Espaces Et Echanges (document en anglais): Quel impact les villes mondiales ont-elles sur la vie quotidienne des gens?

Spaces and exchanges

I am going to talk about the idea of Spaces and exchanges This notion deals with the geographical and symbolic areas that all societies occupy and the interactions between men and different societies. Our world is built on the exploration and conquest of new spaces. The different cultural, economic, sociological and language interactions have shaped and characterised our modern-day world.

This year in class we studied several documents about this notion and in particular about global cities.In order to illustrate this notion I have chosen to talk about two differents global cities : London and Singapore and we will attempt to answer the following question : What impact do global cities have on the people' everyday lives ?

The first part will talk about the positive aspect on people's everyday lives, the second about the negative aspect and the thirs part about the future of global cities.

a)First of all cities have a positive aspect on people's everyday lives. Indeed, when you live in a global city, there is an important cultural diversity.. In class, we’ve learned that in London, 37% of the population is non-white and in a bargraph from yearbook of statistics singapore we saw that the ethnic composition of resident population was diversified with chinese, malay,indian and other people from usa and europe. Therefore there is great cultural diversity in these global cities Diversity which is a very healthy thing because it allows people to better understand each other and peace and prosperity are allowed to thrive

b)Moreover as we saw on a graph of global cities in the world today with its key that London and Singapore contains a lot of businness activity and cultural expererience. Big cities are full of jobs and there are lots of activities as museums, theatres, cinemas, major sporting events as the olympics in london in 2012 or diverse culinary establishments with delicious food as the renowned singapore food. But Beneath the modern buildings and apparent prosperity, global cities also suffer from a number of problems.

a) Many global cities suffer from congestion. Indeed, too much people mean too much pollution. We worked on a photografy from the guardian wich showed group of city workers wearing mask against the heavy smog . In fact In 1952, in London, the month of December had started with a very cold weather. The population responded by burning even more coal to heat their homes. The result was The Great Yellow Smog, a thick fog that plunged everyone in the city in a total darkness. Modern researches have put the death toll closer to 12.000 because of the pollution of the smog, the aggressions, the murders and even the accidents. It was a dark period and infortunately, pollution is present in each big cities nowadays.

b)We can also talk about Singapore. On the one hand, we showed that the city has many good aspects, but on the other hand Singapore hasn’t any common culture, so the population isn't so united. On top of that, it hasn’t natural resources as gas or oil. Singapore has too many rules and as a consequence, it's a very controlled society, were there are no real individual freedom and no real creativity as it is implied in a article from David Lamb in smithsonian Magazine. Too much security means less liberty.

There are also problems with

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