Urban Hinterworlds Revisited

This article further develops the concept of an urban hinterworld. A hinterworld defines a city's relations with other cities across the world. Within a framework of a world city network created by global service firms, new data are described and used to define the global network connectivity of 315 cities based upon the office networks of 100 global service firms. Absolute' hinterworlds are measured by aggregating the level of service provision that is available in a city for doing business in another city. The geography of this first measure closely mirrors global network connectivity and therefore a second 'relative' measure is devised. This is found in the residuals derived from regressing absolute service provision against global network connectivity. The methodology is illustrated by deriving and mapping the hinterworlds of London and Manchester. Introduction: developing a concept IN A PREVIOUS article (Taylor, 2001a), the notion of an 'urban hinterworld' was introduced as a means of describing relations between world cities. The traditional urban geography concept of hinterland was found to be inadequate as a tool for describing the 'urban influence' of world cities under conditions of contemporary globalisation. Hinterlands demarcate the service area of cities and towns as local service centres but in recent decades applications of information and communications technology and rapid transport have enabled some cities to become 'global service centres'. In particular, provision of advanced producer services (financial and business services) by 'global service firms' has meant that clients are being serviced through world cities across all regions of the world. In these circumstances, there are no boundaries to draw around a world city's hinterland; rather provision by its leading service firms can be to all parts of the world. However, the worldwide intensity of service provision will vary from city to city and it is this spatial variation that is captured by the concept of urban hinterworld. Such geographies were constructed in Taylor (2001a) to illustrate the hinterworlds of ten leading world cities. The purpose of this introduction is to develop our understanding of the concept of hinterworld in two main ways. First, the hinterworlds presented below are based upon a new and much improved set of data. In the conclusion of the earlier contribution (Taylor 2001a) a caveat was inserted with regard to the relatively small number of firms (46) that the results were based upon. We have now collected a new and larger data set featuring 315 cities and 100 advanced producer service firms. The following section describes these new data. Second, we are much more analytically sophisticated in our measurement of service variation in this article. Instead of simply mapping service provision from one city to another, we compute the service provision in relation to a city's overall global connectivity. This 'relative' measure of hinterworld tells us where a city's service links are particularly strong or weak in relation to other cities' positions in the world city network. For instance, every city in the new data has its highest two service connections with London and New York for the simple reason that far more service firms are located in these two cities than in other cities. The relative measure takes the latter into account and tells us whether a city has more or less linkage to one of these two cities than expected given London and New York's high level of connectivity. The residual analysis we develop to create these relative measures is described in the second section of this article. Since one of the features of the new data is that it covers a wide range of cities, we illustrate the techniques by comparing the hinterworld of a 'global city' (London) to that of a much less important world city (Manchester).