Global City, An Urban Centre That Enjoys Significant Competitive Advantages and That Serves As A
Global City, An Urban Centre That Enjoys Significant Competitive Advantages and That Serves As A
Global City, An Urban Centre That Enjoys Significant Competitive Advantages and That Serves As A
hub within a globalized economic system. The term has its origins in research on cities carried
out during the 1980s, which examined the common characteristics of the world’s most
important cities. However, with increased attention being paid to processes
of globalization during subsequent years, these world cities came to be known as global cities.
Linked with globalization was the idea of spatial reorganization and the hypothesis that cities
were becoming key loci within global networks of production, finance, and telecommunications.
In some formulations of the global city thesis, then, such cities are seen as the building blocks of
globalization. Simultaneously, these cities were becoming newly privileged sites of local politics
within the context of a broader project to reconfigure state institutions.
Early research on global cities concentrated on key urban centres such as London, New York
City, and Tokyo. With time, however, research has been completed on emerging global cities
outside of this triad, such as Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Houston, Los Angeles, Mexico
City, Paris, São Paulo, Sydney, and Zürich. Such cities are said to knit together to form a global
city network serving the requirements of transnational capital across broad swathes of territory.
The rise of global cities has been linked with two globalization-related trends: first, the
expansion of the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) in global production patterns and,
second, the decline of mass production along Fordist lines and the concomitant rise of flexible
production centred within urban areas. These two trends explain the emergence of networks of
certain cities serving the financial and service requirements of TNCs while other cities suffer the
consequences of deindustrialization and fail to become “global.” Global cities are those that
therefore become effective command-and-coordination posts for TNCs within a globalizing
world economy. Such cities have also assumed a governance role at the local scale and within
wider configurations of what some commentators have termed the “glocalization” of state
institutions. This refers to processes in which certain national state functions of organization
and administration have been devolved to the local scale. An example of this would be London.
Since the 1980s London has consolidated its position as a global banking and financial centre,
de-linked from the national economy.
Global cities are also said to share many of the same characteristics because of their
connectedness and shared experiences of globalization. They all exhibit clear signs of
deindustrialization. They possess the concentration of financial and service industries within
their spatial boundaries, as well as the concentration of large pools of labour. On the downside,
many also share experiences of class and ethnic conflict. They often have segmented labour
markets in which employees of key industries enjoy well-paid and consumerist lifestyles while a
lower stratum of workers staffs less well-paid, more precarious, and less attractive positions
within the urban economy. It has been further argued that the promotion of global cities runs
the risk of economically marginalizing nonurban populations within the national economy.
Although global cities are interconnected, embedded as they are in global production and
financial networks, they are also locked into competition with one another to command
increasing resources and to attract capital. To successfully compete, local governments have
been keen to promote their cities as global. Such cities have been marketed as “entrepreneurial”
centres, sites of innovation in the knowledge economy, and as being rich with cultural capital.
PROS OF NCC
- The city is expected to be the country’s first smart, resilient and green metropolis. It aims
to address growing environmental problems caused by climate change, by being disaster
resilient in a region that has been heavily impacted by natural disasters. New Clark City
offers a unique opportunity to showcase good and sustainable urban planning in the
Philippines by enhancing public space availability, encouraging the use of non-motorized
ways of transport and the creation of mixed use and inclusive developments.
- It can also serve as a sports academy since the New Clark City Sports Hub located within
the National Government Administrative Center contains an athletes' village, an aquatics
center and a 20,000-seater athletics stadium.
- For two consecutive years, TSU was able to use the NCC Sports Hub for the State Colleges
and Universities Athletic Association Region III (SCUAA III) 2018 and 2019.
CONS OF NCC
- Building such a large city is already an ambitious task, but the Philippines have the
additional challenge of managing its exposure to many different types of natural
disasters, from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, to typhoons and flooding.
- Also, the future development shows a lack of affordable housing provision, mixed-use
planning and walkable neighborhoods, adequate streets and lack of baseline data upon
which to base strategic planning.
- The city proposes a development that is not linked to population growth and lacks
strategy on how new public infrastructure will match the needs of the new residents in
the city. There is also ambiguity of how the new development will integrate the existing
population living in the planned area for development.