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The world's great cities are important nodes in the world economy. Major theorists (Friedman, Sassen, Castells) conceptualize global cities as the command and control centers for contemporary global capitalism. The authors' research offers a view of the global system based on a careful examination of the relations and connections between world cities and how those patterns change over time. Formal network analysis allows the authors to interpret data on flows of airline passengers between the world's great cities for six time points between 1977 and 1997,focusing on the changes in network characteristics (especially centrality hierarchies and clique membership)for the entire global city system. Although New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, and afew other major European and North American metropolises dominate this urban hierarchy throughout the two decades, the network roles and positions of other places shift considerably. The article concludes that research on world city networks once again demonstrates that global urbanization patterns are characterized by the uneven development dynamic anticipated by world-system analysis.
The basic idea of systems of interconnected cities is an old one. Early in the 20th century, some of the theorists associated with the Chicago school of urban sociology offered suggestive sketches of worldwide hierarchies of cities (Gras, 1922; McKenzie, 1927; see Smith, 1995, for a discussion). But it was only in the increasingly interconnected world of the later half of this century, and with explicit grounding in world-system analysis, that fully developed conceptualizations of a global city system emerged (Friedmann & Wolff, 1982; Knox & Taylor, 1995; Sassen, 1991).
Now, as we enter a new millennium, a wide range of commentators claim that the world is experiencing fundamental shifts and restructuring often referred to as globalization. As Hargittai and Centeno (2001) explain in the introductory article of this special issue, globalization is a term that is more frequently invoked than explained, and it carries a great deal of definitional uncertainty. Rather than delve into the voluminous abstract debates, we will attempt empirically to map the hierarchy of major world cities. Our fundamental premise, quoting Sassen (1998), is that "globalization can be deconstructed in terms of the strategic sites where global processes materialize and the linkages that bind them" (p. 392). A basic assumption of this approach is that global processes...