Want to know more?
Professor Peter Taylor
T: 01509 222549
E: P.J.Taylor@lboro.ac.uk
When it comes to business, London and New York steadfastly remain at the top of the table of the most connected cities in the world.
But, as Hannah Baldwin finds out, cities in China are rising rapidly up the league, and should be our barometers during the credit crunch.
Two thirds of the way through our interview, Professor Peter Taylor pauses briefly. “Of course if you want to be a pessimist,” he says with a slight smile, “the theory we use predicts that we’ll never get out of the current economic crisis. On this occasion I really hope we’re wrong!”
Professor Taylor is the founder and director of the world-renowned Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) network, which looks at the external relations of cities around the globe.
He explains his theory. “Globalization has synchronised all the cities across the world. In the past when one hasn’t been doing so well, the other cities in its business network drag it back up. But if all of them go into decline at the same time, which is pretty much what we’re seeing at the moment, there’s no city left to pick them up. The only exceptions seem to be in China. Their cities are declining a little, but not as significantly as those in the rest of the world. We need China’s cities to remain relatively buoyant to help the rest of us climb out of the doldrums.”
Centred in Loughborough’s Department of Geography, GaWC is the leading worldwide network for researchers seeking to understand cities in the era of globalization. Members are based in the US, China and Belgium, as well as throughout the UK, and contributions to the group’s online hub come from all four corners of the globe.
“Generally when we talk about anywhere beyond our own country’s borders, we use the term ‘international’ which, as it suggests, refers to relationships between nations,” Professor Taylor says. “At GaWC we believe there are also relationships between cities across the world. With the onset of globalization these have become increasingly important, but traditionally there’s been no data on them because it’s only collected at country level – data on migration is available for the UK as a whole but not, for instance, between London and New York. That’s where GaWC comes in, we fill that city data gap.”
Since the group’s inception in 1998, one of its key projects has been the examination of these relationships between key cities.
Grants from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) allowed the researchers to undertake their first two studies, and the latest phase has just been completed in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS) in Beijing and Ghent University in Belgium.
“Originally we studied 314 cities. This time we’ve looked at 526,” says Professor Taylor. “We don’t compare the cities, we determine how they relate to one another. How does London relate to New York, not whether it’s better at this and worse at that.”
The researchers looked at the location of various firms, including the top financial, legal and management consultancy names, and how they do business with each city. This enabled them to draw up a measure of connectivity – how intensely related one city is to the other cities – and allowed the researchers to rank the cities according to that connectivity.
“In every study we’ve done London and New York always come out way ahead of the others, they’re the real global cities. Of the firms we study it’s very rare to find one that’s not in one or either of those places.
“The third city in our list has always been Hong Kong, which differs from other people’s rankings. They tend to place Tokyo after London and New York, generally because the US, the EU and Japan are the big trio of political areas. Hong Kong ranks third in our list as it’s the gateway to China, the biggest growing market in the world. Tokyo, incidentally, is seventh in our ranking.”
But, says Professor Taylor, it’s slightly further down the table where the more surprising findings come. “In this latest phase of the project, the two cities that have risen rapidly into the top nine are Beijing and Shanghai. Unlike London and New York, they don’t have many company headquarters based there, they have branches of firms, but they’re highly connected.
“Sydney too has climbed up the table. It’s part of the expanding Pacific Asian market. Although Australia’s not big in state terms, Sydney is becoming more and more important.”
Paris and Singapore complete the top-ranked group.
To the casual observer it may be surprising that the list of top cities isn’t comprised solely of capitals. Professor Taylor says we should look to history for an explanation. “Most people who study cities think in terms of hierarchies – the capital city and then all the cities below. But historically people considered cities on a horizontal plane, in terms of their trading networks, and that’s how GaWC looks at them.”
Professor Taylor is hoping that GaWC will be able to continue measuring cities’ connectivity data every two years.
“We’re some of the few people who think the credit crunch is wonderful,” he says, smiling. “We collected data at the beginning of 2008, before the real onset of the economic downturn, and when we collect it in 2010, we’ll hopefully have an ‘after’ set of data, providing us with a picture of how the credit crunch has affected cities’ relationships and therefore the world economy.”
GaWC’s work is of enormous interest to city leaders and even governments around the world, each keen to discover where their key centres appear on the list and, perhaps most crucially, the reasons why. The group is redrawing the map, and perhaps even beginning to change the way the world is perceived.
