Research Opportunities
Redrawing the world map
When it comes to business, London and New York steadfastly remain at the top of the table of the most connected cities in the world. But according to academics at Loughborough, cities in China are rising rapidly up the league.
Centred in Loughborough’s Department of Geography, Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) is the leading world-wide network for researchers seeking to understand cities in the era of globalization.
Members are based in the US, China and Belgium, as well as throughout the UK, and contributions to the group’s online hub come from all four corners of the globe.
Since the group’s inception in 1998, one of its key projects has been the examination of these relationships between key cities.
Researchers looked at the location of various firms, including the top financial, legal and management consultancy names, and how they do business with each city. This enabled them to draw up a measure of connectivity – how intensely related one city is to the other cities – and allowed the researchers to rank the cities according to that connectivity.
GaWC’s work is of enormous interest to city leaders and even governments around the world, each keen to discover where their key centres appear on the list and, perhaps most crucially,the reasons why. The group is redrawing the map,and perhaps even beginning to change the way the world is perceived.