Global urban analysis: a survey of cities in globalization

Global Urban Analysis provides a unique insight into the contemporary world economy through a focus on cities. It is based upon a large-scale customized data collection on how leading businesses use cities across the world: as headquarter locations, for finance, for professional and creative services, for media. These data – involving up to 2000 firms and over 500 cities – provide evidence for both how the leading cities (sometimes called global cities) are coming to dominate the world economy and how hundreds of other cities are faring in this brave new urban world. Thus can the likes of London, New York and Hong Kong be tracked, as well as Manchester, Cleveland and Guangzhou, and even Plymouth, Chattanooga and Xi’an. Cities are assessed and ranked in terms of their importance for various functions such as for financial services, legal services and advertising, plus novel findings are reported for the geographical orientations of their connections.