The Routledge Companion to the Geography of International Business

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STRATEGIC CITIES WITHIN GLOBAL URBAN NETWORKS¹

Ben Derudder, Peter J. Taylor, James Faulconbridge, Michael Hoyler and Pengfei Ni

Introduction

The prime purpose of this chapter is to investigate cities as strategic places in contemporary globalization using the methodology developed as world city network analysis (Taylor, 2001; Taylor & Derudder, 2016). To this end, we draw on the work of Sassen (1991, pp. 3–4), who in her classic book The Global City identified processes of globalization that had ‘created a new strategic role for major cities’ resulting in a ‘new type of city’. Our approach deals with many more cities than Sassen considers: here we ask the question, which of these numerous cities can be reasonably identified as strategic ...