Spaces and Exchanges: the global cities

1. Spaces and Exchanges

1. introduction

I am going to talk about the notion of Spaces and Exchanges.

First of all I would like to give you a definition of this spaces and exchanges notion.

An exchange is an act of giving and receiving something else in return.

Nowadays these exchanges can take several forms :

• economic – goods and work exchanges
• cultural – ideas, information and education exchanges, very easy now thanks to the Internet
• movement of people – immigration and student exchanges

With the improvements in technology and communication our modern world seems to be a smaller place now.

All these interactions have an impact, sometimes positive, sometimes negative.

In order to illustrate this notion, I propose to take as an example the global cities.

Indeed, today our world is interconnected and has become a sort of global village in which global cities play the role of communication hubs.

Global cities are not a completely new phenomenon : London is of international importance a for long time now. But new cities have emerged, such as Singapore, the lion-city in Malay.

So now let's try to answer the question :

what impact do these global cities have on people's everyday lives ?

Of course, global cities have many advantages.

If we look at Singapore, it is built on a rich cultural diversity and it is very easy to access to various cultures.

As mentioned by David Lamb in his article Singapore Swing, the priority for the governement was to have a good integration of the various ethnic groups: Chineese, Indian and Malay. Some quota exists in all public housing in order to mix the different communities. 

We have this ethnic diversity also in London. There are many nationalities living here and more than 300 langages spoken.

For sure, this diversity helps people to understand each other.

Singapore have also invested in a world-class education system in order to garantee its prosperity.

Singapore accepted the fact that it was a British colony and English was made one of the four official languages and it is now the most used in the country, for education, administration and business.  

Global cities have market-places with an international scope.

Singapore becames THE hub of trade finance and transportation in Asia.

All the choices made by Singapore bring prosperity and great success.

In the lion-city also we can notice, there is no graffiti, the streets are very clean and crime's rate is one of the lowest in the world.

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