Globalization, initially championed as a move towards economic progress by reducing trade barriers and integrating the disparate economies of the world, has resulted in both positive and negative effects for the world’s diverse urban and rural spheres. Although economic integration and its resulting spread of beliefs, values and behaviours – the three major components of culture, according to the Society for American Archaeology[1] – have been identified as the major effects of globalization, perhaps the most impressive effect of globalization is the rapid urbanization that has swept through developing and developed states alike.
Globalization has caused urbanization to unfold similarly in different countries. Links between cities, once merely dusty roads or snaking railroad tracks and now airline routes and satellite relay stations, have strengthened due to advancing technology and economic amalgamation. As a result, cities such as Los Angeles, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg (Gauteng), Cairo, Mumbai, Jakarta, and Shanghai have all rapidly grown from urban centres that were home to mere hundreds of thousands or a couple of million inhabitants to megacities with populations well over 8 million.[2]
In many megacities, newly added urban extensions and developments have resulted in similar urban characteristics: sprawl extends from the often abandoned CBD into the outlying areas that were once rural settings; gated communities have been built within commuting distance from the financial districts and are designed to serve as ‘cities within cities’ for their elite inhabitants[3]; “corridors of wealth” have sprung up between gated communities and financial districts[4]; the poor have been relegated to peripheral (or in some settings, abandoned central), unsuitable, and often un-serviced locations; and lastly, many services in the megacities are privatized as the NeoLiberal Institutional economic thought behind globalization has discouraged heavy government subsidies and public expenditure[5]. In fact, the similarities in urbanization between most of the world’s rapidly expanding cities allow one to “...talk meaningfully [about]...a ‘global city’ whose presence [is] felt almost everywhere.”[6]
Although Magnusson refers to a cosmopolitan ‘global city’ presence and the ensuing dissemination of technologies, economies and a shift from an agrarian life to an urban industrial one, the same ‘global city’ presence resulted in privatizations of services, fragmentation of society, and growing disparity between rich and poor. The result is that both globalization and globalization’s key feature – urbanization – have heightened the division between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ – both in the form of state and individual actors. Since urbanization has cast the individual as the actor, it has created a “new urban geography” in most states – pitting urbanity’s few rich consumers against a mass of disadvantaged and unfortunate persons.[7]
Although urbanization has been largely detrimental to large portions of the globe’s population, the ‘global city’ effect has led to an unstoppable cultural exchange and integration. As traditional livelihoods are lost and ethnic customs abandoned – described in Jeremy Seabrook’s account of the destruction of Malaysia’s fishing people[8] – so too, new global identities and cultures (or, in some cases, subcultures) emerge. Urban youth culture has surfaced across continents as television shows, music channels, and sports are made accessible through satellite TV, radio, and the internet. Hip-hop music, breakdance, skateboarding, and reality shows have been translated, adopted, and re-broadcasted by French, Ghanaian, Indian, Korean, and American media sources.
Not only is urban-based youth culture a product of the dominance of Western culture and its reach through the process of globalization, but as diverse urban youth embrace a similar culture, elements of youth culture are used to convey country or culture-specific experiences. MC Solaar was one of the first immigrant rappers to adopt the hip-hop music culture that emanated from poor American urban centres and incorporate immigrant experiences into the beginnings of ‘French Rap’. Another example is that of Las Krudas, a Cuban lesbian hip-hop group that “...have used the hip-hop community as a space to address issues like lesbian sexuality and other experiences of Cuban women that aren't addressed in other areas of the public sphere.”[9]
Urbanization, with its youth culture, privatized social and municipal services, increased prosperity and crippling poverty, and ethnic and social tensions, is a microcosm of the phenomenon of globalization that is rapidly altering the way that states and their inhabitants act in the contexts of international relations, international economic interaction, global cultural integration and expression, and international challenges. Perhaps because urbanization has indeed transformed developed and developing cities alike, Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Global Village’ label[10] – though not chiefly its overly negative technological connotation – is the best way to explain what is happening to the urban centres of the world under the current force of globalization’s most remarkable feature: urbanization.
[1] ___, “Archaeological Terms,” Teaching Archaeology, Society for American Archaeology, http://www.saa.org/publications/sampler/terms.html.
[2]
[3] Pedro Pirez, “
[4] Ibid., 149.
[5]
[6] Warren Magnusson, “Social Movements and the Global City,” Millenium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1994): 627.
[7] Jorge Wilheim, “Urbanization and Globalization,” Le Courrier de l’UNESCO (June, 1996): 32, http://www.unesco.org/courier/1999_06/uk/dossier/intro18.htm.
[8] Jeremy Seabrook, In the Cities of the South: Scenes from a Developing World (London: Verso, 1996), 16-17.
[9] Margaux Joffe, “As Free as the Words of a Poem: Las Krudas and the Cuban Hip-Hop Movement,” Monthly Review Magazine, 13/02/06, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/joffe130206.html.
[10] ___, “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy Magazine, March, 1969, http://www.columbia.edu/~log2/mediablogs/McLuhanPBinterview.htm.
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