Spaces And Exchanf=ges

« The Global City is one that tangibly influences global affairs in terms of politics, culture, and various socio-economic means » according to Saskia Sassen, a Dutch-American sociologist distinguished for her analyses of globalization and international human migration in her work The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Generally speaking, we all hear a lot of talks these days about so-called global cities. However, what is exactly a global city? People tend to refer to some general features when talking about these cities. First of all, a world city is commonly considered to be an important node in the global economic system. Besides, they are home to major stock exchanges and indexes, home to world-renowned historical and cultural monuments, and headquarter of several multinational corporations. As you can assume, this is quite a perfect blend of items that we have to define thoroughly. Globalization is kind of a quip we like to use loosely and largely and the term is always up for debate. What impact do globalization have on big cities and on people’s everyday lives? In order to answer to the question, we are going to review the trademarks of the world centers through London, Beijing, Paris and New York. Thereafter, we’ll focus on a modern and dynamic new global city, « Toronto the Good ».

Quite meaningfully, we must admit that the majority of the global cities are located in rich, prosperous and developed countries, more precisely in the Northern hemisphere. Only recently, in developing country as well, big cities are expanding and growing up, more and more, as Beijing which gathers approximately 21 150 000 inhabitants. Broadly speaking, global cities are postindustrial sites, where innovations in corporate services and finance have been integral to the recent restructuring of the world-economy, now widely known as globalization. Cities, nowadays, are linked to each other as nodes in a networked world. That’s why people easily tend to speak about world centers, without knowing exactly what they are composed of. The key point is that many services, both directly for consumers and for firms, are by no-means so ubiquitous and for S. Sassen they provide a limited number of leading cities. No less important is that «global city» status is considered to be beneficial and desired. That’s why many groups have tried to classify and rank which cities are seen as world cities or non-world cities. Let’s discover what their signatures are. Global Cities have a huge role on the domination of the trade and the economy above a large surrounding area. They are centers of new ideas and innovation in business, economics, culture and politics, like New York City where sits the United Nations or Paris worldwide known for its charm, and majestic monument like Louvre Museum, one of the world’s largest museum. As well, they are well-known to have a large number of residents employed in the services and information sectors as London which welcomed The City and Canary Wharf, the major business districts (CBD) in London. World centers appear to be home to high-quality educational institutions, including renowned universities, as Harvard in the Big Apple, international student attendance and, needless to say, research facilities. Eventually, they are decision-making power at a global level.

To summarize, they drive globalization and turned our world into a global village. As time goes by, new big cities established themselves, and now are set to be in the spotlights.

As a matter of fact, cities, like Toronto, utterly are connected up with the whole global village and try to become key centers. I am going to put the emphasis on this amazing Canadian

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