Which are the world’s most connected cities in terms of financial and business services – accountancy, advertising, banking and finance, insurance, law and management consultancy? New ESRC-funded research by Professor Peter Taylor of Loughborough University puts London and New York well ahead of the pack. While this is no great surprise – though it has never been measured before – the research finds plenty of other surprises.
For example, Tokyo is usually bracketed with New York and London as the world’s three ‘global cities’. But according to Professor Taylor’s analysis – which uses a specially produced and unique data set of the office networks of 100 global business service firms to measure the connections between 316 cities across the world and estimate the relative ‘connectivity’ of each city – Tokyo ranks below Hong Kong and Paris. (See the attached top ten ranking.) Hong Kong ranking third reflects the current influence of the emerging Chinese market on global provision of business services.
The sheer amount of connectivity across cities is quite remarkable: there are 123 cities that have levels of connectivity at least one fifth of London’s score. (See the attached ‘map’ of the global cities archipelago.)These are from all around the world, including Lagos and Nairobi in Africa, Lima and Bogota in Latin America and Karachi and Calcutta in South Asia. But overall, these well-connected cities are concentrated in North America, Western Europe and Pacific Asia.
Globalization is not a monolith: the pattern of financial and business services across the world varies by sector creating six different globalizations:
A law/banking pattern articulated through Frankfurt and Munich as a pan-European process. A banking pattern focusing on Pacific Asia and articulated through Tokyo. An advertising pattern articulated through New York and covering national markets across the world. An American law pattern articulated through New York and Washington. An accountancy pattern with a ‘western bias’ across the world articulated through London. A management consultancy pattern concentrated in the United States and articulated through Chicago. Other cities have different roles as gateways to regional and national markets outside the specific sectors of financial and business services:
The major gateway cities are Hong Kong for China, Singapore for South East Asia, Miami for the Caribbean and Latin America, Mumbai for India, Toronto for Canada, Sydney for Australia, Sao Paulo for Brazil and South America, and Mexico City for Mexico. There are new developing gateway cities to emerging markets, notably Moscow for Russia and Beijing for China.
How cities connect to one another in terms of financial and business linkages goes to the heart of globalization. But until now, we have not had the data to begin to understand these linkages. The irony of the world city network is that, with the exception of New York and Miami, American cities are much more localised in their connections than cities in Western Europe and Pacific Asia. Their excessive US-orientation relates to the size of the home market, which means that a US-based global service firm's growth strategy need not encompass large-scale globalization.
This research – the first global urban analysis – shows an interconnected business world organised through cities with hierarchical, regional and sectoral variations. Professor Taylor’s work constitutes an invitation to look at our world in a new and different way. Here we use cities as our lenses to see the world as a globally connected network. This contrasts with the usual way of viewing the world ‘internationally’, highlighting countries and their boundaries. With globalization, cities need to be taken more seriously.
--- The research project ‘World City Network Formation in a Space of Flows’ by Professor Peter Taylor was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Peter Taylor is Co-Director of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Study Group and Network centred at the Department of Geography, Loughborough University - www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/
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