GaWC
Throughout the twentieth century, planning and planners were central to our understanding of cities and regions. Today, however, planning is facing powerful challenges – professionally, intellectually, practically – in ways arguably not seen before. Recent developments and trends are raising fundamental questions about how we plan regions. Planning is no longer solely the domain of […]
A new paper on the role of urban polycentricity in regional innovation: Yang, Y., Lu, J. and Derudder, B. (2026) ‘Intercity coopetition and regional innovation: The role of urban polycentricity’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. Intercity coopetition—the dynamic interplay between cooperation and competition—is central to regional innovation, enabling knowledge exchange across cities. However, […]
We have today released our latest ranking of Global Media Cities. The reported city positions in 2025 are based on an analysis of the top 100 leading global media firms across 790 cities, the most extensive analysis of global media firms ever undertaken by GaWC researchers. The study includes traditional global media corporations such as […]
The Urban Planning Exhibition in Guangzhou features the city’s position in the latest The World According to GaWC (2024) classification of ‘world cities’. Spotted by GaWC researcher Professor John Harrison on a recent research trip to China’s Greater Bay Area.
A new typology of ‘interplaces’ that recognises their diversity and shows why they matter for how metropolitan regions work: Demuynck, W., Derudder, B., Meijers, E. and van Meeteren, M. (2025) ‘Between suburb and city: Conceptualising interplaces’, Urban Studies. A conceptual blind spot in prevailing models of metropolitan regions is how to understand urbanisation in secondary […]
Two new papers analysing labour market integration from a city network perspective: Liu, X., Derudder, B., Wang, B. and Witlox, F. (2025) ‘Interconnected cities, integrated markets: exploring the impact of transport networks on labor market integration in the Yangtze River Delta, China’, Growth and Change, 56 (4), e70068. This paper examines the impact of cities’ […]
GaWC researchers have long shaped agendas on polycentric urban development, from projects including the pioneering ERDF-funded POLYNET to the Regional Studies Association’s Polycentric Urban Regions (PURs) research network. Among the key outputs are a series of journal special issues addressing globalisation, city-regions and polycentricity in North-West Europe, the identification, evolution and performance of PURs, and […]
Loughborough has been the base of GaWC since its inception in 1998. Initially conceived as Global Observatory, GaWC has pioneered new ways of analysing urban external relations at global and regional scales. Loughborough now has its own Town Observatory, focusing on the local scale of the East Midlands town and its immediate hinterland. The TOWN […]
A new network graph published in the journal Finance and Space, by Yue Wang, Thomas Sigler and Julia Loginova, takes inspiration from GaWC’s ‘world city network’ approach and continues our tradition of innovative visualisations of cities in contemporary globalisation: Wang, Y., Sigler, T. and Loginova, J. (2025) ‘The global city network of firms’, Finance and […]
2023 and 2024 are probably the warmest years humans have ever experienced. We are changing the Earth’s climate in ways that are dangerous for all living beings. Social scientists are responsible for understanding how humans organise their lives. But they have had relatively little to say about climate change. This is even though everything they […]