NYLON’s pre-eminence: The permeability of world regions in contemporary globalization

In this paper we provide a detailed geographical analysis of the role of the New York-London (NYLON) connection in the world city network. We find that its pre-eminence is much greater and much more diverse than previously considered. Our analysis draws on a data collection of the worldwide office networks of producer services firms across cities in 2018, and applies a purposeful combination of principal components analysis and network analysis to identify the relative importance of city-dyads in different regional geographies of globalization. We review the role of NYLON in the the different city sub-nets thus identified, and provide a more focused discussion of NYLON’s role in the production of three of these. In a short conclusion, we consider the meaning of our results for the broader literature.