“To understand the most important characteristics of a society, one must study its major cities.”Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. I

New York of United States, Tokyo of Japan, Seoul of South Korea, and Beijing of China: All society, all nations around the globe have their the-most-representative, major cities. Some of them are capitals, and some of them are not. People around the world visit these cities to tour, trying to feel the atmosphere and understand the ethos of that society. However, touring these representative cities cannot be the best choice for the tourists to understand the true disposition of that society.

First of all, the major city of a country is usually too globalized to understand the distinct characteristics of that society. Major cities around the world are becoming more globalized day after day. This is because these cities are the main source of the nations’ revenue created by tourism business. To allure more and more tourists to their cities, government officials use all of their resources to make the city even more ‘foreigner friendly’. English menus, english traffic signs, and even english street-advertisements are all over the place. Furthermore, multinational corporations such as McDonalds, Starbucks, Taco Bell, and many other world-wide companies adorn the streets of these cities, making the city lose its own, original distinctions.

Second, advancement of social infrastructure of major cities cannot represent the nation’s state of development as a whole. Most of the technological advancements that can be seen from these cities, for instance, convenient transportation system or speedy wireless network services, are likely to be just a singularity of that society. When many reporters worldwide who work on stories about North Korea get a chance to visit Pyeongyang, capital of North Korea, they are astonished by the unexpected advancement of Pyeongyang’s social infrastructure. However, after they look around the rural areas near the capital, certainly the ‘minor’ cities of North Korea, they conclude that Pyeongyang is just a falsifed illusion of North Korea’s economic status and political characteristics.

Finally, in most of the countries that are adopting capitalism as their economic system, many major representative cities are actually an economic center of that society, not a city that reveals the crucial ethos of the society. People gather around those cities, looking for a chance to earn, or invest their money, following and setting up a social trend, minding the capricious global fashion of the day. Some might aver that the city of an economic center can sufficiently give an apt insight to understand the characteristics of the society. However, in the procedure of setting up and following a new global trend, the city inevitably loses its historical originality, and thus cannot be used as a textbook apropos for understanding the true image of that society.

The good news is, that many government officials concerning extreme globalization of their major cities are using strict regulations to conserve the city’s original spirit and distinctions. Restricting new construction of skyscrapers around historical sites, places with significant meaning that alludes the crux of the society can be the example of those regulations. If these regulations work just as intended, major cities keeping their originality against the wind of internationalization, the reasonings I mentioned above can all be repudiated. However, unfortunately, most of these regulations turn out to be feckless, since the power of fiscal motivation is way stronger than the will to conserve the original antiquities in modern society. This is why major city of a nation is not a suitable target to study when understanding the true characteristics of the society.