Abstract World city system attracts increasing attention of researchers since the 1980s. Early researches highly focused on individual world cities by analyzing their attributional and functional characteristics, or ranking world cities based on certain attributes of the cities. This biased situation can be attributed to the lack of connection data of cities, though connections between cities are considered to be crucial in interpreting cities in globalization. This situation is gradually rectified by the abundance of relational data between world cities:first, the improved transportation and telecommunication technology provides support for multiple connections between world cities, and the transportation and communication network per se also help to reflect the structure of world city system; second, multinational corporates are chief actors in the world economy, thus are widely used as crucial proxies in interpreting networked world city system; third, global political and cultural forces, represented by governmental and non-governmental organizations and global music production, are providing diversified ways in analyzing world city system. The abundance of relational data pushes forward the transformation of early qualitative researches into quantitative analysis of the structure of world city system, and the adoption of new methods and the improvement of existing ones. This paper reviews the evolution process of the quantitative world city system research, and compares the two most important methods, social network analysis and interlocking network model in assessing the world city system. Some critiques, discussions, and improvements of the methods are also reviewed and discussed. Lastly, based on a brief review of the urban system research in China, some suggestions and possible research aspects of the quantitative world city system research and its implication to respective studies in China are presented.
2017, Vol. 32 
