Gateway Cities and their Hinterland: Global Cities from the Global South as Nodes in Global Commodity Chains

在过去的几十年里，全球南方的一些地区实现了相当大的经济增长。那里的全球城市拥有蓬勃发展和具有全球竞争力的第二和第三部门。它们是世界经济外围和核心之间的枢纽。我们认为，来自全球南部的全球城市作为枢纽城市或门户城市的作用是跨国公司、相关产业和生产性服务、充足的机构和交通基础设施聚集的结果。门户城市的作用，特别是它们与腹地的关系，可以通过基于独立变量的因果机制来反映，这些独立变量在《2009年世界发展报告》中得到了很好的巩固：密度、距离和区隔。因此，我们将回答以下主要问题：密度、距离和分工(自变量)如何影响全球南部门户城市对世界经济外围地区的全球联系(因变量)？我们的初步研究表明，开普敦、S、圣保罗/里约热内卢和新加坡的石油和天然气部门适合在探索性案例研究中检验这三个D的相关性并确定相关的因果机制。该项目在四个方面具有创新性。首先，通过从经验和理论上将密度、距离和分工与背景联系起来，我们对《世界发展报告》的批评做出了反应。我们展示了相当传统的因果因素与经济过程的相关性，这些因素在经济地理学中被进化和关系方法所忽视。第二，我们将对全球城市的研究与对全球商品链的研究联系起来，推进德鲁德S和威特洛S商品链和世界城市的进展。通过这种方式，我们克服了全球城市与其腹地脱节和全球商品链嵌入性差的问题。我们还与跨国公司的区位选择研究建立了联系。第三，我们致力于新兴经济体的研究，新兴经济体作为地区经济节点和增长引擎的作用有待验证。我们还提出了一种不以国家为中心的新兴经济体的观点，因此更适合于目前塑造世界经济的进程。第四，针对全球城市和全球商品链研究中的方法缺陷，我们利用英国《金融时报》的外国直接投资市场数据库和Van Dijk局提供的Zephr数据库，来衡量源自/流经我们分析的全球城市的流量。此外，我们还应用了一种接近于主体间可验证的定性方法，并允许基于计算机的情景建模：模糊认知图。

During the last decades some regions of the Global South have realised a considerable economic rise. Global cities there possess thriving and globally competitive secondary and tertiary sectors. They are the hinges between the periphery and the cores of the world-economy. We argue that the role of global cities from the Global South as hinges or gateway cities results from the agglomeration of transnational companies, related industries and producer services, adequate institutions and transport infrastructure. The role of gateway cities and especially their relationship with their hinterland can be captured by causal mechanisms based on independent variables handily consolidated in the 2009 World Development Report: density, distance and division. Hence we will answer the following main question: How do density, distance and division (independent variables) condition the global interlinking of the periphery of the world economy (dependent variable) by gateway cities in the Global South? Our preliminary research indicates that the oil and gas sector in Cape Town, São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro and Singapore is suitable to test the relevance of the three Ds and identify related causal mechanisms in exploratory case studies. This project is innovative in four ways. First, by contextualising density, distance and division empirically and theoretically we react to the criticism of the World Development Report. We show the relevance of rather traditional causal factors for economic processes, factors that have been neglected by evolutionary and relational approaches in Economic Geography. Second, we link research on global cities and research on global commodity chains, advancing the inroads built in Derudder´s and Witlox´s Commodity Chains and World Cities. This way we overcome the disconnectedness of global cities from their hinterland and the poor embeddedness of global commodity chains. We also build tie ins with research on location choices of transnational companies. Third, we contribute to research on emerging economies, whose role as regional economic nodes and growth engines remains to be proven. We also advance a perspective on emerging economies that is not state-centric and hence more appropriate for processes that presently shape the world-economy. Fourth, addressing methodological weaknesses in research on global cities and global commodity chains we make use of the FDI Markets Database from the Financial Times and the Zephyr Database provided by the Bureau van Dijk in order to measure flows that originate in/pass through the global cities that we analyse. We furthermore apply a qualitative methodology that comes close to being intersubjectively verifiable and allows computer-based scenario modelling: fuzzy cognitive maps.