The Contemporary World

• “Cyberbalkanization” – eco chambers (e.g. people tend to make their own world by
hiding some post from their news feed. With this, people prevent other users from
listening to or opinions and information that challenges their viewpoints, thus, making
them more close-minded as if they are placed in a chamber. This can even manipulate
political events manifested in the film The Great Hack which discussed how Trump
organization influenced voters through Facebook algorithms.

LESSON 5: GLOBAL DEMOGRAPHY

UNIT 1: Global City

Introduction

The global structure is reflected upon the cities itself. Global and local are merging forming
global cities. These cities represent the interconnection and interrelation of nations in constant
exchanging of resources. This chapter provides discussions on the relationship of the global and
local. This chapter discusses the image of progress that cities portray and the contrasting poverty
within it.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this unit students must be able to:

1. Defining the Global City

2. Relate the contemporary global issues and local problems and
3. Explain how local context affects the global ideas and vice versa.
4. Demonstrate critical thinking in comprehending contemporary issues and problems of
modernity

Sections of the Unit:

1. Global Cities Global cities are strategic for new types of operations
2. Different Societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently
3. Global Issues, Local Perspectives
4.Globalization and Urban Problems

Defining the Global City

Globalization is spatial, you can see it when foreign investments and capital move through
the city and when skyscrapers are built by companies. Bridges connect the flow of goods and
services and many infrastructures assist or mediating exchanges. Accompanied by these events
are jobs generated by the demand created by this economic flow. As all these happen, the poor
are driven to city centers to make way for opportunities.

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Saskia Sassen popularized the term “global city” in

the 1990s using the economic criteria as the primary
indicator. She initially identified three global cities: New York,
London and Tokyo, which all are hubs of global finance and
capitalism. They are homes of the world’s top stock
exchanges where investors buy and sell shares in major
corporations. Limiting the discussion of global cities to these
three metropolises, however, proving more and more
restrictive.(Claudio and Abinales 2018). The definition of
global city has expanded beyond the realm of economics.
Some cities are not as wealthy as these three
aforementioned cities but , an example of this is San
Francisco being home to Facebook, Twitter and
Google.Another is Los Angeles having cultural influence over the world through Hollywood.

Global cities are strategic for new types of operations

Source(s): Atkinson et.al. 2015. The Sociology Book: Big Ideas Explained.DK publishing 345 Hudson
Street, New York.

Global cities, Sassen advises, produce goods in the form of technological innovations, financial
products, and consulting services (legal, accounting, advertising, and so on). These service
industries are highly intensive users of telecommunications technologies and are therefore
integrated into business networks that stretch across national borders. They are also part of the
postindustrial or “service” economies of the developed world, in that their main products are
knowledge, innovation, technical expertise, and cultural goods. Sassen argues in The Global City
(1991, revised 2001) that the emergence of a global market for financial and specialized services

gives global cities a “command and control function” over economic globalization. This is because
the headquarters of many major transnational companies are located in global cities. Consultant
Firms are also “over-represented”in these urban hubs. These Companies make the decisions that

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direct global flows of money and knowledge, and that can cause economic activity to expand or
contract in other regions.

Global cities are supported by multifunctional infrastructure. Central business districts

provide employment clusters where the employees of local, national, and multinational firms
interact. Influential universities and research facilities also contribute to the production of
knowledge and innovation, which are central to information-based economies. Sassen’s research
shows that global cities are sites where the human activities behind the processes of globalization
are performed and their consequences dispersed through the socio economic networks of the
global economy. While global cities are not free from poverty and other forms of social inequality,
they are nevertheless cosmopolitan sites of diverse economic and social opportunities.

Different Societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently

Source(s): Atkinson et.al. 2015. The Sociology Book: Big Ideas Explained.DK publishing 345 Hudson
Street, New York.

Indian social anthropologist and sociologist Arjun Appadurai has taken this debate in a
different direction. He argues that the conventional view of globalization as a form of cultural
imperialism fails to reflect the reality of the changes global -ization has set in motion. Instead,
Appadurai suggests that different societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently.
What this means is that one society, such
as China, may take up one aspect of global
change (such as economic change) very
rapidly, and another aspect (such as
ideological change) very slowly, while
another society will be different altogether.
The results that globalization does not
necessarily denote a uniform and all-
encompassing process; rather, nations are
more positively disposed toward certain
facets of globalization than others,
depending on a range of factors, such as
the state of the economy, political stability,
and strength of cultural identity.
Appadurai’s work addresses how
globalization diminishes the role of the
nation-state in shaping cultural identity and
argues that identity is increasingly
becoming deterritorialized by mobility,
migration, and rapid communications.

The key to understanding

globalization, says Appadurai, is the human
imagination. He argues that rather than living in face-to-face communities, we live within imagined
ones that are global in extent. The building blocks are five interrelated dimensions that shape the
global flow of ideas and information. He Calls these dimensions ``scapes”—ethnoscapes,
mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. Unlike landscapes, which are
characteristically fixed, Appadurai’s “scapes” are constantly changing, and the manner in which

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they are experienced depends largely on the perspective of the social actors involved. In this
context, social actors may be any one of a number of groupings, such as nation-states,
multinational corporations, diasporic communities, families, or individuals. The different ways in
which these five scapes can combine means that the imagined world that one person or group
perceives can be radically different, and no more real, than that seen by another observer.

Appadurai first used the term “ethnos cape” in a 1990 essay, “Disjuncture and Difference
in the Global Cultural Economy,” to describe the flow of people—immigrant communities, political
exiles, tourists, guest workers, economic migrants, and other groups—around the globe, as well
as the “fantasies of wanting to move” in pursuit of a better life. The increasing mobility of people
between nations constitutes an essential feature of the global world, in particular by affecting the
politics of nation-states. Mediascapes refer to the production and distribution of information and
images through newspapers, magazines, TV, and film, as well as digital technologies. The
multiplying ways in which information is made accessible to private and public interests
throughout the world is a major driver of globalization. Mediascapes provide large and complex
repertoires of images and narratives to viewers, and these shapes how people make sense of
events taking place across the world. Technoscapes represent the rapid dissemination of
technology and knowledge about it—either mechanical or informational—across borders. For
example, many service industries in Western Europe base their customer-care call centers in
India, and Indian software engineers are often recruited by US companies. Finanscapes reflect
the almost instantaneous transfer of financial investment capital around the globe in the fast-
moving world of currency markets, stock exchanges, and commodity speculations. Ideoscapes
are made up of images that are “often directly political,” either state-produced and intended to
bolster the dominant ideology, or created by counter ideological movements “oriented to capturing
state power or a piece of it.” Examples include ideas about a state built through concepts such as
“national heritage,” countered by social and political movements that promote the rights of minority
groups and freedom of speech.

By conceptualizing globalization in terms of the five scapes, Appadurai is able to

undermine the view of globalization as a uniform and internally coherent process;instead,
globalization is understood as a multilayered, fluid, an irregular process—and one that is
characterized by ongoing change.

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Global Issues, Local Perspectives

(Atkinson et.al 2015) p.146

Globalization is giving rise to

new cultural forms as global products,
values, tastes, combine with their
local equivalents. According to British
sociologist Roland Robertson, the
intermixing of global and local, is a key
feature of society which produces new
creative possibilities.

Robertson argues that that the

cultural dynamics at the heart of
globalization can be understood by
focusing on the relationships between
four areas: “individual selves,” “nation-
state,” a “world system of societies,”
and “a notion of a common humanity.”
This allows him to examine the
interacting aspects of a person’s self-
identity and their relationship with
national and global cultural influences.

Robertson emphasizes the term “global unicity” in which globalization and cultural exchange is
giving rise to a global culture. But, the emergence of “global unicity” does not mean we are moving
in a single global culture.

Also, Robertson popularized the term “glocalization.” Glocalization is a twofold process of

“universalizing and particularizing tendencies.” Glocalization also refers to a localization of global
cultural products or forms.

Globalization and the Street Homeless in Metro Manila

Source(s): Aoki, Hideo.(2008) “Globalization and the Street Homeless in Metro Manila.” Philippine
Studies Vol. 56, No1 Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University.

New types of homeless people have emerged simultaneously in cities around the world.
In cities of industrial countries the numbers of the "new homeless" have increased since the 1980s
(Baumohl 1996; Aoki 2006). In cities of developing countries the numbers of the "street homeless"
have also increased since the end of the 1990s (Levinson 2004). According to MariaCecilia
Loschiard Dos Santos (2001), a professor at São Paulo Universitywho studies homelessness in
Brazil, the numbers of street homeless in SãoPaulo increased in the 1990s and reached more
than 100,000 people at the beginning of the 2000s. Government officers, NGO activists, and
social scientists whom I interviewed from September 2006 to March 2007 said that the numbers
of the street homeless are increasing in Metro Manila. There Have been many street homeless in

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the past but their ranks are increasing rapidly now. A writer calls them the permanent and visible
homeless in contrast with the squatter homeless (Padilla 2000, 5-6). The street homeless are
becoming noticeable everywhere in the urban center. "They can be seen with their pushcarts
along the seawall, on the sidewalks, under bridges and flyovers, in the middle of traffic islands,
on the empty streets at night, on the lawns of cathedrals and in parks" (ibid.).

There are theoretical and operational problems about the definition of the street homeless.
How can we distinguish the street homeless from the people who work on the streets and sleep
at their houses at night? How can we distinguish the street homeless from the squatter homeless?
What is a shelter or a house? Even though these definitional problems exist, we can insist that
the street homeless are becoming a peculiar social group in Metro Manila. How many street
homeless are there in Metro Manila? We can only make inferences. The Department of Social
Welfare and Development estimates that there are 50,000 to 70,000 street children in Metro
Manila (Maligalig 2004, 10). Most street children live with their families on the streets.According
to Manuela Loza (2006), a staff member of the Jose Fabella Center (JFC), one of the public
accommodation units for the street homeless managed by the Mandaluyong City government,
almost all children who are accommodated in their center have parents. Moreover, a short
technical report made by the JFC points out that 61.4 percent of the 2,799 people who were
accommodated in the first half of 2006 were street homeless who lived alone (JFC 2006). Based
on these data, we can infer roughly but surely that there are much more than 100,000 street
homeless, including street children, in Metro Manila.Administrative officers and researchers told
me that it is impossible to count the numbers
of street homeless because they always
move and have no permanent place where
they sleep. However, most sleep constantly
in the same general area because it is hard
for them to look for new safe places to sleep
on a daily basis. Therefore, it is possible to
count their numbers at least roughly, as we
have done in Japan. It may be the job of the
local government to get an accurate
estimate. Certainly, it is not easy to discern
the street homeless from the people who
work on the streets but actually have their
own houses and from the squatter homeless.
But we can solve this problem by coming up
with an operational definition of the street
homeless.
Who are the street homeless? As far as I have observed, the people who were on the
streets at the main points of Metro Manila and some of whom I talked with, the street homeless
are composed of the following people: people working on the streets who have been evicted from
squatter areas, who recently arrived from the provinces, ethnic minority groups of people who
work as seasonal laborers, and street children and their families. There is some overlap between
these categories, which also include those who are not actually street homeless. Keeping this in
mind, a tentative definition of the street homeless may be given as follows: the street homeless
are people who do not have permanent and fixed houses, who do not have relatives with whom
they can live, and who live alone or in a family unit on the street. . The accommodated people
were composed of various street homeless such as wanderers,beggars, and victims of squatter
eviction. Males comprised almost two-thirds of those people. They were distributed over a broad
age hierarchy ranging from infants to those with advanced ages. Similarly, the civil status of the
accommodated people ranged from single to the widowed. The Sidewalk Operation Group of the

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Metropolitan Manila Development Authority found some of them in the metropolitan central areas,
while others were found in the neighboring areas, and were persuaded to go to the center. Many
street homeless were former squatters who had been evicted from squatter areas,who rejected
to go to relocation sites, and who came back from the relocation sites. Finally, they supported
themselves by working as vendors, scavengers, car watchers, "barkers," beggars, and so on, and
sometimes through illegal activities such as those of snatchers, pickpockets, drug sellers, and
prostitutes. The big three jobs of the street homeless are those of the vendor,scavenger, and
beggar, each of which can be divided into further subgroups.
Why have the numbers of the street homeless in Metro Manila increased recently? We
can obtain a clue from globalization theory. The emergence of the new homeless in industrialized
countries has been analyzed in many studies by using "globalization" as a key concept, such as
in the analyses of the new homeless in the United States (Koegel, Burman, and Baumohl1996)
and of the nozyukusya (homeless) in Japan (Aoki 2003). The concept of globalization has also
been used in the analysis of the new marginality in Mexico (Castells 1983) and of other developing
countries' homeless people (Levinson 2004). It may be said that globalization theory isone of the
most influential theories that explains the relationship between globalization and
homelessness.How about the case of Metro Manila? The increase of the street homeless in Metro
Manila can be explained by globalization theory, at least partly.But we have two theoretical
problems to be solved before we apply it toMetro Manila. First, is Metro Manila a global city? What
is a global city?Second, what was the process by which Metro Manila was globalized?What
Economic and political conditions prescribed by the economic history of the Philippines were there
behind this process? These questions have to be answered. But it is not our purpose to answer
these questions here. Keeping This in mind, we ask why globalization has resulted in the increase
of thestreet homeless in Metro Manila. An answer may be found in a process that itself is
composed of four sub processes, which function and relate to each other as discussed
below.Globalization has resulted in the expansion of the service economy,which has increased
the life chances of the street homeless. First, because of the increase in business facilities,
convenience stores, family restaurants, and the like in Metro Manila, life resources (such as scrap)
on which the street homeless survive have increased. The opportunity for the street homeless to
beg money has increased, too. This is the first pull factor that attracts poor people to the streets.
Second, the expansion of the service economy has increased job chances on the street such as
those of vendors, scavengers, barkers, and carriers. Moreover, it has brought various new
occupations, such as cleaner, sandwich man, car watcher, errand boy, and others, the poor could
engage in with only a small equity capital and without any special knowledge and skills. These
livelihood conditions have augmented the life chances of the street homeless, and form the
second pull factor that draws the poor to the streets. Globalization has brought about the
informalization of work, the flexibilization of labor, and the contractualization of employment in the
Philippines (Sardaña 1998, 69-74). These trends have made workers' employment status
unstable and have cut back real wages. They have worsened workers' livelihood conditions and
strengthened the downward pressure on workers' status. This is the general background in which
poor people became homeless. It constitutes the first push factor that drives the poor to the
streets. This is particularly the case among those who do not have any safety net coming from
relatives or friends. Globalization has accelerated land redevelopment (Payot 2004, 11). The
market for real estate has expanded. Unused and abandoned lands have been redeveloped, and
the gentrification of the inner city has proceeded. Government policies, such as the privatization
of public land, the improvement of dangerous areas, and the beautification of streets, have
accelerated these processes too. As a result, the eviction of squatter settlements in the inner city
has taken place. People who were not given residential lots, who rejected to transfer to relocation
sites, and who returned from their relocation sites to Metro Manila have increased. Among them,
people who did not have any relatives to rely on to have stayed on the streets. The biggest part
of the street homeless is made up of former squatter residents. This makes up the second push

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factor that forces the poor to go to the streets. Globalization has brought on the financial crises of
the government, which has been forced to cut down on expenditures. As a result, the government
could not achieve the purpose of its policies for the poor sufficiently.
Firstly, it could not improve the unemployment situation. The unemployment rate of Metro
Manila was 17.8 percent in 2000, 17.1 percent in 2003, and 17.2 percent in 2006 (NSCB 2007,
11-14). This situation can be seen as exerting a strong pressure on the poor. Secondly, the
government could not enforce the housing policy for poor people sufficiently. Only a few of the
squatter people who had been evicted from squatter areas were given residential lots in relocation
sites (Karaos and Payot 2006, 83). Thirdly, there has not been any fully articulated policy on
employment and welfare targeted at the street homeless. There are no measures to assist the
street homeless worthy of special mention, except emergency aid for medical treatment and six
small temporary accommodation units in Metro Manila. All these policies have not been able to
stop the poor from becoming street homeless. . The street homeless are formed as a social
stratum through processes in which push and pull
factors operate in tandem. The street homeless are the symbolic and representative product of
globalization. The emergence of the street homeless,from which we can draw many theoretical
implications, informs us that the labor and housing conditions among the people at the bottom of
the urban hierarchy are changing.

____________________________________________________________________________

UNIT 2: Demography and Migration

Introduction
Demography has the empirical, statistical, and mathematical size, composition, and spatial
distribution of human populations and changes over time through fertility, mortality, nuptiality
(marriage), migration, and even social mobility. Looking at the populations and discuss the
relationship between economic welfare and populations. This final unit will discuss the various
impacts of globalization on human populations. How migration is a part of globalization and its
impact on both the sending and receiving countries. And discuss the effects of global migration
on the economic well-being of states.
______________________________________________________________________
Learning Objectives

1. Understand what is demography and identify the relationship between population and
economic welfare
2. Identify the effects of overpopulation and why control population
3. Understand what is migration and why people migrate
4. Discuss the effects of global migration on the economic and individual well-being
______________________________________________________________________
Sections of the Unit:
1. What is Demography
2. Overpopulation and Economy
a. Women and Reproductive Rights
b. Food sovereignty and Food security
c. Population Growth and Food Security
3. What is Migration

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