Collaborative Research: Globalization and the Network of World Cities

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Collaborative Proposals SES-0350078 Michael Timberlake Jeffrey Kentor University of Utah SES-0350065 David Smith University of California, Irvine In this pilot study, the PIs will use a social network approach to study cities as important nodes in a worldwide web of exchanges. The major questions that will be explored are on the structure and change in a select network of cities. Specifically, which cities are more central in the network of world cities? Which are peripheral? Is the network of cities growing more tightly integrated over recent time? Do cities' roles in the global network reflect those of the nations in which they are located, or are they becoming independent of national trajectories? Finally, how is social life within cities influenced by their role in the global network? The research includes using formal network techniques to analyze data on flows of airline passengers and air cargo between all pairs of some 150-200 cities comparing patterns in 1990 and 2000, developing other city-to-city network data (e.g., telecommunications, oceanic cargo, human migration), and evaluating untested theoretical claims about the social consequences of global positioning of cities on social structural change within them. The project will contribute to scholarly as well as popular debates about globalization, begin to build a world city network database that will be available to other scholars, contribute to a number of important public policies debates, provide data and results relevant to debates about city and nation-based strategies for global economic competitiveness, the role for "the state" (at various levels) to promote that sort of development, possible tradeoffs between growth and polarization/inequality, and long-term challenges presented by emergent patterns and processes of globalization in the 21st century.