世界城市体系研究的定量化趋势及其方法演化

QUANTITATIVE TRENDS OF THE WORLD CITY SYSTEM RESEARCH AND THE EVOLUTION OF ITS METHODS

20世纪80年代以来,世界城市体系研究受到越来越多的关注,研究内容由早期的案例研究、基于属性的世界城市排名,发展为对世界城市体系结构的定量化分析。这些变化是与城市间关系数据的日益丰富分不开的,数据的丰富也带动了世界城市体系研究方法的日益丰富与完善。本文首先回顾了世界城市体系研究的定量化发展过程,在此基础上对世界城市体系定量分析方法的演化:由社会网络分析到链锁网络模型的发展以及两种方法的讨论和完善进行了梳理,并对两种方法的异同进行了对比。最后结合中国国内相关领域的研究现状,对未来研究进行了展望。

World city system attracts increasing attention of researchers since the 1980s. Early researches highly focused on individual world cities by analyzing their attributional and functional characteristics, or ranking world cities based on certain attributes of the cities. This biased situation can be attributed to the lack of connection data of cities, though connections between cities are considered to be crucial in interpreting cit- ies in globalization. This situation is gradually rectified by the abundance of relational data between world cities： first, the improved transportation and telecommunication technology provides support for multiple connections between world cities, and the transportation and communication network per se also help to re- flect the structure of world city system; second, multinational corporates are chief actors in the world econo- my, thus are widely used as crucial proxies in interpreting networked world city system; third, global politi- cal and cultural forces, represented by governmental and non-governmental organizations and global music production, are providing diversified ways in analyzing world city system. The abundance of relational data pushes forward the transformation of early qualitative researches into quantitative analysis of the structure of world city system, and the adoption of new methods and the improvement of existing ones. This paper re- views the evolution process of the quantitative world city system research, and compares the two most impor- tant methods, social network analysis and interlocking network model in assessing the world city system. Some critiques, discussions, and improvements of the methods are also reviewed and discussed. Lastly, based on a brief review of the urban system research in China, some suggestions and possible research as- pects of the quantitative world city system research and its implication to respective studies in China are pre- sented.