ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how local economic development efforts, in the context of air-cargo delivery services expansion, have transformed Louisville into a distributive world city. It analyses Louisville’s development as a distributive world city coterminous with the expansion of UPS’s package-sorting hub and UPS Airlines’ headquarters in the city. World cities are commanding nodes in the world economy, exhibiting dense patterns of interaction between people, goods and information facilitated by a rapidly expanding and sophisticated global network of transport services and infrastructure. Louisville is, at least by reputation, among the ‘diverse, but ordinary’ places in the modern global economy. As for the applicability of the world-city concept to the Louisville case, Louisville’s occupational structure is unlike that of major world cities. Louisville has a relatively small percentage of the professional, managerial and technical occupations that comprise R. Florida’s creative class, but has a relatively high percentage of working-class occupations as defined by Florida.
