Space And Exchanges

SPACE AND EXCHANGES

I am going to talk about the notion of space and exchanges. First of all, I’d like to give a definition of what is an exchange:

An exchange is the act of giving or receiving something in substitution for something else. Nowadays, these exchanges can take several forms: economic, social or cultural. The notion deals with the geographical and symbolic areas that societies occupy and the interactions between men coming from these different societies. We studied in class the definition of a global city: a global city is a very big city with millions inhabitants. It's a mega city where several people commute and exchange, it's also a multicultural city where different people live together. Living in a big city shows advantages but also lots of drawbacks, so I will answer, at the end of my presentation, to my problematic: What impact do global cities have on people’s everyday life?

In order to illustrate the notion, I have chosen two documents: the first one is about London, a global city during the 19th century, and the second treats about Singapore, the city where nothing is permitted. I have chosen these two documents because I think they illustrate some points of the living situation in a big city.

To live in a glob al city presents a lots of advantages: London is one of the most influent city in the world, living in the England’s capital can be very benefice, to find a job is not complicated, all activities are concentrated in a small space, you don’t have to drive km to find a specific shop, everybody have an access to education and to culture. The city is very accessible with the different common transports

Singapore is seen like a middle checkpoint by lots of students in the world. It is a city full of future where a few possibilities are open to you. Moreover, big cities include very diversify populations, with a huge diversity, Singapore is a great example of these cultural differences: between Asian people, European people and many other ethnics, it presents many categories of people coming from all over the world, like it’s said in the document: Singapore swing where the author describes European and Asian people drinking in a bar. We also saw that Singapore in the cleanest and the safest city in the world, you can walk safe at night, feel quiet and do not risk to be aggressed in the public and crowded places like in other megacities.

But life in these cities is not always as easy as it looks.

We worked a document entitled in the eyes of Dickens to describe the city of London during the Industrial Revolution. The document describes people crossing the Bridge by foot on their way home in London. The narrator shows the impact of bad weather pollution and overcrowding, we can have a gloomy vision of London at the turn of the 20th century. We also studied a text called the «drawbacks of big cities», it’s about the Great Smog in 1952, many people died due to this smog during the Christmas shopping season.

This document shows a real drawback of living in a big city: the pollution is inevitable between the cars, the factories all around the cities and lots of other polluting sources. This affected all the inhabitants of the city, who couldn’t do their everyday activities and obligations.

In the

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