Abstract In addition to their often‐cited role as global service hubs, world cities are also innovation hubs with connectivity in knowledge networks crucial for the clusters they harbour. While both aspects of cities' may allow urban economies grow, we argue that specialization one these two increase economic performance. We provide systematic evidence this substitution effect by examining chan...

This study shows that the position of cities in world economy has diverged from national economies. Using data 2016, we evaluate a network 12,802 formed by location decisions 24,355 firms terms their point centrality, and show inter-city inter-national systems have measurably decoupled, disrupting previously-observed pattern which most powerful city system were located core countries, "mid-leve...

6th century BCE, probably as part of the expansion into the region of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Lying on one of the main branches of the ancient Silk Roads, which connected Europe and Africa to the Far East, a succession of cities flourished. By the early medieval period these encompassed over 1,000ha (Fig. 1). The great Islamic city of Sultan Kala, capital of the eastern Islamic world, wa...