Kathy Pain

External urban relations are commonly described as one of two types: hierarchical local hinterlands (central place theory) and networked non-local hinterworlds (central flow theory), referred to as town-ness and city-ness, respectively. This paper builds on and develops these generic concepts to make them specifically relevant to today’s corporate globalization. The central place process is represented by multi-nodal global city-regions, and the central flow process is represented by inter-city capital investment flows. We find that capital flows in global cities increase flows to proximate smaller cities within their regions. This empirical link between city-ness and town-ness has theoretical and policy implications.

Focusing on commercial office real estate as both a manifestation of and a conduit of cross-border capital flows, this paper refers to the concepts of topology and topography in a theoretical and empirical exploration of contemporary ‘network economy’ spatial implications for the ‘polycentric urban region’ (PUR). A body of research has cast doubt on the normative European representation of the multi-centre PUR as a balanced, sustainable spatial development model. Yet, the model has continued to be propagated in European territorial strategy and has been influential internationally. Academic perspectives and qualitative evidence reviewed in the paper shed a light on mutual dependencies and recursive relations between network economy global structural processes, international office real estate investment practices mediated by city governments, and the spatial configuration of density. Commercial investment and city planning actor practices chime with urban agglomeration, spatial concentration and density. Quantitative evidence of associations between urban density and office real estate investment returns and capital flows is found. It is concluded that network economy topology, politics and the city are in a dialectical relationship with the PUR territorial governance agenda for spatially balanced regional development.

For over a decade, pandemics have been on the UK National Risk Register as both the likeliest and most severe of threats. Non-infectious ‘lifestyle’ diseases were already crippling our healthcare services and our economy. COVID-19 has exposed two critical vulnerabilities: firstly, the UK’s failure to adequately assess and communicate the severity of non-communicable disease; secondly, the health inequalities across our society, due not least to the poor quality of our urban environments. This suggests a potentially disastrous lack of preventative action and risk management more generally, notably with regards to the existential risks from the climate and ecological crises.

This commentary seeks to prompt new discussion about the place of urban planning history in the era of contemporary globalisation. Given the deep historic engagement of urban planning thought and practice with 'place' shaping and thus with the constitution of society, culture and politics, we ask how relevant is planning's legacy to the shaping of present day cities. Late twentieth century urban sociology, cultural and economic geography have demonstrated the increasing significance of intercity relations and the functional porosity of metropolitan boundaries in the network society, however statutory urban planning systems remain tied to the administrative geographies of states. This 'territorial fixing' of practice constrains the operational space of planning and, we argue, also limits its vision to geopolitical scales and agendas that have receding relevance for emerging urban relations. We propose that a re-evaluation of planning history could have an important part to play in addressing this spatial conundrum

The network paradigm has been highly influential in spatial analysis in the globalisation era. As economies across the world have become increasingly integrated, so-called global cities have come to play a growing role as central nodes in the networked global economy. The idea that a city’s position in global networks benefits its economic performance has resulted in a competitive policy focus on promoting the economic growth of cities by improving their network connectivity. However, in spite of the attention being given to boosting city connectivity little is known about whether this directly translates to improved city economic performance and, if so, how well connected a city needs to be in order to benefit from this. In this paper we test the relationship between network connectivity and economic performance between 2000 and 2008 for cities with over 500,000 inhabitants in Europe and the USA to inform European policy.

SCOPUS: ch.binfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe