Command and control cities in global space-economy before and after 2008 geo-economic transition

Abstract

The global economic downturn caused primarily by the US sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2007 engendered revenue loss of the multinational corporations. Existing studies have yet to depict the detrimental impacts on city's command and control functions induced by the sub-prime mortgage crisis together with its residual wave of global economic recession on the global spatial economy. Recent and previous studies have produced an 'instant history' of the global spatial economy before the global economic downturn undermines the global economy in late 2008. However, the waxes and wanes of major cities' command and control functions on the global economic arena before and after the outbreak of financial crisis and its associated geo-economic transitions are still poorly understood. This paper attempts to contribute a new set of customized data to update and fill in the gap in the literature with the investigation of the command and control functions of cities around the world from 2005 to 2009. Particular attentions are paid to the time-space relationship of the geo-economic transition that can capture the recent historical images of the command and control situation of different cities in the world. © 2012 Science Press, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agricultural Ecology, CAS and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.