The Misinterpretation of Women's Status in the Muslim World

Spiritual equality, responsibility, and accountability for both men and women are well‐developed themes in the Qur'an. Spiritual equality between men and women in the sight of God is not limited purely to religious issues, but is the basis for equality in all aspects of human endeavor. This article's main interest is in the woman's status, and her role within the Arab countries. Islam is the main religion—its principles, values, and practices are dominant in the region. Therefore, this article introduces and discusses the misinterpretation of women in Islam, with special consideration of Muslim women's rights and their roles within the Muslim society. This will help to enhance future discussions of social behavior, values, and attitudes toward women in Islam. In the last few decades there has been a great misunderstanding in many aspects of public consciousness about the role of women in Arabic society. There is a significant gap between the status of males and females. However, this gap is more evident in rural areas. The level of women's rights and roles in many Arabic countries prevents women from improving their economic growth and development. This gender gap is the result of social, religious, cultural, and gender inequality. More specifically, it results from structural constraints faced by women. Gender inequality is not a new issue, nor is it only Muslim women who are suffering from this inequality. There is gender discrimination almost everywhere. The Qur'an is the basis of Islam, and encompasses rules, legislation, examples, advice, history, and system of the universe. It draws a picture of the earth and describes the roles of human beings. The Qur'an is the answer to the spiritual and material needs of the Islamic society, and is an exposition and an explanation of all aspects of life.     

Specification of the World City Network

World cities are generally deemed to form an urban system or city network but these are never explicitly specified in the literature. In this paper the world city network is identified as an unusual form of network with three levels of structure: cities as the nodes, the world economy as the supranodal network level, and advanced producer service firms forming a critical subnodal level. The latter create an interlocking network through their global location strategies for placing offices. Hence, it is the advanced producer service firms operating through cities who are the prime actors in world city network formation. This process is formally specified in terms of four intercity relational matrices—elemental, proportional, distance, and asymmetric. Through this specification it becomes possible to apply standard techniques of network analysis to world cities for the first time. In a short conclusion the relevance of this world city network specification for both theory and policy‐practice is briefly discussed.     

Envisioning Seoul as a World City: The Cultural Politics of the Hong-dae Cultural District

This article explores how the vision of a world city influences local cultural politics, by looking at an attempt to construct a cultural quarter in Seoul, South Korea. The Hong-dae area of Seoul has a reputation as a vibrant place of urban amenities, emerging cultural forms, and neighbourhoods of cultural workers and artists. In 2003, the city government announced a policy to create a Cultural District in the area. Subsequently, local conflict over defining Hong-dae culture emerged, and the plan was later postponed. This study elucidates how the proposed policy, framed by a vision of Seoul as a world city, led local actors to territorialise, fossilise, ethnicise and capitalise Hong-dae culture. It argues that competition for world city status may politicise and territorialise urban cultural scenes, rather than enhancing the urban amenities of diversity, openness and tolerance.     

The City Is a Tree; The Real World Is Not a Tree!

The guest coeditors of this issue set a context in which to view a previously unpublished article of Frank Harary. The Harary article is followed here by contemporary material of Joseph Kerski that addresses similar real‐world issues. The two together, along with the context, serve as a springboard to launch the reader into the rest of the materials in this special issue devoted to graph theory and network science. Los coeditores invitados de esta edición establecen marco contextual para una lectura de un manuscrito inédito de Frank Harary. El artículo de Harary es presentado y complementado con material contemporáneo de Joseph Kerski que aborda problemas similares del mundo real. Los dos juntos y el marco conceptual sirven de base al lector para el resto de los materiales en este número especial, dedicado a la teoría de grafos y la ciencia de la redes. 本专辑的客座合作主编发表了一个评论,回顾Frank Harray先前未发表的论文。Harary的论文和当代Joseph Kerski的论文均关注相似的现实世界问题。将两者内容进行对比,结合原文,可以使读者更深入地了解本专辑中有关图论和网络科学之外的其他内容。     

World City Network Integration in the Eurasian Realm

A team of authors from the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research network explores the main empirical features of the global economic integration of Eurasia through an analysis of the (shifting) position of that macroregion's key cities. More specifically, they examine the gateway roles played by key cities in four major subregions—China, the former Eastern Bloc (FEB, i.e., Central and Eastern Europe), former Soviet Union (FSU), and India—in the channeling of transnational flows of capital, goods, knowledge, and people in 2000-2008, focusing on the globalization of firms in the financial and business service sectors. Although cities in the four subregions share a common recent history of transition from closed and state-centered to open and market-based economies, the study reveals the persistence of distinctive geographical idiosyncrasies in their connections across the globe. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F020, F200, O180, P300. 4 figures, 3 tables, 1 appendix, 39 references.     

Structural Determinism in the Interlocking World City Network

Taylor's interlocking specification of the world city network has offered researchers a theoretically informed way to measure the world city network using readily available firm location data. However, the number and size of firms that are viewed as linking cities to one another impose a form of structural determinism on the world city network. Specifically, when a relatively small number of firms is used to define a network among a relatively large set of cities, or when only larger firms are used, this approach is unable to reveal a wide range of structures features that may actually be present in the world city network it is intended to measure. Through a series of examples, I demonstrate how specific features of firm location data predetermine the structure, number and size of cliques, and density of world city networks derived using the interlocking approach. Concluding comments discuss the implications of this structural determinism by focusing on the case of the commonly used Globalization and World Cities data set 11, offer some suggestions concerning how the interlocking approach can be employed while avoiding structural determinism, and identify some alternative approaches to mapping the world city network. El modelo interconexión cerrada (interlocking) de la red mundial de ciudades (world city network) desarrollado por Taylor (2001) ha proporcionado a los investigadores un marco teórico para medir dicha red con datos fácilmente disponibles acerca de la localización de empresas. Sin embargo, el número y tamaño de las empresas que son consideradas como ‘vinculadoras’ (de ciudades) imponen una forma de determinismo estructural sobre la red. En concreto, cuando un número relativamente pequeño de firmas es utilizado para definir la red entre un conjunto relativamente grande de ciudades, o, cuando sólo se utilizan las empresas más grandes, este enfoque (interlocking) no es capaz de identificar o medir una amplia gama de características estructurales presentes potencialmente en la red de ciudades mundiales. A través de una serie de ejemplos, el autor demuestra cómo varias características específicas de los datos de localización de las empresas predeterminan la estructura, número y tamaño de los cliques y la densidad de las redes de ciudades mundiales resultantes de la aplicación de modelos de interlocking. Luego el autor presenta las implicancias del determinismo estructural mencionado, centrándose en el caso la base de datos de uso común GaWC # 11. Finalmente el articulo ofrece algunas sugerencias sobre cómo el enfoque de interlocking puede ser empleado sin caer en un determinismo estructural, y se identifican algunos enfoques alternativos para el mapeo de la red mundial de ciudades. 泰勒（2001）采用相对容易获得的公司地理位置数据提出的世界城市网络连锁度量方法,为研究者提供了一种理论途径。然而,将公司的数量和规模视为城市之间的联接是一种强加的世界城市网络结构决定论形式。特别是当用数量相对较少的公司或仅用大公司的数量来定义相对较大的城市网络集时,该方法不能揭示目前实际情况中大范围世界城市网络需要度量的结构特征。通过一系列的案例分析,本文显示了公司区位数据的特有特征预先决定了集团的结构、数量和规模,以及由泰勒的连锁方法推导出世界城市网络的密度。最后,通过曾被广泛采用的GaWC（全球化和世界城市）数据集的11个城市公司数据讨论了结构决定方法的应用,并就应用该方法如何避免结构决定论提出一些建议,进而识别一些可选用的方法来绘制世界城市网络图。     

The Old and the New: Qualifying City Systems in the World with Classical Models and New Data

Zipf's rank‐size rule, lognormal distribution, and Gibrat's urban growth models are considered as summarizing fundamental properties of systems of cities. In this article, they are used as statistical benchmarks for comparing the shapes of urban hierarchies and evolutionary trends of seven systems of cities in the world including BRICS, Europe, and United States. In order to provide conclusions that avoid the pitfalls of too small samples or uncontrolled urban definitions, these models are tested on some 20,000 urban units whose geographically significant delineations were harmonized in each country over 50 years between 1960 and 2010. As a result, if the models appear not always statistically valid, their usefulness is confirmed since the observed deviations from empirical data remain limited and can often be interpreted from the geohistorical context of urbanism proper to each world region. Moreover, the article provides new free software which authorizes the reproducibility of our experiments with our data bases as well as with complementary data.