world city
A city with worldwide economic importance, taking business factors and real estate markets into consideration.
The concept behind the GaWC World Cities listing is to develop insight into the role of cities in the world order by examining the reach of transnational companies including worldwide firms and conglomerates as well as small companies which qualify as global players. The GaWC analysis examines four industries: accountancy, advertising, banking/finance, and law. Depending on the number of companies in each industry, each city earns 0, 1, 2, or 3 points on an ordinal scale. The aggregation of points in all four industries ranges from 0 to 12. Every city with sufficient business presence to merit at least 1 point is included in the categorization, and the results are divided into 4 classes of successively more elite cities: Alpha, Beta, and Gamma World Cities, and a group labeled Evidence of World City formation.
Phorio Standards bases its World City analysis on the GaWC concept, assigning each city its place in an extended picture of global cities. The GaWC model is expanded by the addition of a fifth industrial index, labeled real estate volume. For this, data on major buildings is gathered and fed into a similar analysis. This data includes information on major buildings (buildings with a minimum floor count or gross floor area) which are completed, approved or under construction. Using this compilation, in a manner similar to the GaWC analysis, each city is assigned between 0 and 3 points:
>1500 buildings: 3 points
500 to 1500 buildings: 2 points
200 to 500 buildings: 1 point
<200 buildings: 0 points
The possible point total for a city is increased in the ranking to 15 points, and is split into 4 classes corresponding to the GaWC classes. The lowest classes D and C have the same width and point boundaries. The Beta World City class is now wider and reaches from 7 to 12 points. The Alpha World City class is as wide as before but now reaches from 13 to 15 points.
Due to this expanded methodology, a World Cities Hierarchy is now visible which takes into account the measurement of building stock and construction activity. Because the data looks at the rates of future building activity in different cities, it is able to add a meaningful forecast of the emergence of new cities on the global scene. By integrating buildings which are approved and under construction, the differences between the existing GaWC model and the Extended Model becomes especially obvious. As one example, Dubai, the fastest rising metropolis in the Middle East, is upgraded to a Gamma World City (Class C) in the Extended GaWC World City model. At the same time a large number of new cities have been added to the lowest category (emerging global cities). These cities have no status in the GaWC ranking, but because of high construction activity their appearance in the new World City network is evidence of a changing balance in urban centers.