The paper covers two areas of research—world cities and political geography—that are not usually linked and therefore addresses two audiences. In both research areas the paper introduces discussion on key topics of interest: How world cities relate to territorial states, and the construction of new trans-state political geographies.

The originality is in the presentation of new data that allows geographical questions about relations between world cities and states to be asked and answered for the first time. The paper covers research areas that have had severe empirical deficits in their recent development.

Contemporary globalization has been marked by two important geographical trends: the rise of world cities (London, New York, etc.) as critical nodes in the world economy and the relative decline of nation-states as players in the world economy. The paper discusses the relationships between these two trends, provides evidence on world cities operating both within states and across states, and speculates on the future of these changes in the world economy.

This is an early paper in a series of research projects supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) that focus upon inner-city relations across the world. The attraction of the topic was that there was little or no data describing relations between cities and the challenge was to try and fill this void. This involved bringing together colleagues at Loughborough University and beyond to set up the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Study Group and Network.