Spaces and Exchanges : What impact do global cities have on people’s everyday lives?

Spaces and Exchanges

I’m going to speak about the notion of spaces and exchanges introducing it through the theme of global cities.

Space: can be real or virtual, it’s a place where people and things who surround us evolve in community or not, they are very many different spaces.

Exchange: An exchange is an act of giving one thing and receiving another one whatever this “thing” may be.

To do so, I will try and answer the following question: «What impact do global cities have on people’s everyday lives? ».

Global cities are a good example of spaces for illustrate this notion.

Global city: very big city where concentrate millions of people from various origins, many economics activities, lot of cultural venues and sometime some political bodies.

First of all, London was a homogeneous white-British city until the end of the World War II.

Since then, the population has changed quite a lot. Back in the 1960s most people did not even talk to people who were of a different colour.

Even in the 1980s, there was still quite a lot of racism. Since then, the situation has changed a lot. People have started developing relationships with people from different ethnic origins. Today, more than a third of London’s inhabitants were born abroad, so it has really become a multicultural city. Many foreign students come to London to study and return to their home countries once they have graduated.

Then, I am going to talk about another example of global cities, as Singapore. Formerly, it had been a British colony.

5M residents of whom almost the third are foreigners. Singapore Malay means “The Lion City”, it is a powerful nation owing to its high income and quality education. Moreover, it attracts workers from all over the world with its health care and public services. In a nutshell, Singapore is an economic powerhouse. On the over hand, the city lacks natural resources, there is no oil, no gas, which makes it vulnerable. It's forbidden to do many things in Singapore like using chewing gum, smoking or picking flowers, indeed it’s a «fine» city because if people don't respect the law, they are finned of 1,000 dollars and we can say that it's a little excessive. So, the city is very strict and the individual's freedom are limited. We can say that global cities likes Singapore wants to promote and respect the environment with the respect of the laws.

At last, we can talk about the political bodies in a global city. New York is the city where sit the headquarter of United Nation and Paris the headquarter of UNESCO. Moreover, it's always in the global cities that international conferences take place.

To conclude, we can say that global cities has brought a wealth of culture, linguistic and ethnic diversity and presents advantages but also drawbacks. However, Global cities have to solve problems in terms of pollution. More and more cities pollute the environment and generate global warming. However, cities try to find solution to reduce their pollution and carbon print to live in a better world. Singapore and London are two examples of global cities and millions exchange and people take place.

...