MODULE V

GLOBAL POPULATION AND MOBILITY: A

CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

INTRODUCTION

In this module, we will focus on the topic cities in a globalizing world wherein
globalization affects the rural and urban areas. We will discuss also why it is in cities
that global operations are centralized and where we can see most clearly the
phenomena associated with their activities, whether it be changes in structure of
employment, the formation of powerful partnerships, the development of monumental
real estate, the emergence of new forms of local government, the effects of organized
crime, the expansion of corruption, the fragmentation of informal networks or the
spatial isolation and social exclusion of certain population groups.

OBJECTIVES

At the end of this Module, you should be able to:

1. Discuss the attributes of a global city;

2. Analyze how cities serve as engines of globalization;

3. Explain the theory of demographic transition as it affects global population;

4. Analyze the political, economic, cultural, and social factors underlying the global;

5. Critique research proposals of classmates; and

6. Participate in outcomes based activities in every learning sessions.

 MODULE V
GLOBAL POPULATION AND MOBILITY: A
CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Discussion:

1. The Global City

1.1. We hear a lot of talk these days about so-called “global cities”. But what is
a global city? Saskia Sassen literally wrote the book on global cities back
in 2021 (though her global cities work dates back well over a decade prior
to that book). She gave a definition that has long struck with me. In short
form, in the age of globalization, the activities of production are scattered
on a global basis.
1.2. 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. Thus they are subject to
agglomeration economics, and tend to cluster in a limited number of cities.
Because specialized talent and firms related to different specialties can
cluster in different cities, this means that they 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.
1.3. In this world then, 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 more global cities than this.
1.4. The question then becomes how to identify these cities, and perhaps to
determine to what extent they function as global cities specifically, beyond
all other things that they do simply as cities. Naturally this lends itself to
our modern desire to develop league tables.
1.5. A number of studies were undertaken to produce various rankings.
However, when you look at them, you see that the definition of global city
used is far broader than Sassen's core version. Wikipedia lists some of the
general characteristics people tend to refer to when talking about global
cities. It cities a very lengthy list, but some of them are:

1.5.1 Home to major stock exchanges and indexes

1.5.2 Influential in international politics affairs
1.5.3 Home to world-renowned cultural institution
1.5.4 Service a major media hub
1.5.5 Large mass transit networks
1.5.6 Home to a large international airport
1.5.7 Having a prominent skyline

1.6. 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 cities.
1.7. To clarify our thinking, let’s look at how various ranking studies have
defined global city for their purposes.

1.7.1 One oft-cited such ranking was a 1999 research paper called A
Roster of World Cities. The authors, Jon Beaverstock, Richard G. Smith
and Peter J. Taylor, explicitly reference Sassen's work seeking to define
global cities in terms of advanced producer services.

1.7.2 Taking our cue from Sassen (1991,126) we treat world cities as
particular 'postindustrial production sites' where innovations in corporate
services and finance have been integral to the recent restructuring of the
world economy now widely known as globalization. The key point is that
many of these services are by no means so ubiquitous; for Sassen they
provide a limited number of the leading cities with a 'specific role in the
current phase of the world economy'. (p.126)

1.7.3 They took lists of firms in four specific service industries – accounting,
advertising, banking, and law – and determined where those firms
maintained branches and such around the world in order to determine the
importance of various cities as production nodes of these services. This
has some weaknesses in that it doesn’t necessarily distinguish whether
say a particular accounting firm is doing routine type work of the sort
accountants have always been doing, or so performing advanced work of
a type specific to globalization, but it at least tries to derive lists related to
the production of services.

1.7.4 As the global city concept grew in popularity, various other

organizations entered the fray. Most of these newer lists take a very
different a much broader approach closer to the Wikipedia type lists of
characteristics rather than a Sassen-like definition.

2. One example is AT Kearney's list developed in conjunction with the Chicago

Council on Global affairs. Their most recent version is the 2012 Global Cities
Index. This study uses criteria across five dimensions:

a. Business Activity (headquarters, services firms, capital market value,

number of international conferences, value of goods through ports and
airports)

b. Human Capital (size of foreign born population, quality of universities, number

of international schools, international student population, number of residents
with college degrees)
c. Information Exchange (accessibility if major TV news channels, Internet
presence (basically number of search hits), number of international news
bureaus, censorship, and broadband subscriber rate)

d. Cultural Experience (number of sporting events, museum, performing arts

venues, culinary establishments, international visitors, and sister city
relationships)

e. Political Engagement (number of embassies and consulates, think tanks,

international organizations, political conferences)

2.1. The Institute for Urban Strategies at The Mori Memorial Foundation in
Tokyo published another study called “The Global Power City Index 2011.”
This report examined cities in terms of functions demanded by several
“actor” types: Manager, Researcher, Artist, Visitor, and Resident. The
functional areas were:

a. Economy (Market Attractiveness, Economic Vitality, Business

Environment, Regulations and Risk)

a. Research and Development (Research Background, Readiness for

Accepting and Supporting Researchers, Research Achievement)

b. Cultural Interaction (Trendsetting Potential, Accommodation

Environment, Resources of Attracting Visitors, Dining and Shopping,
Volume of Interaction)

c. Livability (Working Environment, Cost if Living, Security and Safety,

Life Support Functions)

d. Environment (Ecology, Pollution, Natural Environment)

e. Accessibility (International Transportation Infrastructure, Inner City

Transportation Infrastructure)

2.2. Another popular ranking is the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global City
Competitiveness Index. They rank cities on a number of domains:

a. Economic Strength (Nominal GDP, per capita GDP, % of household

with economic consumption > $14,000/year, real GDP growth rate,
regional market integration)

b. Human Capital (population growth, working age population,

entrepreneurship and risk taking mindset, quality if education, quality
of healthcare, hiring of foreign nationals)
 c. Institutional Effectiveness (electoral process and pluralism, local
government fiscal autonomy, taxation, rule of law, government
effectiveness)

d. Financial Maturity (breadth and depth of financial cluster)

e. Global Appeal (Fortune 500 companies, frequency of international

flights, international conferences and conventions, leadership in higher
education, renowned think tanks)

f. Physical Capital (physical infrastructure quality, public transport

quality, telecom quality)

g. Environment and Natural Hazards (risk of natural disaster,

environment governance)

h. Social and Cultural Character (Freedom of expression and human

rights, openness and diversity, crime, cultural vibrancy)

2.3. Note that these were not all equal weighted. Economic strength is
paramount.
Yet another ranking comes from the Knight Frank/Citibank Wealth
Reports. This ranking is purely subjective and was based n surveying
wealth advisors as to which cities they felt would be most important to their
clients today and in the future based on four areas: Economic Activity,
Political Power, Knowledge and Influence, and Quality of Life.
It’s worth noting that Sassen contributed to various of these surveys.

2.4. Looking at the newer surveys versus the Roster if World Cities, it’s clear
that the game has changed. Rather than attempting to look at the specific
global economic functions, the global city game has to become effectively
a balanced scorecard attempt to determine, as I like to put it the world's
“biggest and baddest” cities.

2.5. There are quite a few differences in methodologies, which is inevitable. But
a few things jump out at me. First the focus on aggregate measures in
these surveys. For example: total GDP, total foreign population, number
of headquarters. There is remarkable lack of attention to dynamism of
headquarters. There is a remarkable lack of attention to dynamism variable
such as growth in various metrics, though the Economist survey include a
couple.

2.6. The focus on static totals versus dynamism tends to reward large,
developed world cities versus rapidly growing or emerging market cities.
In a sense, these ranking are biased in favor of important legacy cities.
2.7. It’s also interesting to see what was included vs. not included in quality of
life type ratings. For Example: items like censorship, media access, the
rule of law, and the environment are listed. But measures of upward social-
economic mobility or income inequality or not.

2.8. Lastly, a number of the rankings suggest a self-consciously elite mindset,

such as shopping and dining options. As with many quality of life surveys,
these seem to orient them towards expatriate executive types rather than
normal folks.

2.9. Looking at theses, I can’t help but think that the criteria were the product if
an iterative process where the results were refined over time. Thus in a
sense the outcomes were likely somewhat pre-determined. That’s not to
say that the game was rigged necessarily. In a sense, global city is like a
obscenity: we know one when we see it, but we don’t necessarily have a
widely agreed upon objective set of criteria to measure it by.

2.10. I sense that these ranking attempt to look at global cities in four basic ways:

a. Advance producer services production mode. This is basically

Sassen’s original definition. I think this one remains particularly
important. Because the skills are specialized and subject to clustering
economics, the cities that concentrate in these functions have a Buffett-
like “wide moat” sustainable competitive advantage in particular very
high value activities. For cities with large concentration of these, those
cities can generate significantly above average economic output and
incomes per worker.

b. Economic Giants. Namely, this is a fairly simple but important view of

that simply measures how big cities are on some metrics like GDP.

c. International Gateway. Measures of the importance of a city in the

international flows of people and goods. Examples would be the airport
and cargo gateway figures.

d. Political and Cultural Hub. An important distinction should perhaps

be made here between hubs that may be large but of primarily national
or regional importance, and those are many media international
significance. For example, there are many media hubs around the
world, but few of them are home to outlets like the BBC that drive the
global conversation.

2.11. There may potential be other ways to slice it as well. The facet that these
various ways of viewing cities can often overlap can confuse things I think.
For example, New York and London score highly on all of these. And there
are surely underlying reasons why they do. Yet trying to sum it all up into
 one overall ranking or score, while making it easy to get press, can end up
obscuring nuance.

3. Global Demography

3.1. In the past 50 years, the world accelerated its transition out of long-term
demographic stability. As infant and child mortality rates fell, population
began to soar. In most countries, this growth led to falling fertility rates.
Although fertility has fallen, the population continues to increase because
of population momentum; it will eventually level off. In the meantime,
demographic change has created a “bulge” generation, which today
appears in many countries as a large working age population.

3.2. This cohort will eventually become a large elderly population, in both
developed and developing countries. Population growth has been the
subject of great debate among economist and demographers. New
evidence suggests that changes in the age structure of population – in
particular, a rising ratio of working-age to non-working-age individuals –
leads to the possibility of more rapid economic growth, via both accounting
and behavioral effects.

3.3. The experiences of east Asia, Ireland and sub-Saharan Africa all serve as
evidence of the effect of the demographic change on economic growth.
The overall implications of population growth for policy lie in the imperative
for investments in health and education, and for sound policies related to
labor, trade and retirement.

3.4. Understanding future trends is essential for the development of good

policy. Demographic projections can be quite reliable, but huge
uncertainties – in the realms of health, changes in human life span,
scientific advances, migration, global warming and wars – make overall
predictions extremely uncertain.

4. Global Migration

4.1. Due to the nature of international migration data, migration is often

conceptualized as a move from an origin to a destination, or from a place
of birth to another destination across international borders. In developed
countries, the idea of migrant as a permanent, or at least long-term mover,
is often institutionalized through flow data that admit people as immigrants
as opposed to those who enter through a variety of non-immigrant or
temporary migration channels

4.2. Thus, migration is often seen as permanent move rather than a complex
series of backward or onward movement. The data omit return or circular
migration as people who are registered in the same place as their place of
birth are “non-migrants” even though they may have spent considerable
 time outside their place of birth. For example, it is estimated that about 40
per cent of English and Welsh migrants to the United States returned back
to their home countries between 1861 and 1913, between 40 and 50
percent of Italian migrants to the United States returned to Italy in the early
twentieth century, and rates of return of migrants from Argentina and Brazil
at the same time, particularly Italians, were similar. (Baines 1991; Nugent,
1992).

4.3. How many of these migrants moved back-and-forth is not known. In more
contemporary studies of internal migration in the developing world, a
circulation between villages and towns appears to exist rather than a
simple movement from rural to urban areas (Hugo,1982; Prothero and
Chapman, 1985; Skeldon, 1990)

4.4. In studies of contemporary international migration to developed countries

high rates of turnover among migrants have been observed. Between 1986
and 1991, some 17 per cent of migrants originating in China, Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region who had moved to Australia had not stay
long enough at their destination to be recorded in the 1991 census and
there was a particularly high attrition rate during the first year after arrival
(Kee and Skeldon, 1994). This particular situation is complicated by the
establishment of homes in destination areas.
References:

Ang, J.M., Zeta, M.T., & Baya, J.W. (2018). The Contemporary World: A Text
Manual for the 21st Century Filipino Student. Mindshapers Co., Inc.

[Link]

[Link]
WP_14.pdf

[Link]
Skeldon_17.[Link]
 Learning Centered and Outcome Based
Activity No. 16
“On Global Population and Mobility”

Name:________________________________ Course/Year:____________________

Direction(s): Travel Write: Write a travel essay on your favorite vacation place. (e.g.
Baguio, Siargao, Camsur, Balisin, El Nido, etc.)

________________________________
(Title)
 Learning Centered and Outcome Based
Activity No. 17
“On Global Population and Mobility”

Name:______________________________ Course/Year:_______________

Direction (s): Picture Travel Blog – Take selfie on your most memorable travel
and write a blog on this unforgettable experience.
 Learning Centered and Outcome Based
Activity No. 18
“On Global Population and Mobility”

Name:_________________________ Course/Year:____________________

Direction (s): Choose your favorite Global City (e.g. New York, Tokyo, London,
Paris, Barcelona, Seoul, etc.). Post a picture of this global city; write a
descriptive essay on this global city

_______________________________
(Title)
 Learning Centered and Outcome Based
Activity No. 19
“On Global Population and Mobility”

Name:___________________________ Course/Year:___________________

Direction (s): Read the lectures on global demography and write a short
position paper on these topic.

______________________________
(Title)