Globalization Brown Bag: The Global City—Where Globalization is Happening
Event summaries from Globalization Week 2003
Friday, February 28, 2003
If you want to see where globalization is really taking place, look no further than global cities. However, while it is impossible to imagine globalization occurring without urbanization, academia still lacks a clear understanding of the social and cultural dynamics that make a city truly "global." Filling this research gap is the purpose of new research conducted by Professors Lisa Benton-Short and Marie Price of the GW Geography Department, which they presented to a student forum for Globalization Week 2003.
The rise of the world's cities has gone hand-in-hand with global integration, according to Lisa Benton-Short. Today, 3.1 billion of the world's 6.2 billion people live in urban areas. More than 75 percent of the populations of the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and many countries in western Europe now live in urban areas. We will soon see this trend repeated in Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, she added.
Cities with a population greater than 10 million are more accurately called "mega-cities," Benton-Short explained. The largest of these is Tokyo, which now boasts 28 million souls. However, the size of a city does not necessarily indicate its importance, she said. Dhaka, Bangladesh, for example, is home to 13 million people yet barely registers in global financial flows.
Benton-Short reported that most urban geographers agree that the three cities of key importance to the global economic and political system are London, New York, and Tokyo. These metropolises form the core of a network rooted firmly in the northern hemisphere.
However, vast gaps exist in contemporary research into global cities, stated Marie Price. Social and cultural indicators of cosmopolitanism are often overlooked in favor of criteria such as financial flows when giving cities global rankings. As a result, a city like Washington, D.C. is typically not considered "global"—despite welcoming migrants from more than 190 countries since the 1990s, said Price.
The purpose of the research into global cities led by Professors Benton-Short and Price is to describe their global nature more accurately by incorporating social dimensions such as human movement. "We are interested in the lived experience of globalization," Price said.
Early research findings suggest that, even allowing for new social factors, the most globally important cities are still likely to be London, New York, and Tokyo, according to Price.
However, look a little further down the rankings and we find that among the most global of cities is Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, where 75 percent of the population is foreign-born. "Vancouver is the poster child for complex global cities," added Price, as almost 35 percent of the Canadian city's residents were born abroad. In contrast, Seoul in South Korea—a prominent contributor to world industry—is startlingly lacking in diversity. Just 0.14 percent of its population was born abroad.
In the future, Price and Benton-Short predict several directions their research might take. For example, they plan to look at whether migrants are ghettoized or geographically-dispersed in cities that they move to. Dispersion, according to Benton-Short, is a good indicator of the integration of migrant communities.
Asked what the relationship is between globalization and urbanization, Price answered that the growth of towns and cities was initially driven by industrialization—not global integration. However, it is impossible to conceive of globalization occurring without the benefits produced by urban societies, such as literacy and large, concentrated markets, she said.
Benton-Short added that one of the practical implications of their research is that it will help to understand remittance flows. Financial remittances from migrants to developing countries have become major income sources, she stated—for example, they account for 22 percent of Jordan's GDP. As a result, maintaining remittance flows is a major policy priority for many countries, said Price.
