The City as the Nexus Model: Bridging the State, Market, Societal, and Geospatial Contexts

Cities serve as nexus, they connect and are shaped by politico-governmental (State), market-economic (Market), civil-societal (Societal), and geographic-natural (Geo-spatial) activities and/or events occurring at all spatial tiers. As a result, a thorough understanding of urban development outcomes requires a trans-disciplinary, integrated approach that draws upon multiple, even sometimes competing, scholarly paradigms. In the spirit of this, this article introduces The City as the Nexus Model, a new perspective for analyzing urban and regional development trajectories, which incorporates the ideas of Agglomeration, Urban Regime, World/Global City, and Nested City Theories, among others. By drawing upon the central themes of these sometimes competing perspectives, this new model shows how a combination of State, Market, Societal, and Geospatial factors uniquely shape economic and spatial outcomes in the world's city-regions. Most importantly, the article/new model provides scholars, practitioners, and students with a new trans-disciplinary framework to utilize in their own empirically-based studies of city-regions.