Large cities under stress

They are powerful magnets for the young and highly educated, as well as the disadvantaged, they are the dominant gateways for new immigrants, the command and information centres for the economy, and the focal points of global connections. [...] Rather, while it recognizes the increasingly prominent role of the large cities in accommodating, managing and shaping economic growth, environmental sustainability and social change in the country, it also acknowledges that our large cities and the rest of the country are intensely integrated. [...] Our largest cities are the organizing nodes of the economy, the financial system and for the media, and they serve as the dominant milieus of social and cultural change. [...] The limitation here is the lack of availability of comparable information and the simple fact that the perception of what is either relevant to the exercise, or world-class, varies widely among observers and different communities of interest. [...] The most common analytically based definition of the threshold population necessary to qualify as a large city is the population figure of 100,000 which serves as the basis of the definition of metropolitan areas used in Canada, the United States, the United Nations, and by many other international statistical agencies (United Nations 1996).