Michael Timberlake Xiulian Ma University of Utah
The city-state relationship under globalization is problematic to policy makers and scholars of urbanization and comparative international development. To what extent is there evidence of growing cross-border articulation of a global system of cities? Just what is the nature of this relationship between "world cities" and the national states in which they are geographically situated? To what extent does the world city system articulate with the international system of nation states? To what extent does the city system represent a different, competing logic? This project is designed to address these questions, first by solving difficult data issues and by then using these data to carefully analyze, quantitatively through new network modeling procedures, the dimensions of global city networks over time and their correspondence (or lack of correspondence) to the international system of states. The research will develop network measures (primarily through inter-city air transportation data) of the global city network, and it will analyze these data through novel network analytic procedures. Several research groups are currently attacking this problem in complementary ways, and this project will produce substantial synergy with ongoing work on these important questions.
Broader Impacts. Study results will be presented at scholarly meetings and in scholarly journals. Beyond the immediate intellectual goals of this project, the research will develop a longitudinal network database consisting of relations among oveer three hundred of the most important cities in the world. This database will be made publicly available to other researchers. In addition, the research will provide a new analytic approach to comparing overlapping and nested, networks, and it will be a key element in the doctoral training experience in sociology at the University of Utah.
