Final Flashcards
(15 cards)
Increasingly, cities around the world aspire to be “global cities”, what does this mean?
- global cities: urban centers that enjoy significant competitive advantages and serve as a node within the globalized economic system
- integrate themselves in the global economy
Why do town planners pursue this goal, and what steps do cities take to attain this status?
- city planners are attempting to make themselves in to nodes rather than hubs
- steps: provide incentives for multinational corporations to come and build there; i.e. Amazon tax cuts and what not in queens
- increase in a desire for a new urban lifestyle; more families are becoming white collar and moving toward city centers while industries move out to the suburbs
- Goldman example: incentives for creating themselves in to a global city; local gov’t are bidding for finance loans and grants, central gov’t JNNRUM world city investment strategy has 11 billion dollars waiting to be invested
How do these patterns affect housing and employment for poor residents in places like Rio de Janeiro or Mumbai?
- housing: pushes poor to the outskirts where they are faced with huge disparities in access to social services
- employment: as multinational corporations come in, the necessities come with them; higher end jobs like lawyers but also the services jobs (which is what most uneducated poor people have and this furthers the gap of the housing inequality)
What has prompted the spread of gated communities in many parts of the world?
- the stark inequalities; those with disposable incomes want more and newer amenities such as gyms and other former public spaces
- also leads to increase in crimes of desperation or petty crimes so gated communities offer protection
What impact does this pattern have on the provision of public services, and on interactions between different groups within the city?
- allows those living in gated communities to have “private” public spaces and services which only those who can afford to live there attend, leading to a removal of interaction with the lower income families and makes them unaware of disparities
Why might these patterns be especially common in “emergent” global cities, like Sao Paulo?
- they spring up much faster
How might these patterns affect local policy-makers perspectives?
- demonizes those living in poorer areas; says crime is coming straight from them rather than the system of oppression and inequality in place that leads to acts of petty and desperate crimes being committed
- policy makers might not hear from the poorer constituents and the opinions from the gated communities are unaware of the economic disparities that occur
Who are the residents of Dharavi, and what distinguishes this area from wealthier neighborhoods nearby?
I.E; Slummin’ It
- residents of Dharavi are the poor, lower class citizens who have been literally and metaphorically pushed to the outskirts or the periphery
- difference: drast economic inequalites and differences in access to social services like proper sewage or constant access to water
Why is the city promoting a new development scheme, and where does the government expect residents to move?
- promotion of the space for commercial lease; especially in recent years for a green city in hopes that it will be a place that it can generate more revenue
- the government subsidized high rise housing communities
What benefits and problems does this scheme seem likely to create?
- Benefits: supposedly offering them larger and nicer homes; will benefit mostly the rich who will profit off of the development
- Problems: Dharavi is 93% employed in the informal sector (i.e. in the factories, recycling places, and bakeries) that exist within the community, if the place is taken out those jobs will be lost, there is no guarantee that there will be enough government subsidized housing; the high rise buildings encourage isolation rather than the community they have lived in for a very long time
Rodgers argues that Central America’s urban gangs arose in an urban context marked by stark inequalities, both in terms of job opportunities for those who are poor or less educated, and in terms of policing strategies, which treat rich and poor neighborhoods differently. What evidence supports this argument?
Rodgers argument:
- changing forms of urban spatial organization in Central America
- heavy handed mano duras response to gangs (Iron Fist)
- dysotopian evolutionary trajectory of gangs
Evidence:
- “slum wars of the 21st century”
- it’s not the return from America bringing gangs in but those constantly ostracized by a globalizing economy are finding the only way to fit in is to join gangs as they provided community and economic opportunity as liberalized export oriented manufacturing has become more popular but is less labor intensive
- Nicaragua: 76-35% in its traditional agricultural and mineral productive activities and exports
- Managua: escalation of gang violence from mortars to Ak’s: pandillas formerly seen as protecting their neighborhood from other pandillas but now are more competitive as the available resources are becoming more scarce and they have to look out for themselves
- Disembedding: creation and linkage of elite communities has made the crime limited to the slums and Nicaragua attempts to list the country as the safest to travel to in SA because of this
- Urbicide
What kind of policies might change these dynamics?
- removal of harsh policing
- more job training offered
- finding ways to control how city planning occurs
Why do many countries, including the Philippines, promote circular migration?
- post Washington consensus, structural adjustment programs lead to a devaluation of currency but countries still had to pay of loans, so they found they had to exploit their comparative advantages
- for countries like Mexico and the Philippines this happens to be an able bodied workforce
What do they hope to gain, and why do so many people sign up to work as guestworkers?
- remittances: Rodriguez article: 2008; 16 million dollars were funneled in to the Filipino economy from remittances
- portraying guestworkers as the “new national heroes”; they’re also offered scholarships for their children and training programs within the country
What are some of the dilemmas created by communities’ increased dependence on migrants’ remittances?
- instances of inability to protect their workers against instances of worker violence (as they risk speaking up but losing their view as a able bodied, easy to work with workforce once the country speaks up on behalf of their people)
- remittances are not able to be directly used for development projects as it goes to the families rather than directly to the government
