megacity

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The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

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Its rise has been so recent and quick that the Asia Society has labeled it “a city without a history.”20 India matches Japan with three megacities, all growing much faster than any city in the high-income world. The population of Delhi, the world’s third-largest city, expanded 40 percent over the past decade; Mumbai, almost 20 percent; and Kolkata (Calcutta) roughly 10 percent, a relatively low rate for a city in a developing country. And there are likely to be more megacities of this kind in the future.21 By 2025, the ranks of megacities in poor countries seem certain to expand. United Nations growth projections to 202522 suggest nine more megacities could emerge by 2030, including Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad (all in India), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Bogotá (Colombia), Johannesburg-East Rand (South Africa), Luanda (Angola), and Hangzhou (China).23 SIZE IS NOT ENOUGH Conventional wisdom suggests that these dense urban areas are the key to creating prosperity and a better life for the population of developing countries.

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. ——— (2012, November 21). “What is a Half-Urban World”, New Geography, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003249-what-a-half-urban-world. ——— (2015, January 27). “World Megacities: Densities Fall as they become Larger,” New Geography, http://www.newgeography.com/content/004835-world-megacities-densities-fall-they-become-larger. ——— “World Megacities: Growing & Becoming Less Dense,” New Geography, http://www.newgeography.com/content/004823-megacities-growing-and-getting-less-dense. COX, Wendell and PAVLETICH, Hugh. (2014). “11th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey: 2015,” Demographia, http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf.

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Together, these two regions, which are now rapidly urbanizing, will account for some 96 percent of the world’s population growth.3 According to UN projections, India’s urban population will increase by nearly 250 million in 20 years—an even greater increase than what is projected for rapidly urbanizing China.4 Driven by these demographic forces, the growth of megacities like Mumbai—urban regions with over 10 million residents5—poses new and often enormous challenges for the urban future. Even as they demonstrate the enormous appeal of city life, these new megacities also represent an enormous break in urban history in two critical ways: their unprecedented size and their relative lack of the kind of economic base that drove urban development in Europe, America, and more recently, eastern Asia. No city in the 19th or 20th century was nearly as large, or grew in countries as poor, as those we see today. Today’s megacities, first of all, reflect a profound shift in urban scale.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

A famous instance of such a "polarization reversal" is Mexico City, widely predicted to achieve a population of 25 million during the 1990s (the current population is between 19 and 22 million). See Yue-man Yeung, "Geography in an Age of Mega-Cities," International Social Sciences journal 151 (1997), p. 93. 7 Financial Times, 27 July 2004; David Drakakis-Smith, Third World Cities, 2nd ed., London 2000. SNOITIia R Figure 2 8 Third World Megacities (population in millions) 1950 ' 2004 Mexico City 2.9 22.1 Seoul-Injon 1.0 21.9 (New York 12.3 21.9) 19.9 Sao Paulo 2.4 Mumbai (Bombay) 2.9 19.1 Delhi 1.4 18.6 Jakarta 1.5 16.0 Dhaka 0.4 15.9 Kolkata (Calcutta) 4.4 15.1 Cairo 2.4 15.1 Manila 1.5 14.3 Karachi 1.0 13.5 Lagos 0.3 13.4 Shanghai 5.3 13.2 Buenos Aires 4.6 12.6 Rio de Janeiro 3.0 11.9 Tehran 1.0 11.5 Istanbul 1.1 11.1 Beijing 3.9 10.8 Krung Thep (Bangkok) 1.4 9.1 Gauteng (Witwatersrand) 1.2 9.0 Kinshasa/Brazzaville 0.2 8.9 Lima 0.6 8.2 Bogota 0.7 8.0 8 Composite of UN-HABITAT Urban Indicators Database (2002); Thomas Brinkhoff "The Principal Agglomerations of the World", www.citypopulation. de/World.html (May 2004).

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In his study of the Mumbai region, Alain Jacquemin emphasizes the confiscation of local power by urban development authorities, whose role is to build modern infrastructures that allow the wealthier parts of poor cities to plug themselves — and themselves alone — into the world cybereconomy. These authorities, he writes, "have further undermined the 56 Oberai, Population Growth, Employment and Poverty in Third-World Mega-Cities, p. 169. 57 Nick Devas, "Can City Governments in the South Deliver for the Poor?," International Development and Planning Review 25:1 (2003), pp. 6—7. 58 Oberai, Population Growth, Employment and Poverty in Third-World Mega-C'ities, pp. 165, 171. tasks and functions of democratically elected municipal governments already weakened by the loss of sectoral responsibilities and financial and human resources to special ad hoc authorities.

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Myriad old cars, beat-up buses, and superannuated trucks asphyxiate urban areas with their deadly exhaust, while the dirty two-stroke engines that power small vehicles emit ten times as much fine particulate matter as modern cars. According to a recent study, foul air is most deadly in the sprawling megacities of Mexico (300 bad ozone smog days per year), Sao Paulo, Delhi, and Beijing.41 Breathing Mumbai's air, meanwhile, is the 36 El Arabi, "Urban Growth and Environmental Degradation," pp. 392-94; and Oberai, Population Groivth, Employment and Poverty in Third World Mega-Cities, p. 16 (accident rate). 37 Glenn McKenzie, "Psychiatric Tests Required for Traffic Offenders," RedNova, 20 June 2003; and Pell, "Urban Housing and Services in Anglophone West Africa," p. 178. 38 Hindustan Times, 1 February 2004. 39 WHO, "Road Safety Is No Accident!"

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

At a sister site at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), researchers slice the clouds with a shimmering green laser, trap air samples in glass flasks, and stare at the sun with a massive mirrored contraption that looks like God’s own microscope. These folks are the foot soldiers in an ambitious, interagency initiative called the Megacities Carbon Project. They’ve been probing LA’s airspace for more than a year, with the help of big-name sponsors like the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Keck Institute for Space Studies, and the California Air Resources Board. If all goes well, by 2015 the Megacities crew and colleagues working on smaller cities such as Indianapolis and Boston will have pinned down a slippery piece of climate science: an empirical measurement of a city’s carbon footprint.

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Officials want to cut emissions 35 percent from 1990 levels by 2030, and to do that they’re going to need a good verification system. The Megacities project “will show that there is a significant impact in what we do,” says Romel Pascual, Los Angeles’ deputy mayor for the environment. “When we talk about LA being green, people roll their eyes. They won’t believe it, right? That’s because of the history of LA. But when you look at the numbers of us hitting major milestones, LA is near the top.” Target practice One morning in January 2013, I pile into a Toyota Prius with Duren and Megacities colleagues Stan Sander and Eric Kort and take a spin up the rock-strewn roads of Mount Wilson.

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He expects the satellite to take some 3,000 samples over a city in just a few seconds. Polluter profiling With this bulging grab bag of equipment, the Megacities team hopes to sculpt a model of LA’s emissions so detailed that they’ll be able to pull out individual signatures, such as exactly what and how much is spewing from rush-hour traffic or the port system or large landfills. Once they get an emissions baseline for Los Angeles, they hope to assist other cities in starting their own climate-reading networks. Duren’s team is already coordinating with French scientists running a Megacities sister project in Paris. (Researchers had to move a Picarro on the Eiffel Tower because its readings were skewed by steamy tourist lung vapors.)

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

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Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the Megacities Foundation, CityNet, and City Protocol—among many others. These clumsily named and seemingly dull bureaucratic constructions are in fact birthing an exciting new cosmopolis whose activities and ambitions hold the secret to fashioning the global processes and institutions that states have failed to create. Many of these networks were created by or contributed to by a few global leaders such as Stuttgart’s Wolfgang Schuster, Barcelona’s Xavier Trias, and New York City’s hyperactive Michael Bloomberg. With or without authoritative underwriting, networked cities and megacities are likely to determine whether democracy—perhaps even civilization itself—survives in the coming decades, when the primary challenge will remain how to overcome the violent conflict within and between states, and how to address the cataclysmic economic and ecological anarchy and the inequalities and injustices that the absence of democratic global governance occasions.

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In the half century since the eminent sociologist wrote, the city has taken still another leap forward: capital cities underwritten by megarhetoric have been morphing into networked megacities of tens of millions, intersecting with other cities to comprise today’s burgeoning megalopolises and megaregions in which an increasing majority of the earth’s population now dwells. Tribes still dominate certain cultures, but even in Africa megacity conurbations have emerged, representing territorially immense urban juggernauts that encompass populations of twenty million or more. Typical is Africa’s Lagos-Ibadan-Cotonou region, where Lagos alone is projected to reach twenty-five million by 2025, making it the world’s third-largest city after Mumbai and Tokyo, in a Nigeria that has six cities over a million and another dozen with 500,000 to a million—all of them growing rapidly.18 Then there is Kinshasa-Brazzaville, two interconnected cities separated by a river in rival “Congo” states.

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Cities are in any case undergoing constant change, as Daniel Brook’s fascinating “history of future cities” makes evident.5 Smaller “middleweight” cities are today outperforming many megacities in terms of overall household growth (see Table 2). According to McKinsey, Jakarta does better in this department than London, Jinan better than New York, and Taipei better than Los Angeles. Lagos actually outperforms twenty considerably larger megacities. Table 2: Top Cities in Terms of Absolute Household Growth, 2011–2025 (projected in terms of million households) Historically, too, the only constant has been change.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Cities are the truly timeless global form. Cities in the twenty-first century are mankind’s most profound infrastructure; they are the human technology most visible from space, growing from villages to towns to counties to megacities to super-corridors stretching hundreds of kilometers. In 1950, the world had only two megacities of populations larger than 10 million: Tokyo and New York City. By 2025, there will be at least forty such megacities. The population of the greater Mexico City region is larger than that of Australia, as is that of Chongqing, a collection of connected urban enclaves spanning an area the size of Austria. Cities that were once hundreds of kilometers apart have now effectively fused into massive urban archipelagoes, the largest of which is Japan’s Taiheiyo Belt that encompasses two-thirds of Japan’s population in the Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka megalopolis.

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The London-based property developer Stanhope recently contracted with China’s Minsheng Investment and Advanced Business Park to overhaul East London’s Royal Albert Dock near the City Airport as a tax-free bridgehead for Chinese and Asian businesses. Beyond wealthy countries, far more countries have megacities that need Chinese-style thinking. Population growth and urbanization have taken cities to a scale never imagined. The largest cities of the West—New York, London, Moscow—have less than half the population of the developing world’s megacities such as Mumbai and Jakarta. And with the exception of Mexico City and São Paulo in Latin America and Lagos and Cairo in Africa, all of the world’s most populous metropolises are in Asia. Megacities are metabolic ecosystems constantly circulating demographic flows; daytime populations can be millions more than in the evenings.

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Cities that were once hundreds of kilometers apart have now effectively fused into massive urban archipelagoes, the largest of which is Japan’s Taiheiyo Belt that encompasses two-thirds of Japan’s population in the Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka megalopolis. China’s Pearl River delta, Greater São Paulo, and Mumbai-Pune are also becoming more integrated through infrastructure. At least a dozen such megacity corridors have emerged already. China is in the process of reorganizing itself around two dozen giant megacity clusters of up to 100 million citizens each.*3 And yet by 2030, the second-largest city in the world behind Tokyo is expected not to be in China but to be Manila. America’s rising multi-city clusters are as significant as any of these, even if their populations are smaller.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

As with all large cities, there has been a strong eastward shift in their global distribution: New York, the largest Western city, is now only in tenth place; Moscow, the largest European city, ranks 22nd; and by 2050 there will be no Western city among the top 20, as urbanization will be an overwhelmingly Asian phenomenon with an increasing share of megacities in sub-Saharan Africa, the region whose population will increase faster than anywhere else. The potential for substantial additions to this list is best indicated by the fact that in 2016 the world also had 45 cities with populations between five and ten million people. All megacities—be they such old metropolitan areas as London or Tokyo or such new agglomerations as Karachi or Lagos—share all the usual urban challenges but on more daunting scales. This scale also means that megacities face megarisks when the cities are subject to such natural hazards as earthquakes, hurricanes (typhoons), floods, tsunami, and volcanic eruption or to terrorist attacks, and that insurers would face unprecedented payouts in the aftermath of such catastrophes (Allianz 2015).

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This scale also means that megacities face megarisks when the cities are subject to such natural hazards as earthquakes, hurricanes (typhoons), floods, tsunami, and volcanic eruption or to terrorist attacks, and that insurers would face unprecedented payouts in the aftermath of such catastrophes (Allianz 2015). A leading reinsurance company concluded that many megacities are “virtually predestined to suffer major natural disasters” (Munich Re 2004). In addition, there are emerging concerns about protracted heat waves and about fires in skyscrapers. Moreover, natural catastrophes that would severely affect or temporarily disable those megacities that have critical roles in the integrated global economy would have worldwide consequences for economic growth, as would the necessity of cutting off some megacities from mass-scale air travel in order to minimize the risks of spreading a new potentially pandemic infection.

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Beijing is extraordinarily polluted, and the entire city has been sinking because of its overuse of ground water drawn from deep aquifers. And no large city has come up with a satisfactory solution for the growing challenge of solid waste disposal. All of these problems reach their most intractable impacts in megacities. Megacities These exceptionally large agglomerations are defined as cities with more than 10 million people, but their actual areas and population totals vary widely, depending on which criteria are used. New York City ranges from 8.5 million in five boroughs to about 20 million in the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area to nearly 25 million in the Combined Statistical Area.

Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

There are many dramatic traffic conditions with miles of traffic jams and poor air quality, especially in the megacities of Southeast Asia and Latin America. Rapidly implementing autonomous and electric cars in emerging countries could improve road safety and protect the environment. People in these markets are very open to new technologies. China and India now have a higher market penetration of smartphones than western Europe. In and around the megacities, roads and telecommunication networks are often newer and better than in developed countries. A service network also has to be created, however, which is a particular challenge in emerging countries. CHAPTER 37 URBAN DEVELOPMENT MEGACITIES The year 2007 served as a historic marker in the history of human settlement.

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What impact will it have on companies in the automotive and technology industry? Can environmental protection be improved? What will the economic consequences of Autonomous Driving 20 this technology be? How will legal and regulatory conditions have to be changed? How can traffic be organised with this technology, especially in megacities? Can autonomous driving improve a nation’s prosperity and competitiveness? These questions and others have to be answered so that autonomous mobility can be used for the benefit of people, companies, nations, cities and the environment. But before that, we need to look at some interesting facts about human driving, so that the significance of autonomous mobility and its social and economic consequences can be assessed.

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The diversity on offer is enormous, which is why many manufacturers would have to produce millions of cars before any two are identical in every detail. Driving a car can also be tedious and boring, when one considers the frequency and duration of traffic jams that occur every day, especially in megacities such as São Paulo, Cairo, Delhi, Beijing or Mumbai. People have had to adapt their lives to the traffic situation and many hundreds of kilometres of traffic jams every day. In Mexico City for example, the average commuter spends 220 hours in traffic jams each year, and there is no improvement in sight; on the contrary, the traffic situation is worsening permanently.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Downtown Seoul, South Korea. The district of Iztapalapa to the east of Mexico City. Afterword In the middle of the twentieth century, New York became the world’s first megacity, a metropolitan area with ten million or more inhabitants. By 2007, according to the UN, there were nineteen megacities, a figure that is expected to rise to at least twenty-six by 2025. Today’s cities and megacities are spreading out to form even larger urban systems. The term ‘Megalopolis’ was first used in 1961 to describe the sprawling city region that comprises Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington–Baltimore.

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On the other are the slum cities of the poor, the ragpickers and the recyclers. Urbanisation may have reduced absolute poverty, but the urban poor are increasing steadily. There are well over a billion slum dwellers in the world today – nearly one in six of the population.69 The age of the megacities is also that of the megaslum. Out of the top twenty megacities, fifteen are in developing countries. Today, one in three city dwellers is living in a slum.70 Of course, there have always been slums in cities. The Romans complained about the ramshackle shacks that appeared on the outskirts of their cities and which were rebuilt almost as quickly as they were demolished.

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Indeed, in the developed world four out of ten cities actually experienced a decline in population during the 1990s. In Europe and North America, where more than 70 per cent of people already live in cities, the growth in urban population is expected to be modest in the coming years and almost entirely due to migration from poorer countries. Europe is the only region without a megacity. There are now some twenty-two megacities – those with populations of more than ten million people. These unprecedented concentrations of humanity are home to 5 per cent of the world’s population. Considerably more people live in metropolitan Mumbai than in Norway and Sweden combined. With a population of some twenty million people, greater São Paulo has just one million people less than the whole of Australia.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

The growth of Lagos exemplifies a key trend within the urbanization trend, as an ever-higher share of the urban population lives in cities that do not seem to end, encompassing areas equivalent to, or larger than, many small countries and with populations larger than those of most EU countries. These aggregations of humanity are known as megacities, while the extended urban area whose growth has eventually resulted in several merging cities is best described as an agglomeration or, pace Geddes (1915), as a conurbation. The Boston-Washington corridor in the northeastern US was the first, and is still perhaps the most famous, example of a megalopolis (Gottmann 1961). Megacities The usual dividing line between a large city and a megacity is put at 10 million inhabitants. But wherever that divide might be, megacities must be studied as functional units, not according to any official administrative delimitations.

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But, fortunately, Tokyo is exceptional in that it has avoided or solved other problems common in megacities, some in truly exceptional ways: its criminal rate is lower than in any other megacity, its air (significantly polluted until the late 1970s) is relatively clean thanks to highly efficient vehicles, imports of LNG and generation of nuclear electricity, and the density, frequency, and reliability of its subway system and of its rail links with other cities is outstanding. In the global ranking, the city is followed by New Delhi, Shanghai, Mumbai, São Paulo, Beijing, and Mexico City. In 2015, 24 of the 31 megacities were in low-income countries (the global “South,” as the UN calls it), with Asia having 18, China six, and India five.

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Given their size, it is not at all surprising that the annual growth of most megacities was slower than that of the whole urban population, which slowed down to about 2% between 2010 and 2015 (from more than 3% in the early 1950s) and ranged from just 0.76% in affluent countries to almost 4% in the poorest nations. Karachi, New Delhi, Dhaka, Guangzhou, and Lagos have been the fastest growing megacities since the 1990s, all in excess of 3%/year, followed by Mumbai, Istanbul, Beijing, and Manila (Canton 2011). The UN expects 10 additional megacities by 2030, six in Asia (including Pakistani Lahore, and Hyderabad and Ahmedabad in India), three in Africa (Johannesburg, Dar es Salaam, Luanda), and Colombia’s Bogotá.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

In building up a cultural obsession with ‘austerity chic’ and firing up demand among an affluent, design-conscious clientele for the tower’s now-private apartments, the image is used to sell off a great achievement of the socially universal welfare state. It therefore presides over what architecture critic Owen Hatherley calls ‘the literal destruction of the thing it claims to love.’82 Global South Megacities: ‘Heavenly Enclaves Surrounded by Slums’ Further startling examples of the elite domination of contemporary high-rise housing can be drawn from megacities in the Global South. The marketing of such towers is especially striking in Mumbai. ‘Reach for it!’ shouts the real estate billboard surrounding the new Indiabulls Sky Tower complex being built at the end of the new Bandra–Worli Sea Link sky bridge express way as it enters the city core.

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In the second example, at least 74 people were killed when construction waste accumulated over two years on a hillside slipped after heavy rain to bury thirty-three buildings in the sprawling megacity of Shenzen, China. One of the first such examples recorded by landslide experts, the Shenzen case demonstrates the risks involved in vertically shifting vast chunks of geology in the often corrupt construction of urban megaprojects. Officials responsible for the waste pile were quickly arrested. Landfill to Landfill The relationship between skyscraper and pit has taken on new implications. – Lucy Lippard Disasters like landfill slides involving the movement of waste ground in and around the world’s megacities are obscured by an almost complete absence of media coverage; by contrast other movements of waste and rubble spark long periods of total media saturation.

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Prosaic lines of parked cars took the place earmarked for ranks of futuristic helicopters. Kinetic Elites Take to the Skies Such controversies failed to kill off helicopter urbanism completely, however. Instead, urban helicopter mobility and ‘direct arrival’ were progressively reinvented as privileges of hyper-individualised super-elites within sprawling megacities. Indeed, elite helicopter travel has emerged to be perhaps the ultimate symbol of the secession of the tiny numbers of überwealthy from the constraints, limits and struggles that surround urban life on the earth’s surface. Through it, the ‘upper’ classes assert monopolistic access to the third dimension: the ‘Z-access’ of verticality, a domain denied to all but the select few.

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

There follows the separation between symbolic meaning, location of functions, and the social appropriation of space in the metropolitan area. This is the trend underlying the most important transformation of urban forms worldwide, with particular force in the newly industrializing areas: the rise of mega-cities. Third millennium urbanization: mega-cities The new global economy and the emerging informational society have indeed a new spatial form, which develops in a variety of social and geographical contexts: mega-cities.70 Mega-cities are, certainly, very large agglomerations of human beings, all of them (13 in the United Nations classification) with over 10 million people in 1992 (see figure 6.4), and four of them projected to be well over 20 million in 2010.

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The ecological dream of small, quasi-rural communes will be pushed away to countercultural marginality by the historical tide of mega-city development. This is because mega-cities are: centers of economic, technological, and social dynamism, in their countries and on a global scale; they are the actual development engines; their countries’ economic fate, be it the United States or China, depends on mega-cities’ performance, in spite of the small-town ideology still pervasive in both countries; centers of cultural and political innovation; connecting points to the global networks of every kind; the Internet cannot bypass mega-cities: it depends on the telecommunications and on the “telecommunicators” located in those centers.

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They also function as magnets for their hinterlands; that is, the whole country or regional area where they are located. Mega-cities cannot be seen only in terms of their size, but as a function of their gravitational power toward major regions of the world. Thus, Hong Kong is not just its six million people, and Guangzhou is not just its six and a half million people: what is emerging is a mega-city of 40–50 million people, connecting Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Macau, and small towns in the Pearl River Delta, as I shall develop below. Mega-cities articulate the global economy, link up the informational networks, and concentrate the world’s power.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

It is the abundance of these weak ties that brings people to the city, for it is the intensity of these informal relationships that makes the city so special – and it is these weak ties that will hold the mega-city together. In his book Loneliness, evolutionary psychologist John Cacioppo proposes that we are hard-wired to be together and that a sense of loneliness is a warning sign, telling us to make more connections for improved chances of survival rather than an existential condition. As the mega-city grows around us we are going to have to adapt our connections and relationships accordingly, finding new ways of living together that benefit us all.

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It is not only cities getting larger, but where they are, that will define their future shape. In 1950 there were only eighty-three cities that had a population exceeding 1 million; today there are over 460. Sixty years ago, there was only one mega-city, defined as an urban area containing more than 10 million people. In those days New York had a total population of 12 million, London just under 9 million and Tokyo, the third-largest city, accounted for 7 million. The development of new mega-cities was a sharp, millennial shift: in 1985, there were nine in all; this rose to nineteen in 2004, and today is estimated at twenty-five. By 2025 the number will have climbed to thirty-six.

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India, a nation that its liberating founder Mahatma Gandhi claimed had its soul in the village, will, by 2030, be a country of sixty-eight cities of over 1 million, thirteen cities with over 4 million and six mega-cities with a population each of over 10 million, with the capital at New Delhi reaching 46 million, twice as large as the total population of Australia. What will these mega-cities feel like? In many ways, they have already arrived and one only needs to visit Mexico City or Nairobi to experience the impact of so many bodies crammed into one place together. Getting around Mumbai was a constant battle.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, carbon footprint, climate fiction, Donald Trump, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, non-fiction novel, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Ted Nordhaus, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning

The Maharashtra government is also opening many unbuilt sea-facing areas, like the city’s old salt pans, to construction (see The Hindu’s Business Line of 22 August 2015: http://m.thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/salt-pan-lands-in-mumbai-to-be-used-for-development-projects/article7569641.ece). 66 corrugated iron: Carsten Butsch et al., ‘Risk Governance in the Megacity Mumbai/India’, 5. 66 Arabian Sea: Cf. C. W. B. Normand, Storm Tracks in the Arabian Sea, India Meteorological Department, 1926. I am grateful to Adam Sobel for this reference. 68 city as well: During the 2005 deluge, ‘The waterlogging lasted for over seven days in parts of the suburbs and the flood water level had risen by some feet in many built-up areas.’ B. Arunachalam, ‘Drainage Problems of Brihan Mumbai’, 3909. 68 illness and disease: See Carsten Butsch et al., ‘Risk Governance in the Megacity Mumbai/India’, 4. 68 40,000 beds: Cf. Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai’s City Development Plan, section on ‘Health’ (9.1; available here: http://www.mcgm.gov.in/irj/go/km/docs/documents/MCGM%20Department%20List/City%20Engineer/Deputy%20City%20Engineer%20(Planning%20and%20Design)/City%20Development%20Plan/Health.pdf). 69 urban limits: Aromar Revi, ‘Lessons from the Deluge’, 3912. 69 rising seas: Natalie Kopytko, ‘Uncertain Seas, Uncertain Future for Nuclear Power’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 71, no. 2 (2015): 29–38. 69 ‘safety risks’: Ibid., 30–31. 70 models predict: ‘All the models are indicating an increase in mean annual rainfall as compared to the observed reference mean of 1936 mm, and the average of all the models in 2350 mm [by 2071–2099].’

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The key concern here is that developers’ interests do not overpower “public interest”, that the rights of the poor are upheld; else displacement from one location will force them to relocate to another, often more risk-prone location’ (‘Lessons from the Deluge’, 3914). 71 threatened neighbourhoods: Climate Risks and Adaptation in Asian Coastal Megacities: A Synthesis Report, World Bank, 2010 (available at file:///C:/Users/chres/Desktop/Current/research/coastal_megacities_fullreport.pdf). The report includes a ward-by-ward listing of the areas of Kolkata that are most vulnerable to climate change (88). 74 ‘below this point’: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html. 75 with the ‘sublime’: Cf.

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Whether such evacuations could be organized at all is an open question. Mumbai has been lucky not to have been hit by a major storm in more than a century; perhaps for that reason the possibility appears not to have been taken adequately into account in planning for disasters. Moreover, here, ‘as in most megacities, disaster management is focused on post-disaster response’. In Mumbai, disaster planning seems to have been guided largely by concerns about events that occur with little or no warning, like earthquakes and deluges: evacuations usually follow rather than precede disasters of this kind. With a cyclone, given a lead-up period of several days, it would not be logistically impossible to evacuate large parts of the city before the storm’s arrival: its rail and port facilities would certainly be able to move millions of people to safe locations on the mainland.

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

The overwhelming majority of these will be in the burgeoning cities and megacities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. To be sure, many cities in developed nations will still be growing, but their growth will be dwarfed by urban explosion in the global South. As demographic, political, economic and perhaps technological centres of gravity emerge in the South, massive demographic and economic shifts will inexorably continue. As recently as 1980, thirteen of the world’s thirty biggest cities were in the ‘developed world’; by 2010, this number will have dwindled to eight. By 2050, it is likely that only a few of the top thirty megacities will be located in the erstwhile ‘developed’ nations (Figure 1.2). 1.2 World’s largest thirty cities in 1980, 1990, 2000 and (projected) 2010.

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The simulations projected sites of massive urban wars involving US forces in 2015, complete with a range of imagined new US sensors, surveillance systems, and weapons geared specifically towards the kind of warfare that could unveil the ‘fog of war’ in a megacity. Opposition forces, programmed to fight autonomously within the virtualized megacity, were equipped with technologies projected to be available on the open market in 2015 – including their own robotic vehicles. As part of its mandate to ‘replicate real-world geography, structures and culturally relevant population behaviors’,56 Urban Resolve even simulated the daily rhythms of the virtualized Jakarta and Baghdad: At night the roads were quiet; during the weekday rush hours, traffic clogged the roads.

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Examples here range from US Christian fundamentalists, through the British National Party to Austria’s Freedom Party, the French National Front and Italy’s Forza Italia. The fast-growing and sprawling cosmopolitan neighbourhoods of the West’s cities, meanwhile, are often cast by such groups in the same Orientalist terms as the mega-cities of the Global South, as places radically external to the vulnerable nation – territories every bit as foreign as Baghdad or Gaza. Paradoxically, however, the geographical imagination which underpins the new military urbanism tends to treat colonial frontiers and Western ‘homelands’ as fundamentally separate domains – two sides in a clash of civilizations, in Samuel Huntington’s incendiary and highly controversial hypothesis.10 This imaginative separation coexists uneasily with the ways in which the security, military and intelligence doctrines addressing both increasingly fuse together into a seamless whole.

Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, business climate, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hive mind, Internet of things, knowledge economy, Masdar, megacity, New Urbanism, operational security, packet switching, QR code, remote working, RFID, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart meter, social software, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, X Prize

But it is important to note that the future likely does not belong primarily to the megacities (generally defined as cities with populations in excess of ten million). The McKinsey Global Institute notes that while we may expect six hundred cities to generate 60 percent of the global GDP into the foreseeable future, much of the growth will occur in cities that are quickly developing after years of backwater existence. These urban centers, with populations between 150,000 and one million, are forecast to generate economic activity at the expense of established megacities over the next decade. Some will become megacities in their own right, but many more will be characterized by less sprawl, poverty, and slum conditions.

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So how can the smart city concept and the technology master planning approach described and tested in the previous chapters be used to tackle the ultimate brownfield challenge: centuries-old megacities like Cairo, Mexico City, and many more that have tens of millions of inhabitants and are indispensable to their nation’s economic growth and social peace. Smart city technology is not just a trillion-dollar industry; it is the key to tackle some of the most pressing challenges of the twenty-first century. Cairo is the epicenter of a nation that has been counted on as a pillar of relative stability in a volatile region. Among the top-tier crowded megacities, few can match this complex, fascinating place for sheer unpredictability.

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The worst slums created in Western nations during the Industrial Revolution have been eradicated, but those oppressive conditions have been duplicated and extended in many developing nations. Meanwhile, developed cities are faced with the challenges of modernization as they attempt to combat congestion, develop better services for residents and businesses, conserve resources, and remain economically vital. There are more cities and megacities than at any point in history, and many more will rise in the coming decades. The world is faced with a choice. City development can progress in a manner that makes the most of new technologies and commits resources to upgrading old and obsolete features, or it can adopt technology in a haphazard, insecure manner that does little to com bat the grave population and environmental problems we face.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Focus on Cities and Urban Clusters, Not Regions or Countries Global consumption is experiencing an unprecedented shift in power toward emerging-market cities. The continued rise of megacities—familiar entities with populations of ten million or more, such as Shanghai, São Paulo, and Moscow—is driving this trend. But the truly dramatic consumption growth will come from middleweight cities such as Luanda, Harbin, Puebla, and Kumasi, four hundred or so of which will generate the GDP equivalent to the entire US economy by 2025.30 In China, the shift in the weight of consuming households from the megacities on the east coast to interior middleweight cities (populations of between two hundred thousand and ten million people) is already visible.

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The sweeping industrialization of emerging economies has shifted the center of gravity of the world economy east and south. Internal migration in those countries, from the farm and village to the city, is fueling astonishing growth. And it has happened at a speed never before seen in history. These developments are powering an explosive growth in demand, which compels us to reset our intuition. The megacities of these emerging economies—such as Shanghai, São Paulo, and Mumbai—are already on the radar of global companies. But the truly dramatic consumption growth will be in cities that most would find hard to locate on a map today, like Kumasi. SHIFTING ECONOMIC CENTER OF GRAVITY From the year 1 to 1500, the world’s center of economic gravity*—a measure of economic power by geography—straddled the border between China and India, the countries with the globe’s largest populations.

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There’s a big difference between the way resources and talent are mobilized to take advantage of an opportunity and protecting against risk. It’s the difference between playing offense and defense. Get to Know the Newcomers In the past, many large companies have done well by focusing on developed economies combined with the megacities of emerging economies. Today, that combination will gain them exposure to markets with 70 percent of the world’s GDP. But by 2025, this combination will generate only about one-third of global growth, which will not be sufficient for large companies trying to position themselves for growth.26 In contrast, between 2010 and 2025, 440 cities in developing nations will generate nearly half of global GDP growth.27 But only about 20 or so of these emerging-market dynamos are likely to be familiar names, such as Shanghai, Mumbai, Jakarta, São Paulo, or Lagos.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

The largest current growth is in East Asia, where the world’s human and financial resources will become concentrated—ending four centuries of North Atlantic hegemony. Demographers predict continuing urbanisation, with 70 percent of people living in cities by 2050. Even by 2030, Lagos, São Paulo, and Delhi will have populations greater than thirty million. Preventing megacities from becoming turbulent dystopias will be a major challenge to governance. Population growth is currently underdiscussed. This may be partly because doom-laden forecasts of mass starvation—in, for instance, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb and the pronouncements of the Club of Rome—have proved off the mark.

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The relevant actions aren’t necessarily best taken at the nation-state level. Some of course require multinational cooperation, but many effective reforms need implementation more locally. There are huge opportunities for enlightened cities to become pathfinders, spearheading the high-tech innovation that will be needed in the megacities of the developing world where the challenges are especially daunting. Short-termism isn’t just a feature of electoral politics. Private investors don’t have a long enough horizon either. Property developers won’t put up a new office building unless they get payback within (say) thirty years. Indeed, most high-rise buildings in cities have a ‘designed lifetime’ of only fifty years (a consolation for those of us who deplore their dominance of the skyline).

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In contrast, the feeling of entitlement is so strong in today’s wealthier countries that there would be a breakdown in the social order as soon as hospitals overflowed, key workers stayed at home, and health services were overwhelmed. This could occur when those infected were still a fraction of 1 percent. The fatality rate would, however, probably be highest in the megacities of the developing world. Pandemics are an ever-present natural threat, but is it just scaremongering to raise concerns about human-induced risks from bio error or bio terror? Sadly, I don’t think it is. We know all too well that technical expertise doesn’t guarantee balanced rationality. The global village will have its village idiots and they’ll have global range.

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

Concentration By 2025 the fraction of the world’s population living in cities is expected to rise to 70 percent.14 With Tokyo’s population density as high as 5,847 persons per square kilometer and with 1 in 25 people already living in a megacity, it is inevitable that “new approaches for surveillance, preparedness, and response will be needed [to deal with pandemics].”15 This is important everywhere but especially in overcrowded or unhygienic conditions, where people live close to animals, and where water is easily contaminated. These incubators for the development and spread of infectious diseases are expected to grow particularly rapidly, because virtually all the growth in megacities will be occurring in developing countries over the coming decades and because many of them have shantytowns and other communities in which people are living in poor conditions.

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The equivalent of special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams with the medical and other capacity to mobilize rapidly (without lengthy authorization procedures) and engage anywhere in the world is vital. Such capacity is required for pandemics nationally and globally. Once a pathogen has skipped from the countryside to a megacity or from a megacity to a major airport, there is no bringing it back. Although the immediate response should be medical, the broader implications also need thinking through. For example, if the emergency requires the culling of all the poultry or pigs on which people depend for their livelihoods and nutrition, alternative mechanisms to support the population need to be put in place immediately, with the costs of this response to a potential global emergency underwritten by WHO or another global institution.

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One noteworthy study estimates that the breakdown of biogeographic barriers and the introduction of invasive species cost the world in excess of $120 billion annually.51 This cost includes that of the rise of pathogens that directly affect the health of humans, livestock, and animals. The same study shows how the effects of globalization have enabled West Nile virus to flourish in regions that were previously immune due to their climates or remoteness. Yet it is essential to note that it is this same proximity that has led to the success of megacities like London, New York, Mumbai, and Shanghai. The challenge, which we explore in this book, is to ensure that proximity and connectivity can be sources of strength while we manage growing vulnerability due to the complexity and density of our connections. The second geographical risk, density risk, relates to the growing concentration of activities in solitary or a small number of world epicenters.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Nearly a third of all the magnetic recording heads at the heart of your hard drive and a sixth of all keyboards are made in the city of Dongguan, just up the road from Shenzhen. Twenty years ago, it was another fishing village; today it’s larger than Chicago. These instant megacities were inevitable. They didn’t have to happen here—they did because Deng and his successors willed them to—but they would have sprouted somewhere. The economics make too much sense. Research by the World Bank suggests the reason China’s megacities have grown so big, so fast is that the returns to scale have grown so massive. What has made this growth possible, the bank argued, is cheap transportation. The catalyst is the jet engine, “perhaps the most significant innovation in long-distance transport ever,” in the bank’s estimation.

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Castells identifies a “new spatial form” emerging: the megacity. His textbook example is the Delta, which he tellingly diagrams with Hong Kong on the edge and Guangzhou at its core. The most striking thing about such cities is that they are “globally connected and locally disconnected.” The Delta may be the world’s factory, but nothing it makes is within reach of the peasants past its fringes, who are uprooting seventy generations of history to find their fortunes here. An estimated 140 million farmers have already left their homes, and the gap between rich and poor, urban and rural, is widening. China’s solution is to build megacities in its interior, like Chongqing, which is officially three times the size of New Jersey and equally dense.

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Such massive inequality is the primary source of China’s unrest—an estimated eighty thousand protests each year in rural towns and villages, suppressed and kept (mostly) out of sight. Despite the size of its coastal megacities, China is less urbanized than its peers. Barely half its citizens live in one, far below the developed world’s 80 to 90 percent. The State Council expects another four hundred million peasants—the second wave in the largest migration in history—to move to cities in the next twenty years. In obeisance to Jiang’s edict to “Go West,” they are being herded away from the coast toward new megacities rising inland. The fear of this influx and the slums it might create underlies China’s resolve to export its way out of poverty.

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce

additive manufacturing, air freight, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blood diamond, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, demographic transition, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food miles, ghettoisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kibera, Kickstarter, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, profit motive, race to the bottom, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Singh put it to me as we toured the farms of northern Nigeria, ‘There is no reason why even Africa cannot feed itself.’ 33 Beyond the Clockwork Orange: Why We Can Green Our Cities A HUNDRED YEARS ago, the largest city in the world was London, with a population of 6.5 million. When I was born in 1951, the top dog was the world’s first mega-city, New York, which had just topped 10 million people. Today there are at least twenty cities above that figure, including three each in India and China. Each of these mega-cities contains more people than the entire population of the planet at the end of the last ice age. The new world urban leader, Tokyo, has mushroomed to 34 million people. From mid-2007, for the first time in history, most people will live in cities.

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London has spread to create an urban region across south-east England that stretches west towards Reading and Oxford, north towards Cambridge, and now east along the Thames estuary. São Paulo is embracing a ‘golden urban triangle’ that includes Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte. The people of Mexico City have fled their congested and polluted mega-city to surrounding cities like Toluca and Cuernavaca. Kolkata has dispersed across west Bengal. Tokyo is extending out to Japan’s second mega-city, Osaka, creating a megalopolis of 70 million people, linked by bullet train. Shanghai is joining hands with Suzhou, Nanjing and Hangzhou, which will soon be just twenty-seven minutes away on a new maglev train with a top speed of more than 400 kilometres an hour.

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Later, Europeans colonized the New World for gold, and spent decades searching for Eldorado. The gold rushes of California and Australia and South Africa and the Klondike globalized the world’s economy in the nineteenth century. Gold smuggling, more than oil, made the fabulous wealth behind the modern mega-city of Dubai. The Gold Standard was for a long time the guarantor of the world’s currencies; and every national treasury still keeps a store. A third of all the world’s gold is locked up in the vaults of various banks and private investment houses. There is Fort Knox, of course. And vaults beneath the Bank of England in the City of London store the bullion reserves of more than seventy countries – hundreds of times more gold than is contained in the Crown Jewels, on display close by in the Tower of London.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Exposure to deadly urban heat has tripled since the 1980s, with a fifth of the world’s population already affected.13 In the next three decades, we’ll see the band of subtropical climate expanding into higher latitudes by about 1,000 kilometres. London will start to feel like Barcelona, Moscow like Sofia and Tokyo like Changsha. To a Londoner, this sounds quite pleasant, but globally, it means that over 40 per cent of the world’s forty-four largest megacities will see dangerously high heat conditions each year at just 1.5°C of warming, whereas at 2°C, 1 billion people would be exposed to extreme heat, rising to 3.5 billion people at 4°C, according to a 2021 UK Met Office analysis – and that doesn’t even account for rising population levels. At 1.5°C, EU member states alone will be experiencing 30,000 heat-related deaths per year by the 2030s.

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Even if global temperatures rise no more than 1.5°C, hundreds of millions of people will be affected. There are a significant number of countries where at least 50 million people live on land exposed to sea-level rise – these include China, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and the United States. Once global temperatures rise by 2°C, flooding will affect at least 136 megacities, with damage costs totalling $1.4 trillion per year by the end of the century. The cost of holding back the rising ocean, through sea walls and other defences, is already prohibitive – consider that the US alone estimates spending more than $400 billion in coastal defence costs over the next twenty years, with longer-term costs for those living in smaller communities as high as $1 million per person.

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Most urbanization in the coming decades will consist of poor people in Africa and Asia migrating from rural areas for paid work. Almost all of them will live in slums at densities as great as 2,500 people per hectare, sharing just two or three toilets (the same number as the average US family home). There are around thirty megacities today, and by 2050 they are expected to merge into dozens of mega-regions, like Hong Kong–Shenzhen–Guangzhou in China, where more than 100 million people will live in a seemingly endless city. Such mega-regions will probably become more influential than nation states. We already see more power being devolved to cities, which now have considerable agency over issues from migration to climate action.

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep

battle of ideas, British Empire, call centre, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, illegal immigration, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Kibera, knowledge economy, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, urban planning, urban renewal

(Metropolitan New York fell behind despite growing to nineteen million.) Tokyo is part of a complex of manufacturing and financial centers along the Pacific Rim—Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, among others. Some are megacities, commonly described as urban areas of ten million or more. Lagos, São Paulo, and Mexico City are also megacities, and vast as they are, such giants do not encompass most of the world’s urban growth. Small cities and even small towns have exploded in size—half a million here, three million there. These smaller cities will encompass most of the world’s urban growth between now and the year 2030.

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Numerous newspapers were for sale on the streets, and while the journalists made a pittance—the publisher of one notable paper, the Daily Times, went at least half a year without paying many reporters at all—they maintained a loud public debate. A few miles away, one of Karachi’s great philanthropists had even opened a horseracing track, with regular Sunday events and all betting creatively reconfigured so that it did not run afoul of Islam’s ban on gambling. Karachi was nothing like Tehran, another Muslim megacity, where many of the richest parts of the culture were samizdat—banned books smuggled in suitcases from outside, banned movies screened secretly in people’s apartments, banned messages shouted from rooftops under the protection of the dark. Much more of Karachi’s culture was still in the open. A few dozen cinemas remained in business.

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Officials in Mumbai planned to demolish one of the city’s famous slums to make room for upscale towers. They were actually building an entire satellite city of the metropolis, called Navi Mumbai, or New Mumbai, which quickly grew to a population of two million. At Inchon, South Korea, the port for the megacity of Seoul, developers were planning a new city on a man-made island; an American firm was leading the project. Chinese officials brought in a Chilean planner attached to a London firm to help design a satellite city outside the absurdly growing metropolis of Shanghai. However, the global financial crisis was complicating or choking off such projects, including the forty-five towers planned by Emaar.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Many urban analysts see a great crisis in the problem of the megacity, which usually means the vast numbers of poor people living in Mumbai or Mexico City. It seems wise to many to limit the growth of these megacities, whose crowds and squalor doom millions to harsh, dead-end lives. In the developed world, cozy, homogeneous suburbs can appear far more egalitarian than the extraordinary urban gulfs that separate a Fifth Avenue billionaire from a ghetto child. But the preceding paragraph is filled with nonsense. The presence of poverty in cities from Rio to Rotterdam reflects urban strength, not weakness. Megacities are not too big. Limiting their growth would cause significantly more hardship than gain, and urban growth is a great way to reduce rural poverty.

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Yet urban poverty, despite its terrors, can offer a path toward prosperity both for the poor and for the nation as a whole. Brazil, China, and India are likely to become far wealthier over the next fifty years, and that wealth will be created in cities that are connected to the rest of the world, not in isolated rural areas. It is natural to see the very real problems of poorer megacities and think that the people should go back to their rural villages, but cities, not farms, will save the developing world. Many poor nations suffer from poor soil quality—that’s one reason why they’re poor—so it’s unlikely that they’ll ever be leaders in global agriculture. Improvements in agricultural productivity typically involve new technology that reduces the number of people working on farms.

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The status quo in the world’s poorest places is terrible, which is why the urban roller coaster has so much to offer, especially because cities can transmit the knowledge countries need to take part in the global economy. The vast flow of migrants to cities certainly stresses urban infrastructure; that’s one of the familiar arguments against allowing the growth of megacities. But while an influx of new migrants worsens the quality of roads and water for a city’s longtime residents, the new arrivals go from having virtually no infrastructure to enjoying all the advantages that come from access to decent transport and utilities. It is wrong to keep the quality of urban infrastructure high by preventing people from enjoying that infrastructure.

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

The projections may surprise you: World Megacities of Ten Million or More (population in millions) 1950 New York-Newark, USA (12.3) Tokyo, Japan (11.3) 1975 Tokyo, Japan (26.6) New York-Newark, USA (15.9) Mexico City, Mexico (10.7) 2007 Tokyo, Japan (35.7) New York-Newark, USA (19.0) Mexico City, Mexico (19.0) Mumbai, India (19.0) São Paulo, Brazil (18.8) Delhi, India (15.9) Shanghai, China (15.0) Kolkata (Calcutta), India (14.8) Dhaka, Bangladesh (13.5) Buenos Aires, Argentina (12.8) Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, USA (12.5) Karachi, Pakistan (12.1) Al-Qahirah (Cairo), Egypt (11.9) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (11.7) Osaka-Kobe, Japan (11.3) Beijing, China (11.1) Manila, Philippines (11.1) Moskva (Moscow), Russia (10.5) Istanbul, Turkey (10.1) 2025 Tokyo, Japan (36.4) Mumbai, India (26.4) Delhi, India (22.5) Dhaka, Bangladesh (22.0) São Paulo, Brazil (21.4) Mexico City, Mexico (21.0) New York-Newark, USA (20.6) Kolkata (Calcutta), India (20.6) Shanghai, China (19.4) Karachi, Pakistan (19.1) Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (16.8) Lagos, Nigeria (15.8) Al-Qahirah (Cairo), Egypt (15.6) Manila, Philippines (14.8) Beijing, China (14.5) Buenos Aires, Argentina (13.8) Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, USA (13.7) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (13.4) Jakarta, Indonesia (12.4) Istanbul, Turkey (12.1) Guangzhou, Guangdong, China (11.8) Osaka-Kobe, Japan (11.4) Moskva (Moscow), Russia (10.5) Lahore, Pakistan (10.5) Shenzhen, China (10.2) Chennai, India (10.1) Paris, France (10.0) The century of megacities has already begun. From just two in 1950 and three in 1975, we grew to nineteen by 2007 and expect to have twenty-seven by 2025. Furthermore, in sheer size alone our global urban culture is shifting east. Of the eight new megacities anticipated over the next fifteen years, six are in Asia, two in Africa, and just one in Europe. Zero new megacities are anticipated for the Americas. Instead, this massive urbanization is happening in some of our most populous countries: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan.

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When combined with its fast population growth rate, this means that Africa will triple the size of its cities over the next forty years.50 At 1.2 billion people, Africa will hold nearly a quarter of the world’s urban population.51 Tucked away in the back of a 2008 report by the United Nations Population Division are some stunning data tables.52 They rank our past, present, and future “megacities”—urban agglomerations with ten million inhabitants or more—for the years 1950, 1975, 2007, and 2025. The projections may surprise you: World Megacities of Ten Million or More (population in millions) 1950 New York-Newark, USA (12.3) Tokyo, Japan (11.3) 1975 Tokyo, Japan (26.6) New York-Newark, USA (15.9) Mexico City, Mexico (10.7) 2007 Tokyo, Japan (35.7) New York-Newark, USA (19.0) Mexico City, Mexico (19.0) Mumbai, India (19.0) São Paulo, Brazil (18.8) Delhi, India (15.9) Shanghai, China (15.0) Kolkata (Calcutta), India (14.8) Dhaka, Bangladesh (13.5) Buenos Aires, Argentina (12.8) Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, USA (12.5) Karachi, Pakistan (12.1) Al-Qahirah (Cairo), Egypt (11.9) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (11.7) Osaka-Kobe, Japan (11.3) Beijing, China (11.1) Manila, Philippines (11.1) Moskva (Moscow), Russia (10.5) Istanbul, Turkey (10.1) 2025 Tokyo, Japan (36.4) Mumbai, India (26.4) Delhi, India (22.5) Dhaka, Bangladesh (22.0) São Paulo, Brazil (21.4) Mexico City, Mexico (21.0) New York-Newark, USA (20.6) Kolkata (Calcutta), India (20.6) Shanghai, China (19.4) Karachi, Pakistan (19.1) Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (16.8) Lagos, Nigeria (15.8) Al-Qahirah (Cairo), Egypt (15.6) Manila, Philippines (14.8) Beijing, China (14.5) Buenos Aires, Argentina (13.8) Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, USA (13.7) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (13.4) Jakarta, Indonesia (12.4) Istanbul, Turkey (12.1) Guangzhou, Guangdong, China (11.8) Osaka-Kobe, Japan (11.4) Moskva (Moscow), Russia (10.5) Lahore, Pakistan (10.5) Shenzhen, China (10.2) Chennai, India (10.1) Paris, France (10.0) The century of megacities has already begun.

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New York City was the world’s second-largest metropolis in 1977, when Liza Minnelli first sang the hit song “New York, New York” (later popularized by Frank Sinatra) to Robert De Niro in a Martin Scorsese movie. By 2050, the “City That Never Sleeps” will be struggling just to stay in the top ten. The story doesn’t end with megacities. People are flocking to towns of all sizes, large and small. Indeed, some of the fastest growth is happening in urban centers with less than five hundred thousand people. According to the United Nations model, the number of “large” cities—those with populations between five and ten million—will increase from thirty in 2007 to forty-eight by 2025.

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

The view from a car window in the center lane of an expressway in Moscow, I quickly realized, is about the same as it is in Shanghai, Hyderabad, or Johannesburg: multiple lanes of cars, trucks, and vans, going nowhere, filled with pained passengers and even more aggravated-looking drivers. From megacity to megacity, only the smell of the exhaust and the makes of the vehicles seem to change. But in Moscow, it turns out, there is one surefire way to cut through even the densest traffic. Behind us, a siren whooped, and red-and-blue lights flashed in our rearview mirror. Three black Mercedes surged past us, playing a sustained game of chicken with oncoming traffic.

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So we were able to debate initiatives like the Spadina Expressway, which had huge implications for both the city and the region. People used to say Metro was the best form of municipal government in the world. I still believe they were right.” Despite Toronto-wide protests and two weeks of spirited filibustering by the opposition, the Harris government replaced Metro with a new “megacity.” Since 1998, this megacity has been represented by forty-four city councilors and made up of six previously separate municipalities, from Scarborough in the east to Etobicoke in the west. (All told, the Greater Toronto Area, which stretches from Oshawa to Burlington, is governed by a staggering 244 municipal office holders, including twenty-five mayors.)

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In 2008, a delegation from China, on a study tour of American subdivisions, visited the Del Webb development in the Phoenix suburb of Buckeye. Nobody in the local media recorded the officials’ impressions, but I hope they weren’t too positive. For if even a tiny fraction of the populations of the developing megacities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America pursue the suburban dream of a detached home for every family and a car in every garage, we’re in trouble. There just isn’t enough planet for any more Phoenixes. 4. The Salvation of Paris Paris, France On that 1st day of October, on the Champs-Elysées, I was assisting at the titanic reawakening of a completely new phenomenon, which three months of summer had calmed down a little—traffic.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

By 1971 60 per cent of fertiliser production came from small plants; 50 per cent of cement; 16 per cent of hydro-generating capacity; overall around 10 per cent of Chinese factory output.28 Transport The idea that the technologies of the poor world simply lag behind those of the rich world in time is not generally applicable, as the case of the fabric of the poor megacity illustrates. Transport provides a second example, since the poor megacities had different transport patterns from those of the great rich cities of 1900, or even of 1930. These rich cities did not have the bicycle or motorcycle densities of the megacities of late twentieth-century Asia. Indeed bicycle and motor-bicycle production boomed in the world, particularly in the poor world, from the 1970s. For the first time in many decades bicycle production surged ahead of motor-car production.

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At the end of the twentieth century, nuclear power, once the technology of the future, was set to be phased out in many countries. And in medicine too, many treatments invented in the twentieth century were discontinued, lobotomy and ECT being prominent examples, though the last is still occasionally used. Not Alphaville but bidonville: technology and the poor megacity The story of the poor world (a term preferable to the euphemistic ‘developing world’, and the now irrelevant ‘Third World’) and technology is usually told as one of transfer, resistance, incompetence, lack of maintenance and enforced dependence on rich-world technology. Imperialism, colonialism and dependence were the key concepts, and the transfer of technology from rich to poor, the main process.

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The great change was the expansion in Chinese production to 40–50 million bicycles from a few million in the early 1970s.29 In addition Taiwan and India between them were, at the end of the century, making more bicycles than were produced in the world in 1950. Bicycle-derived technologies of the poor megacity provide an instance of a creole technology. In 2003 it was reported that the city of Calcutta was still trying to get rid of the hand-pulled rickshaw, long gone from most of the rest of Asia. These rickshaws were deemed old-fashioned even by the standards of hand-rickshaws: Calcutta’s had spoked wheels, but not ones derived from bicycle technology; they were made of wood and were rimmed with solid rubber rather than pneumatic tyres.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

But the developed cities no longer appear to be on a collision course with themselves, the way London did in the nineteenth century. And so it may take the megacities of the developing world a century to reach that same sense of equilibrium, and during that period there will no doubt be episodes of large-scale human tragedy, including cholera outbreaks that will claim far more lives than were lost in Snow’s time. But the long-term prospects for urban life, even in these vast new sprawling “organisms,” are solid ones. It’s likely the megacities will mature faster than London did, precisely because of all the forms of expertise that were in embryo during the Broad Street events: epidemiology, public infrastructure engineering, waste management and recycling.

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It seemed entirely likely to many reasonable citizens of Victorian England—as well as to countless visitors from overseas—that a hundred years from now the whole project of maintaining cities of this scale would have proved a passing fancy. The monster would eat itself. Most of us don’t harbor doubts of this scale today, at least where cities are concerned. We worry about other matters: the epic shanty-towns of Third World megacities; the terror threats; the environmental impact of a planet industrializing at such a dramatic rate. But most of us accept without debate the long-term viability of human settlements with populations in the millions, or tens of millions. We know it can be done. We just haven’t figured out how to ensure that it is done well.

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An outbreak in South America in the early 1990s infected more than a million people, killing at least ten thousand. In the summer of 2003, damage to the water-supply system from the Iraq War triggered an outbreak of cholera in Basra. There is a fearful symmetry to these trends. In many ways, the struggles of the developing world mirror the issues that confronted London in 1854. The megacities of the developing world are wrestling with the same problems of uncharted and potentially unsustainable growth that London faced 150 years ago. In 2015, the five largest cities on the planet will be Tokyo, Mumbai, Dhaka, São Paulo, and Delhi—all of them with populations above 20 million. The great preponderance of that growth will be driven by so-called squatter or shantytown developments—entire sprawling cities developed on illegally occupied land, without any traditional infrastructure or civic planning supporting their growth.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

Cities are constantly being knocked down and rebuilt (by about 2 percent per year) and people are always coming and going, refreshing their energy and creativity. Cities such as London, New York and Tokyo aren’t going away. Indeed, they are now being remade and recast as city-states that are economically and culturally ahead of many countries. Growth of the megacity In 1975, there were just three global megacities: New York, Mexico City and Tokyo. Now there are 20-plus, depending on definitions (usually, 10 million plus people). According to McKinsey, a firm of management consultants, Kinshasa, Lagos, Cairo, São Paulo, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Shanghai, Beijing, Delhi, Kolkata and Dhaka all now qualify.

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ISBN 978-1-62365-195-4 Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway New York, NY 10019 www.quercus.com Contents Introduction POLITICS & POWER 01 Ubiquitous surveillance 02 Digital democracy 03 Cyber & drone warfare 04 Water wars 05 Wane of the West ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT 06 Resource depletion 07 Beyond fossil fuels 08 Precision agriculture 09 Population change 10 Geo-engineering THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 11 Megacities 12 Local energy networks 13 Smart cities 14 Next-generation transport 15 Extra-legal & feral slums TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE 16 An internet of things 17 Quantum & DNA computing 18 Nanotechnology 19 Gamification 20 Artificial Intelligence HEALTH & WELL-BEING 21 Personalized genomics 22 Regenerative medicine 23 Remote monitoring 24 User-generated medicine 25 Medical data mining SOCIAL & ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS 26 Living alone 27 Dematerialization 28 Income polarization 29 What (& where) is work?

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Clearly, natural systems such as climate are highly complex, and attempting to influence them is fraught with difficulty, especially at a technical and political level. However, while complex solutions may be one answer, there are other, much simpler options. Half the world’s population now live in cities, for example. While it could be argued that this is part of the problem, in terms of emissions, cities, especially megacities in developing regions—which are being built, or redesigned, from the ground up—also provide a potential solution because they afford opportunities to make housing, transport and infrastructure much more efficient and sustainable. the condensed idea Radically reengineering the planet timeline 2019 Nobel Prize awarded for a geo-solution to climate change 2021 World’s first large-scale ocean fertilization trial begins 2025 Carbon capture technologies widely adopted 2027 Large areas of Venice, Miami and Dhaka abandoned due to flooding 2030 Creation of artificial forests to scrub carbon from the air 2040 Development of cloud whitening above the world’s oceans 2050 The global space mirror project abandoned due to cost 11 Megacities In 1800 about 3 percent of the world’s population was urban.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

This is long-zoom history: almost a century after Willis Carrier began thinking about keeping the ink from smearing in Brooklyn, our ability to manipulate tiny molecules of air and moisture helped transform the geography of American politics. But the rise of the Sun Belt in the United States was just a dress rehearsal for what is now happening on a planetary scale. All around the world, the fastest growing megacities are predominantly in tropical climates: Chennai, Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Karachi, Lagos, Dubai, Rio de Janeiro. Demographers predict that these hot cities will have more than a billion new residents by 2025. It goes without saying that many of these new immigrants don’t have air-conditioning in their homes, at least not yet, and it is an open question whether these cities are sustainable in the long run, particularly those based in desert climates.

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It goes without saying that many of these new immigrants don’t have air-conditioning in their homes, at least not yet, and it is an open question whether these cities are sustainable in the long run, particularly those based in desert climates. But the ability to control temperature and humidity in office buildings, stores, and wealthier homes allowed these urban centers to attract an economic base that has catapulted them to megacity status. It’s no accident that the world’s largest cities—London, Paris, New York, Tokyo—were almost exclusively in temperate climates until the second half of the twentieth century. What we are seeing now is arguably the largest mass migration in human history, and the first to be triggered by a home appliance

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From the very beginnings of human settlements, figuring out where to put all the excrement has been just as important as figuring out how to build shelter or town squares or marketplaces. The problem is particularly acute in cities experiencing runaway growth, as we see today in the favelas and shantytowns of megacities. Nineteenth-century Chicago, of course, had both human and animal waste to deal with, the horses in the streets, the pigs and cattle awaiting slaughter in the stockyards. (“The river is positively red with blood under the Rush Street Bridge and past down our factory,” one industrialist wrote. “What pestilence may result from it I don’t know.”)

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

To accommodate the continued exponential increase, new cities and urban developments are being built at a truly astonishing rate. China alone will be constructing two to three hundred new cities over the next twenty years, many with populations of over a million, while megacities that already dominate the developing world continue to expand, many of them spawning slums and informal settlements as more and more people flock to cities. As I remarked earlier, megacities of the past such as London and New York suffered from much the same negative image associated with megacities of today. Nevertheless, they developed into major economic engines offering huge opportunities and driving the world’s economy. Here’s the problem: cities do indeed evolve, but they take many decades to change and we simply no longer have the time to wait.

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It was the world’s first industrial city and grew by a factor of six from a population of little more than 20,000 in 1771 to 120,000 in 1831, and to more than two million by the end of the nineteenth century nearly seventy years later. The evolution of Manchester provided the template that has been repeated innumerable times across the globe right up to the present day, from Düsseldorf and Pittsburgh to Shenzhen and São Paulo. Looking back on megacities of the past such as London or New York, we recognize that they suffered from much the same negative image often associated with megacities of today, such as Mexico City, Nairobi, or Calcutta. This is how Manchester’s textile workers were described 150 years ago: “the notorious fact is that well constitutioned men are rendered old and past labour at forty years of age, and that children are rendered decrepit and deformed, and thousands upon thousands of them slaughtered by consumptions [tuberculosis], before they arrive at the age of sixteen.”

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Nevertheless, despite the shameless exploitation and terrible dehumanizing living and working conditions, these cities became highly mobile, rapidly evolving diverse societies, offering huge opportunities that ultimately resulted in many of them becoming drivers of the world’s economy. Much the same could be speculated about megacities emerging today in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world. To quote the American architect and urban planner Andrés Duany: “In 1860, the capital city of Washington, with a population of 60,000, had unlighted streets, open sewers, and pigs roaming about its principal avenues. This condition was worse than the worst of our current cities. There is hope.” I cannot resist inserting a small personal note when writing about the rise of Victorian megacities and the plight of the “working poor.” Although I was born in a rural area of England, the county of Somerset, I have family roots in the East End of London and by a strange twist of fate ended up attending the last several years of my high school there.

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth

accounting loophole / creative accounting, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, digital divide, full employment, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, megacity, microcredit, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, pirate software, planned obsolescence, profit motive, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, yellow journalism

Few of the merchants who operate on the roadsides or in the chaotic marketplaces of the developing world have any idea what the informal economy is. I found this out the hard way. My first foray into the world of unlicensed trade was a trip to Lagos, Nigeria. I spent my first few days in the African megacity walking up to merchants in the city’s street markets, introducing myself, and telling them I was writing a book on the informal economy. Without exception, they gawked at me and refused to talk. My words seemed to fill them with terror. Na so trouble plenty. Fortunately, I was working with two locals who were helping me navigate the chaotic and cramped markets of the city.

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Trade may make Lagos seem frenzied and disorganized, it may sometimes appear aggressive and threatening, but trade built the city and continues to define its culture. Spend enough time there and you come to realize that it is exactly this—the irrepressible hubbub, the hyperentrepreneurial give-and-take, the ceaseless frenzy of talk and exchange—that holds the city together. Lagos is the first megacity in sub-Saharan Africa, and it may well be the first city in the world to be designed, in large part, by System D. According to local officials, 80 percent of the working people in Lagos are in System D. Nationwide, their economic efforts account for a mass of trade and exchange that is worth as much as 70 percent of Nigeria’s gross domestic product—or approximately $145 billion.

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The VW, Dodge, Chevy, and Nissan vans that ply the streets, most of them painted school-bus yellow and tricked out with home-welded bench seats, are so banged-up and rusted—or, as they say in Nigeria in a puff of honest doublespeak, “fairly used”—that it seems doubtful that they could go anywhere, particularly on the crowded, cratered roads of the sub-Saharan megacity. The passenger compartments of some of the older danfo and molue are connected to the chassis only with baling wire. What repairs they do get are just enough to push them forward for another day of life. It’s not unusual for a bus to literally come apart—the universal joint breaking, wheel bearings dropping out, the exhaust system flopping to the roadbed in a cloud of black soot, a hose springing loose and spraying strange messages in steam—while passengers are still inside.

The Plundered Planet: Why We Must--And How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity by Paul Collier

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, business climate, carbon tax, Doha Development Round, energy security, food miles, G4S, Global Witness, information asymmetry, Kenneth Arrow, megacity, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, search costs, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons

That might not sound a lot but if people move from hamlets to megacities the cumulative consequences can be substantial. Someone working in a city of 10 million is on average going to be 40 percent more productive than someone working in a city of 100,000—and most Africans currently live in places that are much smaller than that. The experience of China is so extraordinary that it might have no relevance for Africa: China’s sheer size enables megacities to have large hinterlands but the same pattern is found in India. Africa needs more megacities. Tony Venables and I compared Africa’s urbanization with that of India and found that Africa is missing out on productivity because it lacks cities like Mumbai.

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As Nigeria develops, its population will shift to the coastal cities. We can see this process already being played out on an even grander scale in China, as the population shifts by hundreds of millions from the interior. Within a generation, Lagos, already the largest city in sub-Saharan Africa, will become a global megacity of over 20 million people. Already, it represents half of the entire non-oil economy of Nigeria, so that in the future, as oil runs down and is replaced by a new economy, most of it will be in Lagos and its environs. Lagos has two key advantages. One is that it is a port, and ports are key sites for global manufacturing.

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Tony Venables and I compared Africa’s urbanization with that of India and found that Africa is missing out on productivity because it lacks cities like Mumbai. Lagos is Africa’s best chance of a productive megacity. If Nigeria’s economic future lies in Lagos, and if that future could arrive within a generation—so long as the Nigerian government harnesses the nation’s oil revenues—it is not difficult to work out where much of the public investment financed by oil should be located. Yet, paradoxically, Lagos is precisely, immaculately, the one place in Nigeria where oil money is not reaching. To understand this paradox we have to turn to the politics of oil.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

., 2008, ‘Global trends in emerging infectious diseases’, Nature, Vol. 451. Joo, Y.-M., 2018, Megacity Seoul: Urbanization and the Development of Modern South Korea (Routledge). Jordan, J., 2018, ‘Living on the Frontiers of Climate Change: A Mother’s Story’, YouTube (youtube.com). Kastle Systems, 2022, ‘Recreation activity vs. office occupancy’ (kastle.com). Kelly, H., Kramer, A. and Warren, A., 2020, Emerging Trends in Real Estate: United States and Canada 2020, PWC and Urban Land Institute. Kennedy, C., et al., 2015, ‘Energy and material flows of megacities’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 112, No. 19.

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., 2022, ‘Total fertility rate in Japan from 1800 to 2020’, Statista (statista.com). 22 Authors’ calculations based on Maddison Project database. 23 Kim, K., 1995, ‘The Korean miracle (1962–80) revisited: myths and realities in strategy and development’, in Stein, H. (ed.), Asian Industrialization and Africa, International Political Economy Series (Palgrave Macmillan). 24 Ibid. 25 Joo, Y.-M., 2018, Megacity Seoul: Urbanization and the Development of Modern South Korea (Routledge). 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 World Bank, 2022, ‘Four decades of poverty reduction in China’ (worldbank.org). 29 Authors’ calculations based on Maddison Project database. 30 Whyte, M., et al., 2015, ‘Challenging myths about China’s one-child policy’, The China Journal, Vol. 74. 31 Sheng, A. and Geng, X., 2018, ‘China is building 19 “supercity clusters”’, World Economic Forum (weforum.org). 32 Preen, M., 2018, ‘China’s city clusters: the plan to develop 19 super-regions’, China Briefing (china-briefing.com). 33 The Economist, 2022, ‘Xi Jinping’s economic revolution aims to spread growth’. 34 Authors’ calculations based on World Bank data. 35 Jedwab and Vollrath, ‘Urbanization without growth in historical perspective’. 36 Griffith, J., 2019, ‘22 of the top 30 most polluted cities in the world are in India’, CNN (cnn.com). 37 World Bank Data, 2018, ‘Population living in slums (% of urban population)’ (data.worldbank.org). 38 Nijman, J. and Shin, M., 2014, ‘The megacity’, in Knox, P.

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., 2018, ‘China’s city clusters: the plan to develop 19 super-regions’, China Briefing (china-briefing.com). 33 The Economist, 2022, ‘Xi Jinping’s economic revolution aims to spread growth’. 34 Authors’ calculations based on World Bank data. 35 Jedwab and Vollrath, ‘Urbanization without growth in historical perspective’. 36 Griffith, J., 2019, ‘22 of the top 30 most polluted cities in the world are in India’, CNN (cnn.com). 37 World Bank Data, 2018, ‘Population living in slums (% of urban population)’ (data.worldbank.org). 38 Nijman, J. and Shin, M., 2014, ‘The megacity’, in Knox, P. (ed.), Atlas of Cities (Princeton University Press). 39 Ibid. 40 Marx, B., et al., 2013, ‘The economics of slums in the developing world’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 27, No. 4. 41 Glaeser, E., 2011, Triumph of the City (Penguin). 42 Ibid. 43 International Labour Organization, 2018, ‘Women and men in the informal economy: a statistical picture’ (ilo.org). 44 WIEGO Statistics Database (wiego.org). 45 Samora, P., 2016, ‘Is this the end of slum upgrading in Brazil?’

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

From the hubs of communication and exchange that sprang up in the markets, palaces, and temples of ancient cities, the size of human settlements has grown, and grown, and grown. Today, the largest megacities tie together tens of millions of people who have come together to work and play in countless groupings. New technologies like Meetup (and Foursquare) are vital to helping people navigate the vast sea of opportunities for social interaction that are available in the modern megacity. We focus on the physical aspects of cities because they are the most tangible. But telecommunications networks let us see, increasingly in real time, the vital social processes of cities.

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Instead of undermining the city, new telecommunications technologies played a crucial role in London’s success—it is the hub of a global tangle of fiber-optic networks that plug its financiers and media tycoons directly into the lives of billions of people all over the world. We experience the symbiosis of place and cyberspace everyday. It’s almost impossible to imagine city life without our connected gadgets. In my own pocket, I carry an iPhone. It is my megacity survival kit, a digital Swiss Army knife that helps me search, navigate, communicate, and coordinate with everyone and everything around me. I have apps for finding restaurants, taxis, and my friends. A networked calendar keeps me in sync with my colleagues and my family. If I’m running late, there are three different ways to send a message and buy some time.

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We’ve all become digital telepaths, hooked on the rush we get as these devices untether us from the tyranny of clocks, fixed schedules, and prearranged meeting points. The addiction started, as all do, slowly at first. But now it governs the metabolism of our urban lives. With our days and nights increasingly stretched across the vastness of megacities, we’ve turned to these smart little gadgets to keep it all synchronized. It’s no accident that the most common text message, sent billions of times a year all over the world, is “where r u?”26 The digital revolution didn’t kill cities. In fact, cities everywhere are flourishing because new technologies make them even more valuable and effective as face-to-face gathering places.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

These lead from the long-foretold and longer-postponed eclipse of the nation-state to the ascendance of political theology as an existential transnationalism, from the billowing depths of cloud computing and ubiquitous addressability to the logistical modernity of the endlessly itinerant object, and from the return of the city-state in the guise of a multipolar network of megacities and walled megagardens to the permanent emergency of ecological collapse and back again. My conclusions are speculative and meant to inform and support further design of these systems. Like any other good theoretical design research, it handles slippery problems in ways that are provisional, prototypical, and provocative—not necessarily policy (yet).

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In the emergence of The Stack, it is not that the state declines per se, but that our contemporary condition is qualified both by a debordering perforation and liquefaction of this system's ability to maintain a monopoly on political geography, and by an overbordering, manifest as an unaccountable proliferation of new lines, endogenous frames, anomalous segments, medieval returns, infomatic interiors, ecological externalities, megacity states, and more. These zones fold and flip-flop on top of one another, interweaving into abstract and violent spatial machines of uncanny jurisdictional intricacy. Borderlines are militarized as they are also punctured or ignored. However, the simultaneity of all this is only contradictory at first blush.

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The Stack discussed in the following chapters is a vast software/hardware formation, a proto-megastructure built of crisscrossed oceans, layered concrete and fiber optics, urban metal and fleshy fingers, abstract identities and the fortified skins of oversubscribed national sovereignty. It is a machine literally circumscribing the planet, which not only pierces and distorts Westphalian models of state territory but also produces new spaces in its own image: clouds, networks, zones, social graphs, ecologies, megacities, formal and informal violence, weird theologies, all superimposed one on the other. This aggregate machine becomes a systematic technology according to the properties and limitations of that very spatial order. The layers of The Stack, some continental in scale and others microscopic, work in specific relation to the layer above and below it.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Over the past fifty years, in low- to medium-income countries, urbanization has doubled, sometimes tripled—think Nigeria and Kenya. By 2007, the globe had crossed a radical threshold: Half of us now lived in cities. Along the way, we got cities on steroids. In 1950, only New York and Tokyo housed 10 million residents, which is the figure required for “mega-city” status. By 2000, there were over eighteen mega-cities. Today, it’s thirty-three. Tomorrow? Tomorrow is when the numbers go crazy. In fact, we have a new word for the crazy, a “hyper-city,” a locale with a population above 20 million. By comparison, during the French Revolution, the world’s entire urban population was less than 20 million.

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the 1947 partitioning of India and Pakistan: “History’s Greatest Migration,” Guardian, September 25, 1947. See: https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/Story/0,,105131,00.html. See also: https://www.unhcr.org/3ebf9bab0.pdf. Tokyo is the largest mega-city on Earth: Alexandre Tanzi and Wei Lu,“Tokyo’s Reign as World’s Largest City Fades,” Bloomberg, July 13, 2018. See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-13/tokyo-s-reign-as-world-s-largest-city-fades-demographic-trends. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacity. Urban Relocations Three hundred years ago: UN Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects, the 2001 Revision (New York, 2002). 11 million Americans: David Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, The American Pageant: A History of the American People, 15th (AP) edition (Cengage Learning, 2013), pp. 539–540.

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Climate Central’s prognosis isn’t good: “Carbon emissions causing 4 degrees C of warming—what business-as-usual points toward today—could lock in enough sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people.” To figure out what this level of displacement actually looks like, Climate Central also made a series of maps depicting the effects of global warming on every coastal nation and mega-city on the planet. Unless you’re a fish, the news is not good. With four degrees warming, in many of the world’s mega-cities—London, Hong Kong, Rio, Mumbai, Shanghai, Jakarta, Calcutta, etc.—swimming becomes the fastest way to get from point A to point B. Entire island nations vanish forever. In America, twenty million people end up underwater.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

typhoons have intensified: Wei Mei and Shang-Ping Xie, “Intensification of Landfalling Typhoons over the Northwest Pacific Since the Late 1970s,” Nature Geoscience 9 (September 2016): pp. 753–57, https://doi.org/10.1038/NGEO2792. By 2070, Asian megacities: Linda Poon, “Climate Change Is Testing Asia’s Megacities,” CityLab, October 9, 2018, www.citylab.com/environment/2018/10/asian-megacities-vs-tomorrows-typhoons/572062. the more intense the blizzards: Judah Cohen et al., “Warm Arctic Episodes Linked with Increased Frequency of Extreme Winter Weather in the United States,” Nature Communications 9, no. 869 (March 2018): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-02992-9. 758 tornadoes: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, “State of the Climate: Tornadoes for April 2011,” May 2011, www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/tornadoes/201104. 40 percent by 2010: Noah S.

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., “Sea-Level Rise Due to Polar Ice-Sheet Mass Loss During Past Warm Periods,” Science 349, no. 6244 (July 2015), https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa4019. two-degree scenario: “Surging Seas,” Climate Central. about 444,000 square miles: Benjamin Strauss, “Coastal Nations, Megacities Face 20 Feet of Sea Rise,” Climate Central, July 9, 2015, www.climatecentral.org/news/nations-megacities-face-20-feet-of-sea-level-rise-19217. the twenty cities most affected: Ibid. flooding has quadrupled since 1980: European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, “New Data Confirm Increased Frequency of Extreme Weather Events, European National Science Academies Urge Further Action on Climate Change Adaptation,” March 21, 2018, https://easac.eu/press-releases/details/new-data-confirm-increased-frequency-of-extreme-weather-events-european-national-science-academies.

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Looking globally, researchers have found an increase of 25 to 30 percent in Category 4 and 5 hurricanes for just one degree Celsius of global warming. Between just 2006 and 2013, the Philippines were hit by seventy-five natural disasters; over the last four decades in Asia, typhoons have intensified by between 12 and 15 percent, and the proportion of Category 4 and 5 storms has doubled; in some areas, it has tripled. By 2070, Asian megacities could lose as much as $35 trillion in assets due to storms, up from just $3 trillion in 2005. We are so far from investing in adequate defenses against these storms that we are still building out into their paths—as though we are homesteaders staking claim to land cleared each summer by tornadoes, committing ourselves blindly to generations being punished by natural disaster.

World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Different federal systems organise distinctive powers and responsibilities in governmental tiers, and so the relationship between the world cities and the national governments varies among the four systems outlined in this section. Chapter 7 turns to India to explore the challenges of Mumbai, as a megacity and national financial hub, in negotiating support and reform from above. Mumbai is an example of a world city whose higher tier of government has failed to create the institutions or the planning and co‐ordination mechanisms required to govern the metropolitan space. This chapter describes the mixed effects of past reforms and investments and explains how the Government of India policy has not created the conditions for the state government to overcome short‐term political imperatives and act in the long‐term interest of its major city.

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It even dominates in terms of international hotels, trading and telecommunications firms. Unsurprisingly, a clear majority of Korea’s senior executives, researchers and innovators also operate in the city (Hill and Kim, 2000). In the space of just 75 years, Seoul grew from a city of one million people to a megacity of more than 10 million, and its economic structure transformed from a rural, agrarian system to a labour‐intensive export hub, and then to an advanced industrial and post‐industrial economy. The authoritarian regime of Bak Jeong‐hee (1961–1979) introduced Gukgajohabjuui – ‘state corporatism’ – a process of explicit collusion between Bak’s administration and Korean industrial monopolies (Shin, 2008).

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Mumbai is also home to the region’s biggest cultural export, in Bollywood, and is a dynamic centre for small trading businesses in the design, fashion, tourism and jewellery sectors. These multiple drivers have seen the city’s population more than treble in 40 years, to the extent it is now one of the world’s largest and most high‐profile megacities (Table 7.1). Mumbai is now a 23 million person metropolitan region, comprised of Greater Mumbai (440 km2, 12 million people), seven other municipal corporations and nine smaller municipal councils. The 4350 km2 region is part of a 110 million person state (Maharashtra) whose population is mainly rural, and whose system of government reflects this balance.

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

ISBN 978-1-61039-305-8 (HC) ISBN 978-1-61039-306-5 (EB) E3-20170928-JV-PC CONTENTS COVER TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT DEDICATION INTRODUCTION PART ONE 1 Decisive Battle 2 Indecisive Battle 3 The House of Strife 4 Victory Through Cruelty 5 Failures of Peace 6 Total War 7 The Balance of Terror 8 Stuck in the Nuclear Age 9 A Surprise Peace PART TWO 10 A Science of War 11 Counting the Dead 12 Democracy and War 13 New Wars and Failed States 14 Ancient Hatreds and Mineral Curses 15 Intervention 16 Counter-Insurgency to Counter-Terrorism 17 From Counter-Terrorism to Counter-Insurgency 18 The Role of Barbarism 19 Cure Not Prevention PART THREE 20 Hybrid Wars 21 Cyberwar 22 Robots and Drones 23 Mega-Cities and Climate Change 24 Coming Wars 25 The Future of the Future of War ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALSO BY LAWRENCE FREEDMAN BIBLIOGRAPHY NOTES INDEX For Sir Michael Howard Teacher, Mentor, Friend INTRODUCTION My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn.

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The category could include both a nuclear war of short duration destroying whole civilisations, and some vicious local combat that had continued for years while neighbours barely paid attention. It has become reasonable to ask whether the more ferocious forms of gang warfare, hidden from view in the slums of modern mega-cities, should now count as armed conflict. The reason that the future is difficult to predict is that it depends on choices that have yet to be made, including by our governments, in circumstances that remain uncertain. We ask questions about the future to inform choices not to succumb to fatalism. By stressing this aspect of thinking about war, peace, and the use of armed force this book provides a reminder that history is made by people who do not know what is going to happen next.

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The drama came from the tactical and operational, as these super-smart people made their complex systems do whatever they needed them to do. The strategic picture remained murky. They were fighting the evil and malign because they could not let them win. Behind all this lay some great political failure, but that was not where the story was to be found. [ 23 ] Mega-Cities and Climate Change In our world there are still people who run around risking their lives in bloody battles over a name or a flag or a piece of clothing but they tend to belong to gangs with names like the Bloods and the Crips and they make their living dealing drugs. FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, The End of History, 19921 As Fukuyama looked with optimism at the West’s liberal triumph in the early 1990s, there was also anxiety about whether a lack of anything serious to fight about would lead it into a soft decadence.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Half the population of Asia will live in urban areas by 2020, and half the population of Africa will do so by 2035. Virtually all of the expected growth in world population between now and 2050 is expected to be concentrated in the urban areas of developing countries. Far more people will live in megacities with populations greater than 10 million people. In 1970 the world had only two megacities: New York and Tokyo. Today there are twenty-two, and sixteen of the twenty new ones are in developing countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Greater urbanization means more crowded living spaces, more stress on local water sources, increased air and water pollution, new challenges in creating employment for low-skilled urban workers, and major difficulties in providing adequate water, sanitation, and garbage disposal facilities.

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Abacha, Sani, 99, 113 Abdullah II, King of Jordan, 187 Abu Dhabi, 159 Abundance (Diamandis and Kotler), 300 Acemoglu, Daron, 13, 129, 140, 249 Achebe, Chinua, 72 Aden, Zheng He’s trip to, 152 Afghanistan, 9, 208, 285 education in, 215 as landlocked, 202, 205 Soviet invasion of, 134, 146 US war in, 8, 10, 118, 119, 141, 146 Africa, 37, 44, 46 agriculture in, 261 climate change and, 284 democracy in, 108, 110–11 GMOs in, 172 Green Revolution and, 170–73 growth in, 50, 189 malaria in, 211–13 megacities in, 277 mobile phones in, 157 pessimism about, 12 protests in, 102 resources in, 261 Africa Betrayed (Ayittey), 140 African National Congress Party (ANC), 143, 182, 185 agricultural productivity, 22, 25, 38, 305 agriculture, 37, 44, 45, 56–57, 166, 258, 283, 293 in Africa, 261 in Asia, 201 in China, 35 geography and, 204–5 Green Revolution and, 38, 79, 170–73, 204 growth in production of, 273–74 improvements in, 194–95 trade in, 273 AIDS, 20, 75, 81–82, 83, 94, 95, 173, 174–75, 182, 205, 214, 221, 246, 266 air defense identification zone (ADIZ), 288 air travel, 168–69, 169 Aker, Jenny, 177 Akuffo, Fred, 189 Albania, 50, 108, 159 Algeria, 114 life expectancy in, 78 poverty in, 36 Allende, Salvador, 143–44 aluminum, 53 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 172, 281–82 American Indians, 112, 142 American Medical Association, 172 Amin, Idi, 127 Andes, University of the, 247 Andropov, Yuri, 134 Angola, 114, 145 forest loss in, 280 war in, 100 antibiotics, 77, 94, 267 antimicrobial resistance, 267 antiretroviral therapy (ART), 174, 214 apartheid, 44, 57, 68, 100, 103, 135, 141, 180, 182 Apple, 46 Aquino, Benigno, 143, 149 Aquino, Cory, 17, 104, 109, 184, 185, 186 Arabian Peninsula, 152 Arab Spring, 255, 263 Aral Sea, 285 Argentina, 100 financial crisis in, 255 slowing of progress in, 250, 262 Arias, Oscar, 18, 149, 184 Armenia, 113 and democracy, 248, 263 economic problems in, 255 Army Air Corps, US, 210 Arndt, Channing, 226, 227 Arnquist, Sarah, 176–77 Arrow, Kenneth, 62–63 artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), 213, 267 Asia, 79 education in, 201 financial crisis in, 38, 39, 126, 144 health in, 201 megacities in, 277 values in, 121, 122–23 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 259 assassinations, 118 assembly, freedom of, 198–99 Australia, 25, 78, 167, 231, 281, 291 malaria in, 210 Austria, as landlocked, 202 authoritarianism, 3, 8, 22, 99, 101–3, 106, 107, 109, 120, 121–22, 125–29, 141, 146, 149, 188, 222, 224, 249–51, 255, 263–66 Ayittey, George, 140 Azerbaijan, 114 Babangida, Ibrahim, 99 Bali, 286 Bamako, 265 Banerjee, Abhijit, 14, 31 Bangladesh, 18, 37, 45, 127, 144, 159, 271 building collapse in, 162 data entry firms in, 178 democracy in, 124 education in, 87 garments from, 59 growth in, 6, 45, 238, 242, 271 inequality in, 67 jeans from, 56 MAMA in, 178 threats to gains in, 271–72 war in, 145 Zheng He’s trip to, 152 Ban Ki-moon, 284–85 banks, 56, 154, 241, 303 technology for, 175, 179 Bǎè Chuán, 152 bar associations, 110 Barlonyo camp, 287 Barre, Mohammed Siad, 99 Barro, Robert, 87 Bashir, Omar al-, 185 Batavia, 137 Bauer, Peter, 213, 220, 221 Bazzi, Sami, 225 bed nets, 94, 213 Belarus, 114, 185 Belgian Congo, 13, 140 Belize, 56, 69–70 benign dictators, 125–26 Benin, 103, 144, 216 Berlin Wall, fall of, x, 103, 123, 134, 143, 148 Bermeo, Sarah, 223 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 115 Bhavnani, Rikhil, 225 Bhote Koshi River, 203 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 95, 161, 171, 212 biodiversity loss, 9, 63 biofuels, 281 Birdsall, Nancy, 298 Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, King of Nepal, 122 Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold von, 146 Black Death, 276 black markets, 192 Boeing 707, 168 Boğaziçi University, 247 Bokassa, Jean-Bédel, 222 Boko Haram, 287 Bolivia, 162, 202, 205, 280 Bollyky, Thomas, 268 Boone, Peter, 225 border disputes, 288–91 Borlaug, Norman, 170 Botchwey, Kwesi, 189 Botswana, 9, 37, 207 aid to, 214, 216 as democracy, 98, 263 education in, 190 growth in, 5, 7, 15, 50, 126, 128, 141, 236 as landlocked, 202 life expectancy in, 81, 266 Bottom Billion, The (Collier), 118, 188, 202, 205, 217, 303 Bourguignon, François, 25, 27, 28 Brazil, 20, 22, 36, 38, 45, 155, 186 coastal vs. isolated areas in, 201 data entry firms in, 178 democracy in, 123 economic problems in, 186, 255 future of, 234 growth in, 6, 7, 20, 22, 45, 58, 235, 262 household income in, 50 inequality in, 66–67 infrastructure financing in, 259–60 innovation in, 302 natural capital in, 63 protests in, 263 reforms in, 186, 192 trade encouraged by, 155 universities in, 247 breast feeding, 178 British Royal Society, 172 British Shell Transport and Trading Company, 138 British South Africa Company, 180 Brown, Drusilla, 165 Brükner, Markus, 226 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 166, 300 budget deficits, 295 Buenos Aires, 201 Bulgaria, 7, 134, 143 Burkina Faso: demonstrations in, 281 education in, 87 as landlocked, 205 Song-Taaba Yalgré women’s cooperative in, 178 Burnside, Craig, 225 Burundi, 49 inequality in, 69–70 lack of growth in, 50 as landlocked, 202 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu, 185 Cabbages and Kings (O.

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Abacha, Sani, 99, 113 Abdullah II, King of Jordan, 187 Abu Dhabi, 159 Abundance (Diamandis and Kotler), 300 Acemoglu, Daron, 13, 129, 140, 249 Achebe, Chinua, 72 Aden, Zheng He’s trip to, 152 Afghanistan, 9, 208, 285 education in, 215 as landlocked, 202, 205 Soviet invasion of, 134, 146 US war in, 8, 10, 118, 119, 141, 146 Africa, 37, 44, 46 agriculture in, 261 climate change and, 284 democracy in, 108, 110–11 GMOs in, 172 Green Revolution and, 170–73 growth in, 50, 189 malaria in, 211–13 megacities in, 277 mobile phones in, 157 pessimism about, 12 protests in, 102 resources in, 261 Africa Betrayed (Ayittey), 140 African National Congress Party (ANC), 143, 182, 185 agricultural productivity, 22, 25, 38, 305 agriculture, 37, 44, 45, 56–57, 166, 258, 283, 293 in Africa, 261 in Asia, 201 in China, 35 geography and, 204–5 Green Revolution and, 38, 79, 170–73, 204 growth in production of, 273–74 improvements in, 194–95 trade in, 273 AIDS, 20, 75, 81–82, 83, 94, 95, 173, 174–75, 182, 205, 214, 221, 246, 266 air defense identification zone (ADIZ), 288 air travel, 168–69, 169 Aker, Jenny, 177 Akuffo, Fred, 189 Albania, 50, 108, 159 Algeria, 114 life expectancy in, 78 poverty in, 36 Allende, Salvador, 143–44 aluminum, 53 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 172, 281–82 American Indians, 112, 142 American Medical Association, 172 Amin, Idi, 127 Andes, University of the, 247 Andropov, Yuri, 134 Angola, 114, 145 forest loss in, 280 war in, 100 antibiotics, 77, 94, 267 antimicrobial resistance, 267 antiretroviral therapy (ART), 174, 214 apartheid, 44, 57, 68, 100, 103, 135, 141, 180, 182 Apple, 46 Aquino, Benigno, 143, 149 Aquino, Cory, 17, 104, 109, 184, 185, 186 Arabian Peninsula, 152 Arab Spring, 255, 263 Aral Sea, 285 Argentina, 100 financial crisis in, 255 slowing of progress in, 250, 262 Arias, Oscar, 18, 149, 184 Armenia, 113 and democracy, 248, 263 economic problems in, 255 Army Air Corps, US, 210 Arndt, Channing, 226, 227 Arnquist, Sarah, 176–77 Arrow, Kenneth, 62–63 artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), 213, 267 Asia, 79 education in, 201 financial crisis in, 38, 39, 126, 144 health in, 201 megacities in, 277 values in, 121, 122–23 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 259 assassinations, 118 assembly, freedom of, 198–99 Australia, 25, 78, 167, 231, 281, 291 malaria in, 210 Austria, as landlocked, 202 authoritarianism, 3, 8, 22, 99, 101–3, 106, 107, 109, 120, 121–22, 125–29, 141, 146, 149, 188, 222, 224, 249–51, 255, 263–66 Ayittey, George, 140 Azerbaijan, 114 Babangida, Ibrahim, 99 Bali, 286 Bamako, 265 Banerjee, Abhijit, 14, 31 Bangladesh, 18, 37, 45, 127, 144, 159, 271 building collapse in, 162 data entry firms in, 178 democracy in, 124 education in, 87 garments from, 59 growth in, 6, 45, 238, 242, 271 inequality in, 67 jeans from, 56 MAMA in, 178 threats to gains in, 271–72 war in, 145 Zheng He’s trip to, 152 Ban Ki-moon, 284–85 banks, 56, 154, 241, 303 technology for, 175, 179 Bǎè Chuán, 152 bar associations, 110 Barlonyo camp, 287 Barre, Mohammed Siad, 99 Barro, Robert, 87 Bashir, Omar al-, 185 Batavia, 137 Bauer, Peter, 213, 220, 221 Bazzi, Sami, 225 bed nets, 94, 213 Belarus, 114, 185 Belgian Congo, 13, 140 Belize, 56, 69–70 benign dictators, 125–26 Benin, 103, 144, 216 Berlin Wall, fall of, x, 103, 123, 134, 143, 148 Bermeo, Sarah, 223 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 115 Bhavnani, Rikhil, 225 Bhote Koshi River, 203 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 95, 161, 171, 212 biodiversity loss, 9, 63 biofuels, 281 Birdsall, Nancy, 298 Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, King of Nepal, 122 Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold von, 146 Black Death, 276 black markets, 192 Boeing 707, 168 Boğaziçi University, 247 Bokassa, Jean-Bédel, 222 Boko Haram, 287 Bolivia, 162, 202, 205, 280 Bollyky, Thomas, 268 Boone, Peter, 225 border disputes, 288–91 Borlaug, Norman, 170 Botchwey, Kwesi, 189 Botswana, 9, 37, 207 aid to, 214, 216 as democracy, 98, 263 education in, 190 growth in, 5, 7, 15, 50, 126, 128, 141, 236 as landlocked, 202 life expectancy in, 81, 266 Bottom Billion, The (Collier), 118, 188, 202, 205, 217, 303 Bourguignon, François, 25, 27, 28 Brazil, 20, 22, 36, 38, 45, 155, 186 coastal vs. isolated areas in, 201 data entry firms in, 178 democracy in, 123 economic problems in, 186, 255 future of, 234 growth in, 6, 7, 20, 22, 45, 58, 235, 262 household income in, 50 inequality in, 66–67 infrastructure financing in, 259–60 innovation in, 302 natural capital in, 63 protests in, 263 reforms in, 186, 192 trade encouraged by, 155 universities in, 247 breast feeding, 178 British Royal Society, 172 British Shell Transport and Trading Company, 138 British South Africa Company, 180 Brown, Drusilla, 165 Brükner, Markus, 226 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 166, 300 budget deficits, 295 Buenos Aires, 201 Bulgaria, 7, 134, 143 Burkina Faso: demonstrations in, 281 education in, 87 as landlocked, 205 Song-Taaba Yalgré women’s cooperative in, 178 Burnside, Craig, 225 Burundi, 49 inequality in, 69–70 lack of growth in, 50 as landlocked, 202 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu, 185 Cabbages and Kings (O.

The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, always be closing, California gold rush, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, kremlinology, load shedding, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, the long tail, trade route, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

The combination of violent upheavals and the communications revolution in all its aspects—from cyber interactions to new transportation infrastructure—has wrought a more claustrophobic and ferociously contested world: a world in which territory still matters, and where every crisis interacts with every other as never before. This is all intensified by the expansion of megacities and absolute rises in population. No matter how overcrowded, no matter how much the underground water table and nutrients in the soil have been depleted, people will fight for every patch of ground. On this violent and interactive earth, the neat divisions of Cold War area studies and of continents and subcontinents are starting to be erased as the Long European War passes from living memory.

…

For untold centuries, Beijing’s only problem was the so-called barbarians on the steppelands partially encircling Han China’s arable lowland cradle: the Tibetans, the Turkic Muslim Uighurs, the Inner Mongolians, and others, who either had to be violently subdued, bribed, or demographically overwhelmed, exactly as they must be today. China’s twenty-two urban clusters, each containing at least one megacity, all happen to be located within Han China’s arable cradle, which constitutes the territory of Chinese imperial dynasties throughout history and excludes this semicircle of steppelands. It was only in the mid-eighteenth century that the last of those dynasties, that of the Qing or Manchus (who were themselves outsiders), expanded into the barbarian desert and steppe regions, thus preparing the geographical context of the current Chinese state—a state that overlaps with Muslim Central Asia.

…

And as the principal geographical satellite of the Afro-Eurasian landmass,*41 North America will remain pivotal to world history even while it is protected from many of the disruptions that will overtake Afro-Eurasia itself. For this is a world that will be more volatile precisely because of the growth of middle and working classes that are less stoical than the rural poor, of which there will be less. Indeed, it is the shantytown, the incubator of misery and utopian ideology, that will help define the megacities of Afro-Eurasia. The more urbanized, the more educated, and even the more enlightened the world becomes, counterintuitively, the more politically unstable it becomes, too.*42 This is what techno-optimists and those who inhabit the world of fancy corporate gatherings are prone to miss: They wrongly equate wealth creation—and unevenly distributed wealth creation at that—with political order and stability.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

This system flourished for about twenty years before becoming somewhat squashed by top-down power, but even more by the sheer scale of people who wanted to be included in the process as the city grew in size. In Brazil, as megacities emerged, negotiations between a very large cluster of localities began to lose coherence and stretch out endlessly throughout the year. Moreover, the vast wave of migrants which create a megacity were often not integrated into the organizations and assemblies required for participatory budgeting. Enter the smart city, via the smartphone and big-data assemblage. Huge ‘inputs’, i.e. shifting votes, can be handled, as changes in the distribution of funds over many communities are calculated in real time.

…

Cf. Steef Buijs, Wendy Tan and Devisari Tunas (eds), Megacities: Exploring a Sustainable Future (Rotterdam: Nai010 Publishers, 2010). 11. Cf. Saskia Sassen, The Global City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 12. William H. Janeway, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Chapter 4, passim. 13. Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 4th edn (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2012). 14. Liu Thai Ker, ‘Urbanizing Singapore’, in Megacities, ed. Buijs, Tan and Tunas, pp. 246–7. Singapore stands out as an exception to this rule. 15.

…

Garden cities, in Ebenezer Howard’s original conception, were meant to contain about 60,000 inhabitants; such a place with so few people would be a mere blip in the Shanghai landscape, or in its newly developing satellite cities, where 3 to 4 million people was to be the norm: you’d need a thousand garden cities threaded together and functionally related to make the Shanghai metropolitan region of 2050. Similarly, Corbusier’s original Plan Voisin would have housed, by my rough calculation, 40,000–45,000 people at most. Urban growth of the Chinese sort exposes the limits of either plan in creating coherence for a megacity.26 Of the three Western founders, Frederick Law Olmsted and his conviction about the sociable glue of green space was the most provoking to her, because the most troubling. Landscape projects in the new Shanghai have not glued people together; indeed, the forest of towers, a realization of the Plan Voisin on a huge scale, has engineered a social crisis.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

Cities have grown from the once vast Nineveh – home to 120,000 people in 650 BC – to the megacities of the Anthropocene with more than 10 million inhabitants. The Anthropocene is the urban age. Our species is undergoing the biggest migration in human history – already more than half of us live in cities; by 2050, around 7 billion of us will. We have become Homo urbanus – a different creature, a faster-thinking, more reactive, more genetically diverse human. Human history is increasingly urban history. A million-person city will be built every ten days over the next eighty years.1 There are currently around thirty megacities on the planet, and by 2050 they are expected to merge into dozens of megaregions, like Hong Kong–Shenzhen–Guangzhou in China, where more than 100 million people will live in a seemingly endless city.

…

Canals and parks have been built, the streets are cleaned and drainage ditches maintained. Skyscrapers pierce the heavens at a faster rate than in any other city on the continent. Medellín is no megacity, but smaller cities like this will bear the brunt of humanity’s great urbanisation. Less economically important nationally and internationally, such second-tier cities often miss out on the attention and resources directed at improving megacities and tourist centres. Nevertheless, the example of Medellín shows that the vast migration from countryside to city needn’t be a crisis but an opportunity. That’s something Brazil, one of the most economically unequal countries, has taken to heart.

…

The urban revolution of the Anthropocene could prove the solution to many of the environmental and social problems of our age, allowing humans to inhabit the planet in vast numbers but in the most sustainable way. Or, it could finally prove our species’ undoing, the apocalyptic version of the dystopian megacity so often portrayed in science fiction. Urbanisation in many of the places I visited in the developing world is mired in squalor, the accumulation of rubbish, and polluted waters and land. This is the result of fast, unplanned migration to what are often ‘illegal’ sites, meaning that even if municipalities wanted to provide infrastructure such as waste collection and sewerage they would struggle.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

To accommodate this influx, not only are new cities rising up, but existing ones are getting bigger. In 1800, there were just two cities with at least one million inhabitants, London and Beijing. In 1900, there were around fifteen. By 2000, the number had soared to 371. And by 2030, it is projected to surpass 700, of which 125 will be in China. By then, the world can expect to have over forty megacities, those with 10 million inhabitants or more. All past prophecies of the decay of cities have proved wrong. Cities will endure. Urbanization, especially in developing countries, will likely recover and continue at more or less its pre-pandemic pace. No rural awakening is at hand. Most of the people who leave one city will simply move to another, perhaps smaller one.

…

Even many of the most effective environmental groups were founded by city slickers—from the Sierra Club to Greenpeace. And it was in America’s cities that protesters gathered to demand policing reforms after the murder of George Floyd. Urbanization will continue apace in developing countries. In fact, by 2030, they will be home to some 80% of the world’s megacities. But in the developed world, urbanization has probably peaked. In the United States, the share of the urban population is currently 83%. It may creep up to 89% by 2050, but the share seems to be approaching a natural limit. Researchers note that some big cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, have seen some recent slippage in population, and some worry about a repeat of the 1970s, when New York lost 10% of its residents.

…

Her popularity is understandable—even driving a brand-new Peugeot loses some of its appeal if everything you need is within walking distance. Public transportation, too, might become less crowded, a welcome outcome amid lingering concerns about social distancing. If the Paris plan moves forward, other mayors may try to make their own megacities work and feel more like small, walkable communities. To provide safety for the greater numbers of runners, walkers, and bikers who now avoid the subway, cities like Barcelona and New York banned cars from some streets. Parking spaces were converted into outdoor seating for socially distant dining.

Empire of Ants: The Hidden Worlds and Extraordinary Lives of Earth's Tiny Conquerors by Susanne Foitzik, Olaf Fritsche

deep learning, epigenetics, megacity, microbiome, phenotype, random walk, trade route

Finely Tuned Navigation Getting around the nest A well-constructed road network Behind the beech, right as far as the oak Chasing the sun Sunshine on a cloudy day Desert-dwelling masters of navigation Rewinding the tape Celestial compasses Chapter 6. Savage Hordes No mercy A special kind of tent The queen is dieting again This land is my land Sausage flies and biting sutures The Prince of Insects Chapter 7. A Garden for a City of Millions The flower children of the ant community Birth of a megacity A thousand rooms and three million inhabitants The fungal issue Advanced gardening It’s what’s on the inside that counts Small but deadly Chapter 8. A Treehouse for the Nation Theft = food Will garden for room and board An army of junkies Inside the devil’s garden A flowering trash pile A city in the trees Chapter 9.

…

The chemical code Nose your place The real chemtrails Drums and strings Chapter 5 Finely Tuned Navigation Getting around the nest A well-constructed road network Behind the beech, right as far as the oak Chasing the sun Sunshine on a cloudy day Desert-dwelling masters of navigation Rewinding the tape Celestial compasses Chapter 6 Savage Hordes No mercy A special kind of tent The queen is dieting again This land is my land Sausage flies and biting sutures The Prince of Insects Chapter 7 A Garden for a City of Millions The flower children of the ant community Birth of a megacity A thousand rooms and three million inhabitants The fungal issue Advanced gardening It’s what’s on the inside that counts Small but deadly Chapter 8 A Treehouse for the Nation Theft = food Will garden for room and board An army of junkies Inside the devil’s garden A flowering trash pile A city in the trees Chapter 9 Milking It: Ants and Their Livestock Manna from heaven On land and on water Team players Adopted by ants All good things come to an end The oppressed becomes the oppressor Keeping caterpillars Behind enemy lines Animal husbandry for dummies Eating—and not getting eaten Chapter 10 On Parasites and Slave-makers Gang warfare The Magnificent Seven The joys of living together When ants just won’t let go When recruitment gets brutal The fight for the honeypots The queen is a Trojan horse Professional slave-makers It’s all in the genes The victims’ bloody revenge Six-legged Spartacus The enslaved, but not as we know them Chapter 11 Physician, Heal Thyself Boils, pimples, and lumps False fruits Long-lived and world-weary That darn tapeworm!

…

Perhaps an aggressive neighbor has just moved in and it makes sense to get out of the way. Sometimes, it’s the fault of nasty researchers who dig up the nest and take part of the colony back to their laboratories. Whatever triggers the move, the colony faces a huge project, which, depending on its size, can be akin to relocating a megacity as big as Tokyo. Before embarking on this mammoth task, the colony must first take an urgent look at the local property market. A handful of prospective buyers—scouts—move out, checking every available nook and cranny to determine whether one would be suitable for their colony. Their list of requirements is a long one.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The trend was notable everywhere in the world, but the most important transformation took place in Asia. Megacities of up to 20 million people grew almost from villages, especially in China and India, which together account for about half of the world's megacities. Wuhan, a city of 11 million, had barely registered on the global consciousness before a virus outbreak in 2020 brought it to the world's attention. In 1950, Wuhan had been three towns whose combined population barely numbered a million. The urbanization trend shows no signs of abating. By 2050, the UN says, the reversal will be complete. Two-thirds of the global population will live in cities and megacities,30 and only a third will remain in rural areas.

…

India also remained largely unindustrialized, with hundreds of millions of people living on the countryside, earning only what they could get from small-scale farming. The resulting socioeconomic picture until well into the 1990s was one of a massive rural population living close to or under the poverty line and another large part of the population trying to come by in the country's mega-cities, which nevertheless offered less opportunities for advancement than those in Japan, the Asian Tigers, or China. Starting the 1980s, however, some entrepreneurs started to gradually change the face of this rural, under-industrialized India. As the computer revolution took off, some entrepreneurial individuals, often hailing from the country’s Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), managed to build some of the world’s most successful IT outsourcing firms, such as Infosys and Wipro.

…

Møller–Mærsk) [Denmark], 90, 167–168, 199–201, 202–207, 208, 213, 215 Mærsk Drilling, 205 Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møler ship, 200 Mærsk Oil, 205 Mærsk Tankers, 205 Magellan, Ferdinand, 101 Maisonrouge, Jacques, 11 Ma, Jack, 128 Majendie, Adam, 229 Majority Action, 216 Malaysia economic recession (1997) in, 98 inclusive approach to government in, 186 predicted economic growth (2020–2021) in, 65–66 Maluku islands spices, 97 MAN Energy Solutions (Denmark), 117–118 Mao Zedong, 56, 57 Marco Polo, 99 Marriage rights (Singapore), 123 Marshall, George, 6 Marshall Plan (US), 6–7 Marx, Karl, 105, 131 Massey University, 223 Maybach (German manufacturer), 4 Mazzucato, Mariana, 112, 184–185, 191, 234 McKinley, William, 133 McKinsey's Global Institute, 197 Medicaid, 135 Medicare, 135 Megacities, 159 Mellon, Andrew, 132 Mercedes (Germany), 9 Merkel, Angela, 79, 81, 83 #Me Too movement, 250 Mexico health coverage disparities in, 43 IT and Internet revolution role in expanding economy of, 137 “21st century socialism” of, 225 Micronesia, 181 Microplastics pollution, 50 Microsoft (US), 69, 126, 127, 137, 143, 209, 211 EU's anti-competition ruling against, 139–140, 141 Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows products of, 139 Middle Eastern countries emerging markets in, 63 Locust–19 plague (2020) in, 176 OPEC membership among, 12 Migration increasing tendency of countries to stem, 177 as reminder of interconnectedness of people, 177 Migration Agency (IOM) [UN], 52 Milanovic, Branko, 45, 46, 84, 137, 138, 173 Milanovic's First Technological Revolutions, 45fig–46 Minimum rights rules (European Parliament) [2019], 243 Les Misérables (Hugo), 131 Mittelstand (Germany), 7, 12 Modern Company Management in Mechanical Engineering (Schwab, Kroos, Maschinenbau-Anstalten), 174, 175fig Modi, Prime Minister (India), 68 Modrow, Hans, 78 Mohammed, 99 Møller, A.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The trend was notable everywhere in the world, but the most important transformation took place in Asia. Megacities of up to 20 million people grew almost from villages, especially in China and India, which together account for about half of the world's megacities. Wuhan, a city of 11 million, had barely registered on the global consciousness before a virus outbreak in 2020 brought it to the world's attention. In 1950, Wuhan had been three towns whose combined population barely numbered a million. The urbanization trend shows no signs of abating. By 2050, the UN says, the reversal will be complete. Two-thirds of the global population will live in cities and megacities,30 and only a third will remain in rural areas.

…

India also remained largely unindustrialized, with hundreds of millions of people living on the countryside, earning only what they could get from small-scale farming. The resulting socioeconomic picture until well into the 1990s was one of a massive rural population living close to or under the poverty line and another large part of the population trying to come by in the country's mega-cities, which nevertheless offered less opportunities for advancement than those in Japan, the Asian Tigers, or China. Starting the 1980s, however, some entrepreneurs started to gradually change the face of this rural, under-industrialized India. As the computer revolution took off, some entrepreneurial individuals, often hailing from the country’s Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), managed to build some of the world’s most successful IT outsourcing firms, such as Infosys and Wipro.

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Møller–Mærsk) [Denmark], 90, 167–168, 199–201, 202–207, 208, 213, 215 Mærsk Drilling, 205 Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møler ship, 200 Mærsk Oil, 205 Mærsk Tankers, 205 Magellan, Ferdinand, 101 Maisonrouge, Jacques, 11 Ma, Jack, 128 Majendie, Adam, 229 Majority Action, 216 Malaysia economic recession (1997) in, 98 inclusive approach to government in, 186 predicted economic growth (2020–2021) in, 65–66 Maluku islands spices, 97 MAN Energy Solutions (Denmark), 117–118 Mao Zedong, 56, 57 Marco Polo, 99 Marriage rights (Singapore), 123 Marshall, George, 6 Marshall Plan (US), 6–7 Marx, Karl, 105, 131 Massey University, 223 Maybach (German manufacturer), 4 Mazzucato, Mariana, 112, 184–185, 191, 234 McKinley, William, 133 McKinsey's Global Institute, 197 Medicaid, 135 Medicare, 135 Megacities, 159 Mellon, Andrew, 132 Mercedes (Germany), 9 Merkel, Angela, 79, 81, 83 #Me Too movement, 250 Mexico health coverage disparities in, 43 IT and Internet revolution role in expanding economy of, 137 “21st century socialism” of, 225 Micronesia, 181 Microplastics pollution, 50 Microsoft (US), 69, 126, 127, 137, 143, 209, 211 EU's anti-competition ruling against, 139–140, 141 Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows products of, 139 Middle Eastern countries emerging markets in, 63 Locust–19 plague (2020) in, 176 OPEC membership among, 12 Migration increasing tendency of countries to stem, 177 as reminder of interconnectedness of people, 177 Migration Agency (IOM) [UN], 52 Milanovic, Branko, 45, 46, 84, 137, 138, 173 Milanovic's First Technological Revolutions, 45fig–46 Minimum rights rules (European Parliament) [2019], 243 Les Misérables (Hugo), 131 Mittelstand (Germany), 7, 12 Modern Company Management in Mechanical Engineering (Schwab, Kroos, Maschinenbau-Anstalten), 174, 175fig Modi, Prime Minister (India), 68 Modrow, Hans, 78 Mohammed, 99 Møller, A.

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

autonomous vehicles, call centre, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, garden city movement, gentrification, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, manufacturing employment, market design, market fragmentation, megacity, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, rent control, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

The distribution of cities in figure 8.6 shows the preponderance of urban development in Africa and Asia, areas with the highest growth rates for megacities as well as for smaller cities. The shift in the economic center of gravity of the world, from North America and Western Europe toward Asia, which occurred at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is put in evidence on the graph; while some megacities in Asia are growing at more than 3 percent a year, megacities in Europe, Latin America, and North America are growing at less than 2 percent a year. In Asia, the large investment in infrastructure that took place during the past 20 years has stimulated the growth of more cities by making trade easier and transport less costly.

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Improvements to transport technology have also made possible the spatial concentration of both people and fixed capital. Economists describe fixed capital as factories, office buildings, houses, apartment buildings, community facilities, and infrastructure. In the past 50 years, increasing returns to scale in agglomeration economies as a result of this spatial concentration have led to the emergence of megacities. The potential economic advantages of large cities are reaped only if workers, consumers, and suppliers are able to exchange labor, goods, and ideas with minimum friction and to multiply face-to-face contacts with minimum time commitments and cost. As a city grows, it is important to monitor mobility by comparing how average travel times and transport costs vary over time, as productivity cannot increase without fast and cheap travel (see chapter 5 for a full discussion of travel times and transport costs).

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Mobility generates not only benefits but also costs, including congestion, pollution, noise, and accidents. To reduce those nuisances, many urban planners advocate limiting or at least discouraging mobility. They dream of creating cleverly planned land use arrangements that would require only short trips easily covered by walking or bicycling, even in megacities. These utopian land use arrangements usually rely on complex land use regulations2 that would enable planners to match employers’ locations with employees’ residences. Mobility is an urban necessity that must be encouraged, not curtailed. Poor mobility keeps much of the economic potential of existing large cities from being realized.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

The data from nuclear explosion detectors on the GPS satellites over the past decade have verified that the constant bombardment of asteroids, bolides, meteors and meteoroids has been underestimated by perhaps four to five times—both in frequency of occurrence and mass. The issue of increasing risk from cosmic hazards is building up here on Earth. Increasing risk comes from an ever increasing human population and the rise of megacities—massive, sprawling cities with more than 10 million people. There will be more than 50 such cities by 2050 and perhaps a 100 by 2100. This means that when asteroids carry out target practice on our small planet they have more and more exciting targets to hit. We were lucky with the cosmic hit that led to the 40-m object hitting the very remote Tunguska area of Siberia in the 1900s.

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This chapter reviews the status of current cosmic hazards that face nations of the world and strategies for dealing with these challenges through better detection, a more proactive technological response, the creation of new standards, legal or regulatory actions or possibly new organizational mechanisms. Fortunately some of these steps have been initiated, but there are still many more that need to be taken. Potentially Hazardous Asteroids and Comets If a relatively large asteroid or comet were to strike Earth, it could wipe out a megacity or worse. There are many variables to be considered—the size and composition of the asteroid, the speed of the asteroid or comet, etc. In this case it would likely be traveling at a very accelerated pace. Finally, the nature of the impact in the atmosphere, whether on land or a water impact that could trigger a truly massive tidal wave, is also key.

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The estimates from the B612 Foundation, which was started by astronaut Rusty Schwieckart and now headed by astronaut Ed Lu, is that there are on the order of 1 million near Earth objects (NEOs) that are 35 m in diameter or larger. Probably all of these at the right velocity and angle of entry would be able to wipe out metropolitan New York City, Tokyo, or Shanghai. As the number of megacities continue to increase toward 50 or more, the chances of a mega-kill by a potentially hazardous asteroid continues to increase. Let’s put what we are talking about into numbers. At best NASA, the other space agencies and the ground observatories that are looking for potentially hazardous asteroids has found about 20,000.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

The third section of the book looks forward to the next phase of London as a world city and offers a panorama from which to assess its future prospects. In Chapter 10 I explore the topology of the global urban system in 2015, drawing on the insights of numerous urban benchmark studies. I evaluate the respective merits of the top tier of cities, and contemplates which of the emerging megacities exert the most compelling pressures on (and provide opportunities for) London. The chapter concludes with ten factors of success which the competitive urban system demands that both established and prospective world city leaders consider. Introduction: Honor Chapman and London: World City 9 London’s current standing within this revised global system of cities is explored in comprehensive detail in Chapter 11.

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It also has valuable, if not always optimal or replicable, experience in assembling a metropolitan government structure, pursuing large-scale renewal projects and tackling pervasive worklessness. London’s progress both reflects and shapes its own unique ‘DNA’. I explain how this DNA is instructive for established world cities, emerging megacities, and fast-growing ‘middleweight’ cities. London’s journey since 1991 is one of inspirational adaptation, determined resilience and, on occasion, thwarted opportunity. There are very few examples of cities with millennia of history being transformed as dramatically and peacefully as London has been in the past quarter of a century.

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(Hebbert, 1992) “Some critics argue that the problem is complicated because London, alone among the major cities of the world, does not have its own central, elected government to oversee and coordinate activities.” (Schmidt, 1994) “London may, at first glance, seem an odd place to go for lessons on how to run a megacity. The most striking thing about London’s city government is that it does not exist . . . Many Londoners feel uncomfortable with this lack of a symbolic figure to speak for the whole city, and look with envy at the role of Jacques Chirac in Paris or Rudolph Giuliani in New York. [But] London’s fragmentation is a source of strength rather than weakness … A big central authority is likely to damage, not enhance, London’s longterm economic interests.”

The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover

airport security, Atahualpa, carbon footprint, Deng Xiaoping, East Village, financial independence, Google Earth, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal

Evangelical Christianity and populist Islam were the fastest-growing religions here, and they were of a piece with the worldly grime and grit. They offered a path to higher ground, a spiritual elevation from the omnipresent squalor and constant threat of scam. Higher yet, I could picture the boundaries of Lagos, those edges where creeping urban settlement met with field and forest. Roads connected the megacity to smaller ones, but this megacity was hardly alone: Lagos is “simply the biggest node in the shantytown corridor of 70 million people that stretches from Abidjan to Ibadan,” as Mike Davis has observed. At night, from space, you’d be able to see an amazing band of lights across the coast of West Africa. At least, if the power was on.

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They may not be as wealthy or advanced as celebrated world capitals like London, Paris, Moscow, Montreal, Sydney, and New York, but they are quickly becoming larger. The world’s population of 6 billion will increase by 2 billion over the next thirty years (it is tentatively expected to peak around 10 billion), and almost all of that increase will be in cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By virtue of their sheer size these megacities will be, in certain ways, the most important in the coming century. I chose to end my travel in Lagos for a number of reasons. One was its extremity: of all those fast-growing cities, its growth has for years been projected to be the fastest. In 1950 Lagos had 288,000 people; as I write it is estimated to have 14 million; by 2015, predicts the Population Reference Bureau, it will be the third largest city in the world, with over 23 million souls.

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As the largest city in the region, Lagos attracted a mix of returning expatriates, migrants from the various neighboring countries, many fleeing rural famine and drought, and refugees from the Biafran war (1967-70), in which a southeastern province, Biafra, attempted to secede from Nigeria. The continuing popularity of Lagos, and its ability to assimilate new arrivals, whether foreign-born or native, surprises not only foreigners but Nigerians themselves. The growth of Third World megacities repeats patterns seen in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Europe and North America but also “confounds” these precedents, writes Mike Davis. It’s the confounding parts that interest Koolhaas and others. Are these cities moving toward a robust, vibrant future, or into the apocalypse? Either way, Lagos represents the future for perhaps the majority of people on the planet, a compelling example of what happens when the track through the wilderness comes to the center of society.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

The second part of the book starts with the Darien Gap, a site of such enviable location and natural riches that it has been a target for entrepreneurs since the 1500s. Today the territory remains a lawless no-man’s land, has a reputation as one of the most dangerous places on earth, and is the scene of devastating environmental degradation. Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has such potential that it should be Africa’s best megacity. But it too is a place of failure; home to 10 million people, it is the poorest major city on earth. Glasgow once vied with London for the title of Britain’s leading city, with so many breakthroughs in science, engineering and the arts that there was no better place to live at the start of the twentieth century.

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Their motivation was revenue, not road safety, and it meant abandoning the responsibilities they had been trained and kitted out for. The magnetic effect traffic duties have on the police in Kinshasa shows how even low-level corruption has serious costs by encouraging the misallocation of public resources. THE DIY MEGACITY For the people of Kinshasa the daily challenge is to avoid the costs that tax officials, traffic police and others impose. The way to get ahead starts with personal greetings which, when dealing with any state employee, must be made in Swahili, a language with its roots thousands of miles away in East Africa.

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Yet far from being a city in the doldrums, it is a vibrant place, buzzing, and offers two perspectives that may help as we consider our own uncertain economic futures. The first is to be optimistic about the power of the informal, underground or pirate economy. Kinshasa shows that the human desire to trade, exchange and build a market can go well beyond small villages, refugee camps or prisons – it can span a megacity the size of London. Despite being on a completely different scale, the place I visited that was most similar to Kinshasa was the Zaatari camp. The people of Kinshasa, let down first by colonial powers, then by Mobutu and the Kabila family, have come to rely on a self-built economy of hawking and gig employment.

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas

Airbus A320, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Negawatt, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, special drawing rights, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, We are as Gods

If batteries can be designed that charge faster and last longer, most of us could simply plug in our cars at home or while parked in town—a much better option than driving to a gas station and having to line up to pay afterward. Electric is clearly the way to go for the majority of surface transportation. This includes mopeds and bikes as well as large trucks. With oil prices rising and local air pollution worsening in developing-world megacities, the tipping point may come even sooner than many pundits think and be driven by demand in fast-growing countries like China. All the major automotive companies are now positioning themselves to exploit this massive future market: Nissan, General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen, Honda, Ford, BMW, Tesla Motors, and Daimler are already or soon will be offering affordable electric vehicles.

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SEX AND THE CITY As a general rule—and making an exception for indigenous people and other communities who have demonstrated a long-term commitment to the sustainable use of their local environments—the fewer people who live in or close to rain forests and other important ecological biomes the better. Rural depopulation and urbanization in developing countries are often decried by those who are concerned about the relentless expansion of megacities, which seem terribly unsustainable because of their noise, sprawling slums, congestion, and pollution. But from the perspective of sustainable land use and habitat protection, the more that growing numbers of people can be persuaded to herd themselves into relatively small areas of urban land, the better for the environment.

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Whenever they are given the chance, younger generations tend to flee to the cities, where they have many more livelihood options and can escape the cultural oppression that is often a hallmark of traditional societies. In many parts of the world, if you want to marry the person you choose, be openly gay, be female and have a career, or avoid daily backbreaking labor carrying water or fetching firewood, then you probably need to move to the city. In 1975 there were just three megacities of over 10 million people. Today there are 21. It sounds scary, but this unstoppable shift toward urbanization actually ranks as one of the most environmentally beneficial trends of the last few decades. As the UN Population Fund wrote in a recent report: “Density is potentially useful. With world population at 6.7 billion people in 2007 and growing at over 75 million a year, demographic concentration gives sustainability a better chance.

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

China is also implementing European-style cap-and-trade carbon market schemes in the most industrialized provinces. In addition to industrial output, transportation is among the first targets of any government serious about cleaning up its environmental footprint. China has set a target for 40 percent of the residents of its megacities to use public transportation by 2020, with slightly lower percentages targeted for big, medium, and small cities that have less congestion. It has also mandated that all automotive companies—foreign and local—sell electric cars or risk being banned from selling diesel vehicles. Just as Europe has done for decades in demanding high product safety standards to access its markets, China’s powerful regulatory signals have jolted the global automotive industry.

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Yet China’s diversions of the Brahmaputra River headwaters in Tibet have had significant consequences for the entire Gangetic civilization, much as its damming of the upper Mekong River has affected the agricultural production cycles of much of Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, China’s overconsumption and pollution of its major rivers could speed up nascent plans to divert Russia’s mighty rivers southward toward China’s cities and farmland. Asia has the largest number of megacities facing water shortages from overconsumption. Some Chinese cities are projected to run out of clean water by 2020.35 India faces a crisis of water tables falling nationwide; Iranian protests have been spreading as taps run dry. Across the region, trillions of dollars of spending are necessary to fix leaky pipes and lay new ones, install efficient water management systems, and construct large-scale desalination facilities.

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The more Asians invest in resource-sharing technologies, the more they will integrate into a regional ecological system to complement their economic system. Asia’s spiritual revival has been an ecological motivator across the region. As hyperspeed industrialization chokes Asian cities from coastal China to New Delhi, ever more Asians are opting for a slower life outside the megacities and lending their support to Buddhist and Taoist eco-activist movements that advocate sustainable living. At Mao Mountain, a sacred Taoist site in eastern China, the abbot Yang Shihua calls upon followers to revere the statue of Laozi as a “Green God.” In 2018, the Buddhist Association of China successfully lobbied to block the IPO of a holy mountain site to prevent its overdevelopment.

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

And only electricity and liquid transportation fuels have made it possible to pump drinking water, remove and treat sewage and garbage, and meet the transportation and communication needs of megacities (cities with more than 10 million people). All modern cities are creations of fossil energy flows converted with high power densities, but megacities make exceptionally high claims: a survey by Kennedy and co-workers (2015) concluded that in 2011 the world’s 27 megacities (with less than 7% of the global population) consumed 9% of all electricity and 10% of all gasoline. The rise of fossil-fueled (initially just coal-fueled) cities was rapid.

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Figure 7.8 Comparison of the onsets of major energy eras (identified by principal fuels and prime movers) with innovation clusters according to Mensch (1979) and with Schumpeter’s (1939) long waves of Western business cycles. I have extended both waves to the year 2000. Figure 7.9 Saint Peter’s Basilica completed in 1626 (Corbis). Figure 7.10 Brazil’s largest megalopolis, São Paulo, photographed in 2013. Megacities are the foremost examples of global uniformity imposed by high levels of fuel and electricity use (Corbis). Figure 7.11 Camille Pissarro, Le Boulevard de Montmartre, Matinée de Printemps. Oil on canvas, painted in 1897 (Google Art Project). Preface and Acknowledgments I finished writing Energy in World History in July 1993; the book came out in 1994, and it remained in print for two decades.

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In 2015 the world had about 1.25 billion vehicles on the road, and in 2015 new passenger car sales reached about 73 million (Bank of Nova Scotia 2015), while traffic accidents cause annually nearly 1.3 million deaths and up to 50 million injuries (WHO 2015b), and automotive air pollution has been a key contributor to the worldwide phenomenon of seasonal (or semipermanent) photochemical smog in megacities on all continents (USEPA 2004). The life span of the average car now ranges from nearly 11 years in affluent countries to more than 15 years in low-income economies. Afterward, the steel (and copper and some rubber) is mostly recycled, but we have been willing to put up with enormous death, injury, and pollution costs.

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

Just as important, it would be far more humane and constructive, and it would pave the way for a more cooperative relationship in the decades to come. In time, a deeper U.S. partnership with Mexico could serve as a model for other countries—a far cry from the acrimonious relationship we have at present. The Magic of Megacities The truth, though, is that while migration pressures from Mexico and Central America command much of our attention, the real action in the coming decades will be in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. According to UN projections, even as populations in much of the world stabilize, sub-Saharan Africa will still enjoy relatively high fertility.

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See also linked migration Chakravorty, Sanjoy, 40 charter cities, 144–45, 147–48 child care, 46, 120 child poverty, 22–25, 34, 35–36, 175–77 children of immigrants, 31–61 birthrates, native-born vs. immigrant, 32–33 collective responsibility for well-being, 45–48 intergenerational transmission of poverty, 22–25, 35–36, 43–44, 175–79 King’s “somebody else’s babies” remark, 32, 33–34 “public charge” test, 48–51 Qatar solution, 56–61 role of education, 36, 39, 41–43, 56 role of selection, 40–41, 43–44 separating parent and child, 57 role of social status, 39–40, 44 tax policy, 48, 55–56, 177–79 child tax credit (CTC), 48, 176–79 China immigration, 142–43 megacities, 144 Chinese Americans, 41 Chinese labor, 123–24, 127 CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), 50 circular migration, 81–82 citizens and strangers, 9–11 civil war, 18–19 Claremont Review of Books, 18 class politics, 103–4 Clemens, Michael, 111–12, 132 Clinton, Bill, 49, 125 Codevilla, Angelo, 18 college-educated families advantages of, 27, 42, 86, 87 median income, 22 college-educated immigrants, 165–68 Collier, Paul, 146–47 Columbia University, 52 coming majority-minority crossover, 19–26 Cortés, Patricia, 107 cost of living, 131, 136, 149 Cotton, Tom, 169 Cowie, Jefferson, 80 Cox, Adam, 162, 171 Crown Heights riot of 1991, 181 custodial services, 119 DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), 9–11, 157–58 Democratic National Convention (2016), 157–57 Denmark, poverty rate, 34 disadvantaged groups and the mainstream, 65–69 discrimination, 31–32, 67 Dreamers, 9–11, 157–58, 160–61 Duncan, Brian, 86 earned income tax credit (EITC), 48, 176–77, 178 economic growth, 79–80, 118, 144, 151 economics of immigration, 12–13, 95–128.

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See also “chain migration” Liu, Chen, 83–84, 141, 175 lone-wolf terrorists, 3 Los Angeles, majority-minority crossover, 20–21 low-skill immigrants (immigration), 22–24, 151–52 Americas First policy, 131–34 bullet biters and, 5–6 classic arguments for, 95–96, 151–52 coming majority-minority crossover, 22–24 development in source countries, 131–34 globalization backlash, 123–28 impact on native wages, 101–2, 115 limits on, 12–13, 27–29, 84, 130, 173–75 middle-class melting pot and, 27–28 political powerlessness of, 22–24 short run and long run, 99–102 Singapore model, 97–99, 102 skills gap, 81 Swedish model, 96–97 low-skill workers, 12–13, 99–102 automation and, 5–6, 12–13, 95–96 economic self-interest and, 106–7 labor supply and, 99–102 offshoring and, 12–13, 95–96, 102–7 McIntosh, Craig, 83–84, 139–40, 141, 175 mainstream and disadvantaged groups, 65–69 majority-minority crossover, 19–26 Maloney, Maureen, 159 Martin, David, 163–64 Mayflower, 15 median income, 22, 35 Medicaid, 46, 49, 126 Medicare, 136 megacities, 139–48, 156 melting pot, 14, 15–19, 65–67, 155 brief history of idea, 15–17 mainstream and disadvantaged groups, 65–69 toward a middle-class, 26–29 Melting Pot, The (play), 15 Mendoza, Mary Ann, 159 Mexican Americans, 41, 68, 69–72, 85–87 Mexican immigrants assimilation, two stories of, 69–72 children and role of education, 42–43, 86, 87 development in Mexico and, 134–35, 138–39 mainstream and the margins, 68 Mexican seasonal workers (bracero program), 111–12, 119 Mexico antipoverty programs, 134–35 Central American migrants, 133–35, 138–39 GDP per capita (PPP), 133 per capita income, 133, 134 poverty rate, 34 regulating flow of migration to U.S., 138–39 U.S. retirees in, 135–38 midcentury America, 16–17, 79, 80 middle-class melting pot, 26–29 migrant worker programs, 58–60, 98–99, 111–14 minimum wage, 47–48, 97, 107 model minority illusion, 38–44 monogenerational immigration systems, 57–61, 102 multigenerational immigration systems, 57–61 Muslim immigrants, 3–4, 89–90 Napoleonic Wars, 73 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS), 53–55, 56 National Affairs, 162 nativism, 91, 105 naturalization, 23 New Deal, 14, 16–17, 80 New York City attempted bombing of 2017, 2–3, 4, 6–7 author’s immigrant story, 63–64, 67–68, 75–76 Bangladeshi community, 64, 74–78 civil unrest in, 181–82 New York Times, The, 61 New York University, 121 Nigeria per capita income, 132–33 population growth, 140 “non-zero-sum mobility,” 79 Northwestern University, 52 Obama, Barack, 9–11, 49 Obamacare, 174 offshoring, 12–13, 94–96, 102–7, 123, 135 of caregiving, 137–38 South Korean model, 103–4 virtual immigration, 148–50 Okun, Arthur, 118 open border advocates, 4–5, 8–11, 84, 113, 115, 188.

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

Apollo 11, carbon-based life, clean water, corporate governance, disinformation, Magellanic Cloud, megacity, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, operational security, plutocrats, random walk, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, the scientific method, trade route, urban sprawl

Children were the only people who didn’t work on Augusta, but they did grow up with a faintly screwed-up view of the rest of the Commonwealth, believing it to be made up of romantic planets where everyone lived in small cozy villages at the center of grand countryside vistas. Mark Vernon was one such child, growing up in the Orangewood district at the south end of New Costa. As districts went, it was no better or worse than any other in the megacity. Most days the harsh sunlight was diffused by a brown haze of smog, and the Augusta Engineering Corp, which owned and ran the megacity, wasn’t going to waste valuable real estate with parks. So along with his ’hood buddies he powerscooted along the maze of hot asphalt between strip malls, and hung out anywhere guaranteed to annoy adults and authority. His parents got him audio and retinal inserts and i-spot OCtattoos at twelve so that he was fully virtual, because that was the age for Augusta kids to start direct-loading education.

…

They poured a constant supply of cheap crops into the food processing factories dotted along the inland edge of New Costa, to be transformed into packaged convenience portions and distributed first to the megacity’s inhabitants, then out to the other planets, of which Earth was the greatest market. After snaking down through the Northumberland Hills, Howell Avenue opened out into Santa Hydra, a broad flat expanse that led all the way across to the coastline twenty-five kilometers away. He could see the Port Klye nest in the distance, eleven big concrete fission reactor domes perched along the shore. The ground around them was a flat bed of asphalt squares, where nothing grew and nothing moved, a mile-wide security moat separating them from the megacity that they helped to energize.

…

Given the speed the train was traveling, even that flashed past in a second. Glorious copper twilight streamed in through the carriage windows. Dudley’s ears popped as the new atmosphere flooded into the carriage through the rooftop vents. He looked out at the massive expanse that was CST’s Verona station. There was no visible end to it, no glimpse of the megacity that he knew lay beyond. One edge of the station was a solid cliff of gateways, sheltering under their curving single-span roofs, each oval framing a slightly different colored patch of haze depending on the spectral class of the star whose world they reached. But for the rest of it, as far as the eye could see, trains and tracks were the sole landscape.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

In 2006 the journal Science published a four-year study written by an international group of ecologists from Canada, Panama, Sweden, Britain, and the United States, which predicted that, at prevailing trends, the world will run out of wild-caught seafood in 2048—though the assumptions behind these claims have been widely disputed. Fertilizer. The soil is running out of phosphate, a crucial ingredient in fertilizer required for farming. The most optimistic estimate for “peak phosphorus,” the point at which we reach the world’s maximum rate of phosphorus production, is 2050. Land. Eighty percent of the world’s expanding megacities are sinking on a coast or river plain while sea levels rise. More than 1 million people move to cities each week, and by 2050, about half of the human population will live within 100 kilometers of a coast. Humanity is poised to plunge in 2050. We can drown or we can float. We don’t know enough about each subject to judge whether the 2050 deadline predicted in multiple domains is realistic, or a convenient focal point around which forecasters simplify their perception of trends.

…

Once established in the mainstream consciousness, this will be the first step in what we might call DeltaSync’s master plan to rescue Planet Earth. Because, according to Rutger, as goes Rotterdam, so goes the world. Poised to Plunge Today 30 percent of all people live within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of a coast. By 2050, it will be half the human population. At least fifteen of the world’s twenty megacities grow on a coast or river plain. Human enterprise flourishes closest to the fluid medium, where goods flow speedily and cheaply per pound. As great coastal cities gear up the frenzy of international trade, the human race is racing toward many areas that will soon be flooded. Not only will coastal cities soon run out of livable space, but also the resources produced by inland agriculture will eventually not be able to support them.

…

June 3, 2009, www.scientificamerican.com/article/phosphorus-a-looming-crisis/. Chelsae Rose Johansen, “Solving ‘The Gravest Natural Resource Shortage You’ve Never Heard Of: Applying Transnational New Governance to the Phosphate Industry,” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 46 (2013): 933–68. Eighty percent of the world’s expanding megacities . . . More than 1 million people move to cities . . . by 2050, about half of the human population will live within 100 kilometers of a coast: Rutger de Graaf, “Blue Revolution” (inaugural lecture, Rotterdam, November 6, 2012 Netherland, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences), https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

This is particularly true in the developing world, where rates of urbanisation are lower than in richer countries. As we move further into the twenty-first century, we will see the growth of ever-more megacities of more than 10 million people – in Asia, South America and sub-Saharan Africa. By 2030, nearly 9 per cent of the world will live in just 41 cities.33 Take the Greater Bay Area, a megalopolis – a cluster of megacities – which includes Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, and whose population exceeds 70 million people. Its economy will increasingly depend on high-tech and emerging sectors, and the benefits large agglomerations bring for economic development.

…

, National Defense University Press, 12 July 2016 <http://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/834357/will-technological-convergence-reverse-globalization/> [accessed 6 September 2020]. 26 Nick Butler, ‘US Energy Independence Has Its Costs’, Financial Times, 2019 <https://www.ft.com/content/20870c24-0b86-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957a67> [accessed 10 May 2021]. 27 ‘Urban Population (per cent of Total Population)’, World Bank Data <https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS> [accessed 11 January 2021]. 28 Azeem Azhar, ‘Don’t Call Time on the Megacity’, Exponential View, 20 May 2020 <https://www.exponentialview.co/p/-dont-call-time-on-the-megacity> [accessed 13 January 2021]. 29 Genevieve Giuliano, Sanggyun Kang and Quan Yuan, ‘Agglomeration Economies and Evolving Urban Form’, The Annals of Regional Science, 63(3), 2019, pp. 377–398 <https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-019-00957-4>. 30 Cheng Ting-Fang, ‘How a Small Taiwanese City Transformed the Global Chip Industry’, Nikkei Asia, 15 December 2020 <https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/How-a-small-Taiwanese-city-transformed-the-global-chip-industry> [accessed 13 January 2021]. 31 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 31. 32 West, Scale, pp. 281–88. 33 ‘Bright Lights, Big Cities’, The Economist, 4 February 2015 <https://www.economist.com/node/21642053> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 34 Jeff Desjardins, ‘By 2100 None of the World’s Biggest Cities Will Be in China, the US or Europe’, World Economic Forum, 20 July 2018 <https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/by-2100-none-of-the-worlds-biggest-cities-will-be-in-china-the-us-or-europe/> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 35 ‘Cities Worldwide Will Struggle, but Will Avoid a Mass Exodus’, The Economist, 17 November 2020 <https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/cities-worldwide-will-struggle-but-will-avoid-a-mass-exodus> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 36 ‘COVID-19 and the Myth of Urban Flight’, Knowledge@Wharton, 1 December 2020 <https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/covid-19-and-the-myth-of-urban-flight/> [accessed 13 January 2021]. 37 Samrat Sharma, ‘India’s Rural-Urban Divide: Village Worker Earns Less than Half of City Peer’, Financial Express, 12 December 2019 <https://www.financialexpress.com/economy/indias-rural-urban-divide-village-worker-earns-less-than-half-of-city-peer/1792245/> [accessed 18 March 2021]. 38 ‘Is There Really an Ever-Widening Rural-Urban Divide in Europe’, Euler Hermes Global, 17 July 2019 <https://www.eulerhermes.com/en_global/news-insights/economic-insights/Is-there-really-an-ever-widening-rural-urban-divide-in-Europe.html> [accessed 18 March 2021]. 39 Patrick Greenfield, ‘Uber Licence Withdrawal Disproportionate, Says Theresa May’, The Guardian, 28 September 2017 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/28/uber-licence-withdrawal-disproportionate-says-theresa-may> [accessed 23 March 2021]. 40 ‘Why Cities and National Governments Clash over Migration’, Financial Times, 4 June 2019 <https://www.ft.com/content/319ec1f6-5d25-11e9-840c-530737425559>. 41 John Perry Barlow, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, January 1996 <https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence> [accessed 7 January 2020]. 42 Andrei Soldatov Borogan Irina, ‘How the 1991 Soviet Internet Helped Stop a Coup and Spread a Message of Freedom’, Slate, August 2016 <https://slate.com/technology/2016/08/the-1991-soviet-internet-helped-stop-a-coup-and-spread-a-message-of-freedom.html> [accessed 31 July 2020]. 43 Berhan Taye and Sage Cheung, ‘The State of Internet Shutdowns in 2018’, Access Now, 8 July 2019 <https://www.accessnow.org/the-state-of-internet-shutdowns-in-2018/> [accessed 19 July 2020]. 44 Claudia Biancotti, ‘India’s Ill-Advised Pursuit of Data Localization’, Pieterson Institute for International Economics, 9 December 2019 <https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/indias-ill-advised-pursuit-data-localization> [accessed 20 March 2021]. 45 DLA Piper, Data Protection Laws of the World. 46 Alan Beattie, ‘Data Protectionism: The Growing Menace to Global Business’, Financial Times, 14 May 2018 <https://medium.com/financial-times/data-protectionism-the-growing-menace-to-global-business-f994da37e9e2> [accessed 26 March 2021]. 47 Ian Bremmer, ‘Why We Need a World Data Organization.

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But from that day in 2007 onwards, more than half of us have been city-dwellers. This moment was a long time coming. Two millennia ago, Rome exceeded 1 million inhabitants, as did Alexandria. But cities did not subsequently achieve that scale again until London reached it in the nineteenth century. Our first 10-million-person ‘megacity’, New York, was born in the 1930s on the back of various technological enhancements – electricity, mass transit, modern sanitation, steel-framed skyscrapers, the safety elevator. It also depended on new supply chains that could provide the food and goods needed to sustain a population of that size.28 And yet we have consistently underestimated cities.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

As many as 8.6 billion of those urbanites will live in the cities of the developing world (many of which have yet to be built), while just 1.2 billion or so will occupy the cities of the advanced nations.5 To put all this into perspective, consider that in 1800 there was only one city in the world whose population exceeded 1 million—Beijing. By 1900, there were 12. By 1950, the number had increased sevenfold, to 83, and by 2005 it had ballooned to 400. Today, there are more than 500. In 1950, there were only two mega-cities that had more than 10 million people: New York and Tokyo. Today, there are 28, and by 2030, there will be 40 or so. By 2150, according to one plausible projection, the world will have perhaps ten mega-cities with between 50 million and 100 million people, and five more with populations exceeding 100 million. The population of the mega-region that spans Delhi, Kolkata, and Dhaka in India could reach 200 million by that time, making it bigger than all but five nations in the world today.6 Profound differences in wealth and productivity divide the less advantaged cities of the developing world from their more affluent counterparts in the advanced nations.

…

Overcoming the crisis of the suburbs and restoring their economic prosperity requires that suburbs become denser, greener, more mixed-use, and more connected to urban centers via transit. Before we can turn to specific solutions, however, it’s important to understand the fourth and final dimension of the New Urban Crisis, which is playing out in the mega-cities of the most rapidly urbanizing areas of the globe. 9 THE CRISIS OF GLOBAL URBANIZATION In May 2014, I addressed a summit of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the Integration Segment on Sustainable Urbanization. Among the people sharing the dais with me were Joan Clos, the former mayor of Barcelona and the head of UN-Habitat, the UN agency that deals with cities and human settlements, and Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, who had campaigned on a platform that promised to fight the city’s rising inequalities and create more affordable housing.

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Benjamin Marx, Thomas Stoker, and Tavneet Suri, “The Economics of Slums in the Developing World,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 4 (2013): 187–210. 12. On this point, see Edward Glaeser, “A World of Cities: The Causes and Consequences of Urbanization in Poorer Countries,” Paper no. 19745, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2013, www.nber.org/papers/w19745; Richard Florida, “Why So Many Mega-Cities Remain So Poor,” CityLab, January 16, 2014, www.citylab.com/work/2014/01/why-so-many-mega-cities-remain-so-poor/8083. 13. Remi Jedwab and Dietrich Vollrath, “Urbanization Without Growth in Historical Perspective,” Explorations in Economic History 57 (July 2015): 1–94. 14. Ibid.; Richard Florida, “The Problem of Urbanization Without Economic Growth” CityLab, June 12, 2015, www.citylab.com/work/2015/06/the-problem-of-urbanization-without-economic-growth/395648. 15.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

BMW’s compact i3, on the other hand, was a product of Europe, where there were condensed urban layouts and short distances between cities, so ninety miles of range was enough to serve most driving needs. In China, by contrast, people were geographically dispersed among hundreds of far-apart but heavily populated cities. China has forty-one cities with more than two million people; more than a dozen cities with a population of more than five million; and five megacities with populations exceeding ten million. Che He Jia’s SEV plan made sense for driving within these cities, but the company needed to come up with something else for driving outside them. Back in the workshop, after I slid out of the buck, Li walked over to a pair of pinboards near the door. He smiled as he showed me sketches of Che He Jia’s second vehicle, a long-range SUV planned for release in 2018.

…

By the same token, she suggested that any wholesale transition to electric mobility is likely to be lumpy if you look at the issue from a global perspective, where different regions have different problems to solve. Consequently, she thought the internal combustion engine still “has a while” left in its life span. On the other hand, certain parts of the world are ripe for change. “If you start breaking it down more finely, and you start looking at specific megacities or specific city centers, and look at regions that have common issues, you may see a transformation happen in pockets at a much more rapid pace.” The Bolt is a practical car with good handling and a range of 238 miles per charge as assessed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Some observers, such as the New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo, have suggested that by beating Tesla to market with a long-range mass-market electric car, GM bested the Silicon Valley company at its own game (“How did GM create Tesla’s dream car first?”

…

But perhaps I felt a sense of imminent loss—that these nostalgic-car meet-ups might be the only way my kids and grandchildren will have any inkling of the automotive era in which I grew up. Even as I knew I had seen the future, I felt stuck in the past. Then, a dark green Model T puttered by, a reminder of how this all started. How much of the world that car changed. The roads, the garages, the urban development, the planned communities, the population mobility, the advent of megacities, the burned oil, the mass production, the new American economy, the eight-hour workday. The Model T had a soul and a momentous story, the story of modern civilization. That story couldn’t have been told without Henry Ford’s invention, in 1913, of the moving assembly line, an innovation that dramatically sped up and reduced the cost of manufacturing the Model T.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bretton Woods, corporate governance, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, ghettoisation, Howard Zinn, informal economy, land bank, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, reserve currency, special economic zone, spectrum auction, stem cell, The Chicago School, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Today any talk of redistribution of land or wealth would be considered not just undemocratic but lunatic. Even the most militant movements have been reduced to a fight to hold on to what little land people still have. The millions of landless people, the majority of them Dalits and Adivasis, driven from their villages, living in slums and shanty colonies in small towns and megacities, do not figure even in the radical discourse. As Gush-Up concentrates wealth onto the tip of a shining pin on which our billionaires pirouette, tidal waves of money crash through the institutions of democracy—the courts, the parliament—as well as the media, seriously compromising their ability to function in the ways they are meant to.

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The Kalpasar dam, which would raise the sea level and alter the ecology of hundreds of kilometers of coastline, was the cause of serious concerns amongst scientists in a 2007 report.23 It has made a sudden comeback in order to supply water to the Dholera Special Investment Region (SIR) in one of the most water-stressed zones not just in India but in the world. SIR is another name for a SEZ, a self-governed corporate dystopia of industrial parks, townships, and megacities. The Dholera SIR is going to be connected to Gujarat’s other cities by a network of ten-lane highways. Where will the money for all this come from? In January 2011 in the Mahatma (Gandhi) Mandir, Gujarat’s Chief Minister Narendra Modi presided over a meeting of ten thousand international businessmen from one hundred countries.

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'Homme

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, William Langewiesche

See also Sewell Chan, “Tunnelers Hit Something Big: A Milestone,” New York Times, August 10, 2006. 123 corruption plagued the Board of Water Supply: Grann, “City of Water.” This was confirmed to me by a source who asked not to be identified. 123 $4 billion to the new tunnel: Chan, “Tunnelers Hit Something Big.” 124 the world had 18 “megacities”: Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacity. 124 In 2007, 336 cities worldwide: Ibid., and Thomas Brinkhof, “The Principal Agglomerations of the World,” www.citypopulation.de. 124 in 2008, for the first time in history: UN Population Fund (UNFPA): State of World Population 2007: http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2007/english/introduction.html. 124 As of 2010, China alone had 43 cities: Christina Larson, “Chicago on the Yangtze,” Foreign Policy, September/October 2010. 125 Bruce Rolen: “As supplies dry up, growers pass on farming and sell water,” US Water News Online, February 2008. 125 Perth, Australia: Patrick Barta, “Amid Water Shortage, Australia Looks to the Sea,” Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2008. 125 America’s total water use: Susan S.

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There was some jovial shouting, one man made a quick sign of the cross, the cage door slammed shut, and within minutes the men had disappeared down the giant hole. THE URBANIZATION OF WATER While the fragility of its water system is a pressing concern to New York, other large cities face even greater and more immediate hydrological challenges. In 2000, the world had 18 “megacities,” with populations of 5 million to 10 million (depending on different definitions), or more. In 2007, 336 cities worldwide had populations of 1 million or more. According to the UN, in 2008, for the first time in history, more people lived in urban areas than in rural ones. As of 2010, China alone had at least 43 cities with populations greater than 1 million; by 2025, according to Foreign Policy, that number will grow to 221.

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But California was in its second year of drought, and questions were being raised about the necessity of LADWP’s dust-mitigation efforts. The project had suffered cost overruns and used sixty thousand acre-feet of water a year, which was worth some $54 million and was enough to supply sixty thousand households. Critics thought the money and water could be better spent elsewhere. By 2009, Los Angeles had become a megacity with 3.8 million residents, in a broad combined statistical area that had swelled to 17.8 million people—thanks in good part to the water drained from Mono County. The city is also hydrated by water from the Sacramento Delta, channeled south by the California Aqueduct, and by the Colorado River, channeled west by the Colorado River Aqueduct.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

A multinational organization—NATO for health—provides one path toward making cities safer against infection from abroad. We next turn to the second source of vulnerability: the easy spread of contagion across densely crowded cities and slums. City governments themselves reduced that source of contagion in the West during the nineteenth century. In poor world megacities, that vulnerability remains. Since diseases that evolve in an Indian slum or a Chinese wet market can spread throughout the world, wealthy nations must help those poor cities to take care of their own today. Chapter 3 CAN INDIAN SEWERS MAKE INDIANA HEALTHIER? In the spring of 2020, the world was both isolated and unified.

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What Delhi needed then and what the cities of the developing world need now are the game-changing investments in clean water and sewers that were built, largely as a response to cholera, in the wealthy world. Sporadic, almost feeble, expenditures on new water tanks, or open sewers, could not protect nineteenth-century Delhi and cannot protect twenty-first-century poor world megacities from the scourge of contagious disease. If we are not careful, they cannot protect people in rich countries either. Cholera Travels West Six great waves of cholera afflicted the world between 1817 and 1923. In 1817, after its apparent mutation, the bacterium spread to Indonesia and the Near East.

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This death rate may have been below that of Paris during the same year, but it is five times New York City’s death rate from COVID-19 in 2020. While we may wonder what the COVID-19 pandemic will do to the wealthy world’s cities, we should never think that pandemic will stop the growth of population in the poor world’s megacities. America’s nineteenth-century cities were far deadlier than cities in low-income countries are today, and people still came by the million. The world’s poor will still come to Nairobi and Mumbai, even if contagious diseases disproportionately slaughter those city’s slum dwellers, who certainly caught COVID-19 far more often than their richer neighbors.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Chapter 3, “Blocking the Sun,” warns that solar could undercut its own economics, strain power grids, and struggle to displace ubiquitous fossil fuels. It will take innovation in financing and business models, solar technologies, and energy systems for solar to avoid hitting a ceiling and instead reach its potential. Chapter 1    Two Futures The year is 2050, and the world is more polluted, unequal, and dangerous than ever. Megacities like New Delhi, Mexico City, and Lagos are suffocated by smog. More than a billion people around the world still lack access to reliable electricity. And climate change is serving up droughts, floods, and heat waves with alarming regularity. The trouble is that fossil fuels continue to exert a stranglehold on the global economy.

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It made economic sense to use them to store power for a few hours; but they were too expensive to use for smoothing out the day-to-day variations in solar PV output and certainly for handling the biggest energy storage need: squirreling away surplus solar energy from sunny months for use in gloomier ones. Solar PV’s growth also slowed because countries, especially in the developing world, failed to build out their electricity grids to keep up with the deployment of solar power. For example, India struggled to connect solar farms in distant deserts to its thirsty megacities. And when the government shifted focus to deploying solar panels on building rooftops, ramshackle urban grids buckled under the strain of absorbing sudden surges of solar power.2 Having leveled off, solar’s contribution to the world’s energy needs is respectable but limited today, at the mid-century mark.

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Nearly free electricity has induced heavy industries to switch from burning fossil fuels to running off solar power. Solar PV isn’t just powering glamorous urban buildings or massive industrial plants; PV materials are now light enough to be supported by flimsy shanty roofs in the slum outskirts of megacities in the developing world. And way outside the cities, even the poorest of the poor can easily afford solar power. Abject energy poverty has been eradicated—nearly every person on the planet has access to some electricity—although much work remains to address energy inequality. Still, these wondrous solar PV coatings remain at the mercy of unreliable sunlight.

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

So, without a government subsidy to fix the retail price, Len-len would go hungry. Soon, she will do what tens of millions of the rural poor have done already: leave the land and move to a mega-city to live in a slum and look for work. She will live in a shack just like this, but it will be more cramped, wedged in by others like it. Instead of the viridian and lime of the paddy fields, she will live in a landscape whose colours are predominantly rust and grey. For, horrific as they are, the slums of Manila—as in all the mega-cities of the world—are a makeshift solution to rural poverty. The tunnel dwellers of San Miguel Estero de San Miguel, Manila. There is a long curve of grey water and, along both sides, as far as the eye can see, shacks, trash, washing and grey tin, bits of wood and scraps of cloth, rats and children.

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Once the housing and jobs markets collapsed, the student house became the young accountant house, the young lawyer, teacher and other struggling professional’s house. At the dance clubs students frequent there’s always some urban poor youth: this is true even in smart American college towns. But in the mega-cities of youth culture—London, Paris, Los Angeles, New York—the cultural proximity is more organic. And in no-hope towns where the college is the only modern thing in the landscape, everyone rubs shoulders in the laundromat, the fast-food joint, the cramped carriages of late-night trains. In North Africa, though many of the college students who led the revolutions were drawn from the elite, you find this same blurring of the edges between the educated youth and the poor.

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This is the classic twenty-first-century slum. Across the globe, one billion people live in slums: that is, one in seven human beings. By the year 2050, for all the same reasons that are pushing people like Len-len off the land, that number is set to double. The slum is the filthy secret of the modern mega-city, the hidden consequence of twenty years of untrammelled market forces, greed, neglect and graft. Yet Mena, at my elbow, is feeding me this constant stream of verbal PR-copy: ‘We are happy; there is social cohesion here; only we can organize it like this.’ She’s all too conscious that the Estero de San Miguel has been condemned.

The Weather of the Future by Heidi Cullen

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, air freight, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, bank run, California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, data science, Easter island, energy security, hindcast, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, millennium bug, ocean acidification, out of africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, trade route, urban planning, Y2K

In rural Bangladesh, the weather is the economy. And if you believe the climate models, the weather will get worse. By 2050, the population of Bangladesh will have grown from about 162 million people today to more than 220 million.6 Today, more than 13 million people live in Dhaka. It’s the fastest-growing megacity in the world. And every year, slightly more than 400,000 people in Bangladesh move to the capital, hoping to find a better life. Nearly 15,000 new cars were sold in Dhaka in 2008, a record high. There may be plenty of people and cars, but there are acute shortages of just about everything else. There are no sidewalks.

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As he said, comparison with the developed world is detrimental. But nonetheless, when people along the coast who are unable to grow rice or work the nets to catch shrimp fry make the comparison between Dhaka and their own situation, they will still decide that Dhaka holds the keys to a better life. And by 2050, this megacity with very little energy, transportation, and water infrastructure is expected to be the home of more than 40 million people.7 Experts like Rahman worry about how Dhaka will cope with the rapid and unplanned urbanization in Bangladesh. Dhaka is not immune from the problems of geography that plague the rest of Bangladesh.

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To put that in perspective, the city of New York alone emits about 0.25 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gases. As Rahman says, “Cooking stoves account for almost 20 percent of emissions in Bangladesh. Cooking stoves. This is the level of industrialization we’re talking about.” Rahman still has hopes for megacities; he says that leaders need to start viewing land use and other aspects of city planning as critical components of preparing for climate change. “Properly managed, urbanization can be a good thing,” he said. “Improving urban management is itself an adaptation strategy.” For people in Bangladesh, climate change is not a theoretical, academic, or distant concern.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Re-Programming Mobility: The Digital Transformation of Transportationin the United States, available from: http://reprogrammingmobility.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Re-Programming-Mobility-Report.pdf 341 The Economist: Daily chart Bright lights, big cities: Urbanisation and the rise of the megacity predicts 8.6% of world's population will live in Mega-cities of 10 million or more by 2030, growing at about 1% of the world's population per decade http://www.economist.com/node/21642053?fsrc=scn%2Ftw%2Fte%2Fdc%2Fed%2Fbrightlightsbigcities 342 We do not foresee Segways or Pogo Sticks supplanting feet in most places. 343 Figure A1 Source: MnDOT All Detector Report, Detector 1942 (I-394 near US 169), 2000-11-08, 5-minute counts, ramp meters off. 344 Parthasarathi, Pavithra and David Levinson (2010) Post-Construction Evaluation of Traffic Forecast Accuracy.

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Its overall character depends on many moving parts, and primary among them is how quickly forms of innovation take root and the changing density of land use activities. Key aspects of the future will happen on its own, regardless of policy intervention; other dimensions can or will be accelerated by policy intervention. By 2050 an estimated two thirds of the global population will live in cities (10 percent of the world's population will live in 'mega-cities,' larger than 10 million).341 Urban personal transport will be more multi-modal. The appropriate mode, as always will depend on the trip. But technology will change which modes are appropriate for which trips. We imagine different scenarios in different places. For the shortest trips, within and between buildings, on campuses, and in neighborhoods, walking will remain dominant.342 Escalators and elevators will remain as alternatives to staircases, but moving sidewalks are likely to be rare, limited to special environments like airports.

Humankind: Solidarity With Nonhuman People by Timothy Morton

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, capitalist realism, David Brooks, Georg Cantor, gravity well, Ian Bogost, invisible hand, means of production, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, trolley problem, Turing test, wage slave, zero-sum game

A street full of people is much more than just a part of a greater whole called “city.” It’s hard to locate contemporary megacities because we keep looking for something that totally incorporates its parts. Towns, villages and other formations are strung together in Java in such a way that only the volcanoes on that massive island prevent them from spreading everywhere. The only limit is a perceived threat to life. The string of dwellings isn’t even a megacity, it’s a hypercity, a city that is hardly a city at all. But precisely because of this less-than-a-city quality, a hypercity is beyond even the colossal size we associate with megacities such as Mexico City. Java’s hypercity and Mexico City are less than the sum of their parts.

Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton

car-free, complexity theory, disinformation, forensic accounting, gravity well, megacity, megastructure, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, restrictive zoning, trade route, trickle-down economics, VTOL

And I want to know what the planet looks like when you get back.’ * There was a limousine waiting for Renne when she arrived at EdenBurg’s CST station in Rialto, the planet’s megacity. A young man dressed in a smart dark-grey business suit introduced himself as Warren Yves Halgarth, a member of the Halgarth family security force, and her assigned escort. They drove out of the station and into the midday sunlight. Renne had visited all of the Big15 at one time or another. She was always hard pressed to tell the megacities apart. Rialto was a slight exception in that it was sited in a temperate zone, while most of the others favoured tropical locations.

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Electricity was delivered to the megacity via superconductor, and Sybraska’s plains drained then irrigated to provide nation-sized tracts of highly productive farmland. Because of the cold months, Rialto favoured monolithic apartment blocks rather than the vast sprawls of individual homes and strip malls found on worlds like StLincoln, Wessex and Augusta. Each district had its core of Manhattan-like skyscrapers and bulky concrete tenements; which were encircled by huge swathes of factories and refineries. The CST station was on the edge of the Saratov district, which was the megacity’s financial and administrative heart, giving it the largest nest of skyscrapers, and also the tallest.

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Behind the swathe of arid vegetation were crumbling white walls of enzyme-bonded concrete, scaled by ivy and climbing cacti. Various private roads led off the main track, looping round to gates. For a moment Mark’s imagination painted over the image with long straight driveways of the Highmarsh Valley branching off the main road. It was silent in the Chunatas, the noise of the megacity deflected by the foothills, a condition matching the land behind Randtown. Even the drab brown of the native plants were similar to the weak ochre shadings of boltgrass. But the air here was dryer, tinged with chemicals from the refinery sector ten miles away to the west. And Regulus was a too-bright point of blue-white light in the cloudless sky, still emitting a fierce heat in the late afternoon.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Today, more than half of humanity, 3.5 billion people, cluster in cities, and scientists predict that by 2050 our cities will enthrall 70 percent of the world’s citizens. The trend is undeniable as the moon, unstoppable as an avalanche. Between 2005 and 2013, China’s urban population skyrocketed from 13 percent to 40 percent, with most people moving from very rural locales to huddled megacities whose streets jingle with chance and temptation. At that pace, by 2030, over half of China’s citizens will live in cities, and instead of farming food locally they’ll import much of it from other nations, paying with the fruits of industry, invention, and manufacturing. That’s already the case in the U.K., where by 1950 a checkerboard of cities embraced 79 percent of the population.

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As we wade into the Anthropocene, we’re trying to reinsert ourselves back into the planet’s ecosystem and good graces. Unlovely as the word “sustainability” may be, it’s sashaying through the media, taking root in schools, and hitting home in all sorts of domiciles, entering the mainstream in both hamlets and megacities. We’re undergoing a revolution in thinking that isn’t a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, nor is it a back-to-the-land movement of the sort that became popular during the Great Depression and again in the 1970s. We might sometimes resemble startled deer in the headlights as we face Earth’s dwindling resources, yet at the same time we’re opening a door to a full-scale sustainability revolution.

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The melt allows the orcas to widen their range and catch more of the white “singing” beluga whales, the canaries of the ocean, and the unicorn-tusked narwhals, two of the orca’s favorite meals. But both the belugas and the narwhals are endangered. How astonishing it is that just one warm-blooded species is causing all this commotion. Creating hives of great megacities and concrete nests that tower into the sky is impressive enough. But removing, relocating, redesigning, and generally vexing and bothering an entire planet full of plants and animals is another magnitude of mischief beyond anything the planet has ever known. The first is just brilliant niche building, something other animals do on a much more modest scale.

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, biofilm, Black Swan, Boeing 747, clean water, coronavirus, disinformation, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, moral panic, Pearl River Delta, Ronald Reagan, Skype, the built environment, the long tail, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

“Despite extraordinary advances in medical Science, we cannot be complacent about the threat of infectious diseases,” acknowledged the National Academy of Medicine in a report published just weeks before Zika became a pheic. “The underlying rate of emergence of infectious diseases appears to be increasing.” Why this should be the case—if it is the case—is a matter of ongoing research and conjecture. Certainly urbanization and globalization would appear to be key factors. The mega-cities of Asia, Africa, and South America, like Athens in the time of Thucydides, provide ideal conditions for the amplification and spread of novel pathogens by concentrating large numbers of people in cramped and often unsanitary spaces. Sometimes technology and alterations of the built environment can mitigate the risks that such overcrowding presents for the transfer of pathogens to people.

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Abumonbazi, 223 achromatic lenses, 37 Acute Communicable Disesase Control, 148–49 Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), 59, 244 Afghanistan, 226 Africa, 3 AIDS in, 219, 221–29, 225, 232, 233, 363 (see also specific countries) colonialism in, 199, 227–30 disruption of social relations in, 199, 230–31 distrust of foreign medical aid in, 291–93 early cases of AIDS in, 231 Ebola in, 277–85, 286 economic, social, and cultural change in, 199, 227, 230–32 environmental change in, 231–32 globalization and, 227 mass polio vaccination campaigns in, 225 mega-cities in, 362 public health and humanitarian medical initiatives in, 199 African Americans, 27 African horse sickness, 41 agar media, 205, 396n Agent Orange, 170 AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), 9–10, 193–235, 213 conspiracy theories and, 225–26, 403n cultural causes and factors and, 13–14 as death sentence, 212 early cases of, 221–24, 231 economic, social, and cultural factors, 13–14 economic, social, and cultural factors in, 199–200 as EID, 234 environmental causes and factors and, 13–14, 231–32 as “epidemic of fear,” 213 etiology of, 207, 216, 225 framed as disease of gay lifestyles, 211 hysteria of 1980s, 10 index case for, 218–20, 218n latency and slow onset of, 363 medical technologies and, 199–200, 202, 227–29, 233 as metaphor, 210–11 mother–child transmission of, 220–21 naming of, 198 panic about, 200–201, 211–13 poor public health messaging around, 212–16, 220–21 principal risk groups for, 211, 213, 215, 363 public attitudes toward, 198 sexual transmission of, 197, 199, 217–18 simian versions of, 226–27, 229–30 spillover mechanism from simian to human populations, 226–27 stigmatization of people with, 211, 214–15, 217, 218–21 transmission of, 197, 199, 212, 214–18, 220–21, 222, 232, 402n worldwide spread of, 221 air conditioning systems, 183–85, 189–91, 256, 362 Aldershot, England, 23 All People’s Congress Party, 297 Altino Ventura, 354–56, 357 alveolar macrophages, 185 alveoli, 20, 185 American Expeditionary Force, 18, 25, 29 American Hospital in Paris, 212 American Legion.

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See also specific antibiotics discovery of new, 149 drug-resistant microbes and, 365–66 era before, 47 antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), 60, 347–48 antibody reactions, 259 “antigentic drift,” 55 antiretroviral drugs, 200, 226, 403n antiwar movement, 169–70 arboviruses, 319–24, 326, 330–31, 335, 359 Argentina, 106–8 Argentine National Health Board (Asistencia Publica), 107, 114 Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, 55, 109, 405–6n Armstrong, Charlie, 105–6, 115–17, 118, 120–24, 126, 132, 138–39 Asheville, North Carolina, 31–33 Asia Asian financial crisis of 1998, 266 mega-cities in, 362 Zika in, 326–27 “Asian flu,” 56, 245 Associated Press, 82 AIDS panic and, 213 Ebola and, 296 “parrot fever” pandemic 1929–1930 and, 138 Athenians, 14 Athens, Greece, plague of, 14, 362 Atlanta, Georgia, 300, 302, 303 the Atlanticos, 95 Attaran, Amir, 340 Aureomycin, 142 Avery, Oswald, 22, 35–36, 37, 149 avian influenza, 4, 10, 55–56, 243–48, 250, 257, 274, 284, 367, 381–82n of 1997, 4, 254 H5N1 virus, 59, 405n “multiple reassortants” of, 247 unusual pathology in young adults, 245–46 avian viruses, mutations of, 245–46 avirulence, survival strategy of, 30 Ayer, Massachusetts, 17–18, 19, 28, 33, 47 Aylward, Bruce, 308 Ayres, Constância, 350–51, 352 AZT, 212, 226, 403n Bachmann, Leonard, 155 Bacillus influenzae, 26–27, 34, 35–38, 36–39, 40, 42, 43, 48–49, 58, 113 Bacillus psittacosis, 112–13, 126 bacteria.

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

Most of them, though, function primarily as the manufacturing and service centers of the twenty-first-century global economy. From Guadalajara and Tijuana to Shanghai and the Philippines, they produce the world’s goods, take its calls, and support its innovation engines. • The third group is composed of the megacities of the developing world—with large population concentrations but insufficient economic activity to support their people. Many of these megacities are ravaged by large-scale “global slums” with dense concentrations of homelessness, poverty, and deprivation, high levels of social and political unrest, and little meaningful economic activity.14 These places, increasingly disconnected from the global economy, make it difficult to celebrate what appears to be a level world for a fortunate few

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Many cities in the developing nations are immense but lack the economic clout of megaregions. As Ohmae writes, they “either do not or cannot look to the global economy for solutions to their problems or for the resources to make those solutions work.” Ohmae’s point is important. Population is not tantamount to economic growth. These megacities differ substantially from true megaregions that have large markets, significant economic capacity, substantial innovative activity, and highly skilled talent, on top of large populations. Looking at economic growth and the creation of wealth solely through nation-state data is hugely misleading because national borders are less relevant to where economic activity is located.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place) by Tim Marshall

9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, Charlie Hebdo massacre, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Hans Island, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, market fragmentation, megacity, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transcontinental railway, Transnistria, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, zero-sum game

This has brought it into competition with Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda, which have their own ideas about who should be in charge in the DRC. The Africa of the past was given no choice—its geography shaped it—and then the Europeans engineered most of today’s borders. Now, with its booming populations and developing megacities, it has no choice but to embrace the modern globalized world to which it is so connected. In this, despite all the problems we have seen, it is making huge strides. The same rivers that hampered trade are now harnessed for hydroelectric power. From the earth that struggled to sustain large-scale food production come minerals and oil, making some countries rich even if little of the wealth reaches the people.

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A major concern for South Korea is how close Seoul and the surrounding urban areas are to the border with North Korea. Seoul’s position makes it vulnerable to surprise attacks from its neighbor, whose capital is much farther away and partially protected by mountainous terrain. South Korea’s capital, the megacity of Seoul, lies just thirty-five miles south of the 38th parallel and the DMZ. Almost half of South Korea’s 50 million people live in the greater Seoul region, which is home to much of its industry and financial centers, and it is all within range of North Korean artillery. In the hills above the 148-mile-long DMZ, the North Korean military has an estimated ten thousand artillery pieces.

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The Japanese are an island race, with the majority of the 127 million population living mostly on the four large islands that face Korea and Russia across the Sea of Japan, and a minority inhabiting some of the 6,848 smaller islands. The largest of the main islands is Honshu, which includes the biggest megacity in the world, Tokyo, and its 39 million people. At its closest point, Japan is 120 miles from the Eurasian land-mass, which is among the reasons why it has never been successfully invaded. The Chinese are some five hundred miles away across the East China Sea; and although there is Russian territory much closer, the Russian forces are usually far away because of the extremely inhospitable climate and sparse population located across the Sea of Okhotsk.

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Although most of us live in cities of one million or fewer, the stars of the show are the megacities, with populations of ten million or more. This table lists the ten largest megacities and their population in millions: Tokyo, Japan 38.1 Delhi, India 26.5 Shanghai, China 24.5 Mumbai, India 21.4 São Paulo, Brazil 21.3 Beijing, China 21.2 Mexico City, Mexico 21.2 Osaka, Japan 20.3 Cairo, Egypt 19.1 New York–Newark, United States 18.6279 Only three of these megacities are in the developed world, and two of those are in Japan. And Japan’s population is shrinking.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

For them, a high-growth global economy is the only possible way of attaining a decent standard of living, or perhaps even a middle-class lifestyle—and if not for them, then for their kids. Walk through the streets of Bombay and watch the thousands, hundreds of thousands—no, millions—of people with outstretched hands begging for anything that will just help them stay alive. And if not in Bombay, then Jakarta or Cairo or Sao Paulo or any of the other dozen megacities that you want to pick. Those cities are all packed with 15 million people or more—half of them barely hanging on—and there are millions more in the countryside who are in even worse shape. What can be done with the 2 billion or so poor people in the world? They're alive, and they're having children.

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But then, in the second half of the twentieth century, the restless center shifted west once again, to the West Coast of the United States, where the digital revolution and the new knowledge age seem to have found their best expression. For the Long Boom period that we're describing, from 1980 to 2020, the West Coast corridor is ground zero. There's the megacity of Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, the film and television capital of the world, certainly a place to watch at the beginning of an information age. There's Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, home of the new digital tools and the emerging new media of the Internet. In fact, it's the entire coast from Seattle, home of Microsoft, to San Diego, home of key players in wireless telecommunications.

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This page intentionally left blank PART THREE The ENQJNES of ihE TwENTy'fiRST CENTURY HE ONLY WAY TO KEEP the Long Boom going is to figure out Tway to slow and eventually eradicate damage to the environE ment. There is no other option. The environment is already strained to the breaking point, global warming is starting to seriously affect the climate, and many people in the world's megacities are choking to death. A global boom until 2020 would put us all over the edge— unless we do something dramatic right now, Section III lays out the coming waves of technologies that will allow us to grow rapidly while actually lowering the strain on the environment. These are not pie-in-the-sky technologies but practical ones, many of which are far along in development and ready for commercial use.

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland

active measures, agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, Corn Laws, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, open immigration, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, sceptred isle, stakhanovite, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

If that turns out to be the case, Nigeria would have gone in the space of a century and a half from being 1.5% of the world’s population to 7%. Meanwhile, Nigeria has urbanised rapidly. Lagos has seen a rise in population from 1.5 million in 1970 to over 20 million forty-five years on. Life in this mega-city, as in other African mega-cities, is not attractive from the perspective of someone from a developed country. As one correspondent describes it: A thick layer of acrid, blue smoke hovers just above the waterfront slums that skirt Lagos lagoon, filtering out sunrise and sunset. This man-made mist that clings to the rusted shack rooftops comes from the countless fish-smoking cabins that drive the slum economy.

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There’s an uninterrupted view of the city’s dramatic sprawl of poverty from the road bridges that carry daily commuters between the islands and the mainland.34 Yet the rural poor keep coming, escaping the more grinding prospect of rural poverty in an ever-more crowded countryside. Few would have guessed that one-time colonial outposts would by the dawn of the twenty-first century dwarf the capital of the imperial metropolis. Lagos is foremost of the mega-cities which are now dotted not only across Africa but throughout the developing world and which could only have come into existence with the recent vast population growth, which the countryside was unable to absorb. As with India and China, countries growing on this demographic scale can only fail to be important players on the world stage if they lag behind.

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With Africa still poor and young, the pressure of migration to Europe will be strong. To date, most African population growth can be seen arising from people pouring into towns and cities. Once prosperity gets above a certain level, however, the prospect of looking further afield than the nearest mega-city for economic salvation becomes more realistic. Beyond Imagination The world has changed at a frantic pace in the last few centuries, and the trend only appears to be accelerating. Much of this has to do with technology but it also has to do with demography, for the two are interdependent.

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, defense in depth, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, peak oil, Port of Oakland, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, urban planning

The world's chief financial capitals—New York, London, and Tokyo—are all highly vulnerable, thanks to their low-lying waterfront locations. I visited each of those cities for this book, as well as Shanghai, the epicenter of Chinese capitalism, where three feet of sea level rise would put a third of the city underwater. Mega-cities located in poor countries would be equally pressed and much less able to adapt; Manila, Jakarta, and Dhaka are the three considered most at risk in Asia. In the United States, a mere two feet of sea level rise would put 2,200 miles of roads in Washington, DC, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina at risk of regular inundation, according to a 2009 report by the U.S.

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John Holmes, the UN's coordinator of emergency disaster relief, reported that fourteen of the fifteen major relief operations that his team mounted in 2007 were in response to floods, storms, and other climate-related events. In 2008, nine out of ten major disasters were weather-related, causing up to $200 billion of damage. Yet neither governments, businesses, nor citizens were heeding the warnings, said Holmes, who added, "The risks of mega-disasters in some ... mega-cities is rising all the time." The humanitarian organization Oxfam has projected that extreme weather could affect 375 million people a year by 2015, and the international relief system "could be overwhelmed." As always with climate change, it is the poor and vulnerable who figure to be hurt most. The human suffering and social havoc that engulfed New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina show what can happen when a community's defenses against mega-storms are inadequate, which many are, especially in poor countries.

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Perhaps the most vivid—and economically reckless—example is in Shanghai, where a combination of sea level rise and fiercer river and ocean flooding threatens the business capital of China with a disaster that a senior government scientist warned would be as bad as or worse than what New Orleans suffered from Katrina. Not until the morning I left Shanghai did I fully grasp how vulnerable the city is to climate change. Shanghai is the one Chinese mega-city I had missed while visiting in 1997 for Earth Odyssey, so it was a revelation to see it now. Shanghai was even richer than I had imagined—its streets choked with traffic jams of Mercedeses and BMWs, its shopping districts boasting top-end brands from Europe and the States, its downtown crowded with skyscrapers housing some of the world's biggest companies, all of them intent on riding the magic carpet of endless economic growth that is modern China.

Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, COVID-19, East Village, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, Jane Jacobs, Johannes Kepler, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, Pearl River Delta, period drama, Richard Florida, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

Years from now, after I’ve become a pilot, my housemate’s words—a new city—will often come to my mind involuntarily, when the jet I’m flying emerges from the clouds above the parallel and numbered streets of a roomy metropolis on the west coast of North America, say, in the same week in which I returned from an Asian megacity that might be multiples older and denser, and whose earliest days might be mythical or lost. But the idea of a new city will strike me most forcefully whenever I overfly an obviously modern settlement that lies near or forms part of an ancient one. Along the Nile, for example, on flights on clear and dry winter nights, I’ll sip my tea as I look across metropolitan Cairo at the new cities shining from within it like electrified engineering schematics, or like new sets of holiday lights, plugged in to be tested before they’re pulled from the plastic scaffolding on which they come neatly arrayed.

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As we wait for my brother we once again talk, half seriously, about spending our old age in the Berkshires, and I understand that I’m pulled, as I so often am, by three familiar desires: to be in Pittsfield, my first city; to live near it, but not quite in it; and to look back on Pittsfield from the sheltering anonymity of a megacity on the farthest side of my world. My brother’s car pulls up in a cloud of late-summer dust. Through the rear window I see spokes, wheels, a bright silver frame. Our hike, the athletic highlight of my week, is nothing to him in terms of exercise; after it he’ll go for a long ride around much of Berkshire County.

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In City Improbable, the writer and politician Khushwant Singh described Delhi as possessing “a longer history and more historical monuments than any other metropolis.” Such a conclusion isn’t easy to verify, but what is certain is that the Delhi region has been continually inhabited for thousands of years; and that among today’s megacities, Delhi’s past must be one of the deepest. Long before it became the capital of the world’s most populous democracy—soon to become the world’s most populous country—Delhi was described by Ibn Battuta, in the fourteenth century, as a “vast and magnificent city, uniting beauty with strength”; it was later conquered by a descendant of Genghis Khan; and it gave birth, as well, to a history-shaping rebellion against British imperialism.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

The Peers Inc organization can produce previously impossible growth, unprecedented acceleration of learning and innovation, and the powerful joining of human experience, adaptability, and pattern recognition with supercomputing. The three miracles potentially provide us a way forward through climate change, resource scarcity, and explosive population growth. They also produce some rewarding business opportunities along the way. We can, in fact, make megacities livable and address the needs of the more than seven billion people now on the planet (a figure expected to grow to eleven billion by 2050) through more efficient use of our resources. We can enable people to build satisfying lives in which their individuality is valued. We can quickly build resilient cities with the localized responses required to deflect the worst effects of global warming.

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I recently talked to a CEO of a telecommunications company that had been sitting on a technology improvement that would not only dramatically reduce the company’s costs and improve customer service but do so by reducing the company’s workforce by 40,000 people. Self-driving vehicles, which are coming much faster than people realize, will take away the need for drivers around the world. This will be painful everywhere, but devastating in megacities such as Mumbai and Lagos, where millions of people earn their living from driving. The least skilled and the least educated will likely not find new full-time employment. Even with the optimistic and inevitable forecasts that new technologies will open up new economic frontiers, we all know the difficult truth: In real time in defined geographies, job losses do not equal job gains one for one.

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TEN Addressing Our Biggest Challenges Climate Change and Sustainability Need Peers Inc THE PEERS INC PARADIGM fascinates me not just because it’s shaping the future of business. What is more important is that we’ve figured out what this model is and how it works exactly at our time of greatest need. The earth currently has 7 billion inhabitants, thirty megacities whose populations exceed 10 million, hundreds of cities harboring over a million inhabitants, and all the problems that come with urbanization—poverty, homelessness, congestion, and pollution. Add to this projections of a global average temperature increase of 4°C (7°F) by 2100 and population estimates as high as 11 billion.1 If we continue with business as usual and leave these problems unaddressed, the future looks bleak.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

CLIMATE APARTHEID NOBODY KNOWS FOR sure how many people live in Lagos, Nigeria. The United Nations’ official count is 13 million, but Lagos officials say it’s closer to 21 million. When you are in line at the city’s prehistoric airport, it feels like 30 million. Whatever the most accurate number is, everyone agrees that Lagos is one of the fastest-growing megacities in the world, with a growth rate ten times faster than New York or LA. It is also a city that is sharply divided between rich and poor. About 70 percent of the population lives on $1.25 a day or less, while the top 2 or 3 percent live behind walls in Beverly Hills–like estates. A good percentage of those people made their money in oil.

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When it is finished (or, more accurately, if it is finished—the devaluation of Nigerian currency, as well as other economic factors, has put its future in doubt), Eko Atlantic will encompass more than three square miles of new land, where, developers hope, 300,000 prosperous and technologically sophisticated people will live in sleek modern condos, fully equipped with fiber-optic Internet connections, elaborate security systems, and a twenty-five-foot-high seawall protecting them from the attacking ocean. It’s a shiny new appendage to a megacity slum, one that sells itself as a new vision of Lagos—the Dubai of Africa. What’s happening in Lagos is part of a larger trend of combating sea-level rise with old-fashioned engineering muscle. On coasts and in shallow bays around the world, enormous dredging machines are pumping sand and gravel out of the bottom of the sea and creating new land.

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“This is the new Lagos.” I looked back at the old Lagos and thought of the millions of people who live there in shacks and cheap concrete buildings that flood with every high tide. I wondered how safe I would feel up here on a leather couch on the nineteenth floor as old Lagos drowns. When it comes to megacities with the most at risk from sea-level rise, Lagos doesn’t crack the top ten in potential economic losses. Guangzhou, Shanghai, Kolkata, Mumbai, and other Asian cities are at the top of the list. Lagos doesn’t rank with these cities because, in strict economic terms, the infrastructure along the coast isn’t worth much compared to a place like Shanghai.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

With it came a new idea, about how people should live. In the middle of the last century, architects and planners connived with the car industry to reimagine the city. The Futurama exhibition at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, sponsored by General Motors, depicted a vision of the future in which everyone had a car, living in megacities dominated by expressways and suburbs. And architects like Le Corbusier, the father of Brutalism, and planners like Robert Moses of New York City, perhaps the most powerful unelected bureaucrat in American history, leapt to try to make it a reality, using all the power of the post–World War II state to acquire land, move people, and replace homes, offices, and factories with roads.

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But it happens to be the biggest city on the planet: Tokyo, the capital of Japan. In popular imagination, at least in the west, Tokyo is both incredibly futuristic, and also rather foreign and confusing. Before I first visited, in 2017, I imagined it to be an incredibly hectic place, a noisy, bustling megacity. I was on holiday and trying to escape Nairobi, a rather sprawling, low-height and green city, and I picked Tokyo largely because I wanted to get as far away from Africa as I could. I needed a break from the traffic jams, the power cuts, the constant negotiation to achieve anything, and the heat.

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That had declined to 16 percent by 2010 and further still since. Now, the city’s roads are choked with traffic, and the air is appallingly polluted. Some cities have even adopted some American-inspired policies designed to stop pedestrians from slowing down vehicular traffic, with a typically totalitarian spin. In Shenzhen, the electronics-producing megacity on the other side of the Hong Kong border, China’s terrifying facial recognition technology is being used to fine jaywalkers. As well as being fined, they are publicly shamed, with their photos displayed on a giant LED screen above an intersection in the city. But some parts of the Chinese government have also realized the downsides of expanding car ownership and roads forever.

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

Some cities in these regions doubled in size in a single decade.37 The bulk of this massive human population surge occurred in a handful of so-called megacities—urban centers inhabited by more than 10 million people. In 1950 there were two megacities: New York and London. Both had attained their awesome size in less than five decades, growing by just under 2 million people each decade. Though the growth was difficult and posed endless problems for city planners, the nations were wealthy, able to finance the necessary expansion of such services as housing, sewage, drinking water, and transport. By 1980, however, the world had ten megacities: Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Mexico City, Los Angeles, New York, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, and London.

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But Brinkmann noted that a change in the human/parasite relationship was occurring in Mexico City—then the world’s fastest-growing megacity. People were not getting the worms from uncooked meats, which, as it turned out, they couldn’t afford to purchase. Rather, the parasite had taken advantage of the highly favorable ecology provided by the extraordinarily polluted Tula River, the city’s primary freshwater source. Tens of thousands of people living in the squalid outskirts of the megacity downstream of the urban center’s sewage system were infected with the dangerous Taenia solium parasites.49 By 1980 the tapeworm had found its way to Los Angeles, carried by human immigrants from Asia and Central America.

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For three days scientists presented evidence that validated McNeill’s words of foreboding: viruses were mutating at rapid rates; seals were dying in great plagues as the researchers convened; more than 90 percent of the rabbits of Australia died in a single year following the introduction of a new virus to the land; great influenza pandemics were sweeping through the animal world; the Andromeda strain nearly surfaced in Africa in the form of Ebola virus; megacities were arising in the developing world, creating niches from which “virtually anything might arise”; rain forests were being destroyed, forcing disease-carrying animals and insects into areas of human habitation and raising the very real possibility that lethal, mysterious microbes would, for the first time, infect humanity on a large scale and imperil the survival of the human race.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Under hukou, those who do not have the hereditary right of urban residency will always have an inferior, unprotected status even if they seek opportunity in the city.8 Among the most common themes in contemporary Chinese science fiction is rigid class divisions in the urban world. Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing,” for example, portrays a megacity divided into sharply delineated communities for the elite, the middle ranks, and a vast poor population living mainly by recycling the waste generated by the city.9 This vision represents a shocking divergence from the Maoist ideal. The Polarized Global City Despite their population growth and economic dynamism, the sprawling megacities of the developing world have not nurtured a substantial middle class.10 Power and money tend to be highly concentrated in a handful of elite urban districts, while opportunities for the middle and working classes are limited.

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Renn, “Caterpillar’s HQ Move to Chicago Shows America’s Double Divide,” Urbanophile, January 31, 2017, http://www.urbanophile.com/2017/01/31/caterpillars-hq-move-to-chicago-shows-americas-double-divide/; Emily Badger, “What Happens When the Richest U.S. Cities Turn to the World?” New York Times, December 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/upshot/the-great-disconnect-megacities-go-global-but-lose-local-links.html. 44 Aaron M. Renn, “Population Transformation in Pittsburgh and Chicago,” New Geography, April 13, 2018, http://www.newgeography.com/content/005937-population-transformation-pittsburgh-and-chicago. 45 UCL Urban Laboratory, “How Ruth Glass shaped the way we approach our cities,” University College London, January 13, 2015, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/urbanlab/news/ruth-glass-seminar. 46 Karen J.

Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Elizabeth Truss

Airbnb, banking crisis, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clockwatching, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, fail fast, fear of failure, financial engineering, glass ceiling, informal economy, James Dyson, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, long peace, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neil Kinnock, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, pension reform, price stability, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, tech worker, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

id=10347 4. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/indepth/2010-10/02/c_13540088. htm 5. http://aiesecubc.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/brazil/ 6. http://coa.counciloftheamericas.org/articles/3871/Brazil%E2%80%99s_ President:_Dilma_Rousseff%E2%80%99s_First_Year/ 7. http://aiesecubc.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/brazil/ 8. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16332115 9. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/nov2007/ db20071115_045316.htm 10. http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2010/07/brazils_prospects 11. http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0509/global-2000-11-edward-glaeserslums-dharavi-lands-opportunity_2.html 130 Britannia Unchained 12. http://www.forbes.com/sites/megacities/2011/04/08/curfew-in-the-favela/ 13. http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/12/coming-up-from-the-favelas-brazilsslumdog-entrepreneurs/ 14. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/13/brazil-troops-raidshantytown 15. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15710719 16. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/8890151/ Rio-plans-to-pacify-dozens-more-favelas.html 17. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldclass/16705801 18. http://www.forbes.com/sites/megacities/2011/04/19/favela-fashionovercoming-business-challenges/ 19. http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/08/making-lemonade-out-of-bureaucraticbrazilian-lemons/ 20. http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/08/making-lemonade-out-of-bureaucraticbrazilian-lemons/ 21. http://quererempreender.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/edivan-fundador-da-sedi. html 22. http://www.forbes.com/sites/julieruvolo/2012/01/23/bye-bye-brazilianblowouts-the-next-big-brazilian-hair-trend-is-beleza-natural/ 23. http://www.endeavor.org/entrepreneurs/leila-velez/97 24. http://www.economist.com/node/21528985 25. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11477974 26. http://www.economist.com/node/21528985 27. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/71352352-112c-11e1-ad22-00144feabdc0. html#axzz1kGsfWbFB 28. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/oct/10/world-murder-rateunodc 29. http://www.economist.com/node/21528985 30. http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/12/46643496.pdf 31. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/31/us-foxconn-brazil-id USTRE79T17C20111031 32.

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Human trafficking flourishes amid such economic disparity, with rural women serving as sex slaves in cities and urban men working as bonded laborers in Amazonian gold mines. Most schools do not have phone lines, let alone Internet connections. In a country that is three-quarters urban, São Paulo has grown into something beyond mega-city sprawl: it is a well-nigh infinite city, with a population that can neither be contained nor measured. Its countless steel-gated apartment complexes are, in effect, high-rise favelas for those who can afford housing. São Paulo’s Rua Oscar Freire has been rated one of the world’s top luxury shopping streets, and wealthy Paulistanos boast the highest rate of private helicopter usage in the world—but at chic restaurants, women make sure to have their purses bound with wire to their chairs.

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.*43 This Saudi social apotheosis is occurring just as the country is getting a second chance to climb into the first world. During the 1970s oil boom, no Gulf states created significant manufacturing or service sectors to employ the growing ranks of city dwellers who became what Fouad Ajami called the “angry sons of a failed generation.”23 And if high Saudi birthrates continue, Riyadh could become a megacity of ten million mostly underutilized citizens. Riyadh’s ministry buildings are still dilapidated, and the city is but a cleaner version of Cairo. But this time around, Saudi Arabia is globalization-savvy, bringing in international banks and consultants to modernize smartly.24 It has the space, labor, and money to construct four entirely new industrial cities as tax-free reexport zones that create jobs while spreading the population away from dense Riyadh and Jeddah to reverse the inward migration that also plagues third-world countries.

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Each is so powerful that they are better understood as “region-states,” cities that operate like business units, as connected to the global economy as their own countries, while increasingly linked into a growing Asian network of economic nodes irrespective of political and cultural distinctions.23 Asia also has more than half the world’s megalopolises, which are home to most of Southeast Asia’s five hundred million people. Third-world mega-cities in Africa and India contain bustling downtowns surrounded by rings and pockets of residential and squatter neighborhoods as far as the eye can see. As villages rapidly depopulate, urbanization means not modernization and development but squalor and depravity. Southeast Asia today is rising out of this third-world scenario as its per capita income rises above $3,000 and the poverty rate falls below 25 percent.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize