Pascal Venier links to an intriguing map of regional relations among world cities and their organizational domains in the efforts of Big Business. The map comes from World Cities and Territorial States under Conditions of Contemporary Globalization, The 1999 Annual Political Geography Lecture by P.J. Taylor.

Reading the originating document, I found a second amazing map of alpha, beta and gamma world cities. This is a cropped version to fit here without shrinking, showing only Europe and the Americas. Follow the link for a full version with Asia included. It's enlightening.

The idea of influential cities driving the world's economies and cultures leading to the downfall or irrelevance of enclosing states seems like a natural stage in the growth of multi-nationals. Taking over a city economically and using it to expand and manage territory is what they do. This map was created using quantitative information from a "data bank of 69 firms over 263 cities to identify a roster of 55 world cities." I'm wondering how other statistical analysis would overlay this map. What would wage scales and ethnicity breakdowns look like in comparison? How about levels of education, or local influence of respected academic institutions and research centers? Per capita income? Voting age? Age of the city itself? Dominant religion? Type of government?

An idea has just occurred to me for an excellent comparison display of data using Jitter or Java. Using a table of values for various parameters, one could drag a city to another city, changing the size and color of the circles to show a relative comparison of other factors, while still viewing their world-city status.

After that, I can imagine various automating algorithms to run relationship routes and comparisons, with the output plugged into sound generation patches... as usual, I can take any idea and find some way to make music out of it.

One last quote from Taylor, part of an argument labeled Braudel's Provocation: "Braudel provides us with a lovely bit of unconventional wisdom: capitalism is inherently anti-market. Any sensible capitalist avoids a proper functioning market because that is not where the biggest profits are to be made."