Essay on World Cities
Globalization process in modern political-economic society affects every field of life. In particular mapping of cities within this phenomenon posed a subject of broad research analysis concerning the dynamics of structure of cities and regions. The research analysis was carried out for 123 items - the largest cities of countries participating intensively in the globalization process.
One of the key directions in the analysis was identifying mapping of services within cities, in particular global strategies of 100 service firms were considered using appropriate 100*123 service value matrix. The analysis of objects (cities) and variables (firms) showed the key services - banking, accountancy, advertising, law, and insurance. However, it is worth mentioning that the results varied among 5 common sources of variation (geographical clusters of cities). The data structure results also included three secondary structures and two minor patterns, indicating London and New York as global cities.
The research of configuration of urban arena also took place, dividing 5 clusters into 22 smaller ones hierarchically. The result of this investigation was a table indicating the representativeness of cities and clusters in other regions. The outcome showed rather promising indexes for third World cities of Latin America, Asia, and South Africa.
The interpretation of existing data through the historical past was also helpful in analyzing world-systems concepts in globalization. In this context, metageography concept was used to identify cyclic development of world-cities (in particular of United States, Great Britain and Netherlands) within process of globalization.
Metageography plays a great role in the way society perceives the world, oftentimes being more significant than geography. For example, Asian people used to divide the world into two parts - Muslim part and non-Muslim part, emphasizing metageographical perception over geographical. Therefore, in simple terms, it is logic to suppose that metageography may be changed within globalization, consistently turning hundreds of countries to the single world city. Nationalization of cities from historical standpoint may play a great role in development of world cities.
However, in order to assess the globalization process it is also very useful to consider other aspect besides geography and metageography. In particular, world-city network would imply interaction of cultures, economies, politics, and other spheres of society life. The world city’s evolution may take either political economy or economical politics (preferable) direction to follow. Either way, the list of challenges is rather long, from so-called «city-killers» to competition. Finally, considering that democracy may be only territorial, the problem appears regarding the process of building democratic policy within the world city network.
 |
