Hierarchy, Information and Power Cities as Corporate Command and Control Centers

Thisbook is a collection of selected papers presented in the 2012 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in New York honoring James O. Wheeler (1938-2010). The eight papers are informed and inspired by James O. Wheeler's many contributions to urban geography, particularly in the areas of urban hierarchy, information flows, cities in the telecommunications age, and cities as corporate command and control centers. They adopt and extend Jim Wheeler’s corporate and/or hierarchical approaches to discuss institutional investment in the U.S., corporate interlocking directorates and fast-growing firms in Canada, corporate intangible assets in South Korea, urban development in Beijing and Macau, and social and cultural diversity of global cities such as New York. Although these two approaches are not the fanciest ones in today's urban geography, they are essential to the understanding of how urban areas are connected and what drives this interconnectedness in this age of globalization. This book was previously published as a special issue of Urban Geography.

1. Hierarchy, information, and power: cities as corporate command and control centers.Hongmian Gong 2. The economic geography of institutional investment in the United States, 2010Milford Green, Sean O’Hagan and Martin Lefebvre 3. The geography of Canadian interlocking directorates: how do they relate to brain circulation?Sean B. O’Hagan and Murray D. Rice 4. Fast-growing firms as elements of change in Canada’s headquarters city systemMurray D. Rice, Donald I. Lyons and Sean B. O’Hagan 5. Interaction of corporate and urban systems: accumulation of intangible assetsSam Ock Park 6. Macau’s role as a recreation/tourist center in the Pearl River Delta city-regionClifton W. Pannell and Philip H. Loughlin 7. Planning Beijing: socialist city, transitional city, and global cityChaolin Gu, Yehua Dennis Wei and Ian G. Cook 8. Global cities, cosmopolitanism, and geographies of toleranceBarney Warf 9. A method for delineating a hierarchically networked structure of urban landscapeYichun Xie and Ting Ma

Hongmian Gong is a Professor of Geography at Hunter College and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research interests are urban service economies in the U.S. and China and GIS/GPS/mobile phone applications in urban transportation.