Managing Global Smart Cities in an Era of 21st Century Challenges

Globalization, integration and liberalism are concepts that have been used since ancient history and have influenced urban governance to this day. The aim of the article is to find out, based on the historical development of globalization, Friedmann’s urban concept and Sassen’s global theory of cities—how world cities reflect the new challenges of 21st century globalization. In the recent past, building of the global urban network has been influenced by factors such as the growth of populism, neoliberalism, migration, the existence of exploitative centers, urbanization and changes in the demographic curve. Similar to the year 2020, also in 2021 cities must face a single global challenge posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article the authors used methods of comparative analysis of global Smart Cities such as New York, London and Tokyo. The discussion section includes a summary of results of the analysis, and a design of a new general model for managing global challenges in cities is introduced. The results of the article point towards the role and influence of cultural differences of global cities and this also relates to the approach to managing the new challenges of current times. New York and London are culturally closer and also showed similar results, whereas Tokyo differs across all analyzed elements. The main result of the article are the answers to the research questions and the design of a new general model which involves various elements of globalization management and which is based on the world best practices.