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

This book 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. 2. The economic geography of institutional investment in the United States, 2010 3. The geography of Canadian interlocking directorates: how do they relate to brain circulation? 4. Fast-growing firms as elements of change in Canada’s headquarters city system 5. Interaction of corporate and urban systems: accumulation of intangible assets 6. Macau’s role as a recreation/tourist center in the Pearl River Delta city-region 7. Planning Beijing: socialist city, transitional city, and global city 8. Global cities, cosmopolitanism, and geographies of tolerance 9. A method for delineating a hierarchically networked structure of urban landscape

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.