Analyse the relationships of dominance and dependence between world cities and other urban centres.
With the globalisation process and the growth of the economic there has been the subsequent growth of “world cities”. World Cites are large cities that has out stripped its national urban network and become part of an international global system; centres of political power, world trade and communications, leaders in the banking and finance, stage world entertainment and sporting spectacles, the headquarters of NGO’s and tourist meccas. World Cities form a global urban network to organise this process. Therefore a new set of relationships have developed between those dominant world cities which organise the global economy and those of lesser importance in this organisation. These have also been changed relationships between world cities and other urban centres like Mega Cities, national and regional centres and small towns.
The concept of dominance and dependence between cities developed from the work of Christaller, a German geographer of the early 20th century. He believed that settlements vary in size and spacing depending on the size of the hinterland that they serve. He noted that in any region there are a large number of smaller centres with small hinterlands and fewer larger centres with larger hinterlands. He also so developed the idea of a hierarchy of cities based on the functions of these cities. The highest order centres would thus provide the most complex functions (including banking, legal services, advertising) and would have a large sphere of influence in terms of politics, trade, communication, finance and technology. On the other hand the smaller centres with small hinterlands would only provide simple service functions like retailing, thus making them dependent on the large urban centres. The higher order centres thus dominate over the lower centres in terms of economic, political and cultural influence. Diagram 1 illustrates this...