Opening up to the world? Khartoum's position within a global city network

This article presents three arguments for a new research perspective on global city networks analysis and introduces possible modifications to existing assessment tools in order to investigate the role of emerging market cities. The first argument highlights the need to investigate more ‘peripheral’ cities of the world economy in order to understand how emerging market cities connect to international business networks. The second argument presents some critical observations regarding existing methods to measure a city’s global connectivity. As part of this argument, this article introduces two new variables that help assessing an emerging market city’s integration in international business networks. The third argument suggests that there is a need to also investigate a city’s proactive engagement towards key corporate players in order to enhance its standing in the global economy. The case of Khartoum confirms that an assessment based on this modified research framework offers interesting insights. While Khartoum would score one of the lowest rankings in ‘classic’ connectivity assessments, the introduced approach allows deciphering some of the key drivers of international investments in Khartoum between 2000 and 2009. The study concludes that future research on global city networks and emerging market cities would benefit from including the concepts of prime sectors, office presence parity and urban network policies.