MODULE - Global City - Week 12 14

Republic of the Philippines
NUEVA VIZCAYA STATE UNIVERSITY

Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya
INSTRUCTIONAL MODULE
IM No.: IM-GEWORLD-2NDSEM-2021-2022
College of Arts and Sciences

Bayombong Campus
DEGREE PROGRAM General Education COURSE NO. GE WORLD

SPECIALIZATION COURSE TITLE The Contemporary World
YEAR LEVEL All level TIME FRAME 9 hrs WK NO. 12-14 IM 5
NO.
I. CHAPTER IV: Mobility, Diversity and the community in the Global City
II. LESSON TITLE:
⮚ Global City
⮚ Global Demography
⮚ Global Migration
III. CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This chapter looks at the rise of the cities, patterns of urban development, the idea of metropolis,
the problems experienced in cities as well as the environmental concerns of global cities. It also
presents demographic data, the tools of demography, population concepts and migrtion.
IV. DESIRED LEARNING OUTCOMES
At the end of the chapter, the students should be able to:

1. Identify the attributes of a global city
2. Analyze how cities serve as engines of globalization
3. Explain the theory of demographic transition as it affects global population
4. Analyze the political, economic, cultural and social factors underlying the global movements of
people
V. LESSON CONTENT
Introduction
The notion of ‘global city’ has a central place in understanding contemporary spatial patterns of
globalization: the ways it impacts on local life is nowhere more visible than in the global city. The global
city is therefore the main physical and geographic playground of the globalizing forces: in this space of
population concentration and mixing, the global flows of people, capital and ideas are woven into the
NVSU-FR-ICD-05-00 (0622)
Social Sciences and Humanities Page 1 of 7
“In accordance with Section 185. Fair Use of a Copyrighted Work of Republic Act 8293, the copyrighted works
included in this material may be reproduced for educational purposes only and not for commercial distribution.”
daily lived experiences of its residents. Cultural diversity, a key marker of the global city and a
consequence of human mobility and migration, is usually detected on the surface as a ‘cosmopolitan
feel’: the global city’s ‘natives’ encountering and engaging daily with a variety of immigrants and visitors.
The result is ‘cosmopolitan’ consumption, ‘cosmopolitan’ work culture, global networking and ‘glocal’
transnational community relations. Global city represents and, in many ways, contains the world in a
bounded space. This means that many global problems, contradictions, hostilities and inequalities also
find expression amidst the teeming verve of the global city.
Cosmopolitanism is a phenomenon most readily associated with the global city: large, diverse
cities attract people, material and cultural products from all over the world. The idea of cosmopolitanism
usually invokes pleasant images of travel, exploration and ‘worldly’ pursuits enjoyed by those who have
benefited from globalization and who can, in some ways, consider themselves ‘citizens of the world’. In
the capitalist context, such cosmopolitanism often focuses on consumption in global cities, where
everyday life is significantly shaped by commercial culture, retail and shopping. Ceaselessly on offer is a
cross-cultural variety of food, fashion, entertainment and various other consumables and artefacts. The
promise and allure of cosmopolitan consumption is familiar to the dweller of any large twenty-first century
city.
What is ‘GLOBAL CITY’?
It is barely surprising that the idea of ‘global city’ emerged in the social science literature in the
1980s, shortly after the concept of globalization captured the social scientific imagination, becoming one
of its most powerful notional gravitational pulls. However, the idea of global city was hardly new at the
time, and as a phenomenon, global cities, either as centers of imperial power or ‘free cities’ at the
crossroads of international merchant routes, existed since ancient times. More recently, the concept was
preceded by the idea of ‘world city’. Roderick McKenzie, a Chicago academic, conceptualized a global
network of cities as early as 1927 (Acuto, 2011: 2956).
In order to be able to imagine, observe and define global city, one first needs to be able to imagine
the world, the globe, as one entity. This is not difficult today, with all its graphic, visual and conceptual
representations, and with a constant debate on ‘global issues’ in the realm of economics, security and
the environment. Yet, arguing why and how the human globe, the global society, is one, or should be
one, remains difficult. Since the 1980s, when the globalization paradigm started to dominate social
sciences, it has produced ongoing conceptual and ideological disputes. Conceptually, the meaning and
timing of globalization have been debated; ideologically, the apologists and critics of globalization keep
arguing about who benefits from the intensification of the interconnectedness of economic, political,
cultural and environmental processes and transformations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries (Bauman, 1998; Beck, 2000; Hobsbawm et al., 1999; Wallerstein, 1989).
Global cities are decidedly post-industrial: Shanghai, for example, previously a state-controlled
socialist industrial powerhouse, claimed its global city status when chimneys started to be replaced by
NVSU-FR-ICD-05-00 (0622)
steel-and glass skyscrapers, home to finance, commerce and research and development, facilitated by
massive foreign capital inflows (Wu, 2000). Singapore is another recent addition to the global city club,
with its efficient global transport infrastructure and growing professional service sector. The development
of the city-state of Singapore into a global city neatly reflects the growing global importance of the Asia-
Pacific region (Baum, 1999: 1097).
Zukin describes the process of switching to a ‘service economy’ as a ‘cultural turn’ in the advanced
societies where a ‘symbolic economy’, based on abstract products such as financial instruments,
information and ‘culture’ (arts, fashion, music, etc.), has increasing importance. Such ‘symbolic pro-
duction’ by knowledge workers does not produce smoke, smell, noise or visible motion and is therefore
largely invisible. As a consequence, global cities are no longer experienced as ‘landscapes of production’
but as ‘landscapes of consumption’ (Zukin, 1998: 825).
According to Sassen (1991), global cities are characterized by occupational and income
polarization, with the highly paid professional class on the one end and providers of low-paid services on
the other. Instead of being egg-shaped, with those in the middle being a majority, the labour market of
global cities is increasingly ‘hourglass-shaped’, with a hollow middle (Autor et al., 2006; Baum, 1999).
The polarization of the service-dominated post-industrial labour market is reflected in the polarization of
housing markets.
Gentrified inner city and other attractive, well-connected and services-rich areas have expensive
real estate because in a highly developed and sensitive housing market (a ‘thick’, dynamic housing
market with much supply and demand) the attractive features and advantages of an urban area end up
being readily capitalized into higher property prices. The opposite happens with less attractive and less
liveable outer areas with fewer job opportunities and services (Wood, 2004). Given that most people (at
least in home-ownership English-speaking societies) have most of their wealth stored in their homes, the
polarized housing markets exacerbate general socio-economic inequality (Wood, 2004).
MOBILITY, MIGRATION AND THE GLOBAL CITY: ATTRACTING THE ‘CREATIVE CLASS’
Over the past three decades, the globalization of the labour markets has created a new type of
professional nomadism. Being a dynamic hub of the global capitalist economy and, to use Bauman’s
(2005, 2007) term, a highly ‘liquid’ environment, makes the global city a crucible of demographic and
social change; a hub of ‘creative destruction’ that, according to Moretti (2012: 148), characterizes suc-
cessful market economies. A high level of economic dynamism, and accompanying population mobility,
are considered signs of economic health: it has been somewhat of a mantra that the ‘competitive
economy’ requires a ‘flexible workforce’. Submitted to the requirements of competitiveness and mobility
are both businesses and employees.
Globalization has not only created the global labor market, causing an increase in transnational
mobility and migration, but has simultaneously affected local labor markets (Castles and Miller, 2003).
NVSU-FR-ICD-05-00 (0622)
Employment mobility has been markedly increasing since the early 1970s, especially in the English-
speaking countries which are the most dynamic in this respect.
In the twenty-first century, a loyal ‘company man’ and a ‘job for life’ are largely matters of the past.
Moretti (2012: 155) considers the United States as a hyper-mobile outlier among relatively sedentary
developed countries (he compares his native Italy where generations of the same family live in the same
city, and often in the same suburb or street), but in fact all English-speaking countries have considerably
higher mobility – residential and job mobility, which are interconnected – than anywhere else.
The highly educated are the most footloose section of the population: the professional middle
classes, having in general more control and autonomy in their workplace, and a tendency to understand
their working life as a ‘career’, often change jobs and many are ready to relocate to another city or country
(Colic- Peisker 2010; Moretti, 2012: 155). They move largely by their own plan and career design. The
lower-skilled service workers often move jobs by necessity, but are not as ready to move between cities
and countries. These two sections of the increasingly polarized workforce fit nicely into the classical
conceptual dichotomy of ‘cosmopolitans vs. locals’ proposed by Merton back in the 1950s and further
developed by Gouldner in the late 1970s. Merton’s (1968: 447–74) dichotomy was placed in the context
of ‘latent social roles’ in the community, and Gouldner (1989) applied it to formal organizations. The
community life of ‘locals’ was preoccupied with local problems, while ‘cosmopolitans’ (Gouldner, 1989:
401, calls them ‘itinerants’) were, using Merton’s (1968: 448) expression, more ‘ecumenical’ and sought
social status outside the local community, usually from their professional peers, because their local
community could neither validate nor reward their professional competence.
DIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY IN THE GLOBAL CITY

In a sociological sense, diversity is a rather vague and ambiguous, context-dependent concept,
at the same time carrying positive and negative connotation. In government documents and speeches of
politicians in high-immigration countries (all English-speaking countries belong to this category) it is
usually presented as a potential for both positive and negative outcomes. As a positive, diversity
represents potential for successful merging of cultures and ideas, what usually comes under the label
‘cosmopolitan’.
There is no cosmopolitanism without diversity. Although these two concepts are often associated
and taken to have a large overlap in meaning, they may also carry very different and even opposite
meanings. Namely, as a negative, diversity can mean a potential for fracturing social cohesion and social
capital, as well as a synonym for disadvantage of those seen as ‘diverse’ or ‘Others’.
Apart from their economic importance, the visible cultural and community features of global cities
are also relevant for their global role. Global cities are home to a diverse and visible set of protagonists
of the ‘urban lifestyle’: artists, bohemians, new media designers, gay and youth subcultures, university
students and immigrants, creating a remarkable and also highly visible ‘ethnic’ and cultural diversity.
NVSU-FR-ICD-05-00 (0622)
These groups with their more of less ‘alternative’ and eclectic lifestyles have a natural home in ‘global
cities’, and exert a singular influence in defining various urban subcultures, often giving character to
certain areas within big cities.
Hypermobility of competitive cosmopolitans does not allow much room for community life (Colic-
Peisker, 2010). Dwellers of the global city, regardless of the population density, are likely to be spatially
and emotionally detached from their neighbours and co-locals, and devoted to their professional pursuits,
that usually require them to be highly connected and ‘networked’ in an instrumental way, these days
increasingly through the Internet.
Global Cities, Social Change and ‘Liquid Life’

Outside the advertising discourse of tourist brochures and the upbeat rhetoric of local politicians,
the super-diverse global cities are places that harbour many contradictions. On the one hand, they are
places where the forces of capitalist neo-liberal globalization have their stronghold, but on the other hand
they are crucibles of social change where existing political, social and ideological categories and
relationships are being constantly challenged and transformed by alternative lifestyles, ideas and
movements.
Wherever one stands in the structure vs. agency debate, it is clear that people and their local
communities are not mere puppets of the powerful global economic and political forces. While
globalization endangers the livelihoods of individuals, groups and even nations, it also offers many
opportunities, and these are concentrated in global cities. People therefore flock to these nodes of global
economy and society looking for business and work opportunities, excitement, adventure, change,
creative pursuits, education and various ‘cosmopolitan’ experiences.
.
NVSU-FR-ICD-05-00 (0622)
VI. REFERENCES
ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) (2011) Australian Social Trends. Cat. 4102.0, December 2011
(International Students). At: www.abs.gov.au/
Baum S (2008) Suburban scars: Australian cities and socio-economic deprivation, Urban Research
Program, Griffith University, Brisbane.
Bauman Z (2007) Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press
Colic-Peisker V (2010) ‘Free floating in the cosmopolis? Identity-belonging of transnational

knowledge workers’, Global Networks 10(4):467–88.
Hobsbawm E with Polito A (1999) The New Century. London: Little, Brown and Company.
Humphery K (2010) Excess: Anti-consumerism in the West, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kelly J-F, Breadon P, Davis C, Hunter A, Mares P, Mullerworth D and Weidmann B (2012) Social
Cities, Report, March 2012, Melbourne: Grattan Institute.
Merton RK (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure (enlarged edn). New York: Free Press.
Moretti E (2012) The New Geography of Jobs. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Sassen S (1991) The Global Cities: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Zukin S (1998) Urban lifestyles: Diversity and standardisation in spaces of consumption. Urban
Studies 35(5–6):825–39.
NVSU-FR-ICD-05-00 (0622)

MODULE - Global City - Week 12 14

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

MODULE - Global City - Week 12 14

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Republic of the Philippines

NUEVA VIZCAYA STATE UNIVERSITY

College of Arts and Sciences

DEGREE PROGRAM General Education COURSE NO. GE WORLD

II. LESSON TITLE:

III. CHAPTER OVERVIEW

IV. DESIRED LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the end of the chapter, the students should be able to:

What is ‘GLOBAL CITY’?

DIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY IN THE GLOBAL CITY

Global Cities, Social Change and ‘Liquid Life’

Colic-Peisker V (2010) ‘Free floating in the cosmopolis? Identity-belonging of transnational

Humphery K (2010) Excess: Anti-consumerism in the West, Cambridge: Polity Press.

You might also like