Global Urban Analysis

A Survey of Cities in Globalization

Peter J Taylor, Pengfei Ni, Ben Derudder, Michael Hoyler, Jin Huang, Frank Witlox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849712132
• eBook ISBN: 9781136539282
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Global Urban Analysis provides a unique insight into the contemporary world economy through a focus on cities. It is based upon a large-scale customised data collection on how leading businesses use cities across the world: as headquarter locations, for finance, for professional and creative services, for media. These data - involving up to 2000 firms and over 500 cities - provide evidence for both how the leading cities, sometimes called global cities, are coming to dominate the world economy, and how hundreds of other cities are faring in this brave new urban world. Thus can the likes of London, New York and Hong Kong be tracked as well as Manchester, Cleveland and Guangzhou, and even Plymouth, Chattanooga and Xi'an. Cities are assessed and ranked in terms of their importance for various functions such as for financial services, legal services and advertising, plus novel findings are reported for the geographical orientations of their connections. This is truly a comprehensive survey of cities in globalization covering global, world-regional, and national scales of analysis: - 4 key chapters outline the global structure of the world economy featuring the leading cities; - 9 regional chapters covering the whole world also feature the level of services provided by 'medium' cities; - 22 chapters on selected countries and sub-regions indicate global-ness and local-ness and feature an even wider range of cities. Written in an easy to understand style, this book is a must read for anybody interested in their own city in the world and how it relates to other cities.

1

Introduction:

The GUCP/GaWC Project

Peter J. Taylor, Pengfei Ni and Ben Derudder

This book presents the basic findings of a large, global research collaboration between the Global Urban Competitiveness Project (GUCP) at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing, and the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network at Loughborough and Ghent Universities. The focus is on the relations between cities across the world and the result is the largest and most comprehensive study of world cities ever conducted. For instance, the global urban analyses reported below include investigation of the headquarter geography of 2000 leading firms plus estimations of intercity business connections between 525 cities. With more than 30 chapters detailing our empirical results, this book provides a unique insight into contemporary globalization through the cities within which it is organized and reproduced. Cities in globalization is a very big topic, and this book provides as comprehensive a picture of what is happening as is practically feasible in a truly global urban analysis.

The joint project had two primary objectives. GUCP’s initial interest was to create a new ‘globalizing cities index’ to complement their existing research on the worldwide competitiveness of cities (Kresl and Ni, 2007). The goal was to produce results that would be conceptually and empirically an improvement on many new global rankings of cities being reported in the literature. GaWC’s initial interest was to develop and improve their existing research on the world city network (Taylor, 2004). The goal was not just to update this work, but also to put it onto a much sounder empirical foundation. After meetings and workshops in Loughborough and Beijing, the research turned into a very closely integrated work process. The key steps were as follows:

1 A Data Collection Manual was produced in Loughborough, extended in Ghent and translated in Beijing in late 2007.

2 Data were collected in Beijing from January to May 2008.

3 Data were checked in Ghent between June and September 2008, including numerous iterations to and from Loughborough and Beijing.

4 Final datasets were produced ready for analysis in December 2008.

5 Data analyses were carried out in the first half of 2009, and members of the worldwide GaWC research network and those at GUCP interpreted the findings to produce the chapters below in the second half of 2009.

Thus this has been an exceptionally fruitful research collaboration with researchers in Beijing, Loughborough and Ghent producing the findings and 38 scholars from across the world interpreting the results and writing them up as chapters for this book.

This introduction to the project and book has three sections:

1 The research background to the project is outlined so that our results can be understood in the perspective of changing ideas on world/global cities.

2 The specific designing of the new project is described to provide an introduction to the empirical content of the book.

3 The organization of the book is presented to help the reader navigate what is quite a large, but carefully ordered volume.

Research Background

There is a long tradition of identifying selected cities as ‘world cities’ because of their economic, political or cultural importance – Babylon, Athens, Rome, Baghdad, Paris, Hangzhou, Beijing, London, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Moscow, Tokyo and Los Angeles have all been identified as such for their ‘place and time in the sun’. The scholar who has done most to convert this general recognition of city ‘greatness’ into scholarly investigation is Peter Hall (1966, 1998). However, the specific sequence of research out of which this project has emerged, relates more to the economic changes in the world economy that have created contemporary globalization.

The discovery and identification of world/global cities

In the 1970s there was a spatial restructuring of the world economy that came to be known as the New International Division of Labour (NIDL) (Fröbel et al, 1980). This involved numerous firms in the core of the world economy moving their industrial production to poorer regions to take advantage of the cheaper labour. This decentralization of production required a new centralization of control to coordinate and plan the new global production, initially recognized as new corporate centres (multinational firm headquarters) (Hymer, 1972) and international financial centres (global finance and banks) (Reed, 1981). Friedmann (1986) definitively defined a world city hierarchy wherein a limited number of major cities across the world were deemed to be ‘command and control centres’. The cities were differentiated by the scope of their command: New York and London were global but other cities, such as Madrid, Miami, Sydney and São Paulo, only had regional command areas.

In a separate but equally influential writing, Sassen (1991) identified New York, London and Tokyo as global cities. These were the key examples of a limited number of a new type of city that had, according to Sassen, emerged to organize the new economic globalization. These global cities combined command and control functions with advanced producer services (financial, professional, creative) that enabled global capital to operate transnationally. For instance, global law firms specialized in inter-jurisdictional law contracts, global advertising agencies pioneered global marketing campaigns and global accountants diffused basic auditing standards to facilitate foreign direct investment. Her ideas were taken up by Castells (1996) for his network society thesis based upon global spaces of flows: relations between major cities constituted his prime example of a global-scale network. Between them, Friedmann, Sassen and Castells provided the conceptual framework for a world cities literature that dominated much of urban studies in the 1990s (Knox and Taylor, 1996; Brenner and Keil, 2006).

Initial limitations

Three important limitations of this new literature were soon identified: an empirical deficit, restricted coverage and conceptual confusion.

Short and his colleagues (1996) referred to there being ‘a dirty little secret’ in the world cities literature. They argued that the literature’s bold ideas were not supported by adequate empirical evidence. This was largely because at the scale of analysis required to study world cities there was actually very little publicly available information beyond basic demographics. Thus the majority of data employed for understanding world cities actually related to countries rather than the cities themselves (Taylor, 1999). To solve this problem required new customized data collection on world cities.

A related problem concerned the focus in the literature on a limited number of major cities. As we have seen, Sassen’s global cities were illustrated using just three cities. Friedmann’s hierarchy added a few more, but understanding cities in globalization through just a dozen or so examples also seemed problematic. Robinson (2002) has been the critic of this lack of coverage; she refers to large swathes of urban dwellers being removed from the world map (e.g. in Africa). This problem can be partly traced back to the dearth of data but it is also importantly related to how world/global cities are conceptualized.

The conceptual confusion may have already been recognized by the use of both ‘world cities’ and ‘global cities’ in the discussion so far. Many scholars have used the two terms interchangeably but this is not what Sassen intended: her global cities are defined to be much rarer than Friedmann’s world cities, for which there could be many levels of hierarchy. But there has been a reaction against the restriction of research to just the most important cities. Inclusive approaches have emerged that have used two related concepts: globalizing cities (Marcuse and van Kempen, 2000) and cities in globalization (Taylor et al, 2007). Both concepts treat the coverage problem but they do not advance far in terms of conceptual clarification. In one survey, Taylor and Lang (2004) were able to list 50 different ways that cities in globalization were described. Derudder (2008) provides a comprehensive discussion of the variety of approaches in the world city literature.

The quantitative research programme at GaWC was specifically developed to try and overcome the three limitations described above.

Specifying the world city network

Drawing on Sassen’s emphasis on advanced producer services and Castells’ insistence on networks, a world city network has been formally specified (Taylor, 2001). The purpose is to cut through the conceptual confusion by precisely specifying the model, and to enable its operationalization through feasible data collection on reasonably large numbers of cities.

The world city network is structured as an interlocking network. Such networks are triple-layered: as well as the net-level and node-level found in all networks, there is an additional sub-nodal level. In this case the net-level is the space of flows in the world economy, the nodal level is the cities, and the sub-nodal level is the advanced producer service firms. It is the latter that ‘interlock’ the cities to produce the network. Note, therefore, that the agents in this model, the network-makers, are not the cities per se, but rather the firms operating through the cities. In contemporary globalization these firms typically operate through multi-city office networks. In this way they can service their business clients across the world and maintain their brand integrity. If they were to pass a client on to another firm for servicing in a city where they had no office, they lose quality control of the service and therefore, possibly, the client. Thus through the 1990s and into the new century, most large advanced producer service firms spread their office network across the world economy. It is these office networks that form the basis of the world city network: in effect we treat the latter as an amalgam of all the office networks servicing global capital.

Where is the space of flows in this model? There are no easily available data on intercity flows through offices and therefore there cannot be a simple direct measurement of such flows. Instead we have to use our model to generate indirect measurement of flows, which we will call potential working flows. We focus on potential intra-firm flows; information and knowledge linking offices within a firm in the routine work of project development and execution (e.g. designing and launching an advertising campaign). The basic assumption we make is that the larger and more important an office is, the more flows of information and knowledge it will generate. Therefore, the flows between two cities both housing major offices of a firm will be much larger than flows between two cities both having minor offices of the firm. On the basis of this assumption, the model can estimate potential working flows between all pairs of cities in a firm’s office network. Aggregating all these estimates for all firms provides an indirect measure of total flows between every pair of cities. Adding up an individual city’s potential working flows with every other city provides an estimate of the network connectivity of that city. This is an indicator of the degree of integration of a given city into the world city network.

To operationalize this model requires data on the offices of advanced producer service firms. This information is relatively easy to find. Large service firms tend to flaunt their ‘globality’ on their websites because this is what they are trying to sell to new clients. In addition, they use their globality to recruit a new cohort of professional operatives every year with a promise of global experience and learning. Thus we can use information on these websites to categorize the importance of their offices. Because all websites are different we use a common codification of offices scoring 0–5 as follows:

• 0 indicates no presence (office) in a city.

• 1 indicates a very minor office.

• 2 is a typical office of the firm.

• 3 is reserved for particularly large offices of the firm.

• 4 indicates an office with extra-city responsibilities (e.g. a regi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The GUCP/GaWC Project
• Part A — Global-Scale Analyses
• Part B — World–Regional Connectivity Analyses
• Part C — Key Country and Sub-Regional Connectivity Profiles
• Global Synthesis: National and Sub-Regional Contrasts
• Postscript: Trends and Change
• Appendix A: Lists of Firms and Cities
• Appendix B: Technical Appendix
• Index