ABSTRACT
It has become commonplace to underline that recent developments in (the geographies of) transport and communication infrastructures have had a profound impact on the spatial organization of an increasingly globalized society (e.g. Black 2003; Rodrigue et al. 2006; Dicken 2007). One of the most commonly cited evolutions in this context is the alleged demise of the concept of ‘territoriality’ in favour of the concept of ‘networks’. Leading sociologist Manuel Castells (1996; 2001) famously describes this as a transition from an international economy organized around ‘spaces of places’ to a global economy organized around ‘spaces of flows’. Although there is a great deal of debate on the actual significance and implications of this shift, there can be little doubt that the spectacular growth of border-crossing mobility – for the largest part through air transport – is increasingly producing new spatial patterns of economic and social life. This has led some researchers to suggest that radical new ways of structuring our thinking about global spatial patterns are required, whereby a so-called ‘global city network’ (GCN) appears to be a likely candidate to provide the building blocks for such an alternative spatial framework (Taylor 2004a). Global cities are hereby essentially defined as key points in the organization of the global economy, and derive their functional importance from their mutual interactions rather than with their proper hinterlands.1 In this chapter, we will focus on one particular aspect of the interrelation between transnational aeromobility and this networked metageography,2 i.e. the relevance of data on air passenger flows for revealing the material spatiality of this GCN.
