A Wired World: The Evolving Geography of Submarine Cables and the Shift to Asia

Abstract

Submarine cables for telecommunications were an early catalyst of globalization and of transnational corporate production networks and they continue to facilitate global economic activity. This article describes increasing demand from Internet and mobile phones as well as new uses for cables, such as oil exploration and high-energy physics. We trace the history of submarine cables and their geography from their early days to the Internet era, and analyze a global data set of cables at four intervals since 1979. Although the traditional triad locations (Western Europe, North America, and East Asia) are among the best connected, new networks in new places-notably Asia-are poised to become key network nodes in the twenty-first century. Based on cable capacity, the future submarine cable network looks very different from the old, suggesting new economic geographies and new world cities for a new world economy.

Exploring the co-evolution of the geographies of air transport aviation and corporate networks

“…One particular area of attention in this literature relates to the ways in which the evolution of transport geographies shapes/is shaped by the urban system in which these geographies are embedded (e.g., O'Connor, 2003;O'Connor and Fuellhart, 2012;Tranos, 2012). When narrowing the research context down to the global scale, for instance, there have been analyses of the development of rail systems (e.g., Niedzielski and Malecki, 2012), Internet and telecommunication networks (e.g., Malecki and Wei, 2009), and air transport networks (e.g. O'Connor, 2003) in the context of the 'world city' hierarchy.…”

Airline connectivity as a measure of the globalization of African cities

“…Thus, it is no surprise that their geographies have been used to invoke a spatial imagery of urban networks (see e.g. Derudder and Witlox 2005, Devriendt et al 2008, Malecki and Hu, 2009. In this paper, we use the transnational connections of major African cities to further develop this air transport-based approach and to investigate the globalization of these cities.…”

“…The emergence of the Internet in the mid-90s aggregated and transformed the complex ways in which information and capital could be transferred. The boundless possibilities of this medium and the global coverage of its infrastructure made cities increasingly dependent on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) networks for their exchange of information through, for instance, virtual private networks and video conferencing (Malecki and Hu, 2009). In addition, important airline networks have arisen across the globe, especially between the major cities.…”

“…The work of the GaWC group has been crucial in developing the 'corporate organization approach' that starts with the idea that firms pursuing global strategies are the prime agents in the formation of urban networks, even those involving airlines and information flows (Malecki and Hu, 2009). The GaWC researchers, who based their data collection on the global office location networks of major producer service firms in the fields of law, banking, insurance and advertising, anchored their work on transnational urban networks on the assumption that advanced producer service firms 'interlock' cities through their intra-firm transfers of information, knowledge, plans, directions, advice, etc.…”

ICTs for Mobile and Ubiquitous Urban Infrastructures

“…Thereafter, we evaluate two different approaches to apprehending empirically cities' relative positions within omnipresent ICT networks, detailing the contributions of both infrastructural (or "cyberplace") and informational (or "cyberspace") approaches (Devriendt et al, 2008). While we argue that infrastructure-based accounts of inter-city connection (e.g., Moss & Townsend, 2000;Rutherford et al, 2004;Malecki & Wei, 2009) are valuable, we show that there exists a need to study not only tangible informational infrastructures and their associated material flows between places, but also the evolving cyberspaces of cities in relation to digital information. These cyberspace-based approaches offer new ways of comparing world cities in the knowledge-based "Information Age" based on the nature of their respective cyberspaces.…”