ABSTRACT
Houston is a city that has assumed considerable status globally. It is ranked as one of the third tier Gamma World Cities in the Globalization and World Cities Network (GaWC) inventory of world cities (Beaverstock et al., 1999), in which cities are ordered according to their ‘world city-ness’ – generally meaning their relative strength as global service centres. Friedmann’s (1986) hierarchy identified Houston as one of the core secondary world cities. Houston is also defined as a specialist city because of its status as the world’s energy capital. The city is ranked 10th of all the US cities in terms of global network connectivities (Taylor and Lang, 2005).
