Benchmarking of World cities through self-organizing maps

This paper argues that there is a global trend towards the highest possible performance among functionally specialized and heterogeneous world cities in different parts of our world. It aims to map out the relative disparities in competitive performance among a preselected set of major global cities by offering a hierarchical benchmark analysis of these cities on the basis of a recently completed comparative study on their socio-economic 'power', as exerted and/or perceived by various groups of relevant urban stakeholders. The analytical tool employed to highlight and better understand the relative (hierarchical) position of these cities from a topological perspective is based on Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs), which depict in a multidimensional space the similarities among the cities under consideration. The empirical results are presented and interpreted from the perspective of a benchmark ranking of the various cities involved, while finally also an actor-oriented analysis of the distinct performance components of these cities is provided. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.