These include financial services, advertising, recreation and tourism, health, education, consulting, media clusters and the role that place and space play in national and transnational planning and policy. Evidence of these scholarly worlds is illustrated by growing disciplinary and transdisciplinary literatures with a strong place-knowledge-information context. These inquiries are signature features of knowledge/information worlds. Geographers are among the scholars looking at these features whether related to information production or the increased importance of visualizing place knowledge and networks operating at local, regional, and global scales (Garreau, 1991 Dahlman & Anderson, 2000 Stirbu et al., 2015 Hiernaux & Lindón, 2017 Alvarez, 2019a, 2019b). The information when analyzed, mapped and graphed help us understand the nature and extent of linkages and the place of a city in a broad national or regional hierarchy. One of the salient features of these worlds relates to knowledge production, that is, the amount or volume of information produced or known about a specific place.

The emergence of post-industrial economies, societies, and politics has ushered in new topics for the social and policy sciences (Castells & Hall, 1994 Santos, 1996 Castells, 2000, 2005 Zook & Brunn, 2006 Glaser & Marshall, 2016).

Alpha-level global cities 2016