It is sometimes claimed that the degree of polycentricity of an urban region influences that region's competitiveness. However, because of widespread use and policy relevance, the underlying concept of polycentricity has become a 'stretched concept' in urban studies. As a result, academic debate on the topic leads to situations reminiscent of Babel's Tower. This meta-study of the scientific literature in urban studies traces the conceptual stretching of polycentricity using scientometric methods and content analysis. All published studies that either apply the concept directly or cite a work that does, were collected from the Scopus bibliographic database. This resulted in a citation network with over 9,000 works and more than 20,000 citations between them. Network analysis and clustering algorithms were used to define the most influential papers in different citation clusters within the network. Subsequently, we employed content analysis to systematically assess the mechanisms associated with the formation of polycentric urban systems in each of these papers. Based on this meta-analysis, we argue that the common categorization of polycentricity research in intra-urban, inter-urban and interregional polycentricity is somewhat misleading. More apt categorizations to understand the origins of polycentricity's conceptual ambiguity relate to different methodological traditions and geographical contexts in which the research is conducted. Nonetheless, we observe a firm relation across clusters between assessments of polycentricity and different kinds of agglomeration economies. We conclude by proposing a re-conceptualisation of polycentricity based on explicitly acknowledging the variable spatial impact of these different kinds of agglomeration economies.

This paper interrogates the enduring, yet changing role of world cities as centers of capitalist command and control amidst deepening uneven development. By incorporating financialization processes in Friedmann's (1986) world city hypothesis, we hypothesize that the world city archipelago remains an obligatory passage point for the relatively assured realization of capital. The advanced producer services complex appropriates superprofits as producers of coconstitutive knowledge on operational and financial firm restructuring, the creation of new circuits of value, and capital switching. Geographically, beyond the International Financial Center shortlist, the wider world city archipelago inserts finance capital (logics) in contemporary economies and societies.

Agglomeration and network externalities are fuzzy concepts. When different meanings are (un)intentionally juxtaposed in analyses of the agglomeration/network externalities-menagerie, researchers may reach inaccurate conclusions about how they interlock. Both externality types can be analytically combined, but only when one adopts a coherent approach to their conceptualization and operationalization, to which end we provide a combinatorial typology. We illustrate the typology by applying a state-of-the-art bipartite network projection detailing the presence of globalized producer services firms in cities in 2012. This leads to two one-mode graphs that can be validly interpreted as topological renderings of agglomeration and network externalities.JEL classification: D85, O18, R11

This article critically evaluates the network-centrism of much of contemporary world cities research and queries its capacity to unveil key accumulation processes under financialized globalization. Our object of inquiry is the world city archipelago (WCA), a material yet non-contiguous space of world city 'islands', which is (re)produced through the socio-spatial practices of advanced producer services (APS) firms as they assist in constructing ( financial) accumulation strategies for their clients. Scrutinizing the WCA with a singular focus on networks can veil dynamics that lead to internal stratification and hierarchy between world cities and their constitutive outside. Alternatively, these veiled dimensions are better grasped by territorial, scalar and place-based abstractions. As an example, we unveil WCA space by studying the space of APS practices in three recent cases of Eurobond issuance. By comparing these three instances through an encompassing approach, a bounded geography of a financialized accumulation space is identified, which contains London and other world cities as a necessary space of dependence but also stretches out to various contingent spaces of engagement at the fringes of the WCA network: offshore jurisdictions and places of debt origination. We conclude by making the case for a heightened sensitivity in respect of core-periphery structures that exist between the WCA and its outside, but also within the WCA itself.

The rise of Fintech challenges established financial centres and incumbent financial institutions to rethink their strategies to remain obligatory passage points in the age of digitizing finance. To appreciate these changes, it is important to maintain theoretical interchange between developments in financial geography and economic geography, its parent discipline. In this paper, we argue that the ways in which evolutionary economic geography impacts strategic coupling in global financial networks are crucial to grasp tomorrow’s geographies of Fintech. Through an in-depth examination of Brussels, we analyse the potential of Fintech opening a window of locational opportunity in financial services. Belgium has put together a strategy to seize this window by leveraging its politically neutral image and Brussels’ existing niche in financial collaboration and infrastructural plumbing. The latter status is exemplified by the presence of global players SWIFT and Euroclear. We analyse how Belgian entrepreneurs and politicians assess Brussels’ locational resources, and strategically couple big financial institutions with small tech startups in order to cultivate a Fintech ecosystem in the service of incumbent finance, constituting a Fin-Tech-State triangle. As such, we document and analyse how the coalescence of finance and technology offers new opportunities for second-tier financial centres, while highlighting the difficulties in reaping these in practice.