Global citizen

 Sarah Elgohary

Sociology global cites

Professor Gal Sailer

Spring semester

Final exam

What makes a city 'global'? Is there one model of the 'global city' or competing versions?

There are many qualities that make a city a city, but when do cities become global? In my opinion, there are five factors that make a city global. These factors are 1 The rapid expansion of a global consumer class, and the second factor is the rise of urban regions as the engines of global economic growth have ushered in a new era. The third factor of global cities is that the global economy no longer revolves around a handful of dominant states and their national urban centres. This fundamental shift has both challenged the United States with greater global competition but also offered the prospect of all U.S. metropolitan areas to benefiting from engaging in growing markets abroad .

     Out of all the characteristics that global cities have the two characteristics that stand out to me are one the trait of cities called Culture of Knowledge and Innovation and the second trait is the Compelling Global Identity .- Cities must establish an appealing global identity, while they keep their local uniqueness and maintaining a local identity, and relevance in international markets not only to sell the city, but also to shape and build the region around a common purpose. I think it Is very Important for global cites to always maintain a sense of creativity in order to invent new products to be part of the global market, but also change the meaning of local and global cities in society to blend with technology and the unique cultural way of life and cities must be able change to adapt to modern times In addition , In an increasingly knowledge-driven world, all cities need to have the ability to create positive development in the global economy that requires high levels of human capital to generate new ideas, methods, products, and technologies. Ability that every city can use Inventions to define its own unique way of life and keep up with the global market 

       Saskia Sassen gave a definition that has long struck with me. ` In the age of globalization, the activities of production are scattered on a global basis. I think that Sassen’s definition of a global city is true and unique. She says that gobal cities are “These complex, globalized production networks require new forms of financial and producer services to manage them. These services are often complex and require highly specialized skills. ‘After all, Stassen said that the third factor and the most important of globalization is the idea of the world as a single economy and culture. Sassen talks about globalization as being the world developing a single economy and culture as a result of improved technology and communications and the influence of very large multinational corporations. On the other hand, modern cities do not have the same global connections. Although they might have a smaller network of other modern cities to trade with, it is not on a global scale. A global city generally is considered to have an important role in the global economic system hierarchy of importance to the operation of the global system of finance and trade. (Stassen 4). Sassen defines global cities as “globalized production networks that needs new forms of financial and producer services to manage them. These services are often complex and require highly specialized skills” (Stassen 2). this means that there are actually a quite a few of these specialized production nodes, because they don’t necessarily directly compete with each other, having different groupings of specialties.( Saskia Sassen 1974 PG 10) this is why Human capital is SO important resources that can be used to generate economic wealth as a result, global cities are subject to work together with other cities in order to combine their economies, and they tend to cluster in a limited number of cities. After all, people are necessary as resources for global cities to survive. This proves how important human capital is in society because globalization needs people with different skills, talents for society to unitize as resources that can be used to generate economic wealth. Human capital is needed to make a better and more productive civilization that will be better for future generations to live in as a result of global cities forming. Because of all the human capital that global cities require, they also have larger and more diverse populations. In society a global city is a significant production point of specialized financial and producer services that make the globalized economy run. Sassen covered specifically New York, London, and Tokyo in her book, but there are many more global cities than this.

Cities in the West are known as global because they demonstrate the globalization of capitalism. 

A global city may be defined by its characteristics, but it is necessary to examine the development of such features - globalization: Cities' intriguing reactions to globalisation are important to analyse when defining a global city. "Globalization usually implies decentralization", yet global cities are able to strategically take advantage of globalisation "with their enormous concentrations of resources and talent" (Sassen 1999). 

However, most important to a city's status as a global city is its position in the international 

Global cities are dynamic, diverse and dominant. Due to contemporary globalization, urbaniZAation has become a defining trend of global development; cities are now not only centres of administration, they are populous beyond belief. High concentrations of people leads to increased human productivity, which in turn increases economic output. For a city to be labelled as global, it must boast a number of important characteristics and depending on who you ask, these characteristics tend to differ. All cities possess economic, cultural and administrative characteristics that are the result of global decentralisation, yet are able to strategically centralise economic activity and production of ideas. 

Global cities are culturally striking due to their cultural atmosphere and diversity; such characteristics make them attractive to immigrants and tourists alike. In presenting London's "new geometry of power" - a response to globalisation - Sun describes the city "heterogeneous political space where different groups and communities live with opportunity" (2001: 109-110). New York and London are reasonably open to immigration in comparison to Tokyo, which challenges Sun's socio-cultural global city approach by imposing strict immigration policy. 

As a result of globalization, economic and administrative functions have been centralised to regions that are highly productive and innovative. These are large, developed cities, such as New York, London and Tokyo.. According to Sassen, economic activity provides answers, in particular she stresses the significance of parallel development, to which some authors have associated capitalism. A global city is key in the production of services and in the operation of global economic markets. Other academics discuss the importance of political integration, information exchange and cultural diversity as equally important factors. Tokyo is arguably exempt from a number of global city models; its state-driven economy and stricter immigration policy mean it is not a bourgeois city with a focus on services and international markets that New York and London are. Whichever version of the global city is adopted, almost every city worldwide has a claim to the name.

5 article, "The Global City: Introducing a Concept" (link). This article is a convenient place to gain an understanding of her basic approach to the subject.

Key to Sassen's concept of the global city is an emphasis on the flow of information and capital. Cities are major nodes in the interconnected systems of information and money, and the wealth that they capture is intimately related to the specialized businesses that facilitate those flows -- financial institutions, consulting firms, accounting firms, law firms, and media organizations. Sassen points out that these flows are no longer tightly bound to national boundaries and systems of regulation; so the dynamics of the global city are dramatically different than those of the great cities of the nineteenth century.

Sassen emphasizes the importance of creating new conceptual resources for making sense of urban systems and their global networks -- a new conceptual architecture, as she calls it (28). She argues for seven fundamental hypotheses about the modern global city:

The geographic dispersal of economic activities that marks globalization, along with the simultaneous integration of such geographically dispersed activities, is a key factor feeding the growth and importance of central corporate functions.

These central functions become so complex that increasingly the headquarters of large global firms outsource them: they buy a share of their central functions from highly specialized service firms.

Those specialized service firms engaged in the most complex and globalized markets are subject to agglomeration economies.

The more headquarters outsource their most complex, unstandardized functions, particularly those subject to uncertain and changing markets, the freer they are to opt for any location.

These specialized service firms need to provide a global service which has meant a global network of affiliates ... and a strengthening of cross border city-to-city transactions and networks.

The economic fortunes of these cities become increasingly disconnected from their broader hinterlands or even their national economies.

One result of the dynamics described in hypothesis six, is the growing in formalization of a range of economic activities which find their effective demand in these cities, yet have profit rates that do not allow them to compete for various resources with the high-profit making firms at the top of the system. (28-30)

Three key tendencies seem to follow from these structural facts about global cities. One is a concentration of wealth in the hands of owners, partners, and professionals associated with the high-end firms in this system. Second is a growing disconnection between the city and its region. And third is the growth of a large marginalized population that has a very hard time earning a living in the marketplace defined by these high-end activities. Rather than constituting an economic engine that gradually elevates the income and welfare of the whole population, the modern global city funnels global surpluses into the hands of a global elite dispersed over a few dozen global cities.

These tendencies seem to line up well with several observable features of modern urban life throughout much of the world: a widening separation in quality of life between a relatively small elite and a much larger marginalized population; a growth of high-security gated communities and shopping areas; and dramatically different graphs of median income for different socioeconomic groups. New York, London, and Hong Kong/Shanghai represent a huge concentration of financial and business networks, and the concentration of wealth that these produce is manifest:

Inside countries, the leading financial centers today concentrate a greater share of national financial activity than even ten years ago, and internationally, cities in the global North concentrate well over half of the global capital market. (33)

This mode of global business creates a tight network of supporting specialist firms that are likewise positioned to capture a significant level of wealth and income:

By central functions I do not only mean top level headquarters; I am referring to all the top level financial, legal, accounting, managerial, executive, planning functions necessary to run a corporate organization operating in more than one country. (34)

These features of the global city economic system imply a widening set of inequalities between elite professionals and specialists and the larger urban population of service and industrial workers. They also imply a widening set of inequalities between North and South. Sassen believes that communications and Internet technologies have the effect of accelerating these widening inequalities:

Besides their impact on the spatial correlates of centrality, the new communication technologies can also be expected to have an impact on inequality between cities and inside cities. (37)

Sassen's conceptual architecture maintains a place for location and space: global cities are not disembodied, and the functioning of their global firms depends on a network of activities and lesser firms within the spatial scope of the city and its environs. So Sassen believes there is space for political contest between parties over the division of the global surplus.

If we consider that global cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations (immigrants, many of the disadvantaged women, people of color generally, and, in the megacities of developing countries, masses of shanty dwellers) then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions. (39)

But This is a hugely important subject for everyone who wants to understand the dynamics and future directions of the globe's mega-cities and their interconnections. What seems pressingly important for urbanists and economists alike, is to envision economic mechanisms that can be established that do a better job of sharing the fruits of economic progress with the whole of society, not just the elite and professional end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

As a result, The question then becomes how to identify these cities, and perhaps to determine to what extent they function as global cities specifically, beyond all of the other things that they do simply as cities. Naturally this lends itself to our modern desire to develop league tables.

As you can see, this is quite a hodge-podge of items, many of which are only tangentially related to globalization per se. In effect, many of them seek to define cities only in term of global prominence rather than functionally as related to the global economy. That’s certainly a valid way to look at it, but it raises the point that we should probably clarify what we are talking about when we talk about global 

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