ABSTRACT
One of the most salient propositions in John Friedmann's seminal World City Hypothesis (Friedmann, 1986, p. 71) refers to the fact that: “key cities throughout the word are used by capital as ‘basing points’ in the spatial organization and articulation of production and markets. The resulting linkages make it possible to arrange world cities into a complex spatial hierarchy.” However, the lack of theoretical agreement on the defining characteristics of world cities has resulted in ad hoc taxonomies (e.g., Friedmann, 1986; Knox, 1995) often limited to the highest ranks of the hierarchy (e.g., Sassen, 1991; Abu-Lughod, 1995). Apart from the lack of an undisputed definition of world cities in and by itself, the main reason for these somewhat eclectic approaches has been a lack of data (Smith & Timberlake, 1995a; Short et al., 1996), a problem that is, of course, related to the absence of undisputed defining characteristics of world cities. One of the major consequences of the problems pertaining to a description of Friedmann's ‘complex spatial hierarchy’ is that the lower rungs of this transnational urban hierarchy have remained un-assessed. The prime purpose of this paper is to rectify this limitation: we investigate a very large number of cities, many of which have never figured at all in previous discussions of world cities . . .
