Global City: Its Definition and Concepts

 GLOBAL CITY is an urban center that enjoys significant competitive advantages and that serves
as a hub within a globalized economic system.

What constitutes a global city were primarily economic.

 NEW YORK, LONDON, AND TOKYO - can be identified as global cities, all of which are hubs of
global finance and capitalism.
- economic centers that exert control over the world’s
political economy.

Indicators of a Global City

The following are the foremost characteristics of a global city:

 SEATS OF ECONOMIC POWER

- New York may have the largest stock market in the world
- Tokyo houses the most number of corporate headquarters (613 company headquarters as against
217 in New York, its competitor).
- Shanghai may have a smaller stock market compared to New York and Tokyo, but plays a critical role
in the global economic supply chain ever since China has become the manufacturing center of the
world. Shanghai has the world’s busiest container port, moving over 33 million container units in
2013.

 CENTERS OF AUTHORITY

- Washington DC may not be wealthy as New York but it is the seat of American state power.

its major landmarks: THE WHITE HOUSE, THE CAPITOL BUILDING (CONGRESS), THE SUPREME COURT,
THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL, AND THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT. SIMILARLY, COMPARED WITH SYDNEY
AND MELBOURNE, CANBERRA IS A SLEEPY TOWN AND THUS IS NOT AS ATTRACTIVE TO TOURISTS.

- It is home to the country’s top politicians, bureaucrats, and policy advisors.

 CENTERS OF POLITICAL INFLUENCE

- Cities that house major international organizations may also be considered centers of
political influence.
- The headquarters of the United Nations is in New York, and that of the European Union
is in Brussels.
- An influential political city near the Philippines is Jakarta, which is not just the capital of
Indonesia, but also the location of the main headquarters of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
 - The European Central Bank which oversees the Euro (the European Union’s currency), is
based in Frankfurt.

 Centers of Higher Learning and Culture

- A city’s intellectual influence is seen through the influence of its publishing industry. Many of
the books that people read are published in places like New York , London, or Paris.
- The New York Times carries the name of New York City but it is far from being a local
newspaper. People read it not just across America, but also all over the world. One of the
reasons for many tourists visiting Boston is that they want to see Harvard University - the
world’s top university.
- Los Angeles, the center of the American film industry may also be considered a global city.
- Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. It is so small that one can tour the entire city by
bicycle in thirty minutes. It is not the home of a major stock market, and its population is
rather homogenous. However, Copenhagen is now considered as one of the culinary
capitals of the world, with its top restaurants incommensurate with its size.
- Similarly, Manchester, England in the 1980’s was a dreary, industrial city. But many
prominent post-punk and New Wave bands - Joy Division, the Smiths, the Happy Mondays
- hailed from this city, making it a global household name.
- Singapore is slowly becoming a cultural hub for the region. It now houses some of the
region’s top television stations and news organization (MTV Southeast Asia and Channel
News Asia). Its various art galleries and cinemas also show paintings from artists and
filmmakers respectively from the Philippines and Thailand. It is, in fact, sometimes easier to
watch the movie of a Filipino indie filmmaker in Singapore than it is in Manila.

 Economic Opportunities

- Economic opportunities in a global city make it attractive to talents from across the world. Since the
1970’s, many of the top IT programmers and engineers from Asia have moved to San Francisco Bay
Area to become some of the key figures in Silicon Valley’s technology boom.
- London remains a preferred destination for many Filipinos with nursing degrees.

 Economic Competitiveness

- The Economist Intelligence Unit has added other criteria like market size, purchasing power of
citizens, size of the middle class, and potential for growth.
- tiny Singapore is considered Asia’s most competitive city because of its strong market, efficient
and incorruptible government, and livability. 179 It also houses the regional offices of many
major global corporations.

Cities are the engines of globalization.

An increasing number of large cities, with populations of over five million, are already identified as
global cities, cities that are nodes of global as much as national networks.

In 2000, there were 18 megacities (over 10 million)‚ such as Mumbai, Tokyo, New York City/Newark and
Mexico City had populations in excess of 10 million inhabitants. Greater Tokyo already has 35 million.
The Hong Kong / Guangzhow area is even larger, perhaps 120 million.

Global Demography
Demography: Meaning and Its Origin

 demography was derived from the Greek words demos for “population” and graphia for
“description” or “writing,” thus the phrase, “writings about population.”
 It was coined by Achille Guillard, a Belgian statistician, in 1855. However, the origins of modern
demography can be traced back to the John Graunt’s analysis of ‘Bills of Mortality’ which was
published in 1662.

By its meaning, as cited by Tulchinsky, demography refers to the study of populations, with reference
to size and density, fertility, mortality, growth, age distribution, migration, and vital statistics and the
interaction of all these with social and economic conditions”.

Theory of Demographic Transition

Demographic transition theory suggests that future population growth will develop along a predictable
four- or five-stage model.

Stage 1
In stage one, pre-industrial society, death rates and birth rates are high and roughly in balance.

Population growth is typically very slow in this stage, because the society is constrained by the available
food supply.

Stage 2
In stage two, that of a developing country, death rates drop rapidly due to improvements in food supply
and sanitation, which increase life spans and reduce disease. Afghanistan is currently in this stage.

The improvements specific to food supply typically include selective breeding and crop rotation and
farming techniques. Other improvements generally include access to technology, basic healthcare, and
education.

Stage 3
In stage three, birth rates fall. Mexico’s population is at this stage.
Birth rates decrease due to various fertility factors such as access to contraception, increases in wages,
urbanization, a reduction in subsistence agriculture, an increase in the status and education of
women, a reduction in the value of children’s work, an increase in parental investment in the
education of children and other social changes.

Stage 4
During stage four, there are both low birth rates and low death rates. Birth rates may drop to well below
replacement level as has happened in countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan, leading to a shrinking
population, a threat to many industries that rely on population growth. Sweden is considered to
currently be in Stage 4.

Stage 5
Some scholars delineate a separate fifth stage of below-replacement fertility levels. Others hypothesize a
different stage five involving an increase in fertility.

The United Nations Population Fund (2008) categorizes nations as high-fertility, intermediate-fertility, or
low-fertility. The United Nations (UN) anticipates the population growth will triple between 2011 and
2100 in high-fertility countries, which are currently concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa.

For countries with intermediate fertility rates (the United States, India, and Mexico all fall into this
category), growth is expected to be about 26 percent. Low-fertility countries like China, Australia, and
most of Europe will actually see population decline of approximately 20 percent.

Global Migration: Meaning and Concept

 global migration is a situation in which people go to live in foreign countries specially to find a
job.,
 migration is often conceptualized as a move from an origin to a destination, or from a place of
birth to another destination across administrative borders within a country or international
borders.

 Internal migration. This refers to people moving from one area to another within one country

International migration. This refers to the movement people who cross the borders of one
country to another.

The latter can be broken down into five groups:

 First are those who move permanently to another country (immigrants).

 The second refers to workers who stay in another country for a fixed period (at least 6 months in
a year).
 Illegal immigrants comprise the third group,
  while the fourth are migrants whose families have “petitioned” them to move to the
destination country.
 The fifth group are refugees (also known as asylum-seekers), i.e., those “unable or unwilling to
return because of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality,
membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.“

Reasons for Migration

 Cultural Factor
Forced international migration has historically occurred for two main cultural reasons: slavery
and political instability. Large groups of people are no longer forced to migrate as slaves, but
forced international migration persists because of political instability resulting from cultural
diversity.

 Socio-political Factor
Political instability in some parts of the world is responsible for migration that needs to be
addressed by the scholars of the world. Situation of war, oppression and the lack of socio-
political rights are the major factors of migration in contemporary time.
 Lack of political rights and prevalent exploitation of a particular group or community in any
nation state act as push factors for migration to get away from such situation.

 Environmental Factor
According to IOM (International Organization of Migration): “Environmental migrants are
persons or groups of persons who, for compelling reasons of sudden or progressive changes in
the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their
habitual homes, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either
within their country or abroad”. This definition comprises the people who have been displaced
by natural disasters and those who choose to migrate because of worsening environmental
condition of a particular area. The environmentally caused migration can be internal as well as
international.

 Economic Factor
Migration is a process affecting individuals and their families economically. It ensues as a
response to economic development along with social and cultural factors.

Sustainable Development and Climate Change

 sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
  sustainable development is often linked with climate change which due to its hazardous effects
in the environment is known to be a major restriction in achieving sustainability.

Undoubtedly, climate change is often seen as a part of the broader challenge in sustainable development
thru a two-fold link:

1. Impacts of climate change can severely hamper development efforts in key sector (e.g.
increased threat of natural disasters and growing water stress will have to be factored into
plans for public health infrastructure).

2. Development choice will influence the capacity to mitigate and adapt to climate change (e.g.
policies for forest conservation and sustainable energy will improve communities’ resilience
reducing thereby the vulnerability of their sources of income to climate change)

In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Member States express their commitment to protect
the planet from degradation and take urgent action on climate change. The Agenda also identifies, in its
paragraph 14, climate change as “one of the greatest challenges of our time” and worries about “its
adverse impacts undermine the ability of all countries to achieve sustainable development.

There are significant challenges involved in implementing various measures such as “carbon tax” and
“carbon neutrality” to deal with environmental problems. It is also difficult to find alternatives to fossil
fuels. For instance, the use of ethanol as an alternative to gasoline has an attendant set of problems - it
is less efficient and it has led to escalation in the price of corn, which currently serves as major source
of ethanol. Although biofuels themselves produce lower emissions, their extraction and transport
contribute significantly to total emissions.

The World’s Leading Environmental Problems

The Conserve Energy Future website lists the following environmental challenges that the world faces
today:

1. Depredation caused by industrial and transportation toxins and plastic in the ground; the defiling
of the sea, rivers, and water beds by oil spills and acid rain; the dumping of urban waste.

2. Changes in global weather patterns (flash floods, extreme snowstorms, and the spread of
deserts) and the surge in ocean and land temperatures leading to a rise in sea levels (as the
polar ice caps melt because of the weather), plus the flooding of many lowland areas across the
world.

3. Overpopulation
 4. Exhaustion of the world’s natural non-renewable resources from oil reserves to minerals to
potable water.
5. Waste disposal catastrophe due to excessive amount of waste (from plastic to food packages to
electronic waste) unloaded by communities in landfills as well as on the ocean; and dumping of
nuclear waste.

6. Destruction of million-year-old ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity (destruction of the coral
reefs and massive deforestation) that have led to the extinction of particular species and decline
in the number of others.

7. Reduction of oxygen and increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to deforestation,
resulting in the rise in ocean acidity by as much as 150 percent in the last 250 years.

8. Depletion of ozone layer protecting the planet from the sun’s deadly ultraviolet rays due to
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere.
9. Deadly acid rain as a result of fossil fuel combustion, toxic chemicals from erupting volcanoes,
and the massive rotting vegetables filling up garbage dumps or left on the streets.

10. Water pollution arising from industrial and community waste residues seeping into underground
water tables, rivers and seas.

11. Urban sprawls that continue to expand as a city turns into a megalopolis, destroying farmlands,
increasing traffic gridlock, and making smog cloud a permanent urban fixture.

12. Pandemics and other threats to public health arising from wastes with drinking water, polluted
environment that become the breeding grounds for mosquitoes and disease carrying rodents,
and pollution.

13. A radical alteration of food systems because of genetic modifications in food Production.

Global Food Security

 food security exists when all people, at all times, have access to adequate, safe, and nutritious
food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. 213 This
widely accepted definition of food security emphasizes the four dimensions of food security
which are as follows:

- food access: access to adequate resources to acquire a healthy and nutritious diet
- food use: use of food through adequate diet, clean water and health care to reach the state of a
healthy well-being
- availability: availability of adequate supply of food, produced either through domestic or foreign
import, including as well the food aid received from outside the country
 - stability: access to sufficient food at all times, without losing access to food supply brought by
either economic or climatic crisis.

The global food security situation and outlook remains delicately imbalanced amid surplus food
production and the prevalence of hunger, due to the complex interplay of social, economic, and
ecological factors that mediate food security outcomes at various human and institutional scales.
Food production outpaced food demand over the past 50 years due to expansion in crop area and
irrigation, as well as supportive policy and institutional interventions that led to the fast and
sustained growth in agricultural productivity and improved food security in many parts of the world.
However, future predictions point to a slow-down in agricultural productivity and a food- gap mainly
in areas across Africa and Asia which are having ongoing food security issues.

The problem of food insecurity is expected to worsen due to, among others, rapid population
growth and other emerging challenges such as climate change and rising demand for biofuels.

Challenges in Food Security

- Global food security means delivering sufficient food to the entire world population. It is,
therefore, a priority of all countries, whether developed or less developed.
- The security of food also means the sustainability of society such as population growth, climate
change, water scarcity, and agriculture.

But perhaps the closest aspect of human life associated with food security is the environment. A major
environmental problem is the destruction of natural habitats, particularly through deforestation.
Industrial fishing has contributed to a significant destruction of marine life and ecosystems. Biodiversity
and usable farmland have also declined at a rapid pace.

Another significant environmental challenge is that of the decline in the availability of fresh water.
Because of the degradation of soil or desertification, decline in water supply has transformed what
was once considered a public good into a privatized commodity. The problem is further intensified
by the consumption of “virtual water”, wherein people use up water from elsewhere to produce
consumer products. The destruction of the water ecosystem may lead to the creation of “climate
refugees, people who are forcibly displaced due to effects of climate change and disasters.

- Pollution through toxic chemicals has had a long-term impact on the environment.
- Greenhouse gases, gases that trap sunlight and heat in the earth’s atmosphere, contribute
greatly to global warming. In turn, this process causes the melting of land- based and glacial
ice with potentially catastrophic effects, the possibility of substantial flooding, a reduction
in the alkalinity of the oceans, and the destruction of existing ecosystems.
- Ultimately, global warming poses a threat to the global supply of food as well as to human
health.
There are different models and agenda pushed by different organizations to address the issue of
global food security. One of this is through sustainability. The United Nations has set ending hunger,
achieving food security and improved security, and promoting sustainable agriculture as the second
of its 17 Sustainable Goals (SDGs) for the year 2030.

Global Citizenship
- Having been derived from the word city, the term citizenship tends to suggest allegiance to
one’s own country or state.
- Quitely so, the concept of citizenship has taken on a new meaning from its historical usage
as it has gone “global”.

global citizenship is the idea that, as people, we are all citizens of the globe who have an
equal responsibility for what happens on, and to our world. This means to say that every
global citizen has a duty to address issues affecting our being citizens.

citizenship can thus be associated with rights and obligations.

Caecilia Johanna van Peski (as cited in Baraldi, 2012) defined global citizenship “as a moral and
ethical disposition that can guide the understanding of individuals or groups of local and global
contexts, and remind them of their relative responsibilities within various communities.”

Global citizens are the glue which binds local communities together in an increasingly globalized
world.

In van Peski’s words, “global citizens might be a new type of people that can travel within these
various boundaries and somehow still make sense of the world”.

Salient Features of Global Citizenship

Global citizenship may seem to have far broader meanings than the above given ones. Equally, it is
still important to note its salient features. for a better understanding of this concept.

 Global citizenship as a choice and a way of thinking

People come to consider themselves as global citizens through various formative life
experiences and have different interpretations of what it means to them. For many, the
practice of global citizenship is primarily exercised at home through engagement in global
issues or with different cultures in a local setting. For others, global citizenship means
firsthand experience with different countries, people and cultures.

 Global citizenship as self-awareness and awareness of others

Self-awareness helps students identify with the universalities of human experience, thus
increasing their identification with fellow human beings and their sense of responsibility
 toward them.

 Global citizenship as they practice cultural empathy

Cultural empathy or intercultural competence is commonly articulated as a goal of global
education. Intercultural competence occupies a central position in higher education’s
thinking about global citizenship and is seen as an important skill in the workplace.

 Global citizenship as the cultivation of principled decision making

Global citizenship entails an awareness of the interdependence of individuals and systems as
well as a sense of responsibility that follows from it. Although the goal of undergraduate
education should not be to impose a correct set of answers, critical thinking, cultural
empathy and ethical systems and choices are an essential foundation to principled decision
making.

 Global citizenship as participation in the social and political life of one’s community.
There are various types of communities that range from local to global, from religious to
political group. Global citizens feel a sense of connection towards their communities and
translate this connection to participation.