Kathy Pain

The Role of Location in Knowledge Creation and Diffusion: Evidence of Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces in the City of London Financial Services Agglomeration

In this paper we report on a major empirical study of centripetal and centrifugal forces in the City of London financial services agglomeration. The study sheds light on (1) the manner and magnitude of firm interaction in the agglomeration; (2) the characteristics of the agglomeration that aid the competitiveness of incumbent firms; and (3) the problems associated with agglomeration. In addressing these issues, we use the data to (1) test emerging theory that explains the high productivity and innovation of agglomerations in terms of their ability to generate and diffuse knowledge; and (2) evaluate the ‘end of geography’ thesis.

International Office Investment in Global Cities: The Production of Financial Space and Systemic Risk

Lizieri C. and Pain K. International office investment in global cities: the production of financial space and systemic risk, Regional Studies. The paper explores the relationships between UK commercial real estate and regional economic development as a foundation for the analysis of the role of real estate investment in local economic development. Linkages between economic growth, development, real estate performance and investment allocations are documented. Long-run regional property performance is not the product of long-run economic growth, and weakly related to indicators of long-run supply and demand. Changes in regional portfolio weights seem driven by neither market performance nor underlying fundamentals. In the short run, regional investment shifts show no clear leads or lags with market performance.

Spaces of Practice in Advanced Business Services: Rethinking London—Frankfurt Relations

This paper explores the relevance of Bourdieus 1980 spatial theorisation in Le Sens Pratique (The Logic of Practice 1990, Polity Press, Cambridge) for understanding intercity relations in contemporary globalisation—specifically, interdependencies between Castellss ‘space of flows’ and ‘places’ in advanced business services. Bourdieus relational concepts are reviewed with reference to evidence from in-depth interviews with business actors in London and Frankfurt at the time of European Economic Monetary Union. The intention is to deepen understanding of emergent relations between the cities and, in so doing, to contribute to the reinterpretation of Bourdieus input to geographical thinking.

Developing a research strategy to better understand, observe and simulate urban atmospheric processes at kilometre to sub-kilometre scales

A Met Office/Natural Environment Research Council Joint Weather and Climate Research Programme workshop brought together 50 key international scientists from the UK and international community to formulate the key requirements for an Urban Meteorological Research strategy. The workshop was jointly organised by University of Reading and the Met Office.

Global networks, cities and economic performance: Observations from an analysis of cities in Europe and the USA

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.

Theoretical and methodological challenges

The globalization phenomenon has been discussed and debated in the social sciences literature for over a decade. Both its existence and its meaning have been widely contested from different viewpoints and perspectives. Academic debate has focused most notably on whether globalization is really something new (for example, Veltz, 1996; Hirst and Thompson, 1996, 1999; Amin, 1997; Dicken et al., 1997; ChaseDunn, 1999; Sklair, 1999; Cochrane and Pain, 2000; Held, 2000; Held and McGrew, 2000; Beaverstock et al., 2000; Sassen, 2007; Robinson, 2011). We may think this a purely theoretical debate but identifying what really is new about the current global era may help in understanding the profound changes that people and states are being swept up in, in Europe and across the world. This is the primary focus of this book. This book reports on the findings from a major twoandahalfyear European Spatial Observation Network (ESPON) study – Territorial Impact of Globalization for Europe and its Regions (‘TIGER’) – which has set out to investigate the reality of the processes associated with contemporary globalization in Europe within a global context. Led by Gilles Van Hamme at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and funded by the European Commission, an international research team based in the UK, France, Bulgaria, Sweden and Belgium has together drawn on original data and evidence to critically analyse Europe’s changing spatial relations in a fluid global context and their significance for territorial strategy. While the changes that are impacting on the European territory and integrating Europe into the world have been the foci of analysis, the overarching research imperative has been to investigate the European position through active engagement with the multiscale nature of contemporary globalization. In consequence the research findings reported in this book will be of interest to researchers, students, policy makers and governments worldwide. The contributions to the book from the research teams make visible the complex multidimensional geographies that now constitute Castells’ (1996) socalled ‘space of flows’, informing understanding of the impacts

Megaregions Imaginaries: Excursions Through a Dialectical Maze

From the multiplicity of terminologies used to describe the emerging functional scales and composition of the world’s twenty-first-century urban landscapes, John Harrison and Michael Hoyler have taken a prominent U.S. term as the title for their edited volume of essays, Megaregions. This decision goes a long way in explaining their mission: to debunk “megaregions” “can-do,” “hype” and “hysteria,” recently popularised by American cult urban writers. Yet, as the book’s contributing authors frequently point out, the contemporary “imagined” megaregion (p. 17), or geographic “imaginary” (p. 120), has in reality been in emergence for decades, dating back to the early twentieth-century ideas of Patrick Geddes and their later U.S. reworking by Lewis Mumford, Jean Gottman, and others. Representations of urbanization processes even back then, highlighted the growth of the world’s major cities as not simply a question of increasing size but of global constitution (Pain 2017). However Harrison and Hoyler stress at the outset that the reader should heed August Hecksher’s warning of fifty years ago that an awe-inspiring spatial concept can allow dangerous “misconceptions” to take root (p. 1). They reapply Hecksher’s prophetic anxiety about the dramatic power of Gottman’s mid-twentieth-century “megalopolis”—heralded as a new stage in human civilization—to the “megaregion” (p. 4). In line with Gottman’s prediction that the interwoven urban formation of 25 million population on the U.S. Northeastern seaboard was the beginning of a new American urban demographic, a rash of twenty-first-century megaregions expected to represent more than 70 percent of the nation’s population growth by 2050, has now been identified by independent research and planning organisation, the U.S. Regional Plan Association (RPA) (2006a, 4). According to Harrison and Hoyler, all the excitement whipped up by the populist narrative of new millennium “regional globalization” has led this iconic U.S.-style megaregion to become regarded as the globally competitive urban form of the future (Ohmae 1999; Porter 2001; Scott 2001; Florida, Gulden, and Mellander 2008; Short 2010).

The Strategic Planning Protagonist: Unveiling the Global Mega-City Region

When Peter Hall first brought The World Cities to international attention in 1966, his analytical focus was to predate that of Scott’s (2001) ‘global city-region’ by three decades.

Social Research Finding One: Quantitative Analysis of Successful Enterprises

The network externalities portrayed as connectivities in Part A can only be taken advantage of through the local practices of firms in Chengdu. The framework we use to guide this part of the research derives from the seminal work of Jane Jacobs.