Unpacking the advanced producer services complex in world cities: Charting professional networks, localisation economies and markets

Limited empirical evidence in support of world-city formation has been the ‘dirty little secret’ of the eponymous research area. Since the late 1990s, inspired by Sassen’s account of The Global City , the field focused on advanced producer services (APS) firms as primary actors in world-city formation. While generating robust insights into the shifting geographies of world cities, empirical attention has mostly focused on mapping inter-urban world city networks formed by APS firms. Despite a rich literature on APS clusters, the degree to which specific intra-urban agglomerations and their inter-firm connections shape up has received little systematic attention. Based on a company survey in Brussels (Belgium), our study charts interactions between APS professionals to better understand the geographies, quality and intensity of their encounters. Our findings reveal that the Brussels-based APS cluster constitutes a hybrid of an industrial complex with stable formal ties and a social network based on informal exchange. Financial services assume a central position in what might be called ‘a para-financial services complex’, revealing close ties with legal services, accountancy and audit, and ICT. Geographically, we find that the APS complex depends on fine-grained localisation economies, which allow a small share of APS professionals to service both domestic and international clients. We conclude that APS actors in Brussels exhibit a strong domestic anchoring, indicative of the continued relevance of world cities as national financial centres amidst financial globalisation.