Metropolization in the Age of Knowledge Economy: Is it Building Bridges or Building Walls?
Monika Chomątowska
Abstract
The aim of the article is to discuss the assumption that development of metropolises can be harmful for their neighboring areas. Unfortunately, some governments and international organizations support the development of the metropolis, claiming it is the future of the world. Metropolization is considered the best proposition for the spatial development to accommodate the knowledge economy. As a result, one witnesses the process of the broad migration to the metropolises, especially by young people, causing the depopulation of rural areas, and the widening of the gap between metropolises and the countryside. Such migration and visible social exclusion seem to afflict both rural and metropolitan populations.
What has evolved in the big cities is a social underclass that is noticeable especially in Asia, Africa and South America. Sometimes one hears about green metropolises, but such dreams cannot come true in poor countries. In Poland, the support for big cities and multiplication of the problems outside the centers is noticeable. The Polish government believes that metropolises will stimulate the growth of the rural areas but, in fact, one observes a brain drain. This author suggests that governments should decide if they support metropolises or want to create a more balanced space development to diminish social differences and provide all citizens with the equal opportunity for personal development without a coercion of migration to a metropolis. Smaller towns or cities have a positive influence on the countryside, however, the diffusion effects of metropolises seems to be a beautiful fairy tale and metropolises are a quasi–world.
Keywords: Metropolization, Sustainable development, Environment, Emigration, Slums, Spatial development.
Introduction
Ecology is more than nature. When we consider ecology in its wider sense, that is to say, people and their environment, we should include dimensions such as natural, social, economic, and spiritual in our discussions of environments in which we live. Nowadays people spent less time being close to nature. Instead, they tend to crowd themselves in concrete, glass and metal prisons called metropolises. These super-size cities deny the people of any permanent contact with nature. Such a contact is limited to the time of vacations or occasional jogging. Is this a desirable or a profitable arrangement for us? As anything else, development of big cities has advantages and disadvantages. This author wants to debate the very idea of the spatial development based on the thesis that metropolises help create positive changes in the economic environment of the people.
It is argued that in the times of globalization and knowledge economy where the emphasis is on the intellectual capital instead of material resources, the most practical approach is to support the flourishing of the bigger cities with better-developed regions, i.e., metropolises that would serve as the engines for development. This notion is rooted in the polarization–diffusion theory of spatial development. Such a model suggests that supporting metropolises and the economically strongest cities and regions will eventually improve living standards for the people in the rural areas. The regional surroundings should reach the higher level because of the long–term diffusion mechanisms and interactions between the developed areas and their neighborhood. Malisiewicz, (2013) demonstrates the inadequacy of that model in the development of the metropolitan cities.
G. Myrdal in his theory of regional development (Churski, n.d.) noticed the existence of development pools, where industrial activity was often concentrated. Such places were characterized by faster economic growth profiting from the economy of scale and brain drain, thus widening the regional differences and throwing rural areas into stagnation.).
Myrdal has named two possible effects connected with the existence of development pools: spread or positive effects of the metropolis directed outside the development pool, and backwash or negative effects connected with the outflow of the human capital from the rural area to the development pool. Others have suggested that
(1) the expansion of development pools and diffusion processes have a much stronger influence on the rural areas than polarization effects,
(2) functional connections determine the positive or negative effects of the urbanization process,
(3) the hierarchic differences among growth areas play an important role in the possible diffusion,
(4) the positive or negative effects of the polarization model are connected with the socioeconomic situation of the rural areas,
(5) the endogenous resources in peripheral areas have to be brought into play for their optimal use to prevent their divergence and dependence from growth areas and give a chance for their independent progress,
(6) the existence of the cheap labor in the growth of peripheral areas stimulates its development and
(7) the public economic policy may diminish the negative effects of polarization and create the functional connections between stagnation and growth regions (Churski, n.d.).
In principle, all of the above theories point to the possible appearance of the positive and negative effects of the spatial polarization. If a state accepts the polarization–diffusion model, it presumes that diffusion will occur and that development will spill out on to the less developed regions. Many governments, as well as a recent by the World Bank, sha