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This article contributes new empirical findings and conceptual arguments to topical debates about internationalisation ‘at home’ through a comparative study on how undergraduate students experience...

Walter Christaller’s central place theory famously conceptualizes local external urban relations (town-ness) while neglecting non-local connections characterized as central flow theory (city-ness)....

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.

This special issue offers a cross-section of state-of-the-art research into ‘polycentric urban regions’: regions characterized by the presence of multiple, more-or-less proximate, centres where there is balanced development among these centres. With the literature increasingly transcending the focus on paradigmatic examples, the papers in this special issue concentrate on three fundamental and complementary questions: How can polycentric urban regions be conceptualized? How can we identify them formally? What is the impact of this regional form on people and places? We discuss how the contributions collectively push the boundaries of the regional studies literature and identify promising avenues for further research.

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Environment and Planning A and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17735405. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.

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

Recent UK government policy initiatives have encouraged universities to seek funding from philanthropic sources. Yet, there has been little investigation into the work of the emergent Higher Education professionals expected to deliver this additional income. In this paper, we consider the role of professional networks in facilitating knowledge exchange amongst university fundraisers. Through interviews with senior UK philanthropy professionals in the 1960s universities, we identify significant variations amongst professional networks and peer groups. We argue that professional networks are multi-layered and often exclusionary. Yet, among participants, these associations provide both open spaces of learning and a means of achieving competitive advantage. Moreover, the networks permit university philanthropy professionals to develop new distinctive identities, transcending the institutional and locational setting of their employing organisations. This paper advances theoretical debates on the complexities of knowledge exchange across spatial scales and the role of these networks in the establishment of a new profession.

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.

We explore the temporal evolution of cities and firms (i.e. both modes) in a two-mode intercity corporate network formed by 50 leading advanced producer service firms across 154 cities for the years 2000 and 2010. Drawing upon one-mode network projection and three network centralities, we assess the shifting positions of individual cities and firms in the one-mode intercity and interfirm networks. Major findings include: (1) the intercity network is more stable and hierarchical than the interfirm network; (2) brokerage functions, as captured by betweenness centrality, remain highly uneven for both cities and firms. For example, New York and London’s distinct positions as the world’s leading producer service centres remain intact; and (3) regional and sectoral tendencies are evident in terms of growth rates of centralities.

UK universities are receiving record amounts of funding from private philanthropists. In 2013, it was reported that, for the first time, UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) obtained more major donations from philanthropic sources than any other cause. Three decades of increased neoliberalism and internationalisation of the Higher Education (HE) sector, together with a decline in state funding, have heightened the imperative for English universities in particular to intensify engagement with potential private donors. The UK government, via its Matched Funding Scheme (MFS) 2008–2011, sought to incentivise giving to HEIs in England. Universities have thus been encouraged to grow a ‘culture’ of philanthropy. Yet, there has been limited investigation by geographers into the impact of private donations on UK HEIs. In this paper, we undertake a critical examination of the official publications of 17 diverse English HEIs which participated in the MFS 2008–2011. Particular attention is paid to the differentiated levels of participation by universities with the MFS and the ways in which donations were represented in their public documents. We argue that diverse cultures of HEI engagement with philanthropic giving are critically linked to their: location in conventional institutional hierarchies; integration in professional knowledge networks; and ability to mobilise strategic connections across geographical scales. In doing so, we advance theoretical work on the role of philanthropic giving in reconfiguring contemporary geographies of HE.

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.

Sassen's identification of global cities as “strategic places” is explored through world city network analysis. This involves searching out advanced producer service (APS) firms that constitute “strategic networks,” from whose activities strategic places can be defined. Twenty-five out of 175 APS firms are found to be strategic, and from their office networks, 45 cities out of 526 are designated as strategic places. A measure of “strategicness” of cities is devised, and individual findings from this are discussed by drawing on existing literature about how APS firms use specific cities. A key finding shows that New York and London have different levels of strategicness, and this is related to the former's innovation prowess and the latter's role in global consumption of services. Other cases of strategicness discussed in terms of the balance between production and consumption of APSs are Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai; Palo Alto; Mexico City; Johannesburg; and Dubai and Frankfurt.

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.

This paper contributes to emerging debates about uneven global geographies of higher education through a critical analysis of world university rankings. Drawing on recent work in geography, international higher education and bibliometrics, the paper examines two of the major international ranking schemes that have had significant public impact in the context of the on-going neoliberalization of higher education. We argue that the emergence of these global rankings reflects a scalar shift in the geopolitics and geoeconomics of higher education from the national to the global that prioritizes academic practices and discourses conducted in particular places and fields of research. Our analysis illustrates how the substantial variation in ranking criteria produces not only necessarily partial but also very specific global geographies of higher education. In comparison, these reveal a wider tension in the knowledge-based economy between established knowledge centers in Europe and the United States and emerging knowledge hubs in Asia Pacific. An analysis of individual ranking criteria, however, suggests that other measures and subject-specific perspectives would produce very different landscapes of higher education.

This paper reports a new type of world regionalisation based upon the location strategies of leading advanced producer service firms. To generate these ‘global practice’ regions, a principal components analysis of the office networks of 175 service firms across 138 cities is used to identify 10 common location strategies. These are interpreted as fuzzy (overlapping) and porous regional formations each consisting of two parts: a home-region and a global-outreach. The results indicate five overlapping pairs of regions: (i) intensive and extensive globalisations based upon the USA plus London (USAL); (ii) Americas and Latin America regions; (iii) Pacific Asia and China regions; (iv) Europe and Scandinavia regions; and (v) Australasian and Canadian ‘Commonwealth’ regions. All regions have worldwide global-outreaches but they differ significantly in their respective sizes and importance. Discussion of these findings elaborates upon two key points: first, globalisation is not a ‘blanket’ process creating a homogeneous world, and second, the resulting fuzzy and porous regionalisation counters the traditional ‘territorialist’ regional geographies that can provide a framework for global conflict with a more complex geography of multiple global integrations.

This empirical paper maps changes in the global geography of advanced producer service provision across major cities in the 2000-2008 period. The analyses are based on a systematic assessment of geographical shifts in the office networks of leading firms in finance, management consultancy, accountancy, advertising and law, using measures of inter-city connectivity. It has been previously shown that there has been a general shift of these services from 'West to East'. In this paper, variations in the degree and pattern of this global shift among the different sectors are described and interpreted. The results point to an inherent complexity in economic globalization that is sometimes overlooked in general descriptions of the meta-process.

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 empirical paper analyses how leading international banking centres (IBCs) have been faring under the 2008 global financial crisis. We aggregate data derived from The Banker’s annual list of the world’s leading banks at the city level to map changing levels of Tier 1 capital between 2007 and 2008 and returns on capital in 2008. The results point to a general but nonetheless variegated shift ‘from West to East’ in the world of IBCs. The paper concludes with a brief review of the implications for future research on financial geographies in general and the geographies of the financial crisis in particular.

This paper reports a preliminary investigation into the economic efficacy of two spatial frameworks—English Core Cities and the Northern Way—recently promoted by national policy makers. We ask whether they are consistent with contemporary economic process in the UK space economy through analyses of commercial multi-city law firms. The latter are treated as an “indicator sector” to define the contemporary UK space economy as practised by law firms. Within this new space of flows, the location strategies of the law firms do confirm the salience of the Northern Way (as trans-Pennine corridor) and Core Cities as part of a larger UK metropolitan space of flows. Conflating the two spatial frameworks leads us to identify hints of a rebalancing of London within a metropolitan UK space. A Manchester polycentric mega-city region is found to be the likely candidate for this role. This finding in no way impinges on London's dominant global role, and we conclude that perhaps mutuality between London and provincial cit...

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.

Urban geography, both material and imagined, is a crucial mediating factor in the production and consumption of music. The city provides the concrete places which offer spaces for musical creativity. While certain spaces such as recording studios are specifically organised for this purpose, music is produced in many spaces, from the bedroom, garage or home studio, to community and youth centres, to street corners and clubs. Cities also sustain networks that foster and support musical creativity. These networks come together in locales of creativity and production to find fixity in the concrete spaces of the city. At the same time the networks are fluid, with musical knowledge moving within and between cities through the mobility of skilled creatives and new technologies. A growing body of geographical literature is attempting to foreground the spatial in music studies by focusing on local scenes, musical production, and the particularity of certain places. This article aims to provide an overview of current geographical research and debates on music, with an explicit focus on the role of urban space in musical creativity, and on the musically creative networks at work within and between cities. We argue that there is a need to situate creativity more squarely in its material and embodied contexts of production and to consider the ways in which creative individuals interact in complex ways with urban physical form, technology, and other actors in networks of creativity and production.

This is a short note to take stock of where we were before the financial crisis began to seriously undermine the global economy in late 2008. For once the phrase ‘to turn the world upside down’ could hardly be more merited: the most right-wing US President in living memory is accused by members of Congress in his own party of being a ‘Bolshevik’ pursuing ‘financial socialism’ while in the UK the ‘New Labour’ government is being praised for nationalising more of the British economy than the most socialist, post-1945 Labour government ever did. Instead of the diminution of the state, the era of neoliberal globalization appears to have culminated in a reassertion of state economic power: place-based public finance has come to the rescue of flow-based private finance.

Using data on the ‘career’ paths of one thousand ‘leading scientists’ from 1450 to 1900, what is conventionally called the ‘rise of modern science’ is mapped as a changing geography of scientific practice in urban networks. Four distinctive networks of scientific practice are identified. A primate network centred on Padua and central and northern Italy in the sixteenth century expands across the Alps to become a polycentric network in the seventeenth century, which in turn dissipates into a weak polycentric network in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century marks a huge change of scale as a primate network centred on Berlin and dominated by German-speaking universities. These geographies are interpreted as core-producing processes in Wallerstein’s modern world-system; the rise of modern scientific practice is central to the development of structures of knowledge that relate to, but do not mirror, material changes in the system.

Hoyler M., Freytag T. and Mager C. Connecting Rhine-Main: the production of multi-scalar polycentricities through knowledge-intensive business services, Regional Studies. Most of the literature on polycentric urban regions has focused on the analysis of intra-regional rather than external linkages, while research on the emergence of a ‘world city network’ has analysed external city relations without explicitly addressing city-regional contexts. This paper aims to bring both perspectives together. Drawing on Taylor's interlocking network model, it presents a first analysis of multi-scalar inter-city connectivities within a specific city-regional context. Central to the analysis is the question how knowledge-intensive business service firms in Rhine-Main connect this multi-nodal metropolitan region to other cities within Germany and beyond. The result is a detailed mapping of the business service connectivities of a major European city-region. Hoyler M., Freytag T. et Mager C. Region Rhin-Main et processus ...

This paper introduces a special issue of Regional Studies on 'Globalization, City-Regions and Polycentricity in North West Europe'. The issue focuses on the thematic core of the EU-funded project POLYNET: the analysis of economic connections and information flows generated by advanced producer services in eight European polycentric city-regions. The paper first discusses key elements of the current debate on global city-regions and points out some unresolved gaps. A summary of the main findings of the contributions to the special issue is followed by a research agenda for future work on emerging mega-city regions.

The turn of the twenty-first century saw the re-emergence of debates about the reconfiguration of European financial geographies and the role of stock exchange mergers in this process. There has been, however, no systematic attempt to date to analyse such changes. This paper proposes a specific conceptual framework to explore these issues. It uses a product-based analysis to examine, in the context of recent stock exchange mergers, the factors affecting the competitiveness of a financial centre. It argues that it is important to understand three intertwined influences � product complementarities, the nature of local epistemic communities, and regulation � and their contingent effects on change. This is exemplified by a tentative application of the framework to the case of Amsterdam in order to better understand its recent decline in competitiveness as a European financial centre.

The network externalities portrayed as connectivities in Part A can only be taken advantage of through the local practices of firms in Chengdu. The framework we use to guide this part of the research derives from the seminal work of Jane Jacobs.

01 - Introduction by Immanuel Wallerstein 02 - Ecology and the Geography of Capitalism by Ana Esther Cecena 03 - Economic Inequality, Stratification, and Mobility by Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz and Timothy Patrick Moran 04 - Cities by Peter J. Taylor, Michael Hoyler, and Dennis Smith 05 - Peasantries by Eric Vanhaute, Hanne Cottyn, and Yang Wang 06 - Large Enterprises and Corporate Power by Jorge Fonseca 07 - Intellectual Property by Ravi Sundaram 08 - The States by Atilio A. Borom and Paloma Nottebohm 09 - Citizenship by Oleksandr Fisun and Volodymyr Golovko 10 - Patriarchal Systems and Women's Spaces by Linda Christiansen-Ruffman 11 - Deviance by Ari Sitas, Sumangala Damodaran, Weibke Keim & Nicos Trimikliniotis 12 - Conclusion by Immanuel Wallerstein

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.

The introduction of the Single European Currency, the Euro, put London and Frankfurt's position as European financial centres under the spotlight at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. Many commentators suggested that London being outside ‘Euroland’ would begin to leak capital, labour and prowess to Frankfurt as the German city out-muscled London as the pre-eminent European financial centre for the next Century. In the British and German financial national press the discourse was one of competition and rivalry with predicted winners and losers depending on whether one stood in London or Frankfurt. The London-Frankfurt rivalry is a microcosm of traditional world city research, which in this paper is turned on its head. In-depth research with financial institutions and stakeholders in each city pre-Euro indicated that London's relationship with Frankfurt is based more on cooperation and strong network relations between the two cities than competition. In effect, the cities are bound together by firm ...

This article was published in the journal, Zeitschrift fur Wirtschaftsgeographie [© Buchenverlag GbR] and the definitive published version can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1515/zfw.2004.0005