The geographically variegated connections of the Jakarta metropolitan area as produced by manufacturing firms

Connectivity in urban networks is often deemed to be an important feature of economically vibrant cities. Under conditions of contemporary globalization, the importance and geographies of these connections are increasingly variegated. Accordingly, various attempts have been made to analyse the external relations of cities and metropolitan regions, often through the lens of multilocational firms. Our purpose in this paper is to address the to‐date limited empirical knowledge about whether firms originating from different regions (i.e., firms with different headquarter [HQ] locations) create different patterns of inter‐urban relations. Drawing on the interlocking network model and using the Jakarta metropolitan area (JMA) as a case study, this paper explores how manufacturing firms with HQs either inside (further differentiating between the JMA and other cities) or outside (further differentiating between East Asian and non‐East Asian countries) Indonesia produce different patterns of external relations. Our findings indicate that each category of firms generates unique configurations of interurban relations for the JMA at the global and national scales. We argue that these variegated networks patterns not only reflect different locational strategies of firms, but also Indonesia's evolving policy orientations which have complex relations with evolving patterns of economic globalization.