The Global Sociology Blog

The current issue of Contexts has an interesting article on global cities and the opportunities and challenges they present to urban planners, developing countries and multilateral institutions written by Michael Goldman and Wesley Longhofer. They write

"In the Global South, select cities promise to be catalysts for their national economies, too. Indeed, many scholars and analysts envision the Bangalores and Shanghais to be globally competitive in their own rights, propelling their slower-moving countries to the top of the global economy. And the World Bank leads the way, shifting its lending priorities toward these cities and priming them for an economic boom by financing various global-city solutions.

Although cities in India and China have become pivotal players in the global economy, issues and problems abound. For one thing, world-class airports and cutting-edge architecture aren’t tides that lift all boats. Projects like these often lead to mass displacement and mounting inequalities. For example, the "Shanghai miracle," according to geographer Fulong Wu, occurred on the backs of millions of urban residents forced off their land and out of their social and economic networks." (33)

Global cities are not just places of great inequalities (where the very top and the very bottom of the social ladder coexist side by side with very limited interactions), they also place of great complexity where all the global flows (or scapes) converge and interplay in what the authors call world city circuits. And the global cities themselves are shaped by these global processes as they interact with the local context, in an almost perfect example of glocalization and grobalization.

At the same time, the authors show how Bangalore (the global city in which they did their fieldwork) also illustrates the process of universalization of the particular as the "Bangalore model" is adopted by other urban planners outside of India. As they authors describe, there is a price to pay for access to the exclusive club of world cities, attractive to the transnational capitalist class and that price comes in the form of increased inequalities as world cities provide world class services to their cosmopolitan visitors but third-world quality of life to the peripheral masses. Among other casualty are the local cultures.

And as with many forms of structural violence imposed on people, one also finds resistance social movements against this global gentrification that leaves local citizens behind, forced out of their livelihood and who may have to go to Dubai to work in conditions of quasi-slavery or just eke out a living in the slums that surround the business districts of global cities.

These slums are not going anywhere especially in the context of high food prices, failing agriculture and global economic recession. The rural exodus and rapid urbanization are not over in the Global South. The Earth will have 5.3 billion urban dwellers by 2050, according to UN estimates. In the Global South, the UN estimates that every month, five million people move to the cities. Hunger follows and food riots have already occurred (most notably in Haiti, for instance, according to Food For The Cities).

Food for the Cities via kwout

And indeed,

Le mouvement global d’exode rural fait entrer la faim dans les villes – Planète – Le Monde.fr via kwout

For the non-French speakers, this states that even though the majority of the 900 million people who suffer from hunger and malnutrition are poor farmers, malnutrition and hunger might well become more urban phenomena in the near future as urban and especially slum dwellers are almost entirely dependent upon their income to buy food and incomes are incredibly low. In Africa, the majority of urban dwellers live on less than a dollar a day and the slightest economic shock or increase in food prices is catastrophic.

So the Food and Agriculture Organization and NGOs are trying to establish reliable food distribution systems, based on local sources and practices that have disappeared as food for export created narrow specializations (often required as part of structural adjustment programs).