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Cooperation: Choice for Cities Offered by Globalization
Pierre Bourque, mayor of Montreal, Canada, and Jia Qinglin, secretary of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China, have reached an agreement: Montreal will train a group of officials who will be engaged in the administration of modern cities.
The move represents the two cities' first action in accordance with the Beijing Declaration signed Thursday at the Sixth Major Cities Summit by officials from 24 world cities. The declaration says that cities should strengthen mutual understanding and respect and seek common development regardless of different culture and different level of economic development.
As Oleksandr Omelchenko, mayor of Kyiv, recalled, cities were frequently centers of confrontation and wars in the 20th century. What cities should think about for their future is to avoid worldwide disasters by cooperating with each other, he said.
In fact, the future of human society depends on the development of urbanization. Leaders of major cities from across the world have spent the past two days on discussions about city-to-city development and cooperation in the 21st century.The concept of region will become increasingly important, and cities should cooperate with each other more closely than before, Bernhard Goerg, vice-mayor of Vienna said.
Exchange and cooperation have become very important for those cities trying to become more global and embrace technology, said Anibal Ibarra, mayor of Buenos Aires.
The mayor of Moscow, Yury Mikhailovich Luzhkov, said it is difficult for any country to succeed in realizing harmony between man and nature without cooperation.
Mayors agreed that the revolution brought by the Internet will make city problems world ones in the 21st century.
The next Major Cities' Summit will be held in Madrid, in 2003. Jose Maria Alvarez del Manzano, mayor of the city, said that developed countries will benefit from globalization, which at the same time will enlarge the gap between the rich and the poor.
He called for joint efforts to create more fortune for the developing countries.
"The world is becoming smaller," said Beijing Mayor Liu Qi. "Cities of different countries have never been so close as they are today."
"We share the same wish that the world major cities will cooperate extensively with each other in the coming century," he added.
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