different forms of globalization: extensive and intensive. The latter is characterized by very high component scores and describes the more important city-dyads focused upon London-New York (NYLON). The extensive globalization component heavily features London and New York but with each linked to less important cities. U.S. cities score relatively high on the intensive globalization component and we use this finding to explain the low connectivities of U.S. cities in previous studies of the world city network. The two components are tentatively interpreted in world-systems terms: intensive globalization is the process of core-making through city-dyads; extensive globalization is the process of linking core with non-core through city-dyads.

The expansion of globalising cities into global city-regions poses fundamental questions about how best to govern the new metropolis. Partly because of the relentless pace of change, these newly emerging metropolitan spaces are often reliant on inadequate urban-economic infrastructure and fragmented urban-regional planning and governance arrangements. Moreover, as the demand for more ‘appropriate’, widely understood to mean more flexible, networked and smart, forms of planning and governance increases, new expressions of territorial cooperation and conflict are emerging around issues of increased competitiveness, infrastructure development, the collective provision of services, and further governmentalised remapping(s) of state space. We identify four central tenets of the metropolitan region/governance debate and discuss their relevance for future research on city-regions: (1) periodisation and trajectories, (2) democracy and accountability, (3) form and function, and (4) fragility and mobilisation. These, we argue, pose key challenges for rethinking city-region governance within the emerging new metropolitan paradigm.

The business connections between Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai and other major world cities are investigated using the interlocking network model based upon the location strategies of advanced producer service firms. This approach emphasises non-hierarchical relations between cities. A key new finding is that city-dyad analysis enhances the prominence of these China cities compared with simple ranking by total global network connectivity. This suggests that Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing have developed more strategically important roles in the world city network than previously understood. Yet the geographies of these links are distinctive, with Shanghai shown to be better connected to the more important world cities such as London and New York than Beijing; and Beijing is found to be better connected to political world cities such as Washington and Brussels, and to other Pacific Asian cities, than Shanghai. The results are interpreted as suggestions for developing a new research programme.

Central place hierarchies have been the traditional basis for understanding external urban relations. However, in contemporary studies of these relations, a new emphasis on urban networks has emerged. Rather than either abandoning or extending central place thinking, it is here treated as representing one of two generic processes of external urban relations. Town-ness is the making of ‘local’ urban—hinterland relations and ‘city-ness’ is the making of ‘non-local’ interurban relations. Central place theory describes the former through an interlocking hierarchical model; this paper proposes a central flow theory to describe the latter through an interlocking network model. The key difference is the level of complexity in the two processes.

This is an empirical quantitative study that uses urban demographic data to identify economic change in cities. Unlike previous demographic studies, a strong theoretical framework is provided for the analysis. The research is designed and interpreted through Jacobs's theory of the city as economic process within the framework of Wallerstein's modern world-system. This is the first time Jacobs's theory has been subject to systematic inquiry over big time and big space. We create an inventory of 184 examples of Jacobs's "explosive growth" from 1500 to 2005 within the modern world-system. These results are interpreted in terms of systemic hegemonic cycles with first Dutch, and then British, and finally U.S. cities dominating the inventory lists. It is found that Dutch, British and U.S. city growth spurts are front-loaded in their respective hegemonic cycles: this is strong evidence of hegemony being created and initially sustained through and by these dynamic cities. This study makes a direct contribution to...

This is an empirical paper that measures and interprets changes in intercity relations at the global scale in the period 2000—08. It draws on the network model devised by the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research group to measure global connectivities for 132 cities across the world in 2000 and 2008. The measurements for both years are adjusted so that a coherent set of services/cities is used. A range of statistical techniques is used to explore these changes at the city level and the regional scale. The most notable changes are: the general rise of connectivity in the world city network; the loss of global connectivity of US and sub-Saharan African cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami in particular); and, the gain in global connectivity of south Asian, Chinese and eastern European cities (Shanghai, Beijing and Moscow in particular).

Cities and city regions are back on the research agenda in the UK. Taking the world city literature as a guide, this article uses advanced producer service firms to study contemporary inter-city relations in the UK space economy. We employ an interlocking network model, initially developed for global scale analysis, to assess signs that recent globalization is effecting a revival outside the London region, and to identify leading urban areas in the UK national economy. Two different analyses are presented: a connectivity analysis, which indicates how well cities and towns are linked into the UK space economy, and a fuzzy clustering analysis, which classifies the cities and towns in order to search out hierarchical and regional tendencies. From these findings, we identify two distinctive polycentric city-regional processes in contemporary Britain: a Jacobs-style polycentric mega-city regional process out of London, which creates new important service centres and reaches selected smaller cities and towns; and a polycentric multi-city regional process beyond London, which mainly enhances the service capacities of selected larger cities. A concluding section considers the implications of the two processes for spatial planning in the UK. Resume Les villes et regions urbaines reviennent en force dans la recherche britannique. Oriente par les publications sur les villes mondiales, ce travail utilise les entreprises de services avances a la production pour etudier les relations contemporaines entre villes dans l’economie spatiale britannique. A l’aide d’un modele de maillage, mis au point a l’origine pour une analyse a l’echelon mondial, nous mesurons les signes indiquant que la recente mondialisation provoque une relance hors de la region de Londres et nous identifions les zones urbaines dominantes de l’economie nationale. Sont presentees deux analyses differentes: une analyse de la connectivite, montrant dans quelle mesure les villes et grandes villes sont reliees au sein de l’economie spatiale britannique, et une analyse des groupements flous qui classe villes et grandes villes afin de trouver les tendances hierarchiques et regionales. A partir de ces resultats, sont identifies deux processus distincts de region urbaine polycentrique dans la Grande-Bretagne contemporaine: un processus de mega-region urbaine polycentrique, proche de la description de Jacobs, a la peripherie de Londres, qui cree de nouveaux centres de services importants et atteint certaines villes et grandes villes plus petites; un processus de multi-region urbaine polycentrique au-dela de Londres, qui renforce principalement les capacites de services de certaines grandes villes. La conclusion etudie les implications des deux processus sur l’amenagement spatial au Royaume-Uni.

During the past 30 years, community centres and youth clubs have emerged all over Germany, providing spaces that challenge traditional forms of high culture. This paper explores the role of these spaces in the making of hip-hop music in East and West Germany. From the mid-1980s, community centres served as local testing grounds for DJs, rappers, graffiti writers and breakdancers. ‘Jams’ encouraged an exchange of ideas and styles, the refinement of skills in competitions, and the establishment of lasting social networks. Centres and clubs provided important ‘homebases’ and nodes, linking local scenes with a highly mobile national and trans-European hip-hop community. The paper argues that the production and consumption of hip-hop as a hybrid cultural form was shaped in part by the way these local spaces were created and organized. In the context of changing cultural policies, the sites’ historicities and their use as musical spaces are crucial for an understanding of the geographical constitution of hip-hop music in Germany.

We live in a world of competing urban, regional and other spatial imaginaries. This book’s chief concern has been with one such spatial imaginary – the megaregion. More particularly, its theme has been the assertion that the megaregion constitutes globalization’s new urban form. Yet, what is clear is that the intellectual and practical literatures underpinning the megaregion thesis are not internally coherent and this is the cause of considerable confusion over the precise role of megaregions in globalization. This book has offered one solution through its focus on the who, how and why of megaregions much more than the what and where of megaregions. In short, moving the debate forward from questions of definition, identification and delimitation to questions of agency (who or what is constructing megaregions), process (how are megaregions being constructed), and specific interests (why are megaregions being constructed) is the contribution of this book. The individual chapters have interrogated many of the claims and counter-claims made about megaregions through examples as diverse as California, the US Great Lakes, Texas and the Gulf Coast, Greater Paris, Northern England, Northern Europe, and China’s Pearl River Delta. But, as with any such volume, our approach has offered up as many new questions as it has provided answers. In this concluding chapter, we identify some of these questions as part of an ongoing reconsideration of megaregions and reformulation of a programme of research for those of us interested in megaregions and global urban studies more broadly. One of the main unresolved questions to arise out of this book is the status and position of the ‘megaregion’ within global urban studies. This extends much further than the immediate focus of this book, so one of our aims in this final chapter is to connect the contribution(s) of this collection to contemporary debates centred on urban futures and the future of the urban. The book has presented multiple pathways into the megaregion debate and we have identified four to develop further in this chapter, which are: (1) competing or complementary spatial imaginaries; (2) megaregional glocalization; (3) utopian/dystopian urban dreams; and (4) urban history, periodization and temporality. To foreground this, we begin with three examples which caught our eye in the short period we were writing this chapter. They serve as an important reminder both of the continuing influence of megaregions within popular public discourses and the need for the type of more critical analysis that this book promotes.

In the first section we aim to critically examine the foundations upon which the megaregion discourse has been constructed. In so doing, we conceptualize the position occupied by the megaregion in debates prior to the onset of globalization, and then discuss how the concept has been reawakened during globalization. The second section then explores four separate, yet interrelated, lines of argumentation which cut into the megaregional debate as it is currently constructed and form the basis for developing a more critical approach toward megaregional research. We conclude with some cautionary remarks about the challenges and opportunities for near-future megaregional research.

There are three purposes: (1) to illustrate diversity amongst world cities; (2) to show how this reflects/constitutes power relativities between cities; and (3) to place debates on diversity and power on a firm empirical basis. The power of cities is interpreted both as a capacity (“power over”) and as a medium (“power to”). World cities are treated as global service centres and the world city network is conceptualised as being “interlocked” through provision of business and financial services by global firms. The study is primarily empirical and uses a global data set comprising information on100 global service firms in 123 world cities. Seven different ways of measuring and illustrating power differentials are presented: global network connectivity, banking/finance connectivity, dominant centres, global command centres, regional command centres, high connectivity gateways, and gateways to emerging markets. These categories have been identified before but never specified as comprehensively and rigorously as here. Whereas power as command power is concentrated in the USA, western Europe and Tokyo, network power is much more geographically diffused transcending the old “North–South divide”. Finally the focus on diversity makes problematic the lazy policy tendency for emulation of a few well-known “global cities”.

Please note that this material is copyrighted and that any download is for personal use only. This is a chapter from a book entitled: International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities. It is also available from: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781781001011.00009

Please note that this material is copyrighted and that any download is for personal use only. This is a chapter from a book entitled: International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities. It is also available from: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781781001011.00005

This paper traces the latest round of debates about appropriate scales and scopes of government and governance in Rhine-Main - an economically highly integrated but politically, territorially and emotionally divided region. We identify a downscaling of political power from the regional to the municipal level, and an upscaling of informal networking and image building to an extended regional scale. These countertrends are signs of a more complex geographical rearrangement in municipal and institutional relations. The inherent contradictions in the rescaling and reimagining of Rhine-Main are evident in the Strategic Vision for Frankfurt/Rhein-Main 2020. Its new conceptualization of Rhine-Main postulates complementary polycentricity as a competitive asset but remains firmly grounded in an institutional territorial logic that contravenes its own economically-driven agenda.