Multilevel Analysis of Corporations Networks: A Comparison Between Agro-Food and Automobile Strategies for Urban Development - Methods for Multilevel Analysis and Visualisation of Geographical Networks - page 166

Table 10.3 Most important
cities in each economic sector

Agro-food industry Motor industry

City Nb afiliates City Nb afiliates

London 500 Paris 109

Paris 120 Torino 71

Rotterdam 95 Nagoya 50

Mexico city 92 Coventry 46

Edinburgh 81 Wilmington 43

New York 67 London 29

Dublin 56 Buenos Aires 28

Chicago 43 Tianjin 26

Amsterdam 41 Madrid 24

Vitoria 40 Bangkok 24

The inter-urban relations of the motor industry are made on a more global scale
than those of the agro-food industry. We explain this pattern through the strong
specialization of the territorial resources necessary for the competitiveness of the
automotive companies and the close relations of the markets of the agro-food
industry. In terms of weight (see Table 10.3 ), we notice a stronger polarization of
the cities for the agro-food industry: London accumulates 500 subsidiaries, which is
one-sixth of the total agro-food subsidiary sample used. The position of London in
the strategic space of the agro-food sector is largely due to its European position: the
city radiates to all of Europe for Kraft Foods, which uses the cultural and linguistic
proximity between the United Kingdom and the United States. The city is also a
pillar for the Unilever firm, which has a secondary headquarters there that influences
all the European cities. Paris is the second city most heavily invested in by the
subsidiary companies of the agro-food industry. Paris is the main city in Nestlé's
network, because of the cultural proximity between French-speaking Switzerland
and France. Paris has regional importance for the European agro-food networks.
The weight of the European Union in the agro-food strategies is strong: six of the
ten most heavily invested cities belong to the European Union. This result is due to
the cohesion and the size of the European market (Figs. 10.8 and 10.9 ).
The first most heavily invested city in the network of the automotive sector is
Paris, which contains 109 subsidiary companies, due to the presence of the PSA
headquarters and its surroundings (Fig. 10.6 ), since PSA centralizes many functions
at the top of the hierarchy. It is the same for Torino and Nagoya, respectively
second and third most heavily invested cities of the classification. The fourth city is
Coventry, a town in the United Kingdom of 305,000 inhabitants (UK census, 2002),
which saw the establishment of Rover at the end of the nineteenth century. Since
then, 130 industries connected to the automobile sector have settled nearby. This
specialization is also visible in Shanghai and Warsaw, with the presence of the three
selected firms (Fig. 10.6 ). Finally, this automobile classification reveals the strong
proportion of cities belonging to emergent countries, such as Buenos Aires, Tianjin
and Bangkok, which may result from strategies to minimize production costs.