Beyond Westphalia: Cities as the New Metrics

Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the standard paradigm in approaching any multinational issue—in law, business or geopolitics—has been the nation state. The legacy of Westphalian sovereignty is visible in how we approach “global rankings”: we tend to draw comparisons and consider global disparities within the prism of the nation-state. We rank on a country by country basis; yet, given intra-national disparities and the nature of contemporary globalization, is this really the optimal method of comparison?

The “nation-state” is perhaps no longer the most relevant or even particularly descriptive method of categorization; indeed, the global economy in particular circumscribes territorial political boundaries, and permeates the borders of the nation-states. What alternatives exist for making global rankings and global hierarchies? One increasingly discussed alternative is to consider making comparisons on the basis of urban agglomerations—cities, metropolitan regions, urban corridors.

One method of inter-urban comparison is to rank cities based on their power and influence over the global economy. Scholars at the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research institute in the UK propose the following geographic hierarchy of the global urban network:

This urban hierarchy was made using data from 100+ “advanced producer-services firms”—the law firms, investment banks, consultancies, and other “white-collar” businesses that have the most “command and control” over contemporary global business. In constructing the hierarchy, GaWC considered both the city’s quantity of firms, but also the connectivity of these firms within a global urban network. That is, they measured both nodal size and nodal connectivity: how many of a firm’s employees were located in a city, but then also how many connections they had with international partners. The result was a web of interconnected cities:

Taken out of the geographic context and made simply as a geometric figure, here is the current urban hierarchy (based on agency and command over the global economy, according to GaWC):

Of course, the office sizes and locations of the 100 advanced-producer service firms are not the only data points available in drawing inter-urban hierarchies and picturing a global urban network. The map below, for example, measures urban importance (and, by extension, urban competitiveness), based on IP traffic from New York City; that is, what cities are receiving the most information, and which cities have the most connections (linked computers), from and with New York, respectively. It is a map showing the nodal size and nodal connectivity, on the basis of digital information transfer, within the global network:

Another example of inter-urban networks is collaboration and cross-referencing in scientific research and academia. Consider the map below: by data mining the bibliographic entries of nearly 2 million academic journal articles, and grouping cross-references on the basis of the geographic location, researchers proposed this urban network for “academia” (note the regional concentrations and relative isolation of continental and linguistic sub-groups).

The practice of measuring both the quantity of activity within an urban node as well as the quantity of activity between urban nodes is the increasingly dominant means of making inter-urban comparisons and rankings. As we move beyond the Westphalian paradigm, the city, and by extension this means of comparison (intra- and inter-urban), could become the predominant metric of global comparison.