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I would not doubt for a second that this list has been debated several times in this forum. I can't find those posts though, and so I'm compelled to bring up the question, do all you world travelers, social scientists, economists, political analysts, and demographers out there agree or disagree with these categorizations?
I thought the rankings had something to due with a city's economic ties to London or something like that. I may be confusing it with something else though.
I thought the rankings had something to due with a city's economic ties to London or something like that. I may be confusing it with something else though.
it sure seems biased like that, although London and NYC would make sense as the center of a web of global connections.
it sure seems biased like that, although London and NYC would make sense as the center of a web of global connections.
Sure, the US may have a disproportionate share of the list, but we also have the largest economy, so it makes sense.
I believe the Alpha, Alpha+, and Alpha++ lists do a good job of showing the major players. The Beta category cities seem slightly more interchangeable to me.
I would not doubt for a second that this list has been debated several times in this forum. I can't find those posts though, and so I'm compelled to bring up the question, do all you world travelers, social scientists, economists, political analysts, and demographers out there agree or disagree with these categorizations?
On the Global city link there are several studies referenced.
The first is GAWC. GAWC is known to be least credible. GAWC is the only tool basing their ranking cities off their economic ties with London.
The second is global cities index. Third is global economic power index. Fourth is global power city index.
Therefore, there are FOUR different studies in your link. GAWC is the only one of the four to lack credibility.
Chicago, Singapore, Sydney and Dubai in the same category as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris and Shanghai doesn't makes sense.
It doesn't, you're right. Although I would drop Shanghai from that latter group, it's much more in line with the former group (in my personal opinion) than the latter one.
As has been mentioned by two other posters in this thread, GaWC is a fail and a self admitted one at that. It measures nothing but financial firms each city has connected to London, there is nothing noteworthy about that charade of a publication which P.J. Taylor (the man that created it) notes as the most used city ranking in the history of the Internet.
Anyone want proof? Here's a bulletin from GaWC's home site itself with self admission of it's glaring flaws:
Quote:
I have begun with this little rant because it addresses challenges to world city network analysis at their most overt level. Of course, ill-informed discussion in the blogosphere is an easy target but such academic smugness is not my intention here. Quite the opposite in fact: my purpose is to show that peer-reviewed knowledge is by no means immune from the basic assumptions underpinning list-mania. I have personally been caught up in this process through an early research project on how London related economically with other world cities.The latter had to be identified and a ‘roster of cities' was devised by counting numbers of selected firms in a range of cities (Beaverstock et al 1999). The variation in numbers was simplified by dividing cities into strata labelled alpha, beta and gamma. This essentially petty exercise, just a first step in investigating London's external links, has had immense influence: personally it is my most cited article and, with hundreds of citations, it is the most cited article ever published in the journal Cities. I interpret this astonishing success as my ‘alpha-beta-gamma misgiving'.
Why a misgiving? This most successful paper is a very simple taxonomic exercise in which relational thinking is conspicuous by its absence. Hence we have made a major contribution to cities considered as merely separate entities to be ranked and compared. As all my subsequent writings show (deriving from Taylor 2001), such modes of thinking eliminate a crucial part of the complexity of cities and thereby misunderstand them. Hence the alpha-beta-gamma misgiving is just about as large a research embarrassment as can be imagined. What can we learn from it? Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with simplification, in fact it is a necessity: simplifying complex reality is precisely the task of social science research as it tries to make sense of society continuously changing in myriad ways. However, in this basic pursuit, it is often relations between entities that are over-overlooked or largely ignored. To understand how such unhelpful simplification comes about requires thinking about the way research begins – what presumptions are brought to a subject?
The man who made the Alpha-Beta-Gamma system himself acknowledges how much of a failure his strata approach is to measuring the world's most powerful cities. Essentially, he made the stratas to measure which cities his hometown (London) has the most connections to, in terms of financial firms and nothing more than that. Over the course of the last 16 years, his strata ranking system has been widely misused and abused on the blagosphere (such as the forum we are on now) to define cities into being more or less than what they are.
My recommendation to everyone is if they want power rankings for cities, go with any of the other lists and researches, as mentioned already this one has been misused from it's original purposes.
Last edited by Trafalgar Law; 05-17-2013 at 03:08 AM..
Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
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I think they could come up with a better ranking.
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