Abstract:

Study on urban economic network benefits from the rapid development of complex network research to depict the spatial pattern of urban economic activities more accurately. But a large number of studies still follow the spatial structure of urban system approach, which concerns competition, ranking, and centrality but not cooperation, equality, and connectivity. This article divides the urban economic network research into three stages with regard to complexity theory: (1) initial and theoretical development stage before the 1940s; (2) innovation and breakthrough stage from the 1950s to the 1990s; and (3) diversification and prosperity stage since the beginning of the 21st century. The current focus areas of urban economic network study cover topological structure and spatial coupling of urban economic network, connectivity measurement and quality evaluation in world city network, dynamic effect of urban economic network structure, and safety control and functional optimization in the future. It is very important to pay close attention to data integration and mining in the age of big data to build the research framework of urban economic network.

Key words: urban economic network, complex network, world city, safety control