Global Urban Analysis: A Survey of Cities in Globalization

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

Jun 2012 · Routledge

About this ebook

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.

About the author

Peter J. Taylor is Professor of Geography and Environmental Management at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK, and Director of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network.

Pengfei Ni is Professor of Economics at the Institute of Finance and Trade Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing, China, and Secretary General of the Global Urban Competitiveness Project (GUCP).

Ben Derudder is Lecturer in Human Geography at Ghent University, Belgium, and Associate Director of GaWC.

Michael Hoyler is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Loughborough University, UK, and Associate Director of GaWC.

Jin Huang is Lecturer at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China, and Research Fellow at GUCP.

Frank Witlox is Professor of Economic Geography at Ghent University, Belgium, and Associate Director of GaWC.