M10: Lecture Notes

This chapter will discuss the physical space of globalization. The birth of global cities
has become more pronounced at the turn of the 21st century.
Definition and Attributes of Global City
Global city was preceded by the idea of "world city"
Roderick McKenzie conceptualized a global network of cities as early as 1927 (Acuto,
2011)

According to Gilpin (2000), global city emerged in the social science literature in the
1980s.
Saskia Sassen (1991) identified only three (3) global cities: New York, London and
Tokyo. This choice indicated the criteria for the status of global city as primarily
economic. Global cities are the command centers, the main notes of triumphant global
capitalism. It is the concentration of financial, information technology, law and
accountancy services. The things that are produced in it are not material things but on
handling money and creating ideas.

Sharon Zukin (1998), taking a cultural view of the issue, put New York, London and
Paris as the top of the urban cultural hierarchy in terms of cultural innovation and ability
to attract visitors. She describes the process of switching from production to a service
economy as a "cultural turn " so global cities are no longer "landscapes of production"
but the "landscapes of consumption."

To Mike Featherstone (1998), a global city is “data city”, or an infinitely

“reconstructable city of bits” because people like him enjoy much greater mobility
in the virtual reality like the social media.
To Enrico Moretti (2012), global cities are “brain hubs”, that is concentrations of
innovative people and firms, and are also good: human ecosystems” for cutting-
edge businesses, providing all the support functions or “secondary services” for
the innovation.
To Zygmunt Bauman (2005), a global city is a highly “liquid environment” or a
crucible of demographic and social change.
To Richard Florida (2005), global cities are place for “creative class” or they are
incubators of creativity. He argues that geography is not dead because of the
reach of internet connectedness
To Richard Sennett ( 1998), people in the global cities are not sociable and
generous with their time; social bonds take time to develop; time is readily
exchange to money; hypermobility of comparative cosmopolitanism does not
allow much room for community life; and dwellers of global city are spatially and
emotionally detached from their neighbors and co-locals and devoted to their
professional pursuits.
To Claudio and Abinales (2018), the attributes of a global city are the following:
1) Economic power
-Largest stock market
-Most number of corporate headquarters
-Plays a critical role in global economic supply chain
-Attractive to professionals from across the world due to economic opportunities
-Economic competitiveness such as market size, purchasing power of the
people, size of middle class, livability, incorruptible government
2) Centers of authority
-Seat of government power
-Host to Major international organizations

3) Centers for higher learning and culture

-Publishing industry
-The host to top world’s school
-Leading English –language universities
-The center of American film industry is Los Angeles
- A hub for cuisine.
-media hub
To Japanese Mori Foundation’s Global Power City Index (2011), the global
power of cities is measured by a combination of six (6) criteria such as economy,
research and development, cultural interaction, live-ability, environment and
accessibility.
CHALLENGES OF GLOBAL CITIES
The undersides of global cities are the following:
– Sites of poverty, inequality, and violence (global south)
– Consumes much of the world’s energy
– Lack public transportation, housing, security
– Pollution
– Targets of terrorist attacks
– Gentrification, which is a process of social class polarization and residential
segregation of the affluent from the poor (Zukin, 1998).
 
M11
The Malthusian Theory of Population is a theory of exponential population growth
and arithmetic food supply growth. Thomas Robert Malthus, an English cleric,
and scholar published this theory in his 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle
of Populatio
He believed that through preventative checks and positive checks, the population
would be controlled to balance the food supply with the population level. These
checks would lead to the Malthusian catastrophe.
When couples are asked why they have children, their answers are almost
always about their feelings. For most, having a child is the symbol of successful
union. It also ensures that the family will have a successor generation tht will
continue its name. the kinship is preserved, and the family’s story continues. A
few, however, worry how much strain a child can bring to the household as
he/she “competes” for the parent’s attention, and in reverse, how much energy
the family needs to shower its love to an additional member. Viewed from above,
however, having or not having children is mainly driven by economics. Behind
the laughter or the tears lies the question: will the child be an economic asset o a
burden to the family? Rural communities often welcome an extra hand to help in
crop cultivation, particularly during the planting and harvesting season. The
poorer districts of urban centers also tend to have families with more children
because the success of their “small family business” depends on how many of
their members can be hawking their wares on the streets. Hence, the more
children, the better it will for the farm or the small by-the-street corner enterprise.
Urbanized, educated and professional families with two incomes, however desire
just one or two progenies. With each partner tied down, or committed to his/her
respective professions, neither has the time to devote to having a kid, much more
to parenting. These families also have their sights on long-term savings plans.
They set aside significant parts of their incomes for their retirement, health care
and the future education of their child/children.
Rural families view multiple children and large kinship networks as critical
investments. Children, for example, can take over the agricultural work. Their
houses can also become the retirement homes of their parents, who will then
proceed to take care of their grandchildren. Urban families, however, may not
have the same kinship network anymore because couples live on their own, or
because they move out of the farmland. Thus, it is usually the basic family unit
that is left to deal with life’s challenges on its own.
These differing versions of family life determine the economic and social policies
that countries craft regarding their respective populations. Countries in the less
developed regions of the world that rely on agriculture tend to maintain high
levels of population growth. The 1980 united nations report on urban and rural
population growth states that these areas contained 85 percent of the world rural
population in 1975 and are projected to contain 90 percent by the end of the 2oth
century.
Since then, global agricultural population has declined. In 2011, it accounted for
over 37 percent of the total world population, compared to the statistics in 1980 in
which rural and urban population percentages were more or less the same. The
blog site “nourishing the planet, however, noted that even as the agricultural
population shrunk as a share of total population between 1980 and 2011, it grew
numerically from 2.2 billion to 2.6 billion people during this period.
Urban population have grown, but necessarily because families are having more
children. It is rather the combination of the natural outcome of significant
migration to the cities by people seeking work in the more modern sectors of
society. This movement of people is specially manifest in the developing
countries where industries and businesses in the cities are attracting people from
the rural areas. This trend has been noticeable since the 1950s, with the pace
accelerating in the next half-a-century. By the start of the 21 st century, the world
had become 44 percent urban, while the corresponding figures for developed
countries are 52 percent to 75 percent.
International migration also plays a part. Today, 191 million people live in
countries other than their own, and the united nations project that over 2.2 million
will move from the developing world to the first world countries. Countries
welcome immigrants as they offset the debilitating effects of an aging population,
but they are also perceived as threats to the job market because they compete
against citizens for jobs and often have the edge because they are open to
receiving lower wages. Voter pressure has often constrained their government to
institute stricter immigration policies.
THE PERILS OF OVERPOPULATION
Development planners see urbanization and industrialization as indicators of a
developing society, but disagree on the role of population growth or decline in
modernization. This lengthy discussion brings back ideas of British scholar
Thomas malthus, who warned in his 1798 an essay on the principles of
population that population growth will inevitably exhaust world food supply by the
middle of the 19th century. Malthus prediction was off base, but it was revive in
the late 1960s when American biologist paul r. ehrlich and his wife, anne, wrote
the population bomb, which argued that overpopulation in the 1970s and the
1980s will bring about global environmental disasters that would, in turn, lead to
food shortage and mass starvation. They proposed that countries like the united
states take the lead in the promotion of global population control in order to
reduce the growth rate to zero. Their recommendations range from the bizarre
(chemical castration) to the policy-oriented (taxing an additional child and luxury
taxes on child-related products) to monetary incentives (paying off men who
would agree to be sterilized after two children) to institution-building ( a powerful
department of population and environment).
There was some reason for this fear to persist. The rate of global population
increase was at its highest between 1955 and 1975 when nations were finally
able to return to normalcy after the devastations wrought by world war II. The
growth rate rose from 1.8 percent per year from 1955 to 1975, peaking at 2.06
percent annual growth rate between 1965 and 1970.
By limiting the population, vital resources could be used for economic progress
and not to be diverted and wasted to feeding more mouths. This argument
became the basis for government population control programs worldwide. In the
mid-20th century, the Philippines, china and India sought to lower birth rates on
the belief that unless controlled, the free expansion of family members would
lead to a crisis in resources, which in turn may result in widespread poverty,
mass hunger and political instability. As early as 1958, the American policy
journal, foreign affairs, had already advocated contraception and sterilization as
the practical solutions to global economic, social and political problems. While
there have been criticism that challenged this argument, it persist even to this
very day. In may 2009, a group of American billionaires warned of how a
nightmarish explosion of people was a potentially disastrous environmental,
social and industrial threat to the world.
This worry is likewise at the core of the economist argument for the promotion of
reproductive health. Advocates of population control contend for universal access
to reproductive technologies such as condoms, the pill, abortion and vasectomy,
and more importantly, giving women the right to choose whether to have children
or not. They see these tools are crucial to their nation’s development. Thus, in
Puerto rico, reproductive health supporters regard their work s the task of
transforming their poor country into a modern nation.
Finally, politics determine these birth control programs. Developed countries
justify their support for population control in developing countries by depicting the
latter as conservative societies. For instance, population experts blamed the
irresponsible fecundity of Egyptians for that nations run-o population growth, and
the Iranian peasants natural libidinal tendencies for the same rise in population.
From 1920 onwards, the Indian government marked lower castes, working poor,
and Muslims as hypersexual and hyper-fecund and hence a drain on national
resources. These policy formulations lead to extreme policies like the force
sterilization of twenty million violators of the Chinese government’s one-child
policy. Vietnam and Mexico also conducted coercive mass sterilization.
IT’S THE ECONOMY, NOT THE BABIES!
The use of population control to prevent economic crisis has its critics. For
example, betsy hartmann disagrees with the advocates of neo-malthusian theory
and accused governments of using population control as a substitute for social
justice and much needed reforms such land distribution, employment, creation,
provision of mass education and health care, and emancipation. Others pointed
out that the population did grow fast in many countries in the 1950s, and this
growth aided economic development by spurring technological and institutional
innovation and increasing the supply of human ingenuity. They acknowledge the
shift in population from the rural to the urban areas 52 percent to 75 percent in
the developing world since the 1950s. they likewise noted that while these
megacities are now clusters in which income disparities along with transportation,
housing, air pollution and waste management are major problems, they also
have become, and continue to be, centers of economic growth and activity.
The median of 29.4 years for females and 30.9 for males in the cities means a
young working population. With this median age, states are assured that they
have a robust military force. According to two population experts:
As a country’s baby-boom generation gets older, for a time it constitute a
large cohort group of working-age individuals and, later a large cohort of elderly
people. In all circumstances, there are reasons to think that this very dynamic
age structure will have economic consequences. A historically high proportion of
working-age individuals in a population means that, potentially, there are more
workers per dependent than previously. Production can therefore increase
relative to consumption, and GDP capita can receive a boost.
The productive capacities of this generation are especially high in regions like
East Asia as Asia’s remarkable growth in the past half century coincided closely
with demographic change in the region. As infant mortality fell from 181 to 34 per
1000 births between 1950 and 2000, fertility fell from six to two children per
woman. The lag between falls in mortality and fertility created a baby-boom
generation: between 1965 and 1990, the regions working-age population grew
nearly four times faster than the dependent population. Several studies have
estimated that this demographic shift was responsible for one third of east Asia’s
economic growth during the period a welcome demographic dividend.
Population growth has, in fact, spurred technological and institutional innovation
and increased the supply of human ingenuity. Advances in agricultural production
have shown that the Malthusian nightmare can be prevented. The green
revolution created high-yielding varieties of rice and other cereals and, along with
the development of new methods of cultivation, increased yields globally, but
more particularly in the developing world. The global famine that neo-malthusians
predicted did not happen. Instead, between 1950 and 1984, global grain
production increased by over 250 percent, allowing agriculture to keep pace with
population growth, thereby keeping global famine under control.
WOMEN AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
The character in the middle of this debates-women-is often the subject of these
population measures. Reproductive rights supporters argue that if population
control and economic development were to reach their goals, women must have
control over whether they will have children or not and when they will have their
progenies, if any. By giving women this power, they will be able to pursue their
vocations- be they economic, social pr political and contribute to economic
growth.
This serial correlation between fertility, family and fortune