(Correspondent: Wang Yuanzhi) At the invitation of Professor Jiang Manqi of the Urban & Regional Economic Institute, on the morning of October 19, Professor Jean-Claude Thill, the distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, former President of the International Association for Regional Science (RSAI), former Executive Director of the North American Regional Science Council, and RSAI Fellow, gave a lecture entitled China in World City Networks: Evidence from Meso-scale Analysis of the Internet.

Professor Thill firstly introduced the concepts of regional science, world cities, and the World City Network (WCN). He proposed that the WCN has three dimensions: microscale (local), mesoscale (intermediate), and macroscale (global). After that, Professor Thill introduced the global city level established by the Globalization and World City (GaWC) research network, introduced the mesoscale structure of the WCN using the matrix model, and proposed the number of web pages that appear simultaneously with the city name as the strength of the relationship between cities, introduced the analysis process of inter-city relations. Professor Thill believed that the mesoscale world city network should be classified by language, and ranked the cities in the world, and drew the mesoscale world city network of English and Chinese respectively, and drew conclusions. Finally, Professor Thill had an in-depth exchange with the professors and students.