ABSTRACT
Measures of connectivity are the first clear benefit to be obtained through precise specification and customized data collection. Such measures provide a basic understanding of the cities within a network; they go a long way to satisfying the evidential lacuna in inter-city relations identified in Chapter 2. This is where I began Part II as discussions of ‘connections’. But connectivities do not exhaust this discussion. As aggregate measures they are good for general assessment of cities, and disaggregations can inform us about roles and positions of cities within the network, as the previous chapter demonstrates. What is missing is any notion of how the network fits together. Thus the previous chapter can be viewed as ‘node orientated’; in this chapter I move on to become much more ‘network orientated’: inter-city relations are analysed as a network structure.
