In this dissertation, I evaluate questions related to the role of connectivity in economic and innovation-related processes. Specifically, I utilize conceptual frameworks from the economic geography literature to study the relevance of internal, external, and infrastructural connectivity at a city level.In the first essay, I examine the role of intra-metropolitan connectivity of inventors and evaluate the quality of the associated innovation outputs. I focus on the fact that there exist meaningful demographic differences between people domiciled in city centers and the suburban areas and claim that these heterogeneities serve as sources of diversity and creativity. I suggest empirical evidence that the collaboration of inventors from the two different sub-regions is associated with higher quality innovation outcomes. I further study how firm heterogeneity moderates the effects of this intra-metropolitan connectivity. The findings suggest that local firms and small to mid-sized firms (SMEs) enjoy more benefits because foreign firms and large firms are exploiting their own global network. This paper provides both managerial and practical implications that a metropolitan area may improve its quality of innovation outputs by taking advantage of the urban-suburban connectivity among the inventors. In the second essay, I provide specific guidelines to city planners to evaluate the external connectivity of the associated city. Cities are industry hotspots, playing vital roles as centers of economic development. Each city has different location-specific advantages that can foster different core industries and firms, participating in diverse activities within a global value chain system. Given the increasing rate of globalization at the metro level, it has become paramount for cities to establish and develop economic partnerships with other cities to further growing their regional economies. However, few city planners have clear directions in choosing partner cities, and the decisions are rarely based on appropriate data analysis. Based on the Brookings Institution’s Global City Initiative 2.0 project, and after enhancing it with additional data analyses, I introduce a set of step-by-step guidelines to city planners for finding global partner cities. To provide an actual case, I share our own anecdote regarding how Philadelphia chose potential partner cities in order to attract more FDI in its biopharmaceutical sector and foster innovation activities. I also present evidence that the inadequate ability of local firms to source knowledge from international markets associates with relatively weak economic performance. The comprehensive analyses of the city’s role in the global value chain include from the upstream (Research and Development) and the midstream (FDI, imports, international joint ventures) to the downstream (exports). This case-based paper provides practical implications to city planners by providing ways of understanding the broad global value chain with which the city is involved. In the third essay, I assess the relationship between soft networks and hard networks of global cities. Public transportation systems (PTS) have been developed along with the associated metropolitan area. Scholars in urban studies have emphasized the important roles of PTS in connecting diverse people, regions, activities, and socio-economic consequences. In this paper, I examine the relationship between public transportation systems and the innovation network in four major U.S. cities in the northeast - New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. I graphically show that inventor locations, as well as their connectivity, are established along with the city’s public transportation networks. I further stipulate that this relationship has been seriously undermined by the recent pandemic – COVID-19. Even though it is too early to draw a conclusion, I advance propositions that predict how the relationship between public transportation network and inventor connectivity will be changed followed by the pandemic. In conclusion, I claim that a metropolitan area’s internal, external, and infrastructural network significantly affects its competitiveness. Throughout this dissertation, I confirm that both hard networks and soft networks are key to enhancing the economic and innovative performance of the city. / Business Administration/International Business Administration

Yes / This study explores the impact of city-specific factors on skilled migrants’ career capital within the intelligent career framework. It compares global and secondary cities as distinct career landscapes and examines how differently they shape development and utilisation of three ways of knowing (knowing-how, knowing-whom and knowingwhy). Findings from 82 qualitative interviews with skilled migrants in global (London) and secondary (Newcastle) UK cities explain the importance of cities at an analytical level, as skilled migrants’ careers were differently constrained and enabled by three groups of city-specific factors: labour market, community and lifestyle. By exploring the two types of cities in career context, this article contributes to developing an interdisciplinary dialogue and problematises careers as a relational and contextually embedded phenomenon. Limitations and recommendations are discussed.

In this thesis, I propose that bike courier delivery is not merely a convenient service for clients but an important function in the operation of successful economies. By allowing the regions to function at higher speeds, same-day courier networks seem to play an active role in generating positive economic outcomes. The availability of courier networks is found to be as uneven as economic vitality itself. Cities like New York and Toronto have large, dense courier networks, capable of delivering items within an hour while smaller cites, do not support same-day courier service at all. They do this, in part, by allowing for couriers to cope with the precariousness of their work, and in part by providing supportive sub-cultures. These findings point to the role of service workers, and wider eco-systems in fostering regional advantage.

In this thesis, I propose that bike courier delivery is not merely a convenient service for clients but an important function in the operation of successful economies. By allowing the regions to function at higher speeds, same-day courier networks seem to play an active role in generating positive economic outcomes. The availability of courier networks is found to be as uneven as economic vitality itself. Cities like New York and Toronto have large, dense courier networks, capable of delivering items within an hour while smaller cites, do not support same-day courier service at all. They do this, in part, by allowing for couriers to cope with the precariousness of their work, and in part by providing supportive sub-cultures. These findings point to the role of service workers, and wider eco-systems in fostering regional advantage.

abstract: Beijing, in its Twelfth Five-Year Plan for the National Economic and Social Development of Beijing (2011 – 2015), affirmed its intention to become a leading “World City with Chinese characteristics.” This research is based on an assessment of the proposed strategies contained within the 12th Five-Year plan that are grounded in the set of indicators (variables) closely associated with world city status. Indicator selection (e.g., percentage of foreign born population) is based on review of shared characteristics of world cities (e.g., Tokyo, New York, Singapore) constrained by availability of Beijing data; plus the significant academic literature on the topic from leading scholars such as Peter Hall. Using these indicators, Beijing’s baseline conditions and associated trends are established for assessment in a Status-Quo Scenario. Thereafter, interventions proposed by the Beijing Municipality to achieve world city status are evaluated. The results of this assessment will inform Beijing’s policy-makers regarding potential obstacles, pitfalls, or potential disruptions on the road to premier ‘World City’ status, and emphasize the need to undertake peremptory interventions and/or prepare contingency responses, as well as, inform stakeholders and decision-makers of critical and non-critical interventions recommended to achieve World City status by the year 2030. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Urban and Environmental Planning 2016

The diploma thesis "Global cities in the air transport system" is focused on the importance of global cities for the international airline network. The first chapter defines significant clasification of the global cities and subsequently, the operational ranking is created based on the three selected rankings of global cities. Second chapter is dedicated to the system of air transport and also defines the main air transport hubs in particular world regions. Following chapter analyses transportation outputs of the airports of global cities and its growth in years 2004 - 2008 based on the economic level of each state. It also identifies factors that have the highest influence on the air transport outputs within the frame of global cities. In last chapter, the selected global cities are ranked by their connectivity within airline network based on the results of analysis of airline connectivity of global cities. In the conclusions the importance of the global cities for international airline network is summarised.

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Recent years have seen a huge increase in the amount of data collected from multiple sources: mobile phones are ubiquitous, social networks are widely used, cities are more and more connected and the mobility of people and goods has risen to a global scale. The Big Data Era has opened the doors to new kinds of studies that were unthinkable with previous qualitative methods: human behavior can now be analyzed with a fine-grained resolution, patterns of mobility and behavior can be extracted from the incredible amount of data collected every day. Modern large cities are becoming more and more interconnected and this phenomenon leads to an increasing communication and activities’ synchronization. Due to the amount of data available or for anonymization reasons, it is often necessary to aggregate data spatially and temporally. A natural representation of clustered mobility data is the temporal network representation. In this thesis we focus on these two aspects of spatial distance in human mobility: (i) we study the synchronization of 76 Italian cities, using mobile phone data, showing that both distance between cities and city size determine the synchronization in communication rhythms. Moreover, we show that the effect of the distance in synchronization decreases when the size of the city increases; (ii) we investigate how clustering continuous spatio-temporal data affects spatio-temporal network measures for real-life and synthetic datasets and analyze how spatio-temporal networks’ measures vary at different aggregation levels.

This study is generally concerned with the assumption that the contemporary global flows of people, capital, and commodities, which accelerated dramatically in the age of globalization, have significant impacts on the land use patterns of global cities. With this assumption, the study further questions in the context of polycentric US metropolis, whether or not the distribution of transnational advanced producer service firms define a new form of centrality, in which the traditional central business districts and suburban centers differ from each other in terms of spatial clustering patterns and sectoral distributions of transnational advanced producer service firms. Spatial clustering patterns of advanced producer service firms are evaluated according to high-rise and high-density criteria. In ten selected cities, clusters of advanced producer service firms and high-rise office buildings are identified through the Nearest Neighbor Hierarchical Clustering Method in CrimeStat. To define the polycentric US metropolis, the research employs Lang et al's (2006) classification of metropolitan office space. The results show significant differences between former manufacturing belt cities and Sunbelt cities. / Ph. D.

Recent developments around the sharing economy bring to the fore questions of governability and broader societal Benefit-and subsequently the need to explore effective means of public governance, from nurturing, on the one hand, to restriction, on the other. As sharing is a predominately urban phenomenon in modern societies, cities around the globe have become both locus of action and central actor in the debates over the nature and organization of the sharing economy. However, cities vary substantially in the interpretation of potential opportunities and challenges, as well as in their governance responses. Building on a qualitative comparative analysis of 16 leading global cities, our findings reveal four framings of the sharing economy: "societal endangerment","societal enhancement", "market disruption", and "ecological Transition". Such framings go hand in hand with patterned governance responses: although there is considerable heterogeneity in the combination of public governance strategies, we find specific configurations of framings and public governance strategies. Our work reflects the political and ethical debates on various economic, social, and moral issues related to the sharing economy, and contrib-utes to a better understanding of the field-level institutional Arrangements-a prerequisite for examining moral behavior of sharing economy organizations.