Directed World City Network Centrality Scores for 12,802 Cities, 2016
Benjamin Leffel, Helge Marahrens, Arthur S. Alderson
This database provides measures on the point centrality and structural position for 12,802 cities in a directed world city network for the year 2016. The network is measured as the inter-city headquarter-branch connections of 24,355 companies globally. Point centrality measures include indegree and outdegree, calculated as the sum of incoming/outgoing ties for each city, as well as closeness and betweenness centrality, representing the prestige (indegree) and power (outdegree) of each city. Position measures include primary and isolate positions for each city, calculated from regular equivalence blockmodelling that clusters cities according to their structural role in the overall network. Primary position denotes a central structural role in the network, while isolate denotes a peripheral role, respectively representing 4% and 72% of the network.
These data are from the study Divergence of the world city system from national economies (citation below), for which the full replication code is available here and at this GitHub link.
These data also inspired artwork by data science artist Kirell Benzi, including his piece Globalization and his 3D animation of the world economy.
Reference
Leffel, B., Marahrens, H. and Alderson, A.S. (2023) Divergence of the world city system from national economies, Global Networks, 23 (2), 459-477.
As per our data protocol, the following acknowledgement should accompany any public use of the data:
Acknowledgement: The data were produced by Benjamin Leffel, Helge Marahrens and Arthur S. Alderson and constitute Dataset 29 of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research network (https://gawc.lboro.ac.uk/) publication of inter-city data.