G4 Sustainable cities 4.1How can cities throughout the world be classified? Size Rate of growth Level of development

GaWC Hierarchy (Taylor 2004) A. ALPHA WORLD CITIES 12: LONDON, Paris, New York, Tokyo 10: Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Milan, Singapore B. BETA WORLD CITIES 9: San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto, Zürich 8: Brussels, Madrid, Mexico City, São Paulo 7: Moscow, Seoul European cities in italics U.K. cities CAPITALISED

The GaWC Hierarchy (ctd.) C. GAMMA WORLD CITIES 6: Amsterdam, Boston, Caracas, Dallas, Düsseldorf, Geneva, Houston, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Melbourne, Osaka, Prague, Santiago, Taipei, Washington 5: Bangkok, Beijing, Rome, Stockholm, Warsaw 4: Atlanta, Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Miami, Minneapolis, Montreal, München, Shanghai

The GaWC Hierarchy (ctd.) D. EVIDENCE OF WORLD CITY FORMATION Di Relatively strong evidence 3: Auckland, Dublin, Helsinki, Luxembourg, Lyon, Mumbai, New Delhi, Philadelphia, Rio de Janeiro, Tel Aviv, Wien Dii Some evidence 2: Abu Dhabi, Almaty, Athens, BIRMINGHAM, Bogota, Bratislava, Brisbane, Bucharest, Cairo, Cleveland, Köln, Detroit, Dubai, Ho Chi Minh City, Kiev, Lima, Lisbon, MANCHESTER, Montevideo, Oslo, Rotterdam, Riyadh, Seattle, Stuttgart, Den Haag, Vancouver

UK Cities in Europe and the World: Latest GaWC Evidence (1)

UK Cities in Europe and the World: Latest GaWC Evidence (2)

4.2What pressures currently confront cities and how are they changing them? Transport and communications Disparities in wealth Areal extent Quality of the environment

Cities of extremes Historically, inequality has been a central feature of cities all along. Even the walled cities of the medieval era (where the rich and poor and various ethnicities lived side by side) were marked by considerable hierarchy. Yet the modern era transformed the cities in a more fundamental way. Even though modernity had already fractured cities along class-spatial divide, the more recent neo-liberal capitalist globalization is generating novel types of inequality and exclusion. Today’s cities have become the mirror image of the late modernity itself as spaces of extremes—of immense wealth and poverty; comfort and misery, cosmopolitanism and communalism, community and alienation, massive recreation and boredom, hygiene and disease; hope and despair. In the global South, the collapse of populist/socialist states along with their (minimalist) distributive justice have led to the privatization of, and thus disparity in access to everyday necessities—drinking water, clean air, schools, clinics, neighborhoods, streets, police, and physical safety, rendering millions of ‘unfortunate’ city-zens, the poor, as ‘outsiders’, splitting the cities into divergent economic and cultural universes.

The new economic restructuring-- for instance, the shift from manufacturing to services and expanding informalization have made public spaces, streets, a prime locale of livelihood, to do business and even live; so that an emerging ‘right to streets’ is challenging the prerogative of the modern states to control the public space. Or, the gentrification of city centers to accommodate globalized enterprises tends to push scores of middle class families (state employees, teachers, and professionals) to live the life of the poor in the expanding “planet of slums’. Here ‘fundamentalism’ (in its secular populist or religious variants) flourishes on the ruins of failed socialist and secular liberal ideologies. Along with the real and imagined danger of crime and ‘extremism’, invariably associated with these “un-civil societies” (slums) has come the flight of the rich into the safe havens of the private cities, the gated communities.

Thus, with so many real and subjective “check-points” and barriers, cities cease to be spaces of flaneure, or free flow of inhabitants in the urban expanse. The privatization of streets and neighborhoods means that ‘outsiders’ lose their access to these places. Meanwhile the threat of real and imagined crime and violence restricts the movement of the rich as well as the ordinary people, notably women, in many areas of their cities. How can one account systematically for the dynamics of these interrelated processes? What does the neo-liberal urbanity tell us about urban citizenship, about who owns, manages, controls, benefits from, and have access to the cities, when many of the agents of change (e.g. global capital) are not even residents of these cities ? What are the implications of these new developments for creating a ‘livable city’?