Networks of European cities in worlds of global economic and
environmental change
Stanley D. Brunn*1, lomme DevrienDt2, anDrew Boulton1, Ben DeruDDer2 anD
Frank witlox2
Brunn, Stanley D., lomme Devriendt, andrew Boulton, Ben Derudder & Frank
witlox (2010). networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and
environmental change. Fennia 188: 1, pp. 37–49. Helsinki. iSSn 0015-0010.
Geographers use a variety of economic, social, and demographic data to meas-
ure the importance of global cities and the linkages between cities. we analyze
the importance and connectedness of european cities using hyperlinks, or the
electronic information provided by the Google Search engine. Hyperlinks are
web sites representing information that is produced; they are especially useful
in measuring the impact of contemporary crises. we use the phrases economic
slowdown and global financial crisis to derive a Global Financial Score (GFS)
for 16 core, semiperiphery and peripheral european cities and global warming
and climate change to derive a Global environmental Score (GeS). london and
Paris are in the european core; rome, Dublin, madrid and Prague are in the
semiperiphery; while tallinn, riga, and Belgrade are in the periphery. a strong
positive relationship exists between the GeS and GFS. we examine the linkages
of the 16 cities to the 100 largest world cities and illustrate, with “clockgrams,”
the linkages london, Brussels and athens have with other world cities. we cal-
culated the number of linkages each of the 16 cities had with other world cities
to identify europe’s urban cores, semiperipheries, peripheries, and deep periph-
eries. new york is in the core of both the economic and environmental maps.
Some world cities are in the semiperiphery of one category and periphery of
another. milan, istanbul, and Delhi are in the deep periphery for the GFS while
toronto and athens are for the GeS. Hyperlinks represent valuable databases to
measure the impact of crises and regional and global urban linkages.
keywords: europe, world cities, urban networks, cyberspace, core-periphery
relations, environmental change, financial crises, Google Search engine, hyper-
links.
Stanley D. Brunn & Andrew Boulton, University of Kentucky – Department of
Geography, 1457 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington KY 40506-0027, USA.
E-mail: brunn@uky.edu
Lomme Devriendt, Ben Derudder & Frank Witlox, Ghent University – Depart-
ment of Geography, Krijgslaan 281, S8, B9000 Ghent, Belgium.
E-mail: lomme.devriendt@ugent.be
Introduction
Study of the financial and environmental
crises
“Global” and “world” are popular descriptors
used by observers and analysts examining the dra-
matic financial and environmental changes occur-
ring during the past year. Countless stories, reports,
and editorials looked at the causes and conse-
quences of these changes and how they affected
the daily lives of cities, governments, residents,
and businesses in large and small cities alike (see
http://widerimage.reuters.com/timesofcrisis). re-
ports reflected on the widespread and pervasive
impacts of the global economic recession and en-
vironmental catastrophes in major world cities
(kluger 2006). Headline items conveyed the sharp
urn:nBn:fi:tsv-oa2524
38 Fennia 188: 1 (2010)S. D. Brunn, L. Devriendt, A. Boulton, B. Derudder and F. Witlox
decline in new york, tokyo and london stock
markets, but also in many national and regional
exchanges in South america, South and Southeast
asia, the middle east and southern africa (e.g.
new york times, 10 october 2008). rising unem-
ployment, declines in house sales and rising hous-
ing foreclosures, government bailout attempts,
bank failures and acute professional and non-pro-
fessional job losses were regular news items (ilo
news 2008). at the same time, environmental sci-
entists and government ministries were alerting
their governments and citizens to continued tem-
perature increases and rising sea levels, the shrink-
ing of glaciers and ice fields in circumpolar areas,
expanded desertification in semiarid areas, and
anomalous weather patterns in many world re-
gions (torn & Harte 2006; Scheffer et al. 2006).
on the world financial and environmental maps,
few cities were spared unpleasant and gloomy re-
ports about their economic status or environmen-
tal condition (Glantz 2006).
Scholars in various disciplines who are inter-
ested in the current state of economic and envi-
ronmental affairs on global and national scales
should be in the forefront of analyzing the impacts
of aforementioned conditions. Geographers,
economists, and political scientists should be
among those social scientists examining these
conditions, but also those in climatology, hydrol-
ogy, and natural disasters (amelung et al. 2007;
Grimm et al. 2008; Fidrmuc & korhonen 2009;
Florida 2009).
A world cities perspective on the crises
a particularly useful perspective is gained by ex-
amining these current problems and changes in
highly populated places. the world’s largest cities
would seem to provide a good starting point as
most are connected with other cities both within
their regions and at extraregional and global
scales. also since much headline news, data, and
government decisions are city-based, it makes
sense to consider the places where the intensity
and magnitude of the problems are most manifest
and visible. thus we examine both the major cities
themselves as major places of, and players in the
economic and environmental crises, and how
these cities are linked to one another. the unfold-
ing of the global economic crisis or economic
slowdown that began in 2007 and peaked around
September 2008 was not centered on only one or
two global population, financial, or government
centers, but it became worldwide almost simulta-
neously. while new york, london and tokyo
seemed to generate the most press and news,
banks and stock exchanges in South asia, latin
america, russia, and the middle east were soon
included in the spiralling economic recession or
collapse. the networks of national and regional
banks to creditors and lenders demonstrated the
porosity of national borders and the globalization
of financial markets. also, the financial institutions
demonstrated linkages that were both transnation-
al and transregional.
environmental scientists and ministries at the
same time were also seeking solutions to acute
problems that went beyond national boundaries.
Global environmental changes, including the
short term consequences of global warming, bio-
diversity loss and desertification required a differ-
ent mindset than a compartmentalized domestic
or national solution. international scientific coop-
eration and treaties were necessary to correct both
impending crises and long term problems. in short,
financial and environmental challenges faced rich
industrialized countries or coastal megacities, but
also small developing countries and developing
world cities faced short term precarious environ-
mental problems/crises in their agricultural, indus-
trial or tourist economies.
An urban and knowledge basis to
understanding current crises
we focus on major world cities and the amount,
and content of web information generated about
their economic and environmental crises (see also
Devriendt et al. 2009). Cities are an appropriate
scale of inquiry because these are places where
more than half of the world’s population lives.
these are also the places which directly or indi-
rectly are and will be most heavily impacted by
declining markets, job losses, housing foreclos-
ures, bank failures, plant closures, unemployment
increases, downturns in the construction industry
and declines in public services (Hall 1966; taylor
2004; alderson & Beckfield 2007). Cities’ eco-
nomic problems cannot be addressed in isolation
given the complex and various connections be-
tween cities throughout the world.
we can view the cities affected by environmen-
tal crises in a similar manner; seldom are environ-
mental challenges confined to the territorial
boundaries of one state. Problems of water short-
Fennia 188: 1 (2010) 39Networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and …
age or water quality, increasingly frequent coastal
storms, rising sea levels inundating tourist beaches
and hotels, and dependency on foreign fossil fuels,
face cities and entire regions throughout the world.
large and small cities in hazard prone regions are
affected both by unexpected short term environ-
mental events and the unforeseen impacts of pro-
jected climate change.
a useful barometer to examine both the geogra-
phy of economic and environmental crises is the
content and distribution of web information. in-
formation is a core ingredient in a knowledge
economy and society (kellerman 2002). identify-
ing problems and resolving them may be consid-
ered primarily political and financial, but at their
base we need to consider the information gener-
ated, reported, and analyzed. we can use a
number of components to measure the impact of a
knowledge economy. these could include em-
ployment in banking, financial, health, education,
and communications (print and visual) as well as
investments in information and communications
technologies, science and technology, education,
real estate, and financial institutions (Pred 1980;
kellerman 2002). employment data on these and
related categories can be obtained from govern-
ment and industry reports and media reports about
economic transactions and environmental events
(Beaverstock et al. 2000).
while newspapers or government and industry
reports are valuable information sources, we also
have access to unprecedented volumes of relevant
“crises” information via the worldwide web
(www). the web can be characterized as a vast
informational archive; it represents a vast, valua-
ble, and easily accessible information source for
monitoring changes in urban economics. we also
believe that the web provides a very useful lens on
the impacts of the current economic and environ-
mental conditions in major world cities.
Below we present an empirical analysis of cur-
rent economic and environmental changes based
on the volume of web information for major euro-
pean cities. we use the Google, yahoo, Bing, and
altavista search engines which index billions of
web pages—numbers that increase by continu-
ously creating, for all intents and purposes, seem-
ingly inexhaustible databases. these electronic
databases are both vast and timely, two character-
istics which make critical and judicious analyses
of their content an exciting and rich source of in-
sights into the impact of economic and environ-
mental crises on global urban networks. we use
the volumes of hyperlink information provided by
these search engines to derive real-time informa-
tional rankings of major european cities in regards
to the global financial crisis, and global climate
change. the Google database has been used previ-
ously to examine urban linkages by Brunn (2003),
williams and Brunn (2004), and Devriendt et al.
(2008). we follow their procedure to not only
identify the importance of these two crises in indi-
vidual cities, but in measuring the amount or de-
gree of paired linkages between cities (see also
Devriendt et al. 2009; Boulton et al. 2010).1
Using google hyperlinks to measure the
impact of the global economic and
environmental changes at european
cities in the global urban system
we discuss sixteen major european cities through
a quantitative analysis of their individual topical
cyberspaces (that is, the amount of web informa-
tion available about each city in relation to global
environmental and economic crises), and the link-
ages between cities (that is, the volume of joint
references to each city in relation to environmen-
tal and economic topics). we consider these six-
teen to be representative of the variety of urban
experiences within europe. Some are major world
cities, such as london, Paris and rome; others are
major regional centers in different regions such as
madrid in iberia, Helsinki in norden, rotterdam in
northwest europe, Prague in eastern europe, and
Belgrade in the southeast. we also selected some
from europe’s core, another set from the conti-
nent’s semiperiphery and the final set in europe’s
periphery. the cities are:
· Core: london, Paris, rotterdam, Brussels, and
milan
· Semiperiphery: Dublin, madrid, Helsinki,
Prague, vienna, and rome
· Periphery: lisbon, athens, Belgrade, tallinn,
and riga.
we specifically identified cities in each of eu-
rope’s core, semiperiphery, and periphery to ob-
serve whether there were any salient differences in
the volume of information about the economic
and environmental crises and if there were any sig-
nificant or systematic differences in terms of link-
ages.
to obtain a reading of the relatives impacts of
environmental and economic crises in each city,
40 Fennia 188: 1 (2010)S. D. Brunn, L. Devriendt, A. Boulton, B. Derudder and F. Witlox
we first recorded the absolute numbers of search
results or hyperlinks for each of the european cities
in combination with the two most frequently used
keyword search terms describing the global finan-
cial crisis (‘economic slowdown’ and ‘global fi-
nancial crisis’). For example, “rotterdam, nether-
lands + economic slowdown” and “rotterdam,
netherlands + global financial crisis”. Similarly, to
obtain data to measure the impact of environmen-
tal problems, we recorded the number of hits on
‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ categories.
For example, searching for the number of (Google)
web pages that jointly mention “Paris” and “glo-
bal financial crisis” resulted in 283,000 entries.2
Given that the correlation between the two finan-
cial and the two environmental search terms is
high on the web, we examined the two individual
categories of the economic data and derived a
Global Financial Score or GFS, which is the aver-
age of the two data entries for each city. we use
the same procedure to derive a Global environ-
mental Score or GeS.
the second part of our analysis looked at the
relationships between each of the aforementioned
sixteen cities to the world’s largest 100 cities in
terms of population (Demographia 2008). By com-
bining two cities with one information term, we
assembled four 16 x 100 city matrices on GFS and
GeS topics. Searching, for example, for the number
of (Google) web pages that jointly mention “lon-
don”, “Sydney”, and GFS topics resulted in an av-
erage of 119,705 entries. as one would expect, the
city results exhibited some variations. we look at
the top ten links, or paired linkages, for each of the
sixteen european cities. again we would antici-
pate that there would be differences both in the
volume, the ranking, and the location of london’s
(versus Prague’s or riga’s) most linked cities in
terms of economic and environmental informa-
tion.
with these datasets in hand – that is, the hyper-
link volume for each city and the hyperlink vol-
ume of the pairs of cities – we addressed several
questions in this empirical analysis which we dis-
cuss below. we provide an analysis of the data and
present a set of graphics to represent our findings
visually. First, we have a look at the variations in
the Global economic measures and Global envi-
ronmental measures in europe’s core, semiperiph-
ery, and periphery to discern whether there is a
relationship between the Global Financial Scores
and Global environmental Scores for these sixteen
european cities. Secondly, we look at their links to
other world cities and in what parts of the world.
thirdly, are there any consistent patterns in the
linkages of europe’s cities between cities in eu-
rope’s core, semiperiphery, and periphery? and fi-
nally, are there any discernible differences in the
linkages of europe’s cities in regards to the eco-
nomic crisis and the environmental crisis data? to
aid in understanding these relationships, we con-
structed some “maps” of europe’s position vis-à-
vis the world’s current economic crisis and current
environmental crisis.
Empirical analysis
this analysis builds on and differs from earlier hy-
perlink-based publications (Brunn 2003; Devriendt
et al. 2008) in that we limit the number of “un-
wanted”/irrelevant search results per city. in previ-
ous urban studies based purely on hyperlink/web
page volume, some ambiguities in data searches
emerged. For example, quantifying the hyperlinks
of “Paris” provides, in addition to “relevant” web
pages, substantial numbers of web pages (blogs,
“news” sites, forums, etc.) referencing celebrity
Paris Hilton instead of the city “Paris”. our mining
of the Google database relates to cities with infor-
mation on specific topics. this procedure mini-
mizes, but does not remove entirely, the “Paris
Hilton effect”. adding the words “climate change”
to “Paris” eradicates the ambiguity as to which
Paris we are referring and thus removes (many)
Hilton-related results. thus, our rankings are based
on their relationship with Global economic meas-
ures and Global environmental measures (tables 1
and 2).
the volume of the Global Financial Crisis hy-
perlinks ranged from 662,000 for london, 283,000
for Paris, 144,000 for vienna and 125,000 for
Brussels to only 11,000 for tallinn and 10,400 for
riga (table 1). rome and madrid had between
89,000 and 100,000 and five other cities (milan,
Prague, athens, Dublin, and lisbon) had between
40,000-59,000. Belgrade, Helsinki, tallinn, rot-
terdam, and riga had from 10,000-25,000. the
numbers for the Economic Slowdown category
also exhibited wide variance, from 710,000 for
london to only 5220 for riga. Paris and Brussels
were the second and third leading cities in hyper-
links for this phrase, but they had only 137,000
and 109,000 respectively. Dublin was fourth, but
it had only 71,000 followed by rome, madrid,
and vienna between 38,000-41,000. Four cities
Fennia 188: 1 (2010) 41Networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and …
(lisbon, Prague, athens, and Helsinki) had be-
tween 15,000-24,000 hyperlinks. Belgrade, rot-
terdam, tallinn, and riga were the lowest. in gen-
eral these rankings were similar for cities in both
categories. there were some discrepancies be-
tween the numbers and those in the three regions.
london, Paris, and Brussels were considered core
cities; all had large numbers of hyperlinks. rotter-
dam and milan, also in the core, did not. Cities we
considered in europe’s periphery had the fewest
hyperlinks.
the rankings for the sixteen cities were not that
dissimilar when we looked at the number of hy-
perlinks on the two environmental measures (ta-
ble 2). in regards to Climate Change the top four
cities were Paris with 13 million, london 9.6 mil-
lion, Brussels 2.1 million and rome 1.5 million.
lisbon and vienna also had slightly more than 1
million each. madrid, Dublin, Prague, athens, and
milan had more than one-half million each. the
fewest hyperlinks were in descending order: Bel-
grade with 122,000 followed by riga and tallinn
at 77,000 and 65,000 each. there were fewer
Global Warming hyperlinks for each city, but the
ranks remained almost the same. london had the
most with 5.5 million followed by Paris 3.5 and
then rome 1.4 and Brussels 1 million. madrid and
vienna had about 700,000 each. Dublin, Prague,
milan, and athens were in the middle. the bottom
five were rotterdam, Helsinki, Belgrade, tallinn
and riga. using this phrase the results were fairly
similar to the core, semiperiphery, and periphery
categories we established for the three sets of eu-
ropean cities.
looking at the relationship between the Global
Financial Scores (based on both financial search
terms) and Global environmental Scores (based on
both environmental search terms) for europe’s cit-
ies, we observe that there is a strong positive rela-
tionship between the two scores: r =0.82; r²= 0
.67 (see Fig. 1). not surprisingly, from what was
stated above, london and Paris were the highest
on both scores and riga and tallinn were the low-
est. there was some consistency in the clustering
of these cities in europe’s cores, semiperipheries,
and peripheries. rotterdam was the one of the ex-
ceptions; its place on the scattergram was distinct-
ly different from other core cities. athens and lis-
bon on the other hand were more similar to other
semiperiphery cities than the periphery city we
classified them. the semiperiphery city category
classified most of these cities correctly.
when we examine the economic and environ-
mental linkages between the 16 european cities
table 1. Global economic measures
rank City
economic
Slowdown
Global
Financial
Crisis GFS
1 london 710000 662000 686000
2 Paris 137000 283000 210000
3 Brussels 109000 125000 117000
4 vienna 38200 144000 91100
5 madrid 39500 91600 65550
6 rome 41700 89000 65350
7 Dublin 71100 41500 56300
8 milan 38100 58500 48300
9 Prague 23800 53200 38500
10 athens 23500 49700 36600
11 lisbon 24900 40300 32600
12 Helsinki 15600 18700 17150
13 Belgrade 6810 25100 15955
14 rotterdam 9250 11100 10175
15 tallinn 5550 11200 8375
16 riga 5220 10400 7810
(Source: Google.com, 29 July 2009)
table 2. Global environmental measures
rank City
Climate
Change
Global
warming GeS
1 Paris 13000000 3490000 8245000
2 london 9600000 5570000 7585000
3 Brussels 2130000 1050000 1590000
4 rome 1550000 1450000 1500000
5 vienna 1020000 793000 906500
6 lisbon 1320000 370000 845000
7 madrid 854000 799000 826500
8 athens 694000 658000 676000
9 Dublin 609000 402000 505500
10 Prague 557000 423000 490000
11 milan 423000 425000 424000
12 rotterdam 478000 187000 332500
13 Helsinki 405000 181000 293000
14 Belgrade 122000 80100 101050
15 tallinn 64500 64200 64350
16 riga 77000 48100 62550
(Source: Google.com, 29 July 2009)
42 Fennia 188: 1 (2010)S. D. Brunn, L. Devriendt, A. Boulton, B. Derudder and F. Witlox
and other cities we discover the extent of their in-
ternational and transnational dimensions. as not-
ed above, for each of the sixteen, we will look at
their top ten links to other world cities. we would
anticipate that some of the sixteen would be linked
with large european cities, some with north amer-
ican cities and some with cities in asia and else-
where. what we did not know in advance in this
empirical analysis was what patterns we would
uncover.
in our examination of the Global Financial
Scores for our sixteen european cities, we discover
that their top ten connections are accounted for by
a total of 35 world cities. all are connected to
new york, which is not surprising considering the
u.S. and especially wall Street Stock exchange
were identified early as major actors/contributors
to the global economic slowdown and financial
crises. new york was the most linked city to lon-
don, rome, vienna, and milan – all major knowl-
edge and industrial cities – but also Dublin,
Prague, and athens, and the second most linked
city for Brussels, Paris, rotterdam, tallinn, Helsin-
ki and Belgrade. london had the most links with
Paris, rotterdam, Brussels, Belgrade, Helsinki and
tallinn. what were noteworthy in these rankings
were the strong ties with asian (especially Chi-
nese) cities as well as Singapore and also moscow.
Singapore was the third most linked city with mi-
lan and rotterdam, the fourth most linked with
Paris, and fifth most linked with madrid. Beijing
was the second most linked city with Dublin, the
third for Brussels, and the fourth for rome. the
Chinese capital’s rankings were ahead of Hong
kong (fourth for Dublin and fifth for Paris) and to-
kyo (ranked second for milan). moscow, like Sin-
gapore and Beijing, was linked to many european
cities, perhaps not surprising considering its close
proximity to some of our selected cities in eastern
europe. it was the third most ranked city with
tallinn, fourth with Brussels, Belgrade, and Prague,
and fifth with athens, Helsinki, and riga. Berlin
also emerged as a major city with links to other
european cities. it was the third most linked city
with Paris, the fourth with athens, and the fifth
with Brussels, tallinn and Belgrade.
there were also some unexpected and unusual
linkages that defy easy explanation; these include
teheran as athens’s third most linked city, Delhi as
milan’s fourth, Sydney as london’s second, Cairo
Fig. 1. relationship between GeS and GFS
Figure 1: Relationship between GES and GFS
Fennia 188: 1 (2010) 43Networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and …
as vienna’s second, teheran as rotterdam’s fifth.
when we consider the sixth through tenth rank-
ings for our sixteen european cities, we also have
some new cities, some with only links to only one
or two cities. examples include atlanta (with lon-
don), Shanghai (with Dublin), Seoul (with Brus-
sels), Baghdad and mumbai (with Paris), karachi
(with rome), Shanghai (with rotterdam), Delhi
(with Helsinki and lisbon), Phoenix (with riga),
mumbai (with rome), and miami (with lisbon).
another perspective on these variations illus-
trates the vast differences in the volumes of hyper-
links between pairs of cities. For example, there
are more linkages between london and new york
(217,000) than between london and other nine
cities it is most connected (Prague, lisbon, vienna,
Dublin, Belfast, Helsinki, tallinn, rotterdam, and
riga). this discrepancy illustrates the importance
of these two north atlantic anchor cities, london
and new york, in the world’s financial markets.
the london-new york linkages exceed those of
london-Paris. Brussels links with london (70,000)
exceed those of vienna with new york and madrid
with mumbai being most linked to madrid. athens
in our calculations had more links with teheran
than with Berlin or moscow and milan had more
with tokyo than with Paris or Brussels. Helsinki’s
links were with a variety of cities, including lon-
don, new york, Paris, Delhi, and moscow.
the top ten linkages in terms of Global Environ-
mental Scores for our sixteen cities are with 34
world cities. all are linked to new york. But new
york was not the most linked for all cities; it was
the leader for london, Paris, rome, Dublin, and
madrid, and, but not for rotterdam, Helsinki, and
tallinn, all with more links to london. Brussels
was most linked to Paris. there were also some un-
expected patterns, including Prague and Sydney,
Belgrade and Houston, athens and istanbul, lis-
bon with Hong kong, and vienna with moscow.
the pattern of second most linked cities exhibited
nearly as much variety as the leading cities. again,
some unexplained patterns emerged: Berlin was
second for vienna and riga; new york for Brussels,
Prague, Helsinki, and lisbon; Chicago for rome
and Dublin; and Paris for rotterdam and tallinn.
other rather surprising linkages were athens and
mexico City, milan with Bangkok, and madrid
with istanbul. in regards to the variation in hyper-
link pairs, there are vast differences. there are
more linkages between london and new york (4.1
million) than for all of the ten most linked cities to
Dublin, Helsinki, rotterdam, Belgrade, tallinn,
and riga combined. another way of looking at the
london-new york volume is that it exceeds all of
the cities most linked to rome. the Brussels-Paris
links (685,000) exceed the london-Houston
(650,000) links; athens-istanbul (421,000) is more
than madrid–new york (436,000), rome-los an-
geles (402,000) and vienna-new york (487,000).
Helsinki is most linked to london, new york, and
Paris (each from 100,000-130,000 links) followed
by moscow, Berlin, Chicago, tokyo, Boston,
washington, and Beijing (each above 60,000
links).
to illustrate the linkages that european cities
have with other world cities in regards to the cur-
rent economic and environmental crises, we de-
veloped a series of innovative so-called “clock-
grams.” each illustrates both the volume and name
of each of the ten most linked cities on the GeS
(see Figs 2a, 3a, 4a) and GSF (see Figs 2b, 3b, 4b).
we illustrate these variations with two cities in eu-
rope’s core, london and Brussels, and one in the
semiperiphery, athens.
one reads each graphic by starting at the top,
that is, twelve o’clock. By going clockwise one
can identify the ten leading cities with which that
city is connected and also the volume of hyper-
links (web pages jointly mentioning the two cities
in relation to financial topics). when comparing
the three GeS graphics, it is easy to identify lon-
don as having the most total hyperlinks; Brussels
has only about one-quarter of london’s total and
athens has only about one-tenth. the top ten link-
ages also exhibit some variation. london’s linkag-
es are global: new york, Sydney, moscow, Hong
kong, and São Paulo. Five of london’s top ten
linkages are with u. S. cities. Brussels on the other
hand has many more linkages with asia: Beijing,
Hong kong, istanbul, Singapore, Seoul, and to-
kyo. new york is its only north american linkage.
noteworthy also are the ties with moscow. athens,
a much smaller city, and much less important on
the european and global economic scene, illus-
trates an expansive network not that dissimilar
from new york. its top ten linkages include some
in east asia (tokyo and Hong kong), South asia
(mumbai), Southeast asia (Singapore), middle east
(teheran), australia (Sydney), and russia (mos-
cow). its only major european link is with Berlin.
the clockgrams for the Global environmental
Scores also exhibit some distinct variations. lon-
don has far and away more linkages than Brussels
and athens combined. in regards to the global
warming and climate change variables, london
44 Fennia 188: 1 (2010)S. D. Brunn, L. Devriendt, A. Boulton, B. Derudder and F. Witlox
Fig. 2a. GeS clockgram london Fig. 2b. GFS clockgram london
Fig. 3a. GeS clockgram Brussels Fig. 3b. GFS clockgram Brussels
has a huge volume of linkages especially with one
city, new york. this linkage dwarfs all other link-
ages combined. the other cities on this city’s list of
top ten links are mostly a cross section of cities in
the u.S. (four), asia (two), and middle east (one);
none in europe. Brussels has linkages, as it did
with the economic graphics shown above, with
major cities outside europe; these include cities in
europe (Berlin and madrid), asia (Beijing, Hong
kong, tokyo and Singapore), russia (moscow),
australia (Sydney), and one in the u.S. (new york).
athens, like Brussels, also exhibits an international
mix, but is dominated by a half dozen cities in the
middle east (istanbul), latin america (mexico), u.
Figure 2a: GES clockgram London
Figure 2b: GFS clockgram London
Figure 2a: GES clockgram London
Figure 2b: GFS clockgram London
Figure 3a: GES clockgram Brussels
Figure 3b: GFS clockgram Brussels
Figure 3a: GES clockgram Brussels
Figure 3b: GFS clockgram Brussels
Fennia 188: 1 (2010) 45Networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and …
Fig. 4a. GeS clockgram athens Fig. 4b. GFS clockgram athens
S. (new york), Canada (toronto), and europe (mi-
lan and Berlin). moscow and Sydney are also in-
cluded in this city’s mix.
we next wanted to observe if there are any dis-
tinct patterns in the cities listed most frequently in
regards to the economic and environmental crises.
the central query was whether there were core,
semiperiphery and periphery cities that might be
easily identified. we totaled the number of times a
given city appeared in the top ten lists of all sixteen
Fig. 5. Global Financial cores, semi peripheries, peripheries,
and deep peripheries
Fig. 6. Global environmental cores, semi peripheries, pe-
ripheries, and deep peripheries
cities. the highest possible score was 16, which
would represent a core city, that is, a city that was
ranked in the top ten for each of the sixteen cities.
the lowest score would be one, which would
mean it was important for only one of the sixteen
cities. the two diagrams we constructed are Fig. 5
for the Global Financial Score and Fig. 6 for the
Global environmental Score. on each we identify
and map these knowledge regions: core, semipe-
riphery, periphery, and deep periphery.
Figure 4a: GES clockgram Athens
Figure 4b: GFS clockgram Athens
Figure 4a: GES clockgram Athens
Figure 4b: GFS clockgram Athens
Figure 5: Global Financial cores, semi peripheries, peripheries, and deep peripheries
Figure 6: Global Environmental cores, semi peripheries, peripheries, and deep peripheries
Figure 5: Global Financial cores, semi peripheries, peripheries, and deep peripheries
Figure 6: Global Environmental cores, semi peripheries, peripheries, and deep peripheries
46 Fennia 188: 1 (2010)S. D. Brunn, L. Devriendt, A. Boulton, B. Derudder and F. Witlox
in regards to the Global Financial Score, new
york was clearly identified as the core. no other
city was ranked by all european cities, thus this
global metropolis becomes the core or center for
an understanding of the linkages these cities have
to the global financial crises. in the second region
are cities mentioned 12–13 times: three of the four
cities are in asia: Beijing, Hong kong, and Singa-
pore. moscow is also in the second or semiperiph-
ery category. in the periphery region are five cities
with 5–9 linkages; two of these are in europe (Ber-
lin and london) and two in north america (los
angeles and Chicago); the remaining city is Syd-
ney. in the deep periphery category are seven cit-
ies mentioned only 3–4 times. these are mostly
cities in asia: istanbul, Shanghai, mumbai, tehe-
ran, and Delhi; atlanta is the non-asian city in this
mix. Seventeen other cities had linkages with one
or two of the sixteen cities; these are also deep
periphery cities. examples of single linkages were
Brussels with Seoul, lisbon with montreal, Phoe-
nix with riga, and vienna with Cairo.
we also identified the same four regions for the
Global Environmental Score. new york is the sole
core city appearing somewhere in the rankings of
all sixteen cities, hence it is our knowledge core.
the second zone, or semiperiphery, has three cit-
ies: Berlin, Chicago, and Beijing, three major cities
in three different economic world regions. the pe-
riphery category includes six cities, also in differ-
ent regions; Hong kong and tokyo in asia, Boston
in the u.S., Paris in europe, moscow in russia and
Sydney in australia. the outer ring, the deep pe-
riphery, includes nine cities mentioned 3–4 times.
most (four) are in europe and three in north amer-
ica. there were 15 other cities that had a single or
two linkages with the sixteen. examples of single
linkages were Paris with miami, milan with osaka,
Prague with São Paulo, and rome with rio de Ja-
neiro.
Discussion
From our analysis, we identify five major findings.
First, the current economic and environmental
worlds, as measured in information or knowledge
contexts, are very complex. that is, there are no
easily discernible or predictable patterns charac-
terizing the linkages between cities. Beneath the
volume of information/knowledge linkages for any
individual city, or within any given pair of cities,
captured in terms of search engine data there are
many complex interactions between businesses
(financial, advertising, iCts, real estate, etc.), in-
dustries (heavy and light), services (tourism, health
care, environmental, and education) and nGos.
From our “one day time slice” of data looking at
the linkages of the world’s 100 largest cities, the
financial worlds and environmental networks are
shown to be complex indeed. while one might
have expected that new york, london, Paris, and
tokyo would lead the way in being linked with
major cities in europe, this generalization has not
been shown to be the case. rather Beijing, Berlin,
Sydney, moscow, and even mumbai, Cairo, and
istanbul enter the picture as being linked promi-
nently to one or more of the sixteen european cit-
ies we investigated. tokyo, surprisingly, is eclipsed
in this analysis by Beijing.
Second, explaining the results or attempting to
provide some authoritative insight into the signifi-
cance of these results is problematic. whereas
new york and london are leaders in terms of link-
ages in measuring the financial slowdown and cri-
ses, Beijing, moscow, Chicago, Sydney and Singa-
pore also enter the picture. this complex picture
also emerges when looking at cities most linked in
regards to information generated about environ-
mental problems, including climate change. in
short, it is not simply the case that the world’s larg-
est cities are those most linked with the sixteen
european cities. rather, large regional cities in
South, Southeast, and east asia emerge as impor-
tant, as do large cities in the middle east and latin
america. what we do not know based on this
analysis of european cities are the kinds of specific
economic and environmental information gener-
ated about each city, or the complex business,
governmental, and other linkages underpinning
these “information” connections (we examined
these relationships previous for selected world cit-
ies in Devriendt et al. (2009)). Perhaps these euro-
pean cities are leaders in the linkages related to
service and industrial economies, or to distribu-
tions of investments by national and regional
banks and other financial institutions. Further, it is
possible that the volume of linkages is related to
diaspora populations investing in major cities,
these cities having strong and active tourism econ-
omies, or vibrant “Sister City” relationships be-
tween pairs of cities.
a third major finding is that there is a strong and
positive relationship between the GFS and GeS.
while this relationship might be a surprise, on re-
flection it makes some sense that the many cities
Fennia 188: 1 (2010) 47Networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and …
reporting economic problems and financial crises
would likely be the same ones where their govern-
ments, industrial and service economies, research
universities and think tanks would be concerned
about the impacts of global warming and climate
change. many of the european coastal cities exam-
ined here facing potentially serious environmental
problems, including rising sea levels, and depend-
ency on imported fossil fuels are the same ones
facing financial problems of one sort or another.
environmental and economic problems are infor-
mation-based and most of those reports from any
country would emanate from, and relate to, the
largest cities and the capital cities.
a fourth major finding from our analysis is that
the traditional consideration of core-semiperiph-
ery-periphery categories for european cities does
not appear to make much sense in a knowledge/
information world where distance is no barrier to
communication of economic transactions. that it
does not make sense should also not be surprising
as the economic recession or depression gripped
the continent’s large, medium and small cities, re-
gardless of location. to be sure the largest cities
had the most information/knowledge hyperlinks
about the economic and environmental catego-
ries, but some other large cities had fewer than
expected, for example, rotterdam and vienna. the
smaller cities, not unexpectedly, had fewer infor-
mation hyperlinks in part probably because of
their population size; this would be the case for
riga, tallinn, and Belgrade. in short, the small
number of hyperlinks simply meant there was less
information generated.
the fifth pattern is that a different kind of core-
periphery pattern emerges from these results, and
it is a pattern that has some unexpected surprises.
new york becomes the knowledge/information
core around which european cities revolve. that
new york is at the center is not that surprising, but
what is surprising are the next leading cities which
are most linked to european cities. Beijing, Berlin,
moscow, Singapore, and Hong kong are leaders
rather than london and Paris. this finding illus-
trates that the global economic and environmen-
tal linkages of many european cities are indeed
trans-european, that is, they are in large, impor-
tant, and emerging financial and decision making
centers in South, Southeast and east asia. the
multitude of major city linkages, even for those
ranked, third through tenth, is also a global pat-
tern, not one of highly concentrated linkages
amongst european cities. this may be one of the
most important and interesting findings of this re-
search.
Following the above interpretations, the point
about the diversity of economic and environmen-
tal linkages for these cities needs to be amplified.
Some of the linkages are surprising as they do not
seem to follow any obvious logic. one example is
that european cities link with others in europe but
also with former colonies. another example is that
Beijing emerges as a stronger and more dominant
linkage of european cities than tokyo. this finding
may reflect the dynamic growth of China’s aggres-
sive production and trading climate while the rest
of the world was experiencing a slowdown. lon-
don comes across as a more important european
lynchpin than does Paris. that moscow is strongly
linked with riga, tallinn, and Helsinki should
come as no surprise, since it is closer to these cit-
ies than to large central and west european cities.
what is interesting is that these three northern eu-
ropean cities have stronger linkages with london
and new york than with moscow. and there are
some unexplained linkages that emerge, for exam-
ple, milan and Barcelona with Prague in the finan-
cial sphere, mumbai with madrid also on financial
crises, and Bangkok with milan, also on financial
issues. in regards to the environmental crises, there
are also some puzzling results, for example, istan-
bul linked most with Cairo (perhaps not unexpect-
ed if one considers they are two major players in
the middle east information production), mexico
City linked with athens, and São Paulo linked with
Prague. what is noteworthy in our analysis is that
the only latin american cities that ranked in the
top ten with the sixteen european cities were mex-
ico City, São Paulo, and rio de Janeiro. no major
city in Sub Saharan africa linked as among the top
ten linkages with any european city in our study.
Conclusions and future studies
this study represents a first attempt to provide a
detailed description and analysis of the linkages of
european and world cities in regards to current
web information generated about economic and
environmental crises. our reading is based on the
volume of electronic information pieces, viz.,
search engine results, based on the linkages of six-
teen european cities with the world’s one hundred
largest cities. Specifically, we looked at the vol-
ume of information linkages between cities with
respect to two economic crisis related keyword
48 Fennia 188: 1 (2010)S. D. Brunn, L. Devriendt, A. Boulton, B. Derudder and F. Witlox
phrases: “global financial crisis” and “economic
slowdown”. we also examined two categories of
information about the state of the world’s environ-
ment: “global warming” and “climate change”.
we calculated the number of Google search re-
sults for each of the four phrases in conjunction
with our sixteen cities into combined Global Fi-
nancial Score (GFS) and Global environmental
Score (GeS). our sample deliberately included cit-
ies in europe’s core as well as semiperiphery and
periphery.
the results revealed a much more complex pat-
tern of relationships regarding knowledge gener-
ated than what we anticipated. the linkages of
these cities seem to follow little regularity with re-
spect to city size or city location, that is, location
within europe’s core, semiperiphery and periph-
ery, or with their most linked cities. new york
emerges as the dominant city that most european
cities are linked; london and Paris are not always
in the top five and neither is tokyo. the global link-
ages place Berlin, Beijing, Hong kong and also
Sydney, Singapore, and moscow as strongly linked
with europe’s cities in regards to the economic and
environmental crises. we also discovered that
there was a strong and positive relationship be-
tween the GFS for the cities and the GeS. Since
both scores are information-based, it is not unrea-
sonable to assume in knowledge economies that
cities that generate the most news about economic
crises would also generate much information
about their environmental conditions.
the findings reported and the approach we
adopt offer many additional opportunities for in-
vestigation into the current economic and envi-
ronmental crises where information generated or
produced is the framework for linkages in a global
network of cities. we would identify four studies
that are worthy of investigation. First, how similar
would be the results if we investigated the infor-
mation hyperlinks for sixteen or twenty cities in
another region, such as South asia or east asia or
latin america? would there be as many or more
global linkages? what city or cities would domi-
nate? Second, what would be the results of a hy-
perlink analysis that looked at information gener-
ated for european or other cities in Chinese or
Spanish or French? third, what are the specific cri-
sis categories of the linkages between these cities?
one could examine the content or subject matter
of the top ten search result items for each pair. are
they about real estate investments, business clo-
sures, bank collapses, unemployment, quality of
life, or anomalous weather? Fourth, and last, it
would be useful to investigate the linkages with
smaller populated centers in europe and else-
where. would these cities have more national and
regional ties than the largest ones or would they
also be linked globally to places in asia and north
america? the results to these and other research
questions regarding knowledge economies and
societies await further study by economic and ur-
ban geographers, and others, interested in the spa-
tial and temporal patterns of the current economic
and environmental crises. Both human and envi-
ronmental geographers have much to contribute to
our understanding of the regional and global
worlds of crisis facing urban humankind.
aCknowleDGementS
all authors contributed equally to the research and
writing of this article and take responsibility for any
errors or omissions. the research work is funded by
the research Foundation–Flanders.
noteS
1 one shortcoming of previous hyperlink analyses is
that there is not any critical reflection or discussion
on the merits of using search engine data. while
there are clear advantages to using the Google Search
engine – especially size (over one trillion unique
urls trawled), and timeliness (the index is continu-
ously updated by its distributed network of “spiders”)
– some cautions should be noted. For example, when
searching via Google.com (the uS/international ver-
sion of Google), the spelling of search terms and city
names in english limits our analysis to the english
language web. this and other “problems” regarding
these methods are discussed, and how these are ad-
dressed in the subsequent analysis, in Devriendt et al.
(2009).
2 this real-time information analysis was run on 29
July 2009. as the Google database is updated on a
continuous basis and second by second, as spiders
trawl for new, updated and defunct content. we uti-
lize, in order to obtain real “snapshot” data, a script
that ran our queries and extracted search results syn-
chronously (see Devriendt et al. 2009).
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