Benchmarking of world cities through Self-Organizing Maps

This paper takes for granted the structural urbanisation trend in our world. It argues that there is a global competition among world cities in different parts of our planet. It aims to map out the relative disparities among a preselected set of major global cities by offering a benchmark analysis of these cities on the basis of a recently completed comparative study on their socioeconomic ‘power’. The analytical tool employed to highlight and better understand the relative position of these cities from a topological perspective is based on Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs). 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 various performance items of these cities is given.