Alpha world cities, complexity of cities, inter-city relations, world city network, world city rankings
Peter J. Taylor, FBA, is Emeritus Professor of Geography at Loughborough and Northumbria universities (UK). He created GaWC in 1998 to facilitate worldwide research collaboration on the role of cities in economic globalisation focussing on collaborative research projects, new data collection, and early publication of results. His own research contribution was to create a model of the world city network that enabled scrutiny of large numbers of city positions in the world economy, codified as alpha, beta, and gamma categories.
He is a prolific author on cities drawing on the seminal works of Jane Jacobs (city complexity), Peter Hall (world cities), John Friedmann (world city hierarchy), Saskia Sassen (global cities) and Manuel Castells (spaces of flows). His focus is on relations between cities, for instance recent findings on the interlocking roles of London and New York in the world economy, commonly referred to as NY-LON. He has written the basic text on inter-city relations at a global scale: World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis (2016, 2nd edition with Ben Derudder, Routledge). His latest books are Cities Demanding the Earth (2020, with Geoff O’Brien and Phil O’Keefe, Bristol University Press) and Advanced Introduction to Cities (2021, Edward Elgar). For a personal memoir, see his What Would Calverton Do? Only Twenty Four Essays from Tynemouth.