Module 8: The Global City (GE 102) - Philippines

**MODULE 8** **Module Title:**  The Global City **Course Title:** The Contemporary World **Course Number:** GE 102 **Course Description:** This course introduces students to the contemporary world by examining the multifaceted phenomenon of globalization. Using various social sciences, it examin...

**MODULE 8** **Module Title:**  The Global City **Course Title:** The Contemporary World **Course Number:** GE 102 **Course Description:** This course introduces students to the contemporary world by examining the multifaceted phenomenon of globalization. Using various social sciences, it examines the economic, social, political, technological, and other transformations that have created an increasing interconnectedness of peoples and places around the globe. To this end, the course provides an overview of the various debates in global governance and sustainability. Beyond exposing the student to the world outside the Philippines, it seeks to inculcate a sense of global citizenship as a responsibility. This course includes mandatory topics on population education in the context of population and demography. **Total Learning Time:** 3 hrs. **Overview** Global economy is the exchange of goods and services integrated into a huge single global market. It is virtually a world without borders, inhabited by marketing individuals and/or companies who have joined the geographical world with the intent of conducting research and development and making sales. International trade permits countries to specialize in the resources they have. Countries benefit by producing goods and services they can provide most cheaply and by buying the goods and services other countries can provide most cheaply. International trade makes it possible for more goods to be produced and for more human wants to be satisfied than if every country tries by itself to produce everything it needs **Learning Outcomes** At the end of the chapter, the students must: 1. Define a global city; 2. Discuss the positive and negative sides of global cities; 3. Demonstrate the effects of global cities in our daily lives; and  4. Explain the challenges experienced in a global city. **Indicative Content** 1. Global City 2. Negative and positive impact 3. Effect of global cities 4. Challenges of global cities **Discussion** **THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF A GLOBAL CITY** Global cities are an important node in the global economic system. It is largely created and enacted in strategic locations, which are chosen according to the global system of finance, trade, and social-cultural-political relations. The global city has a direct and tangible effect on global affairs through socio-cultural economic and political means. Globalization has a profound impact on how the cities in the global south structure or organize life in socially/spatially differentiated manners versus in the global north. A global city is also known as *world city*, *alpha city* or *world center*. In geography and global studies, globalization refers to the largely created, facilitated, and enacted strategic geographic areas based on the significance of the global city finance and trade. The existence of a global city has direct and tangible effects on international affairs and socio-economic measures. Originally the term was megacity, which was later changed to a global city by the noted socialist Saskia Sassen in her 1991 work entitled- The Global City: New York, London, and Tokyo. Patrick Geddes was the one who coined the term world city in 1915. Subsequently the term has meant the city's influence and financial capital with the other factors considered less significant. Global city is the center of the different globalizing forces where there exist population concentration and mixing. The intertwined flows of people, capital, and ideas are lived and experienced by the people in a global city. The consequence of this mobility is cultural diversity, which is considered as a "cosmopolitan feel". Consequently, there is a cosmopolitan consumption, cosmopolitan work culture, global networking, and global transnational community relations. Global cities accommodate the world\'s bounded space. Inevitably, there are global problems, hostilities, and injustices that transpire out of a global city.  Cosmopolitanism is best described as large, diverse cities that attract people, material and cultural products worldwide. Zukin (1998) discussed that cosmopolitanism is concomitant with the capitalist context, which focuses mainly on consumption and is highly influenced by commercial culture, retail, and shopping. These are also shaped by cross-cultural variety of food, fashion, entertainment, and other artifacts.   An important characteristic of a global city is the presence of a cosmopolitan variety of cultural products, which satisfy the cross-cultural curiosity of people. The cosmopolitan consumption in all its richness and variety than a global city can offer requires time and money. The foreigners in a global city are the constant people therein fully devoted to its cosmopolitan consumption. This hyper-mobile unreality is called an overseas holiday (Featherstone, 1998). A flaneur refers to a man-not even do women of today enjoy the same freedom to idly roam the city by themselves. According to Featherstone (1998:921), there can exist an electronic flaneur who no doubt enjoys much greater mobility in virtual reality through social media. Research says that even the old survives in the new because of Internet networking. Global cities are both a dream and a nightmare. Indeed it is a huge source of attraction to the migrants and tourists and yet this can also be a source of inequalities and inequities in the society. There are high-living professionals with greener pastures yet undeniably, which may not be visible to sight are the marginal dwellers, sweat-shops workers, poorly paid labour in the grey areas, asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants, drug dealers, sex workers, and the homeless. These global cities are hubs of innovation, creativity and productivity and the creators of new trends and fashions, but unfortunately, these are also the niches of demi-monde and social ills of all kinds. There are two sides of a coin. This urban life in the global city is considered a pinnacle of civilization but at the same time these can also be dehumanizing and alienating people from the natural milieu (Tonnies, 1889/1957; Simmel, 1903/1971). The concept of a global city is a phenomenon, which was preceded by the idea of "world city". This originated as early as 1927 by Roderick McKenzie, a Chicago academician. This is considered as the center of imperial power of free cities at the crossroads of international merchant routes, which prevailed since ancient times. The globalization paradigm evolved since the 1980s and it has developed conceptual and ideological disputes. The importance of nation-states cannot be discounted, however, the impact of the global macro-processes in the everyday lives of the people is also increasing. These are ignited by the global forces, from the economic, geo-political, cultural, and environmental aspects. Every global city is also a national city, which often goes beyond the host nation. Saskia Sassens (1991) identified only three global cities, namely New York, London and Tokyo. The choice was mainly based on economic standards. According to Sassen, global cities are the command centers; the main nodes of triumphant global capitalism. He contended that the globalized the economy becomes, the higher the agglomeration of central functions in a relatively few sites. Moreover, Sharon Zukin (1998; 826) considered the cultural perspective of globalization and put New York, London and Paris at the top of the "urban cultural hierarchy" in terms of cultural innovations. Wu (2000) discussed that the focus of production in a global city is no longer primarily material. It seems that one of the conditions of the status of a global city is to stop making things and switch to handling and shifting money and ideas. These global cities are undeniably post-industrial. For instance, Shanghai was previously a state-controlled socialist industrial powerhouse, which claimed its global city status when the chimneys started to be replaced by steel-and glass skyscrapers. The same is true with Singapore through its efficient global transport infrastructure and growing professional service sector (1999, p.1097). Consequently, global cities are no longer tagged as landscapes of production but rather as the landscapes of consumption (Zukin, 1998, p.825). The abstract products like financial instruments, information, and culture have been growing in importance. This is best described as a symbolic or service economy with a cultural turn in the society. Only five percent of the New York residents composed the global cities at the start of the twentieth century, which later grew to 30 present by the late 1980s. Colic-Peisker (2010) elaborated that these knowledge workers are not necessarily part of the core wealth and power elite of global capitalism, but are a globally mobile, career-minded middle class. Their growing presence in global cities, concomitant with the withdrawal of manufacturing and its working class, results in the gentrification of previously industrial inner-city neighbourhoods in the past centuries. Gentrification is referred to as the process of social class polarization and residential segregation of the affluent from the poor. Zukin (1998:835) highlighted this situation as a "wedge between urban social classes". Sassen (1991) stressed that these global cities are inevitably resulting to occupational and income polarization, with the highly-paid professional class on the one end and the providers of low-paid services on the labor market of global cities is increasingly hourglass-shaped with a hollow middle as depicted in the polarization of housing markets. Global cities attract large population intakes, which also increases real-estate prices, like the case of Australia in the past decade (Wood, 2004). Zhong, Clark and Sassen (2007) utilized the census data to support their contention that the income polarization is generally present in large gateway cities, which unfortunately depress the wages at the bottom of the labour market. The Japanese Mori Foundation's Global Power City Index (2011) revealed that the global power cities are measured by a combination of six criteria, namely: economy, research and development, cultural interaction, liveability, environment, and accessibility. Based on these criteria, the top five cities include New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Singapore. This global status is influenced by their "magnetism", which is a comprehensive power to attract creative people and excellent companies from around the world in the middle of accelerated interurban competition. The best way to describe the twenty-first century cities is through the lens of the brain hubs.  The latter refers to the concentration of innovative people and firms and are also good human ecosystems for cutting-edge businesses, which grants the support functions or secondary services for the innovators (Moretti, 2012:133, 247; Solimano, 2006). Knowledge spillover means that creative people thrive in the company of other creative people and tend to stagnate in isolation, even if Internet-connected. Apart from the economic importance of global cities are also its visible cultural and community features. Hence these global cities are home to a diverse and visible set of protagonists of the urban lifestyle. These are expounded by the economist Moretti and sociologist Florida such that these bigger brain concentrations consist of a thicker labour market as well. Florida (2005, 113-114) saw the connection between the bohemian and alternative lifestyles with vibrancy and creativity, which can nowadays be channelled into the core knowledge economy of creative capitalism. The urban cultural diversity is a creative mirror of economic polarization as the cities continue to attract the extremes of poor, migrant and footloose populations (Zukin, 1998:837). There exist different types of marginalities, based on gender, ethnicity, culture, and class. But the flipside of this is the coexistence of different disparate groups, which rarely leads to active citizenship. According to Featherstone (1998:912), it is possible to see new forms of citizenship and responsibility as a result of broader cosmopolitan identifications and the tolerance of diversity. According to Colic-Peisker (2010), the hypermobility of competition does not allow much room for community life. The competition in global cities is apparent with the locals devoted to nurturing community life and abandoning the short attention span of competitive capitalism. Bauman detected through a disintegration of locally grounded shared community living. He further said that the community becomes replaced by a network, which is a matrix of random connections and disconnections. The Global University City Index ranking uses four main criteria of a global city: 1) Global university recognition, meaning there should be at least two high profile universities in the city, with at least five percent; 2) Amenity, meaning the connectivity of people through the Internet use and the population scale must be larger than two million people; 3) Research inputs and performance as measured by the GDP expenditure on higher education outcomes. **CHARACTERISTICS OF A GLOBAL CITY** 1. It involves cultural diversity, cosmopolitanism, movement of people, capital, ideas, and creativity, imagination and urban consciousness, and symbolic productivity. 2. There is creativity, fluidity, and productivity. 3. It is opposed to the methodological nation-states which serve as a container, which are too static and bounded. 4. It is primarily economic-financial versus geo-political-cultural and environmental experiences. **GLOBAL CITY: HYPERMOBILITY, HOMOGENIZATION, AND DIFFERENTIATION** The differentiated insertion and engagements with the global city involve the high rolling capitalists and high end professionals vis-à-vis the marginalized migrants, sweatshops, and grey economy. This impacts the flow of finance, goods, people, ideas, models, etc. What is apparent in a global city is the knowledge economy. There are high-end real estate exclusive developments and gentrification. The polarization of the socio-economic cultural aspects among the markets, finance, and labor markets becomes evident. In a global city, the intra and inter regional trade flows occur. The flow of goods, services, finance, people, data, and communication is inevitable. This further requires a new kind of citizenship. **SIGNIFICANT FEATURES OF A GLOBAL CITY (cf. Sassen, Friedmann, Val Colic-Peisker)** 1. Geographic dispersal of economic activities, simultaneous integration that feed the growth and importance of central corporate functions; 2. Central functions increasingly complex, headquarters of large global firms outsource them from highly specialized service firms; 3. Specialized service firms engaged in highly complex and globalized markets subject to agglomeration economies; 4. Headquarters outsource their most complex, unstandardized functions, esp. those subject to uncertain/changing markets, thus, can opt for any location; 5. Specialized service firms need to provide a global service, which has meant a global network of affiliates; strengthening of cross border city-to-city transactions and networks;  6. Economic fortunes of these cities become increasingly disconnected from their broader hinterlands or even their national economies; and  7. Growing informalization of economic activities which find their effective demand in these cities, yet have profit rates that do not allow them to compete for various resources with the high-profit making firms at the top of the system. *Table 10.1 Global City: Key Indicators * +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | **Economic** | ***Political*** | ***Cultural*** | ***Industrial** | | | | | * | +=================+=================+=================+=================+ | Corporate | Active | First-name | Advanced | | headquarters, | influence and | familiarity | transportation | | multinational | participation | | system | | corporations, | on | | | | and | international | | | | international | events and | | | | financial | world affairs. | | | | institutions.  | | | | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Significant | Hosting | New York | Major | | financial | headquarters | | international | | capacity/output | for | Tokyo | airports and | | : | international | | ports | | city/regional | organizations | Paris | | | GDP | (UN) | | | | | | London  | | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Financial | Large | Highly renowned | Advanced | | service | metropolitan | cultural | communications | | provision e.g. | area.  | institutions, | | | banks, | | galleries, | | | accountancy | Quality of life | sports complex, | | | | standards  | film centers, | | | | | opera | | | | Expat | | | | | communities | | | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Costs of living | | Influential | Skyscrapers | | | | media produced | | | | | (ex. NYT) | | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ | Personal | | Educational | | | wealth: e.g. | | institutions | | | number of | | | | | billionaires | | Tourism | | +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+ 1. 2. +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | *No.* | *Names* | *Net | *Age * | *National | *Source | | | | Worth (US | | ity* | (s) of | | | | \$)* | | | Wealth* | +===========+===========+===========+===========+===========+===========+ | 1. | *Bill | *75.0 | *60* | *United | *Microsof | | | Gates* | billion* | | States* | t* | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | 2. | *Amancio | *67.0 | *79* | *Spain* | *Inditex* | | | Ortega* | billion* | | | | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | 3. | *Warren | *60.8 | *85* | *United | *Berkshir | | | Buffet* | billion* | | States* | e | | | | | | | Hathaway* | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | 4. | *Carlos | *50.0 | *76* | *Mexico* | *America | | | Slim* | billion* | | | Movil | | | | | | | Grupo | | | | | | | Carso* | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | 5. | *Jeff | *45.2 | *52* | *United | *Amazon.c | | | Bezos* | billion* | | States* | om* | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | 6. | *Mark | *44.6 | *32* | *United | *Facebook | | | Zuckerber | billion* | | States* | * | | | g* | | | | | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | 7. | *Larry | *43.6 | *71* | *United | *Oracle | | | Elison* | billion* | | States* | Corporati | | | | | | | on* | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | 8. | *Michael | *40.0 | *74* | *United | *Bloomber | | | Bloomberg | billion* | | States* | g | | | * | | | | L.P.* | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | 9. | *Charles | *39.6 | *80* | *United | *Kach | | | Kach* | billion* | | States* | Industrie | | | | | | | s* | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | 10. | *David | *39.6 | *75* | *United | *Kach | | | Kach* | billion* | | States* | Industrie | | | | | | | s* | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ Does place matter? It does, as shown in these aspects: telecommunications, globalized markets, information industries, global and digital age, and digitized consumption. Centralized territorial nodes are still existent. These are run with the help and contribution of many specific and important material and place-bounded activities. Sessen encourages us to look beyond the skyscrapers and into the layered and complicated organizational pattern of global cities. Global cities are place-bounded.  Global cities are key sites for not only the specialized servicing, financing and management of the global economic process but also the incorporation of large numbers of immigrants in activities that service the strategic sectors.  Directly: through need for blue collar, workers of color, female labor for domestic services (e.g., hotel/tourism, for global north HHs) cf. Dierdre on global care-chain.  Indirectly: through consumption practices of high-income professionals. This leads to the growth of low wage workers being an important aspect of the globalized city. A rising "service class" sector of mainly migrant women (OFWs, migrant, circular labor). Globalization includes the demand for high-level professionals and an increase of employment of women in corporate professional jobs. There are growing shares of household tasks relocated to a market immigrant community.  **GENDER AND GLOBALIZATION (PUBLIC-PRIVATE SPACES)** The service workers (migrants, mostly women) do two very important things: 1. 2. Globalization: 1. 2. **Global cities require us to study:** - - - **CHALLENGES OF A GLOBAL CITY** 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. World \# Billionaire Source of Wealth Affiliated Brands 2016 Real Time Net Worth ---------- ------------------------------ ------------------ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- 71 Henry Sy and family Diversified  SM Investments Corp. City of Dreams Manila 270 John Gokongwei Jr. Diversified  JG Summit Holdings, Cebu Pacific, Universal Robina \$13.3 billion 380 Lucio Tan and family Diversified  Asia Brewery, Philip Morris-Fortune Tobacco, Philippine Airlines, Philippine National Bank \$5.1 billion 421 George Ty and family Banking  GT Capital, Metrobank \$4 billion 569 David Consunji  Construction  DMCI Holdings \$3.8 billion 569 Andrew Tan Diversified  Megaworld, McDonald's, Emperador Distillers, Resorts World Manila  \$3.1 billion 569 Tony Tan Caktiong and family Fast food Jollibee Foods, Greenwich Pizza, Chowking \$3.2 billion 722 Enrique Razon Jr. Ports International Container terminal Services, Solaire Resort \$2.5 billion 1121 Lucio and Susan Tan Retailing  Puregold Price Club \$1.63 billion 1121 Robert Coyiuto Jr. Power  Prudential Guarantee & Assurance, PGA cars, National Grid Corporation \$1.59 billion 1367 Manuel Villar Real estate Starmalls, Vista Land & Landscapes \$1.33 billion    Global cities have become more important in recent times for these reasons. How they impact our human lives: 1. 2. **Exercises/Drills** 1. True or False. Write True if the given statement is correct, and False if it is not. Write your answer on the space provided before each number.  1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. B. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. **Evaluation** 1. List 3 global cities and give justification through its political, culture and technology that you think contributed the most to globalization. 2. List 3 Filipinos (owners of MNCs) **Additional Readings** 1. 2. **References:** Aldama, P.K. R. (2018). The Contemporary World, Rex Bookstore. Fernandez, G.C. et al. (2019). The Contemporary World, Mutya Publishing House Inc.