Mega City Mumbai

There are several World Cities that are classified as being of supreme importance to the entire planet. Washington, New York, and Los Angeles are good examples. Another world city is Chicago, often referred to as the Windy City. It is a place where people love their sports, outdoors, and cars. It is a unique place with some of the tallest buildings in the world, a thriving arts community, some of the most beautiful beaches, and other areas in the entire city.

It is only natural then that when people want to talk Chicago, they group with others who have an interest in discussing the Windy City, its sports, cars and politics. However, finding those people can be difficult, unless you just want to stand around the streets and talk to people about this particular city.

Some people have attempted to find groups through churches or organizations that will advertise at either coffee shops or the local library. The ones that have been able to know where to look on the Internet have been able to really dig deep into the events that are part of the deep Chicago culture. This has been even more profound with the Windy City being considered as both a transitional city from the Eastern and the Western United States, and also as a global hub to all over the United States and also the European Union. The global hub is one thing that only two cities in the Central United States can truly claim, Atlanta and Chicago.

With the many cultural groups and ethnic oriented organizations, Chicago has developed a lasting need for those that are willing to build a city infrastructure that can provide not just information on the city, but also on the many options that a person can have in this metropolis and the respective Chicago community.

Despite not being one of the mega-cities of the world, Chicago has a strong base in sports, industry, and also in various world consumer bases. Unlike many larger cities, Chicago has proven that a large city can develop a personality and not sell itself to the corporate domination. The one irony in this though is the depth of topics that can arise in the individual aspects of the Chicago community. It is truly one of the few cities that have shown a unity and also a type of tension that can about only in well-formulated words.

In the sports world alone, there are many that are discussing the Windy City and its magnitude of teams. As one of the few cities to have had sports dynasties and also hard luck cases, it is one that has brought forth a huge level of attention in the national and global media.

With the importance that the virtual world has taken in the world, it is no surprise that many of these topics have surfaced in many forms. Whether it is the professional sports that have made a blockbuster trade or a scandal of a political leader, few cities have been able to compete with Chicago in the media limelight.

To truly know any location a person really needs to speak to the individuals of the place. This is where many of the social gatherings on the Internet have developed a number of focal points for the many members of the Chicago community and also those that have traveled through this majestic city.

After the detailed media coverage that surrounded the Beijing Olympics highlighted the dubious effect that a highly populated nation can have on the world's environment, some of the earth's major cities are expected to come under the microscope with regards to their CO2 emissions policies. As population hubs, they represent more extreme examples of the human effect on the earth's environment.

Indeed Beijing alone was registered with an estimated population of 12.8m in 2007, and some of the world's other mega cities register more highly still; Tokyo, with its agglomerations Yokohama, Kawasaki and Saitama included, marked a total population of 33.6m, and Seoul, Mexico City and New York all have respective agglomerate populations of 23.4m, 22.4m and 21.9m respectively.

Beijing, then, has more than half the population as a city in its own right as New York has with its agglomerations Newark and Paterson, which is why its environmental and CO2 emissions policy was so heavily reported during the Olympics as a perfect case in point for the effect of mega cities on climate change, CO2 emissions and global warming.

Why, though, are mega cities so important to the problem of climate change? First, they are useful and practical when we are analysing the debate; with large populations, the more extreme results that they produce can be seen as a microcosm of effects in the world at large, making investigation of them fruitful and pertinent. Second, their investigation is warranted based on the fact that - as mega cities with large populations - they are some of the highest contributors to world CO2 emission levels, meaning that climate change and CO2 emissions cannot be separated from the growth of mega cities; the two concepts are interdependent.

A third, perhaps less pivotal but still important factor, is the prevalence of mega cities as cultural leaders. Cities like New York, Tokyo or Beijing are in many ways the 'crowning glory' of human society; population in such cities grow because they have the benefit of government spending and private investment, so that they are often the cities with the most impressive technological or social advances, and are often indeed the places where new concepts and initiatives are piloted. That status makes them some of the places on which new environmental policy might wish to be tested. As they contribute to CO2 emissions, it seems, they are looking to limit them.

Mega cities, then, have a paradoxical relationship with the environment;as centres of excellence, populations have flocked to them, and as cities they have flourished. But as culture and economy has grown, and as populations have grown with them, mega cities have naturally become some of the world's biggest polluters; with CO2 emissions being performed almost solely by humans, and populations in mega cities growing as these mega cities improve, they cannot fail to contribute to growing concerns of over climate change.

So the mega city is very much the keeper of a double edged sword. They at once represent the brilliance of human endeavour, in architecture, arts and technology - including, for example, the most recent Olympic games - but they also show how destructive the genius of the collective human mind can be; as mega cities grow, for that relationship to be overturned, we will perhaps have to think of a new set of terms for the achievement of brilliance.