ABSTRACT
In what sense does networking turn a city into a world or global city? This is not an easy question to answer, and the attempted responses testify to a fundamental divergence of epistemological, metatheoretical and methodological views. This diversity of approach is no surprise. Almost from the very beginning, research on world cities has been characterized by a great variety of perspectives, ranging from a quantitative-positivist approach and neo-Marxist regulation theory to flirtation with postmodernism. In his review of research on this topic nine years after the announcement of the world city hypothesis (Friedmann 1986), Friedmann (1995:43) arrived at the conclusion that the hypothesis had ‘been fleshed out into a solid research paradigm’. A ‘counter-narrative’ to ‘the meta-narrative of capital’, synthesizing ‘what would otherwise be disparate and diverging researches’, was born.
