Oral Presentation Institute of Australian Geographers & The New Zealand Geographical Society Conference 2014

Proxy for Global Cities or Cities of Global Production? A Comparative Analysis of Australian Corporate Geographies (14029)

Thomas Sigler 1 , Kirsten Martinus 2 , Glen Searle 1 , Matthew Tonts 2
  1. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
  2. School of Earth and Environment, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia

Global Cities research in its current form is now three decades old and continues to be a foundational theory explaining the impacts of post-industrial economic globalisation on the urban landscape. Global Cities research generally takes one of two forms—intensive, case-based analyses investigating the ‘globalised’ dimensions of urban development in cities such as Sydney, Tokyo, and London, and extensive analyses investigating the relationship(s) between cities or sets of cities. This project focuses on the latter, proposing a framework for understanding the global network of cities. Drawing upon data comprising the branch office locations of all 1849 active Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) listed firms as a proxy for inter-urban connectivity, this research elucidates multiple, nested networks of ‘global’ urbanism that simultaneously reinforce and deviate from understandings of urban networks as hierarchical and rigid. We conclude that while certain cities do in fact act as basing points for capital, other factors of production such as labour and resources are also determinants of urban networks, as are factors such as access to political structures (i.e. networks of national capital cities) as well as a very particular nuanced of capital flows related to tax avoidance (i.e. tax ‘havens’). These complementary urban networks will be given attention as a means by which to advance understandings of relational urban and economic geographies.