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Measuring Globalization in the World-
System’s CitySystem: A Research AgendaJeffrey Kentor, University of UtahDavid Smith, University of California, IrvineMichael Timberlake, University of Utah
 
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Introduction
“World cities” (Hall, 1966; Friedmann and Wolf, 1982) and “global cities” (Sassen, 1991) haveincreasingly attracted the attention of urban-focused social science research since Peter Hall introducedthe idea in the mid-1960s. Social scientists working on comparative social change are now concernedwith situating these cities conceptually and empirically within the broad currents of the world politicaleconomy (e.g., Smith, 1996; Timberlake, 1985). A more recent development among scholars of cities,urbanization, and development is to view city networks as constituting an important structural dimensionof the world system. From this perspective, the great cities of the world are organizational nodes inmultiple global networks of economic, social, demographic, and information flows. This relational viewallows us to begin to think about mapping cities in terms of their structural relationships with one another.This, in turn, suggests a research agenda the objectives of which range from describing the structure of aworld network of cities, to identifying and explaining hierarchical relations among world cities, tounderstanding the “nesting” of the world city network into the broader world-system, to analyzing theconnections between particular cities’ places in the global hierarchy and social relations within them.Leading scholars focusing on world cities contend that economic power inheres in a few key“global cities”, where the world economy’s key functions, such as financial and other producer services(Sassen, 1991), are concentrated. The top cities are followed in the hypothesized hierarchy of world citiesby less influential sub-global cities which, nevertheless, are said to “articulate” among large regions of theworld economy. The picture emerging from this body of scholarship is that of a hierarchical world-system of cities (see Knox and Taylor, 1995), and though this hierarchy is subject to change, theconsensus is that the particular cities at the top of the global hierarchy have changed little in recenthistory. But this rich and evocative line of scholarship tends to fall short empirically: it rarely is based onactual analysis of data on the
relationships
undergirding the global network of cities. We need to developmuch better indicators of actual links and flows between these great cities in order to evaluate some of this perspective’s most important assumptions, and to develop more accurate descriptions of world citysystem structure and changes therein. Such a project will provide an alternative strategy for evaluatingtheories of globalization, one based not on a system of nation states alone, but one defined by examiningthe contours of a world-wide system of cities. Paralleling the scholarship comparing world cities isanother body of urban research focusing on coalitions of actors within particular cities who are compelledby their land-based interests to push “their” cities into competition for more prominent roles in this globalhierarchy (Logan and Molotch 1987; Rondinelli, Johnson and Kasarda 1998; Scott 2001). This suggests apromising way to link the “global” and the “local”. In fact, local political actors are increasinglyconsciously using the language of globalization to justify putting public resources into making their citiesmore competitive globally (e.g., Saito and Thornley, 2003). With information on the theoreticallyrelevant attributes of each city in the hypothesized network, we will be able to develop and testpropositions about how variations in local economic and social relations are related to global network relations. At the same time, there are strong theoretical reasons to look for “upward links” between thishypothesized global city system and other global networks within which this system is assumed to havebeen produced: the set of global relations in which nation states are the chief constituent parts, therebyevaluating some of the claims about “denationalization” and the “deterritorialization” of the state that aremade in the globalization literature.
1. Objectives and Significance
 The objectives of the proposed research are to test the implications of theoretical developmentsabout globalization and “world cities” by refining and analyzing three relevant data sets: (1) data on worldcity network relations from 1980 to the present, (2) an international trade model of the world-system forthe same time period, and (3) a database on the theoretically significant attributes of those world citiesthat are included in the network database. We plan to conduct descriptive and explanatory analyses of these data, and to make these data available for use by other scholars of world cities and comparative
 
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social change. The focus of the proposed research is on relations among the world’s large cities and itwill involve collecting information on interlinkages between pairs of cities in a hypothesized worldnetwork of great cities. The research will also develop measures of theoretically important attributes of each city in the network. We will perform the initial analyses of these data with the aim of providing bothadescription of the world city network for specific points in time and a description of how it changes overtime (based on formal network analysis of these data). We will investigate the way the global citynetwork is nested and articulated into the relational world-system of nations, and offer explanatoryanalyses of the relationships among the changing structure of the network, other global socioeconomicprocesses, and theoretically significant attributes of the cities (based on combining the results of theformal network analysis with more conventional variable-based analytic procedures, such as OLSregression).The proposed research reflects our longstanding goal to understand the global dimensions of urbanization and urban change. This project focuses on understanding large scale social change in lightof global processes and structures. It also involves examining the articulation between global structuralchange and social structures and processes manifest at the local level. In many ways the research can beseen as an extension of a project that began in one co-PI’s dissertation exploring the cross-nationalrelationship among urbanization, international dependence, urban labor force structure, and social quality(Timberlake, 1979; Evans and Timberlake, 1980). Collaboratively, we further developed this line of work in the early 1980s under the auspices of Christopher Chase-Dunn’s NSF-supported research aimedat framing urbanization processes within an international political economy perspective. This projectresulted in a number of theoretical and empirical scientific publications exploring the relationships, onone hand, among urbanization patterns, global urban hierarchy, and the growth of particular cities and, onthe other hand, among urbanization patterns, national-level socioeconomic and political trends, andinternational dependency and world-system relations (e.g., Timberlake and Kentor, 1983; Chase-Dunn,1985; Kentor, 1982, 1985; Timberlake, 1985; Nemeth and Smith, 1985a). Much of this research viewedurbanization and urban hierarchy partially as outcomes of national level processes, such asindustrialization, and global processes, such as foreign investment dependence. Later, the long-termproject took a new turn. Instead of viewing cities and urbanization as derivative, we began to view citiesas crucial basing-points in a global network. From this perspective, inter-city relations are, in part,constitutive of “globalization.” We developed this line of inquiry in several theoretical and empiricalpublications (Smith and Timberlake, 1995a, 1995b, 1998, 2001; Shin and Timberlake, 2000). Thefindings of these efforts are discussed in more detail below.The roots of our efforts are found in important themes in comparative sociology, urban ecology,and urban geography. It resonates with the work of other scholars who are currently attempting to shedlight on the ways in which cities are involved in the macro-level processes associated with what now iscommonly termed as “globalization.”World City Networks & Hierarchies.McKenzie and other early urban scholars saw citiesin terms of a system of cities, related to one another along a dimension of power. Some of hiswork is prescient of much more recent research: global integration, world-wide hierarchies of dominance, and competition and change were all important themes in it: “Old centers lose theirrelative importance as new factors enter to disturb the equilibrium....New centers of dominanceare arising...” (McKenzie, 1927). More than a generation later, the same logic appears in thework of scholars of urban planning such as Peter Hall (e.g., 1966) and John Friedmann who arethe immediate pioneers of the now extensive body of research on world cities. In 1986Friedmann produced a ranked list of key world cities, providing a figure that “maps” the linkagesbetween them. He argues that world cities can be located in a global hierarchy based on theirpositions in the global geographic nexus of economic power: “Cities can be arrangedhierarchically, roughly in accord with the economic power they command (1995: 25-6).Moreover, because cities can rise and fall in this hierarchy it becomes important to recognize “theexistence of differences in rank and investigate the articulations of particular world cities witheach other” (23). Friedmann labels world cities as either “primary” or “secondary,” according to
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