Effects Of Globalization On Cities In Asia

Closely associated with the process of globalisation is the notion of ‘World cities’. World cities are those such as London, New York and Tokyo where urban function has moved beyond the national scale to become a part of the international and global system. They are centres of culture, economics, employment, tourism, transport and communications and have been referred to as the command centres of the World’s borderless economy.

Recent data has shown that the world’s total population is doubling; however, the world's urban population is tripling. In the early 1800s, only 2 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas (Urbanization; an environmental force to reckon with). This is a sharp contrast to what we have today. The promise of ample job opportunities, higher wages, and a better standard of living have been the main luring factors for attracting people into cities. Today about 50 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas. It is estimated that by 2050 about 60-70 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas (Urbanization; an environmental force to reckon with). This growth trend of the urban populace is troubling since it has tremendous bad effects on our environment which in turn has bad effects on our health and well-being.

It is estimated that over 50% of the world’s population now lives in urban areas and that this will rise to 70% by 2050. Such a change will

Urban development is the social, cultural, economic and physical development of cities. The development of cities is the main topic of human geography. Urban development can be used in different ways by the researchers. It can cause the price of things to increase fast. Urban development occurs in major cities like New York City, Tokyo, Japan. Urban development started back in the earlier cities like Mesopotamia, Egypt. This spreads the culture that affect people which makes them want to go to the major cities. Over fifty percent of the earth’s population lives in urban areas. Studies show by 2045 that the number of people living in a urban area will increase.

Globalization has been an integral part of India’s progress. It has opened up new avenues for growth.

Ghemawat (2007) detailed that globalisation is more than just a powerful economic and political transformation it bound people, countries and market closer. It is a growing network of different companies, groups, and individual. Globalisation has shrunk the world from size small to size tiny and flattened the world.

First, India has been identified by the World Bank as a country that will “lead the world’s urban population surge in the next 40 years.” According to India’s census, Urbanization rates have increased from 11% in 1901 to well over 30% in 2011. While urbanization is commonly conflated with a growing economy and a move from blue-collar to white-collar jobs, Deborah Oxley showed in her paper The seat of death and terror: urbanization, stunting

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century urban populations grew rapidly through migration from rural areas to find new jobs in the cities created by the industrial revolution, which led to 6,5 million inhabitants in London. In the twentieth century cities kept growing and in the 1950’s around thirty percent of world’s population was urban. The first mega city in the world emerged, as New York City broke the boundary of ten million inhabitants around 1930 (Wendell Cox Consultancy, 2005). In 1990 there were ten megacities that were home to 153 million people which is less than seven percent of the global urban population. In 2014 the amount of megacities has almost tripled to 28 with a population of 453 million people, which account for twelve percent of the global urban population. The total urban population in 2014 was 54 percent (UN, 2014). These numbers can be related to the second important event,

World cities are connected to each other by a range of transport networks and services. They are also connected to other major cities and a variety of urban and rural centres at global, national, regional and local scales. Global centres function as frameworks of world growth and dominate the world technologically, financially and culturally engage in strategic decision making. World cities therefore exist at the top of this hierarchy of cities. A net transfer of funds exists between the worlds developed countries to the developing world. Information, goods and services, people and capital flow can be traced to analyse the operation of the global network of cities. A cities prominence in the global economy is a considerable factor but other social political and cultural aspects have also been acknowledged by geographers who recognise innovation, equity, wellbeing and liveability across all these spheres as an important aspect. There is considerable agreement, however that advanced economic growth and development on a global scale is a

The world as we know it is experiencing an unprecedented shift for the first time witnessed in human history. It wasn’t even 100 years ago that the world was still overwhelmingly rural with global urban population rates around 10%. Fast forward to 2015, now accounting for roughly around 53% of the worlds population living in cities and is projected to rise to around 67% by 2050.1 The comparative analysis sets out to understand the opportunities and challenges among the North American megacity New York and the Asian megacity of Beijing. The metropolitan area of both New York and Beijing consist of a population each over 10 million people, which generally defines as a megacity. A “megacity” can also be coined as world city, global city, megalopolis, metropolis, conurbation, and agglomeration. Megacities such as New York and Beijing are comprised of a central core, surrounded by satellite cities within daily commuting distances, separated by greenspace. Thus, urban agglomerations can be numerous cities and towns when they are linked by the flows of people, goods, and information, as long as the aggregate population exceeds 10 million.2

Globalization is among the top most contested topics in the globe. It, however, lacks a universal definition. Nevertheless, Ismail (2010) describes globalization as a set of divergent processes and social, cultural, and economic shifts that are experienced in cities across the globe. Ismail (2010) also asserts that the most significant economic trend, which is associated with the modern-day wave of globalization, is the immense economic restructuring in cities. She points out that this new structure in the economic activities is linked to a new spatial order. It results in a new urban hierarchy merely founded on networks and connectivity. The current economic trend and the global economic changes are the basis for spatial and social

These cities are often called megacities because they have a high density of population. Between the 1950’s to the 1960’s China’s government had implemented the Five- Year plan, this plan was the government’s way of initiating population growth, which resulted in high rates of urban in-migration (Shin, 2015, pg.3). This was the spark of urbanization in the megacities. A few decades later the “urbanization population ratio has skyrocketed in the past two decades from 26% in 1990 to 50% in 2010... with more than one billion people” (Song, Chen, 2014, pg.485). In this instance, China’s population has rapidly grown in a short amount of time creating many megacities within their country, after the first spark called the Five-Year plan between the 50’s and 60’s. With the creation of these megacities comes the factor of urbanization. Many of these cities will be flooded with large amounts of people that need the basic necessaries of life and therefore these megacities will become urbanized. Urbanization of these cities means the building of many resources such as housing, transportation routes, health services and shopping centres. With the becoming of urbanization this also comes with many other factors that can be both positive and negative.

The process of urbanization first began in the more developed regions of the contemporary world. Almost a century ago, 1920 saw below 30 per cent of the ‘developed world’ in living urban areas. Only decades later, over half of their populace were residing in urban areas. Today, the

Cities are the dwellings and ideal examples of how our world is shaped and impacted through the flow of people from around the world. Within these cities, urban culture and economies emerge, grow and branch out. From deindustrialization to the creation of urban culture and hip hop or the impact of immigrants on the country they choose to reside in, these are the factors that reflect globalization both in the United States and abroad as well as perpetuate it.

Urbanization is the defining phenomenon of the 21st century. For the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lives in cities, with 90 percent of urban growth taking place in the developing world. Increasing population growth in the existing urban areas and rapid urbanisation is leading to need for increased land area to accommodate the growing population. Rapid urbanization is turning villages are into towns, towns into big cities and cities in to metropolitan cities. This is leading to various emerging challenges that urban areas today have to address like inadequate housing, inefficient physical infrastructure like water, sanitation, transport, inadequate social infrastructure like education and health, spiralling construction costs and land prices.