Intracity and intercity networks of multinational firms, 2010-2019

Globalization induces common global economic rules that are addressed by numerous various local answers (Castells 2010; Robinson and Roy 2016), but across the world, the role of cities is to leverage knowledge and information in the network of globally connected exchanges (Scott 2001; Roy and Ong 2011; Neal 2012; Scott and Storper 2015). According to Grabher and Stark (1997, p. 540), ‘globalization does not displace the properties of localities but makes them all the more salient’. Firms that are organized in networks meet together in different cities in which they extend their access to resources by establishing multiple plants. At stake is the local and global coordination of transfers of value through intrafirm and interfirm networks, resulting in the concentration of wealth in specific firms in specific cities at the expense of other firms and cities, thereby contributing to the increase in interurban inequalities (Hadjimichalis 1984; Chapter 29 in this volume). Owing to the mutual construction and reinforcement between the intraurban and the interurban networks, some intraurban properties are linked to global connectiveness. In addition, between local and global scales, state and regional arrangements, such as free trade zones, are identified scales where the actors’ strategies meet institutions facilitating or limiting the organizational complexity of the global value chains of firms (Sassen 2010; Dicken 2011; Rozenblat 2018). Thus, global and local networks are mutually dependent in cities, and different intermediary scales shape the actors’ strategies operating at multiple spatial scales in order to ensure their stability and their power. Many questions remain unanswered in the intraurban versus interurban networks’ analysis, especially the question of how ‘to make explicit an implicit and simplistic equating of spatial scale and power’ (Beauregard 1995, p. 241). This question was examined by seminal papers developing reflections on the networking effects of global economic forces on cities (Amin and Thrift 1992; Castells 2000, 2010; Sassen 2000; Bathelt et al. 2004; Massey 2007; Bathelt and Glückler 2011). However, in our opinion, the absence of a distinction between scales and levels of processes avoids a better conceptualization of this intertwining between local and global networks and constituting the dynamics of cities (Pflieger and Rozenblat 2010; Pumain 2018; Chapter 1 in this volume).