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The paper discusses in a personal appreciation of the literature whether the ‘interlocking world city network model’ (IWCNM) has contributed to overcoming the evidential crisis of world or global city research. After a brief summary of the main arguments made by John Friedmann and Saskia Sassen, the paper deduces methodological implications that follow from their economic‐geographical conceptualisation of global cities. In the third and fourth sections of the paper I recapitulate the rationale(s) given by Peter Taylor for the IWCNM and assess the model's contribution to empirically corroborating the global city concept. The paper's main claim is that the IWCNM bypasses the theoretical core of the global city paradigm, for which reason an evidential crisis continues to undermine the strength of the global city argument. Accordingly, in the last section of the paper a research strategy is proposed that is apt to take global city studies a step forward.

The central argument of this article is that global cities are, due to their clustering of producer service firms, critical governance nodes in global production networks. More in particular, the article scrutinises the role of producer service firms in uneven development and, especially, in the geographical transfer of value (Hadjimichalis, 1984). Because the direct as well as the indirect mechanisms through which value is transferred geographically require the intervention of producer service firms, global cities can be theorised as governance nodes for centripetal wealth transfers along global commodity chains. Moreover, and in the context of the persisting criticism that the global city concept has a bias towards Northern/Western cities, the article argues that the claim that global cities are critical places for the organisation of uneven development also holds for cities beyond ‘the usual suspects’. Referring to cases of how producer service firms in Hamburg and Mexico City erect entry barriers to protect their clients from competition and of how they shape labour relations at the expense of employees, I have maintained that governance is, as Sassen (2010: 158) has argued, indeed ‘embedded’ into the services provided. From that follows that even ‘minor’ global cities are strategic governance places from where the transfer of wealth towards the centres of the world economy is organised.

-due to globalization, and as part of its process Mexican capital city it is changing from a national metropolis to a "hinge" between Mexican economy and global economy. Accordingly, it is an important place for the production and managment of globalization in México. This has consequences over the economic, social and spatial structure of the Metropolitan Zone of Ciudad de México (ZMCM). It is also shown that the ZMCM is well integrated to the transnational global cities net]]>