Not Chicago: voids in world city network formation

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses some of the putative limitations of world city network research, which has often focused on producing “maps” of cities that are well-connected in the office networks of globalized producer services firms. We retain the data and model, but extend the conceptual focus and methodological toolkit by (1) disaggregating the network in its key geographical components and (2) focusing on notable absences in some of these geographies. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to discuss some of the notable voids in the myriad processes that constitute world city network formation. Using data on the office networks of 175 producer services firms across 707 cities, we first focus on the surprising case of Chicago and subsequently deal with a total of 21 world city network voids. The paper is concluded with a discussion of theoretical implications and the relevance for the broader literature on global urban studies.

KEYWORDS:

• World city network
• producer services
• Chicago
• postcolonial critique
• multiple globalizations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For a similar use of the parable in urban and regional studies, see Batty’s (2018) recent discussion of the concept of a “digital twin” in contemporary discussions of how to build and use simulation models.

2. In addition, there are parallel research streams that seek to analyze global inter-city connections based on headquarter-subsidiary networks of multinational corporations (e.g., Alderson & Beckfield, 2004; Rozenblat et al., 2017; Sigler & Martinus, 2017) and infrastructure networks (e.g., D. A. Smith & Timberlake, 2001; Ducruet et al., 2017; Mahutga et al., 2010).

3. In addition, there have been other critiques of the world city network literature on which we draw, often treated in tandem with the research by Friedmann (1986) and Sassen (1991): on the treatise of territorial states (Child Hill & Kim, 2000; Therborn, 2011), and on the need for an engagement with other network conceptions as in the literature on actor-network theory and nonrepresentational theory (R. G. Smith & Doel, 2011; Smith, 2003).

4. A recent example of such a misspecification is a postcolonial critique that praises the addition of advertising, accountancy and legal firms to world city network data thereby broadening a previous narrow economistic approach (Myers, 2018). Anyone who had actually read this literature before writing about it would know that these three services are featured in all analyses going back to initial data collection in 2000.

5. Instead of applying the PCA to all 707 cities, we only focused on the 370 most connected cities. In his classical handbook on factor analysis, Rummel, 1988, pp. 209–209) suggests that there are different ways in which cases (i.e. cities) can be pre-included/excluded in/from a principal components analysis. We use the selection mechanism he calls “theoretical importance”: we only include the cities that are reasonably well connected in the WCN. The reason for deleting the least-important cities from our abstraction of the WCN is that these cities’ roles are entirely defined by what may be idiosyncratic presences of a very small set of firms. So restricting the number of cases can be seen as a move to ensure that for the cities retained we can make credible, statistically robust, claims about how these are connected and positioned.

6. According to World Business Chicago there are about 350 Japanese firms in Chicago and over 100 Chicago firms in Japan (http://www.worldbusinesschicago.com/japan-chicago-ties/).