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

Abstract

In this paper we aim to contribute to the literature on the empirical parallels between urban hierarchies and the transport networks supporting and/or reflecting these hierarchies. We adopt a stochastic actor-based modeling framework to analyze the co-evolution of the world city hierarchy and global air passenger networks between 2000 and 2010/2011. The data are drawn from an inventory of the location strategies of globalized service firms across world cities and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Major findings include (1) exogenous effects, such as the impact of economic development and regionality; (2) endogenous micro-level effects producing macro-level patterns, such as preferential attachment processes; and (3) the two-way impact of both networks. (i.e., cities that are well connected in the aviation network tend to attract more major offices of globalized service firms, while the co-presence of major offices of globalized service firms in cities in turn stimulates the development of aviation connections between them).

Sea-Land Interdependence in the Global Maritime Network: the Case of Australian Port Cities

“…Although analyses of single networks remain dominant in the literature, it is possible to find several examples of works looking at least at two types of linkages. Throughout the latter perspective, most empirical studies looked at networks or layers of the same nature: planar networks, such as electrical transmission network and Internet network backbone (Rosato et al, 2008) or non-planar networks, such as airline networks and corporate networks (Liu et al, 2013), to name but a few (see a recent review by Ducruet, 2017). …”

Dynamics in the European Air Transport Network, 2003–9: An Explanatory Framework Drawing on Stochastic Actor-Based Modeling

“…Since their introduction for network dynamics by Snijders (1995) and his colleagues, SABMs have been widely applied in various fields, ranging from friendship networks (Cheadle et al, 2013) to inter-organizational networks (Liu et al, 2013a;Liu et al, 2013c;Van de Bunt and Groenewegen, 2007), manufacturing networks (Buchmann and Pyka, 2013), political networks (Andrew, 2009;KINNE, 2013), and many other areas. However, to date this approach has not been applied to air transport networks, probably in part because of the high requirements in terms availability of longitudinal network data, which has been a longstanding limitation to analyze the changes of transportation networks using statistical analysis tools (Xie and Levinson, 2009).…”

Transport Geography: perspectives upon entering an accomplished research sub-discipline

“…Sismanidou et al 2013;Russo & Musolino 2012) to the global (e.g. Grubesic et al 2009;Tavasszy et al 2011;Liu et al 2013). Participants also identified a potential role for the supra-global.…”