megacity

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pages: 565 words: 122,605

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

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.

. ——— (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.

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.


pages: 232

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).

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.

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!"


pages: 83 words: 23,805

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.

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.

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.)


pages: 501 words: 145,943

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

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.

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.

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.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

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.

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.

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.


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

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.

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.

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.


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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.

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.

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.


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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.

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.

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].’

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.

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.


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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


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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.

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.

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.


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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.

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).

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.


pages: 414 words: 101,285

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.

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.

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.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

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.

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.

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.


pages: 407 words: 121,458

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.

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.

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.


pages: 302 words: 92,206

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.

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.

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.


pages: 364 words: 102,225

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.

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.

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.


pages: 598 words: 140,612

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.

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.

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.


pages: 421 words: 120,332

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.

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.

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.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

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.

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.)

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.


pages: 353 words: 91,211

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.

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.

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.


pages: 304 words: 88,773

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.

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.

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.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

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.

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?

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.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

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.

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

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.”)


pages: 578 words: 168,350

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.

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.”

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.


pages: 340 words: 91,387

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.

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.

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.


pages: 288 words: 76,343

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.

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.

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.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

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.

., 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.

., 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?’


pages: 464 words: 127,283

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.

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.

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.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

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).

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.

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.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

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.

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.

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.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

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.

., “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.

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.

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).

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.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

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.

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.

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.


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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.

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.

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.


pages: 247 words: 78,961

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.


pages: 505 words: 147,916

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.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

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.


pages: 335 words: 86,900

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.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

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.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

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.

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.


pages: 769 words: 169,096

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.

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).

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.


pages: 321 words: 89,109

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.”


pages: 366 words: 123,151

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.

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.

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.


pages: 412 words: 128,042

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.

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.

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.


pages: 369 words: 98,776

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.

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.

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.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


pages: 197 words: 49,240

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.

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.

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.


pages: 1,234 words: 356,472

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.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

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?


pages: 447 words: 111,991

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.

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.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

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.

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.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

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.


pages: 91 words: 26,009

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.

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.


pages: 692 words: 167,950

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.

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.

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.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

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.

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.

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.


pages: 469 words: 132,438

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.

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.

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.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

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.

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.

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.


pages: 391 words: 99,963

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.

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.

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.


pages: 257 words: 64,285

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.

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.


pages: 225 words: 70,180

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.


pages: 1,386 words: 379,115

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.

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.

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.


pages: 380 words: 104,841

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.

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.

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.


pages: 529 words: 150,263

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.

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.

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.


pages: 325 words: 73,035

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

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.


pages: 306 words: 79,537

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.

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.

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.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

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.


pages: 353 words: 355

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.

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.

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.


pages: 405 words: 121,999

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.

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.

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.


pages: 326 words: 48,727

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.

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.

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.


pages: 393 words: 127,847

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.

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.

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.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

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.

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.

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.


pages: 292 words: 92,588

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.

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.

“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.


pages: 278 words: 91,332

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.

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.

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.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

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.

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.

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.


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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.

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.


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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.

.*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.

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.


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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

First, you have the rapid urbanization of the peasant population, as farmers leave their ancestral lands to try their luck in the megacities. In 1800, only 3 percent of the population lived in cities. By the end of the twentieth century, that figure rose to 47 percent, and it is expected to soar above that in the coming decades. The expense of child rearing in the city drastically reduces the number of children in a family. With rents, food, and expenses being so high, workers in the slums of the megacities perform the same calculus and conclude that each child reduces their wealth. Second, as countries industrialize, as in China and India, this creates a middle class that wants fewer children, as in the industrialized West.

Shoppers flood the stores, in spite of economic hard times. Instead of proliferating cyberclassrooms, universities are still registering record numbers of students. To be sure, there are more people deciding to work from their homes or teleconference with their coworkers, but cities have not emptied at all. Instead, they have morphed into sprawling megacities. Today, it is easy to carry on video conversations on the Internet, but most people tend to be reluctant to be filmed, preferring face-to-face meetings. And of course, the Internet has changed the entire media landscape, as media giants puzzle over how to earn revenue on the Internet. But it is not even close to wiping out TV, radio, and live theater.

The stars are not twinkling, as they appear from the earth, but staring brightly, as they have for billions of years. The elevator slowly comes to a stop about 100 miles from the surface of the earth. From space, you see a dazzling sight that you previously saw only in pictures. Looking down, you suddenly see the earth in an entirely new light. You see the oceans, the continents, and the lights of megacities that shine into outer space. From space, the earth appears so serene that it’s hard to believe people once spilled blood fighting wars over silly borders. These nations still exist, but they seem so quaint, less relevant today, in an age when communication is instantaneous and ubiquitous. As Karen puts her head on your shoulder, you begin to realize that you are witnessing the birth of a new planetary civilization.


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A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

The point isn’t to eliminate all forms of trade in favour of entirely autonomous household economies, but to put some limits around trade in view of its ecological and economic dysfunctions, and to avoid a romanticising language of ‘trade-ification’ as inherently beneficial.54 The settlement pattern of a small farm future best suited to deliver less extractive relationships based on renewable local resources would probably look something like Figure 15.1.b, with centrifugal relations of power and service – emphasising what the countryside can draw from urban centres – balancing or exceeding the centripetal ones based on what urban centres can draw from the countryside. It would most likely be a world of farmsteads, hamlets, villages, market towns and regional hub cities, with little need for today’s mega-cities. That’s why I’ve made the centrifugal arrow of service from town to country in Figure 15.1.b larger than the converse centripetal one. There are already political developments of this kind: in a new municipalism of smaller towns and cities stranded by super-urbanism that are trying to reconnect to their hinterlands in ecological re-localisation movements, in peasant movements and so on.

But rather than unjust, futile and politically dangerous border mobilisations to stop it, I’d argue that we should take seriously the ‘human right not to have to migrate’ by trying to mitigate the environmental drivers, economic inequalities and social injustices behind mass migration. It’s probably too late to do this adequately to prevent large-scale migration from happening anyway. In a world of rising temperatures, melting ice caps and melting global capital reserves, it seems likely that a lot of people will be moving away from the mostly coastal mega-cities where jobs serving the nodes of global capital will be increasingly thin on the ground, and indeed where ground itself will be increasingly thin on the ground. For rural areas, that means there’ll be a lot of incomers from near and far looking for agricultural land on which to make a living. It’s not hard to imagine the problems this could cause.

‘The Strong Perennial Vision: A Critical Review,’ Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 39(5): 471–99. Smil, Vaclav. 2010. Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate. Washington, DC: AEI Press. _______. 2017. Energy and Civilization: A History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. _______. 2019. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, Adam. (1776) 1993. Wealth of Nations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Jo, et al. 2012. ‘Reconciling Productivity with Protection of the Environment: Is Temperate Agroforestry the Answer?’ Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 28(1): 80–92. Smith, Stephen. 2005.


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Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

We are an urban animal now, and although our habitat trends vary locally, in net global terms all future population growth will be in cities. By 2050, humanity’s urban population may grow by another 2.5 billion people; our rural population is expected to shrink by 150 million.46 The city is the center of things, and as a species we are rushing to be there. New crossroads are again emerging. Mega-cities like Tokyo, New York, London, Toronto, Paris, Delhi, São Paulo, Mumbai, Mexico City, Shanghai and Dhaka command the world’s headlines, but the real story—at least so far as urban growth is concerned—will play out in the more than 700 developing-world cities with populations that exceed 500,000 today and the more than 350 new cities that will reach that threshold by 2030.

Much of what needs to be done can be done by “coalitions of the working”—groups of influential citizens, companies, cities or countries that get the issue and get the urgency, and by their coordinated actions generate momentum that pulls the laggards along.70 The C40 cities initiative (c40.org), originally comprising 40 megacities (now 69) around the world, is a good template. Member cities commit to taking practical actions to cut greenhouse gases and share best practices among themselves. Many global challenges can be met when a few big players get together like this. These challenges include climate change—over half of the world’s carbon emissions are produced by just four countries (China, US, India and Russia)—and finance, in which the top thirty-odd banks can make or break the health of the global banking system.

See da Vinci, Leonardo Levchin, Max, 152 libraries, 26, 29, 33, 143–5 Lintott, Chris, 147–8 Luther, Martin, 2, 30, 55, 65, 215–18, 224–5, 260–1 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 6, 11, 160, 168, 229, 246, 256, 259 The Prince, 108, 266 Magellan, Ferdinand, 19–20, 39–40, 68 Manutius, Aldus, 143–4 maps and Mercator, 20–1, 61, 252 new maps, 15–25, 33, 40, 45, 53, 60, 62, 251–2 political world circa 1980, 22 political world circa 2015, 23 and Ptolemy, 15 world according to the Bible, 16 world according to Ptolemy, 17 world according to Mercator, 20 market economies, 25, 68. See also capitalism medicine. See health and medicine mega-cities, 54 Mehmed II, 18 Mendel, Gregor, 114 Mercator, Gerard, 20, 61, 252 Metcalfe, Robert, 159 Mexico, 19, 29, 43, 54, 93, 144 Michelangelo. See Buonarroti, Michelangelo middle class, 73–5, 93, 178, 186, 241 Middle East, 40–1, 93 Arab Spring, 24, 36, 211, 222–4, 228 and economic divergence, 211 and development, 161 and health care, 98 and life expectancy, 76 See also Islam migration benefits of, 86–8 challenges of, 230–1 drivers of, 59 economic migration, 56–7 and innovation, 59 international migration flows, 58 and labor, 57–9 long-term, 52–60 and policy, 249–51, 254 in the Renaissance, 55–6 and selected capital inflows to developing world, 87 and urbanization, 53–5, 249–50 See also refugees Milner, Yuri, 156 modernity, 152, 207–10, 212, 229 Moore, Gordon, 31 Moore, Michael, 227 Moore’s Law, 31–2, 117, 123, 136 More, Thomas, 75, 261 Mosteghanemi, Ahlam, 212 Musk, Elon, 243 Myanmar, 24, 206, 252 9/11, 4, 166, 207, 219, 227, 242 nanotechnology, 125–31, 157, 162 National Security Agency (NSA), 24 nationalism, 65, 230 new media, 25–37 New Renaissance, 7–10, 139, 235–67 beginning of, 10 breadth of achievement, 101 and collaboration, 145 and democracy, 230 and life sciences, 121 and progress, 11, 98–9 and protest, 223 Newton, Isaac, 107, 124, 237 Nigeria, 43, 94, 146, 182 Nobel Prize, 137, 158, 238 Nokia, 43 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 25 North Korea, 25, 98, 111, 197–9, 223 Occupy movement, 36, 220–1, 224 offshoring, 44, 249 open-source movement, 145, 241 Open Tree of Life, 36 Ottoman Empire, 2, 10–11, 18, 30, 40–1, 51, 55, 60–1, 72–3, 135, 194–5, 204, 209, 213, 230 Oweidat, Nadia, 213 pandemics, 137, 185–7 Black Death, 1, 70, 72–3, 93, 143, 173–5, 177, 184 defined, 179 Ebola, 181–3 H5N1 (bird flu), 165, 183–5, 186, 237, 253 HIV/AIDS, 76, 83, 98, 101, 154, 158, 185–6 SARS, 180–1 Spanish flu, 165 paradigm shifts and Copernicus, 105–8, 110–12, and genius, 107 in life science, 112–21 in physical science, 121–31 in the Renaissance, 105–11 See also genius Paris Climate Accord, 36, 67 patents, 136–7, 159, 227, 244–5 PayPal, 59, 153, 243 perspective, need for, 4–7 Peru, 29, 93 Petrarch, 80, 133, 256 Peurbach, Georg von, 105, 133 PewDiePie, 138 pharmaceutical industry, 83–4, 113, 183, 245 3D-printed drugs, 119 and diminishing returns, 154–5 gene therapy, 119–20, 158 and nanotechnology, 131 and pace of discovery, 162–3 R&D spending, 154 Phelps, Edmund, 240–1 physics, 121–5 quantum mechanics, 123–8 and random motion, 128 and scale, 121–8 scanning tunneling microscope (STM), 128 and stickiness, 128 plague.


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The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The figures on remittances are quoted from the World Bank Development Indicators Database (2011 edition). 12. Dean Yang, “Migrant Remittances,” in Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 3 (Summer 2011), pp. 129–152 at p. 130. 13. Richard Dobbs, “Megacities,” Foreign Policy, September–October 2010, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/prime_numbers_megacities. 14. The National Intelligence Council, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds” (Washington, DC, 2012). 15. Saxenian, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. 16. The figures on tourist arrivals are from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators Database (2011 edition). 17.

What was already the fastest process of urbanization in history is accelerating, especially in Asia. More people have moved, and continue to move, from farms to cities than ever before. In 2007, for the first time in history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas. Richard Dobbs describes the immense scale of this transformation as follows: “The megacity will be home to China’s and India’s growing middle classes—creating consumer markets larger than today’s Japan and Spain, respectively.”13 The US National Intelligence Council reckons that “every year 65 million people are added to the world’s urban population, equivalent to adding seven cities the size of Chicago or five the size of London annually.”14 The consequences of this revolution for the distribution of power are just as intense internally; indeed, an increasing number of people are spending and investing in two (or more) countries at the same time.


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The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The structural changes in the economy resulting from new technologies have increased the importance of trust. A high value economy is a high trust one. At the same time, though, the structural changes taking place in the global economy make building trust difficult and indeed create some social fragility. The simultaneous strengths and social tensions are apparent for example in the megacities that are hubs of the global economy. Trust is built by and expressed in the institutions that govern the economy and society. As I go on to describe, many of the institutions we have at present, in all their variety right up to the international organizations responsible for the global economy, are not up to bearing the new pressures.

Most have pockets of seemingly intractable poverty and crime, while some seem to be irredeemably scarred by social disorder and crime. They are the hubs of global multinational enterprises, centers of the drugs and people trafficking trades. Yet other parts of many huge global cities are astonishingly peaceful and civilized given the number and variety of people living and working in them, and the strains of urban life in a megacity. The level of trust prevailing is a marker of the city’s economic success. A face-to-face city at the leading edge of the economy can only function if there is a high level of trust or social capital. Take my home city, London. Its population has increased from 6.8 million in 1981 to 7.6 million today.

The global mafia operates through the global cities, just as legitimate multinational businesses do. But in contrast to those who are nostalgic for a supposedly gentler and kinder past, I would strongly argue that the “average” trust level can be higher now than it was twenty years ago and indeed is higher in certain cities such as New York and London.31 These megacities are the successful hubs of the global economy. The higher value activities in which they now specialize are higher trust activities, albeit with clear fragility such as the collapses we’ve seen in the financial sector in both cases. Others which are low-trust places, such as Mumbai or Sao Paolo, still have to cement their role in the global economy; it’s not yet clear whether or how well they’ll succeed.


pages: 239 words: 68,598

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Garrett Hardin, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Northern Rock, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, quantum entanglement, short selling, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, Virgin Galactic

Our great‐grandparents often saw the constellations of stars and used Polaris to guide their way; on clear nights they even saw the Milky Way, that faint white band that crosses the sky and is a sideways view of our home galaxy. Apart from a few sailors and farmers miles away from any settlement, who still see the dark depths of the sky, we are all lost in the hazy air of that mega‐city that globalization has made of the human world. In a similar way scientists have become urbanized and have only recently taken the idea of a live Earth into their thinking. Most of them have still to digest the idea of Gaia and make it part of their practice. We are trying to undo some of the harm we have done, and as climate change worsens we will try harder, even desperately, but until we see that the Earth is more than a mere ball of rock we are unlikely to succeed.

Nuclear energy is by far the most effective way to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide, but that is not the most important reason for us to emulate France and make electricity from uranium. What is important is that cities demand a constant and economic supply of electricity which until recently has come from coal and gas but these are now declining and leave no alternative to nuclear energy. Huge flows of electricity will be demanded by the mega‐cities that are starting to emerge and this can only be met in the near term by a vigorous and rapid expansion of nuclear energy. This need is intensified by the fact that we have little land on which to grow food and intensive agriculture needs abundant energy. As oil runs out we will need to synthesize fuel for the mobile machinery of construction, transport and agriculture.


pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The Romans, like the Athenians, were so deeply attached to their city that Rome itself was a spiritual project. Civic pride drove heroic feats of engineering and architecture—from aqueducts, highways, sewers, and massive ports to muscular temples and basilicas—which helped Rome grow into the world’s first megacity, with a peak population of more than one million.* As Rome grew fat on the fruits of its vast empire, its citizens adopted a new god of happiness. In 44 B.C. Julius Caesar approved construction of a temple to Felicitas, the god of pleasure, fortune, and fertility, not far from the Curia Hostilia, the meeting place of the Senate.

Repton’s manipulations appear in the drawings he made for his landed clientele, in which he would move trees from forest edges into open space, add herds of grazing animals, and create watering hole–like lakes to mimic savanna-like vistas. His contemporaries even built ditches, or haw-haws, to keep animals in without interrupting the naturalistic scenes with fencing. These views have been reproduced complete with shade trees, broad meadows, and lakes in the heart of some megacities, from London’s Hyde Park to Mexico City’s Bosque de Chapultepec to Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York masterpieces, Central and Prospect parks. In many ways, our landscape preferences support the lingering nineteenth-century idea that the city itself is a toxic and unnatural environment, and that dispersal is the natural response to biological truths.

On his advice, cities such as Jakarta, Delhi, and Manila have reclaimed streets from their usurpation by private cars, creating vast linear parks or handing the space to rapid bus systems modeled on Bogotá’s own. “Peñalosa’s philosophy on public spaces had a great impact on our perception of model cities,” Moji Rhodes, an assistant to the mayor in the seething megacity of Lagos, Nigeria, told me after Peñalosa convinced Lagos to start building sidewalks along new roads. Americans used to get by: U.S. Census Bureau, “Statistical Abstract of the United States 2009,” Washington, DC, 2009; The World Bank, “Motor Vehicles (per 1,000 People),” http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/is.veh.nveh.p3/countries (accessed April 28, 2013); U.S.


pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

But even more damaging was their inability to offer any example to follow in the place where it was most urgently needed, the fastest growing propertied economy in the world. In 2004, just about when Mrs. Polk’s last mortgage was being issued, Yang Wu, an excitable, stubborn restaurant owner living in Chongqing, central China’s megacity, began to build a redbrick house in the Hexing Road. It replaced the family’s dilapidated wooden dwelling, and according to its owner was as smart as any in Shanghai or Beijing. Three years later, a semiofficial development company, Chongqing Shengbo Real Estate, with plans for a shopping mall, slapped a compulsory purchase order on Yang’s house and demanded that he move out.

Since collectives were often represented by only a few village delegates and a party official, one collective might easily overrule another or in turn be overruled by a planning bureau backed by Communist cadres from a neighboring city. With party backing, it was easy for speculators to hack free what land they wanted from chengbao possession. In less than three decades, the megacity of Zhenzhen had grown from a fishing village near Hong Kong to an urban empire of more than eight million inhabitants, and gobbled up close to two hundred square miles of homes, fields, and ponds. But Zhenzhen was only one of 160 cities with populations of more than one million that clawed into the countryside to provide housing and employment for their inhabitants.

There the strongest pressure for reform came from members of the State Organs committee and the Business Works committee—the representatives of China’s booming industrial sector—anxious to boost domestic demand through growth in the housing market. Allied with them were representatives of the provinces and of municipalities, such as the megacity of Zhenzhen, well-known for advocating greater clarity in property law to facilitate its own acquisition of land for development. Not surprisingly, their fingerprints were evident in the way the new property law favored corporate interests rather than those of individuals. It was modeled on the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, itself a product of German business and bureaucracy.


The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History by Greg Woolf

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, capital controls, classic study, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, Dunbar number, Easter island, endogenous growth, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, global village, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, joint-stock company, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, social web, the strength of weak ties, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

By the end of this century, that figure will probably reach 75 per cent. Cities are growing so fast that it is difficult to keep count. One recent estimate lists nearly a thousand metropolitan areas that each have at least half a million inhabitants. The United Nations’ latest survey of World Urbanization Prospects lists 33 megacities—cities with more than 10 million inhabitants each.2 What counts as a city? The answer (and the definitions used in those reports) varies from place to place. In Nicaragua a settlement with street lights and electricity is a city, even if it has only 1,000 inhabitants. Japan sets the threshold at 50,000.

Many early cities were smaller, and some were quite low-density, vast sprawling areas of yards and gardens and compounds loosely connected by paths or even separated by patches of woodland or common ground. But often this was not feasible. No ancient cities approached the population densities of today’s megacities, but some had population densities of 10,000 to 20,000 people per square kilometre. This was only possible by building up and building down, by packing homes close together. Modern cities can often spread horizontally, because transport systems allow people to live long distances from where they work or find food.

Since the Industrial Revolution, migration along new transport infrastructure has piled up vast populations. Chicago famously grew from less than 5,000 inhabitants to more than a million in the second half of the nineteenth century. Toronto had only slightly less dramatic growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The latest megacities are growing fast in West Africa and Northeast India, in parts of China, and along the western and eastern seaboards of the United States. Modern states are often more successful at planning or at least accommodating growth. Ever since the days of Gilgamesh rulers and governments have tried to control urbanization, planting cities in new lands, amalgamating cities, even obliterating some or resettling entire subject populations in new lands to create dynastic and national capitals.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Their power lies in money, knowledge, and stability. New York City’s economy alone is larger than most of sub-Saharan Africa’s. Port cities and entrepôts such as Dubai act like twenty-first-century Venice: They are “free zones” where products are efficiently re-exported without the hassles of government red tape. Such mega-cities as Rio, Istanbul, Cairo, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Manila are the leading urban centers of their countries and regions, yet each teems with hundreds of thousands of new urban squatters each year. The migrant underclass lives not in chaos and “shadow economies” but often in functional, self-organizing ecosystems, the typical physical stratification of medieval cities.

India has an Energy Conservation Act that mandates that states set aside funds for clean energy. New Delhi has enforced strong regulations requiring buses and scooters to run on natural gas, while planting thousands of trees to make the city’s air breathable again—a rare success for a poor-country mega-city. Its accomplishments are the results of both a progressive high court and a persistent lobbying from India’s rambunctious civil society, particularly the Center for Science and the Environment, which sends representatives from village to village to teach people to harvest as much as 60 percent of the rainwater that falls on their properties using a system of rooftop gutters and ground trenches.


pages: 273 words: 76,786

Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett

airport security, Burning Man, call centre, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, failed state, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Jane Jacobs, Julian Assange, late capitalism, megacity, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, place-making, shareholder value, Stephen Fry, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, white flight, WikiLeaks

Thrift, ‘Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance’, Theory, Culture & Society 24: 3 (2007). 12 Dylan Trigg (2005), ‘Ninjalicious 1973–2005’, Side Effects. 13 Ninjalicious, ‘On Viewing Holes’, Infiltration, 13: 2 (1999). 14 David Pinder, Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 149, quoted in Luke Dickens, ‘Placing Post-Graffiti: The Journey of the Peckham Rock’, Cultural Geographies 14: 4 (October 2008). 15 Peter Adey, ‘Vertical Security in the Megacity: Legibility, Mobility and Aerial Politics’, Theory, Culture & Society 27: 6 (2010); Stuart Elden, ‘Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power’, Political Geography 34 (May 2013). 16 Minton, Ground Control. 17 You can see the photo at guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/sep/21/urban-exploration-bradley-garrett-photography. 18 Eva Weber, dir., The Solitary Life of Cranes, Channel 4, 2008. 19 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life, transl.

CROWDS AND CUFFS 1 See Rachel Pain, Mike Kesby and Kye Askins, ‘Geographies of Impact: Power, Participation and Potential’, Area 43: 2 (June 2011); Tom Slater, ‘Impacted Geographers: A Response to Pain, Kesby and Askins’, Area 44: 1 (March 2012). 2 David Pinder, ‘Urban Interventions: Art, Politics and Pedagogy’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32: 3 (September 2008). 3 Tom Bill, ‘London “Shard” Homes Create Record Price Gap’, Reuters, 12 April 2012. 4 ‘The View from the Shard: Plan Your Visit’, at theviewfromtheshard.com/#plan-your-visit/visitor-information. 5 Bradley L. Garrett, ‘Scaling the Shard’, Domus 960 (July/August 2012). 6 P. Adey, ‘Vertical Security in the Megacity: Legibility, Mobility and Aerial Politics’, Theory, Culture and Society 27: 6 (November 2010), p. 58. 7 Stephen Graham and Lucy Hewitt, ‘Getting Off the Ground: On the Politics of Urban Verticality’, Progress in Human Geography 9 (April 2012). 8 Matthew Power, ‘Excuse Us While We Kiss the Sky’, GQ, March 2013. 9 Wasik, ‘My Crowd’, p. 65. 10 Rancière, ‘Notes on the Photographic Image’, p. 9. 11 There are more than 130 other comments on that blog post (placehacking.co.uk/2012/04/07/climbing-shard-glass), along with the many others in newspapers and blog articles around the web. 12 Bradley L.


China's Superbank by Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, failed state, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, price mechanism, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, too big to fail, urban renewal, urban sprawl, work culture

Powerful local officials have snatched it back, sometimes violently, to make way for apartment blocks, bullet trains, malls, “development zones,” and sports complexes in a building binge that has been financed by more than 10,000 so-called local-government financing vehicles (LGFVs; ), companies set up by local governments to allow them to spend beyond the limits of their budgets. These hidden and unregulated companies have been the unseen hand pushing China’s investment-led economic growth over the past decade, which has so impressed foreign visitors. No city, from the skyline of Shanghai to the western mega-city of Chongqing, has been without one, or sometimes handfuls, and they have been the main conduit through which the savings of the Chinese people have been channeled into investment and construction. But the result has led the state banking system to hold trillions of yuan of questionable debt with little accountability for its repayment.

Chen realized the importance of a powerful development bank to overcome bottlenecks in financing and create markets across the country, turning what were local government fiefdoms into companies that could borrow money and sell bonds. The result has seen China expand infrastructure like never before in its history, creating cities such as the bustling port of Tianjin and the megacity of Chongqing on the banks of the Yangtze. “Investment lies at the heart of economic development,” William Diamond, a World Bank expert, wrote in his 1957 book about development banks, in a view that CDB would later share. At the same time, before other commercial banks became involved, CDB backed the central state-owned enterprises to become internationally competitive and acquire resources and investments overseas, with loans to Venezuela and countries in Africa helping to bring in new contracts and business.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

In an effort to thwart terrorism, all cash will be outlawed and instead, everything will be moved into digital currency in the form of a microchip that everyone will have implanted under their skin to conduct all financial transactions, courtesy of the World Bank. In order to protect the ocean from additional pollution, the mega-cities will be constructed inland and the oceans will be rezoned as protected areas with no access for the masses. The same goes for National Parks as the federal government will move to reclaim the majority of the land in the United States, including all of the minerals and oil, while the citizens are forced to migrate into large cities.

This is the same organization that was involved in the intentional infection of Guatemalan orphans with syphilis from 1945-1956. Both Johns Hopkins University and the Rockefeller Foundation were sued for $1 billion by the victims for their role in this non-consensual experiment. What Event 201 simulated in October 2019 was a Coronavirus outbreak that spread from bats to pigs to people, starting in a tightly-packed megacity and spreading through airplane travel all over the world, leading to a severe pandemic where a vaccine would have to be created in order to gain control over the situation. THE EVENT 201 SCENARIO (WEBSITE): Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic.

The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms. The disease starts in pig farms in Brazil, quietly and slowly at first, but then it starts to spread more rapidly in healthcare settings. When it starts to spread efficiently from person to person in the low-income, densely packed neighborhoods of some of the megacities in South America, the epidemic explodes. It is first exported by air travel to Portugal, the United States, and China and then to many other countries. Although at first some countries are able to control it, it continues to spread and be reintroduced, and eventually no country can maintain control.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

This had been a focus of recent efforts on the part of the CCP to consolidate its grip on China’s sprawling new megacities.20 In 2020, that investment in what was called “social administration innovation” paid dividends. Zhejiang province, on China’s southeastern seaboard, is where Xi had made his name as a provincial official. It had a population of nearly 60 million and enlisted 330,000 “grid workers.” Hubei managed 170,000, Guangdong 177,000. Sichuan mobilized 308,000, and in the megacity of Chongqing, there were 118,000 grid workers monitoring every neighborhood. This was the equivalent in terms of density of coverage of a big city police force in the United States.21 Working with the property management companies that service China’s private apartment complexes, enrolling millions of volunteers from the ranks of the party, they turned each compound into a lockdown zone.22 The aim was to find infected people and quarantine them.

“The mess in Hubei is only the tip of the iceberg and it’s the same with every province,” Xu opined.6 It was only a matter of time, therefore, before the Communist regime suffered its comeuppance. Xu would pay for his audacity with dismissal and house arrest. But worse than that, his prediction of comprehensive regime failure was refuted too. As for the West, mistaking Wuhan for Chernobyl would cost it dearly. Wuhan was not a backwater deep behind the Iron Curtain. It was a globalized megacity, which is why the outbreak was so dangerous. Come the holidays, roughly half Wuhan’s population left to visit family and friends. That meant 5 million travelers spreading the infection by car, bullet train, and airplane not just to the rest of China but to the entire world.7 In January, 15,000 Chinese tourists left Wuhan’s international airport for Japan alone.8 Within a few weeks, cases were reported in twenty-five countries, the first in Thailand.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Public-transportation policy makers will need to consider the economics of AVs and consumer attitudes toward AVs in their investment plans. Their long-term planning must consider the possibility that the favorable economics of AVs might lead consumers not only to give up their own vehicles but also to shun conventional mass transit in favor of robo-taxis. This phenomenon could be particularly pronounced in megacities in emerging markets, where public-transit capacity can’t keep up with rising demand. Policies that would incentivise drivers to switch to AVs—such as requiring expensive permits for conventional personal vehicles—could substantially quicken attempts in those cities to prioritise daily commutes and errands by other modes such as walking, bicycling, and ridesharing.

This leapfrogging has already happened with telephone systems: Developing countries that lacked land-line telephone and broadband connectivity, such as India, made the leap directly to mobile systems rather than build out their land-line infrastructures. With an annual toll of 150,000[317] deaths, over 10% of all the road deaths in the world are in India. Given the population densities in some of these megacities, the relatively young populations and the lack of a historical model of car ownership, there may just be an opportunity for shared self-driving cars to avert a generation of carnage and pollution spreading further around the globe. Framing the Future “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking.


pages: 290 words: 82,220

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

biofilm, Black Lives Matter, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Graeber, Easter island, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, megacity, off-the-grid, rent control, the built environment, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

The anxiety I experienced in San Francisco during a single economic bust-and-boom cycle might seem like nothing in retrospect, especially if the next century brings war in the Pacific, or the earthquake that Californians call “the big one” finally hits. For the same reason, we can’t assume that US cities like Detroit and New Orleans—victims of economic and natural disasters in the early 21st century—will ultimately be abandoned. In 200 years, both might be thriving megacities that look nothing like they do today. Their fates depend on political will, as well as the human labor power needed to rebuild. Though the futures of individual cities may be uncertain, we can make predictions about the likelihood that people will abandon a city, based on evidence from urban history.

If our political systems can’t address the twin problems of climate and poverty, there will be more food and water riots, as well as global wars over natural resources. The costs of city life will far outweigh the benefits, sparking mass migrations of people seeking new homes—and more international conflicts. Eventually, some of today’s megacities will look like something out of a far-future science-fiction movie, full of half-drowned metal skeletons covered in incomprehensible advertisements for products we can no longer afford to make or buy. But if we’ve learned anything from history, we know the death of a few cities doesn’t mean the world will collapse into dystopia.


pages: 254 words: 82,981

A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, biofilm, carbon footprint, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, Easter island, epigenetics, food desert, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, precautionary principle, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, South China Sea, the built environment

Marine Pollution Bulletin 104 (1–2): 290–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2016.01.006; Dris, Rachid, Johnny Gasperi, Vincent Rocher, Mohamed Saad, Nicolas Renault, and Bruno Tassin. 2015. “Microplastic Contamination in an Urban Area: A Case Study in Greater Paris.” Environmental Chemistry 12:592–99. https://doi.org/10.1071/EN14167; Dris, Rachid, Johnny Gasperi, and Bruno Tassin. 2018. “Sources and Fate of Microplastics in Urban Areas: A Focus on Paris Megacity.” In Freshwater Microplastics: Emerging Environmental Contaminants? The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry 58 edited by Martin Wagner and Scott Lambert. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61615-5_11; Klein, Malin, and Elke K. Fischer. 2019. “Microplastic Abundance in Atmospheric Deposition within the Metropolitan Area of Hamburg, Germany.”

“Atmospheric Microplastic Deposition in an Urban Environment and an Evaluation of Transport.” Environment International 136:105411. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2019.105411; Truong, Tran-NguyenSang, Emilie Strady, Thuy-Chung Kieu-Le, Quoc-Viet Tran, Thi-MinhTam Le, and Quoc-Thinh Thuong. 2021. “Microplastic in Atmospheric Fallouts of a Developing Southeast Asian Megacity under Tropical Climate.” Chemosphere 272:129874. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemo sphere.2021.129874. Fuller, Gary. 2021. “It’s Not Just Oceans: Scientists Find Plastic Is Also Polluting the Air.” Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environ ment/2021/feb/26/not-just-oceans-plastic-polluting-air-delhi-smog.


Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

Today the transportation sector is already one of the largest contributors to air pollution. In the United States alone, exhaust from cars and trucks causes an estimated 29 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that human activities generate each year.4 If driverless cars were to increase the number of vehicle miles traveled per capita, densely populated “megacities” in developing nations would be hit particularly hard. While the United States has a nearly 100-year-old relationship with the car, other nations are enthusiastically catching up. China is following in the footsteps of the United States, gaining its own car culture. As a growing and newly affluent Chinese middle class embraces the convenience of car travel, cities such as Beijing and Zhengzhou are suffering from spectacular eight-lane traffic jams and worsening smog levels.

Commuting The greater metropolitan areas of cities such as Mumbai, Mexico City, and Shanghai are each home to more than 20 million people. By the year 2050, the size of the global urban population will nearly double, from today’s figure of 3.3 billion people to a projected 6.4 billion.21 These megacities will stretch for miles and their streets will be stuffed with cars as their citizens are forced to engage in a daily and potentially deadly attempt to get around. As urban populations grow, cities will need to use their space wisely. When driverless cars become commercially available, forward-thinking city planners can repurpose urban parking lots as parks and affordable housing.


pages: 341 words: 89,986

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

The ruins of the Yuanming Yuan – largely ignored if not viewed with suspicion as remnants of a feudal past between 1949 and 1978 – are now used to whip up nationalist, and sometimes xenophobic, sentiment, in order to forge a nation state based on those very nineteenth-century European ideals that led to the destruction of the palace in the first place. The cruel irony that the most visible of its remains are Western buildings has not been lost on Chinese observers, although the possibility that they might be inappropriate touchstones for a supposedly socialist country is very rarely suggested. And today, Beijing, Shanghai and the other mega-cities of China are filled with modern buildings that meld Western and Chinese characteristics. The so-called Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, for example, was the result of a collaboration between Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei. Like the Olympic opening ceremony that took place there in 2008, it’s a bizarre confection of Soviet and consumerist spectacle.

These come in many forms, whether peripheral accretions like Rocinha or older enclaves such as Cairo’s City of the Dead, a Mameluke cemetery the tombs of which are inhabited by over half a million people. Slumification is not the only problem facing architecture: in 2010 the proportion of the world’s people living in cities passed 50 per cent for the first time. The majority of urbanites live in the mega­cities of the developing world, such as Shanghai, Mexico City or even prodigious new forms like the endless sprawl of the Rio/Sao Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region, which has a combined population of 45 million. While cities swell and fuse to become regional megalopolises, the countryside is also urbanising.


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

.), RG 330, Project Agile, NACP. 9 “Signs of conflict”: Hickey, Window, 19, 90–91. 10 change of plans: Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam (U), 114; Hickey, Window, 91. 11 effective means of pacification: Memorandum from the director of the CIA to Secretary of Defense McNamara on the Strategic Hamlet Program, July 13, 1962, CIA. 12 “monitor”: Ehlschlaeger, “Understanding Megacities with the Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Intelligence Paradigm,” xii. 13 Cu Chu villagers: Hickey, Window, 93. 14 “I said, in essence”: Ibid., 99. 15 Hickey recalled paraphrasing: Ibid., 99. 16 ARPA officials complained: Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 342. 17 “more patient approach”: Elliott, 33. 18 “ground to a pulp”: Ibid., 38. 19 Tanham showed great optimism: Tanham, War Without Guns, 25-29. 20 “Given a little luck”: Elliott, 31.

Congress, H8500–H8550, Joint Explanatory Statement, Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA), Congressional Record, September 24, 2003. 5 “detect the clandestine production”: Tether, Statement to Congress, March 10, 2005, 11. 6 “a network of nonintrusive microsensors”: Leheny, “DARPA’s Urban Operations Program,” 38. 7 unclassified documents: Ehlschlaeger, “Understanding Megacities with the Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Intelligence Paradigm,” 50–53. 8 the HURT program: DARPA Information Exploitation Office (IXO) HURT Program Office, aerial vehicle platform documents; See also James Richardson, “Preparing Warfighters for the Urban Stage,” located in DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 166–67. 9 “The [HURT] system”: Pagels quoted in Clarence A.

Franke, Morris Hadley, and William D. Pawley. “Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency.” Special Study Group, Washington, DC, July 1954. Eckhart, Major General George S. Vietnam Studies: Command and Control, 1950–1969. Department of the Army, Washington, DC, 1974. Ehlschlaeger, Charles. “Understanding Megacities with the Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Intelligence Paradigm.” U.S. Army Engineer Research Development Center, April 2014. Foster, John S. “Alfred Dodd Starbird, 1912–1983.” National Academy of Engineering, Volume 3, The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 1989. Gates, W. L. “Rand/ARPA Climate Dynamics Research: Executive Summary and Final Report.”


pages: 614 words: 176,458

Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie

agricultural Revolution, air gap, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, Food sovereignty, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Haber-Bosch Process, household responsibility system, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Just-in-time delivery, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, military-industrial complex, Northern Rock, Panamax, peak oil, precautionary principle, refrigerator car, rewilding, scientific mainstream, sexual politics, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Concerns arise when the pace of change in the livestock sector exceeds the capacity of the rest of the economy to provide alternative employment opportunities.13 There is no shortage of reasons for challenging the trajectory laid down by the FAO. Why, we may ask, should the rest of the world follow the path we have trodden, can they not learn from our mistakes? What is to be gained by dispossessing peasants – the only people on this earth whose environmental footprint does not extend into other people’s space – and herding them into megacities of jaw-dropping unsustainability? When the world is already facing a resource crisis, how can it make sense to promote a centralized food economy that pours good human food down animals’ gullets and that relies so heavily upon fossil fuels for its fertility, processing, transport, refrigeration, packaging and commercialisation?

As the FAO remarks ‘ruminant production, both meat and milk, tends to be much more rural-based’, because of the need for bulky fibrous feeds. If large numbers of ‘inefficient’ cows were culled, millions of poor rural dwellers would lose the ability to harness their local biomass and add to the swell of refugees flocking into megacities. There is a very good case for reducing the numbers of feedlot cattle and of rainforest cattle, which are extravagant and destructive in other respects; but beyond that, large scale reductions in ruminants would have uncertain returns in terms of methane emission because we cannot be sure how the biosphere will respond, would increase pressure for fossil fuel consumption, and would have severe social repercussions.

Nutrient loading is caused by high animal densities, particularly on the periphery of cities and by inadequate animal waste treatment.79 The FAO’s solution is to ruralize ‘confined animal feeding operations’, or factory farms, which it considers should no longer be sited like satellites around megacities, but should be more widely distributed throughout the countryside. Since the SARS and swine flu epidemics, the FAO also cites the risk of disease as another reason for dispersal.80 This is a move in the right direction, but unless these factories are subdivided back into smaller farms, the nutrients will still end up in a huge methane generating HEAP (though in a more bucolic location) and still require fossil-fuel powered transport to take them back to the land from which they came.


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Even the richest man in town, Mukesh Ambani, chairman of the energy and materials conglomerate Reliance Industries, who’s built a twenty-seven-floor, four-hundred-thousand-square-foot home for his family, doesn’t run off the neighbors living in the cracks between the surrounding buildings, because his mansion needs a staff of six hundred. Mumbai is one of the few places on Earth where there is 100 percent employment, where literally anybody can find work—unlike its gloomy megacity alter-ego five hundred miles up the Arabian seacoast, Karachi. Mumbai may lack Karachi’s menace—but what will happen when it’s all built? Building is what Krishna Pujari is worried about—not that they’ll stop, but that Dharavi, where he lives and makes his living, is where the developers have fixed their crosshairs next, and they’re going to build him out of business.

“Ecosystem Service Assessment and Management.” PowerPoint Presentation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, September 24, 2010. Webel, Sebastian. “Sustainability Boom.” Pictures of the Future Magazine (Siemens), Spring 2012: 90–94. http://www.siemens.com/pof. Webster, Paul, and Jason Burke. “How the Rise of the Megacity Is Changing the Way We Live.” Observer (UK), January 21, 2012. Weiss, Kenneth R. “Beyond 7 Billion: The China Effect.” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2012. Wines, Michael. “Qian Xuesen, Father of China’s Space Program, Dies at 98.” New York Times, November 3, 2009. Wong, Edward. “Reports of Forced Abortions Fuel Push to End Chinese Law.”

“For Muslims in India, an Uneasy Calm.” Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2008. “Dr. Gurcharan Singh Kalkat.” Accessed at: pbplanning.gov.in/pdf/Biodata%20GS%20Kalkat.pdf. “Farmer suicides: NGO points to Punjab reporting fewer numbers.” Times of India, December 30, 2011. Ferris, David. “Asia’s Megacities Pose a Stark Environmental Challenge.” Forbes, August 31, 2012. Goldenberg, Suzanne. “Where a Baby Is Born Every 2 Seconds.” Guardian (UK), Saturday 14, 1999. Gupta, Shankar Prasad. “Forest Tenure Issues in Terai of Nepal: Understanding the Present Management Regimes.” A Term Paper Report on Forestry and Wildlife.


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

China also plans to expand the number of airports in the country from 206 to 272 by 2020, half as many again as existed in 2011. Beijing’s second international airport is expected to open in June 2019, complete with seven runways and the capacity to process 72 million passengers a year. Just 50 kilometres south of Beijing, moreover, in a backwater of Hebei province, there are plans to build a new megacity, called Xiong’an New Area, which is supposed to rival Shanghai and Shenzhen one day. It is thought that the project could attract 3–6 million people over the next decade, along with RMB 1–2 trillion of investment, making it the biggest single infrastructure project in the history of modern China.6 Yet, for all these and similar statistics, there is also a litany of stories about ghost towns with empty apartment blocs and few residents, lonely and underused airports in impoverished counties of China, empty roads, the chronic overcapacity of multiple transportation projects to the same access point, and industrial zones that are barely occupied, and to which foreign companies rarely go.7 It is all very well to argue that, in the long run, more people living in more cities will gradually chip away at the overcapacity in infrastructure.

Such policies would most likely help to lower household savings, accelerating a change that will probably happen anyway over time as China ages. The working-age population is now in decline, and the old-age dependency ratio is predicted to double between 2017 and 2030. Social benefits should rise and be extended to all working people and their families. The growth in services should be actively encouraged, both in megacities such as Beijing or Shanghai, which are already well -served, but also and importantly in other cities, especially those inland, which are not.28 Modern service industries, which remain relatively closed, could be deregulated and opened up, for example in a wide range of communication, professional, business, entertainment and information services.


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

Mary Ann O’Donnell, an anthropologist and long-term resident, met me in a historic Shenzhen neighborhood with factories that had produced Cabbage Patch dolls, cheap electronics, and plastic Star Wars figurines in the 1980s. While we walked the streets, she introduced me to the city that supported Dr. He’s research. In the space of thirty years, Shenzhen had grown from a collection of fishing villages into a megacity with a larger population than New York City. O’Donnell explained that Shenzhen had been the place where China first opened up to global capitalism. After the death of Chairman Mao, who isolated the country with a hard-line Communist regime, a new generation of leaders was keen to trade with the rest of the world.

The supertall skyscraper was named after its primary tenant: one of the world’s most valuable insurance brands.2 Time and space collapsed as I gazed below. Shenzhen’s twenty-first-century vision of green urban planning—with parklands and forested hills spreading throughout the landscape—was juxtaposed with agrarian landscapes on the outskirts of the megacity. I was inside the fourth-tallest building in the world. Ryan Ferrell, my source inside Dr. He’s laboratory, was leading me around Shenzhen, offering crumbs of reliable information on our encrypted chat. Snapping a picture of the ultramodern cityscape, I sent it to Ryan on Signal, letting him know I had arrived.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

In other words, nonlinear events tend to get very big, very fast. One infected person, possibly asymptomatic, spreads the virus to 2 people, those 2 spread it to 4, 4 to 16, 16 to 256… and on and on to the millions. Exactly the dynamic that freaked out Bill Ackman in January 2020. Now, due to the modern world’s hyper-networked, jet-fueled, megacity intermixing, the spread—the R0—could be even more nonlinear, more exponential. “Global connectivity is at an all-time high, with China one of the most globally connected societies,” the “Systemic Risk” memo explained. “Fundamentally, viral contagion events depend on the interaction of agents in physical space.”

., 19 Kepos Capital, 221, 238–39 Keynes, John Maynard, 121, 136 Kim, Paul, 276–77 Klipp, Everett, 40, 41, 42–44, 47, 48, 68 Knopoff, Leon, 85 Kolbert, Elizabeth, 239 Krugman, Paul, 122 Lagnado, Ron, 151, 152, 153–54, 157, 158, 159, 175 Law of Large Numbers, 104, 266 Leatherman, Lamont, 247–48, 252 Ledoit, Oliver, 86, 87 Lehman Brothers, 109, 115, 119–20, 134, 167, 261 Linden, Larry, 229 Litterman, Bob, 219–31, 236, 237–41, 273, 290 Lloyd’s of London, 105, 261, 266–67 log-periodic power law singularity (LPPLS) model, 90, 91, 92, 131–32, 205 Lollos, Adam, 15 LongTail Alpha, 157, 176 Long-Term Capital Management, 13, 50, 60, 68, 102 longtermism, 281–84 Lorenz, Ed, 132 Madoff, Bernard L., 77 Mais, Andrew, 263 Malachite Capital Management, 168 Manchin, Joe, 287, 290 Mandelbrot, Benoit, 73–76, 84, 88, 89, 97, 103–4, 105 Mann, Michael, 246 Markowitz, Harry, 101, 228 Maturana, Humberto, 208 McCoy, Keith, 233 McKay, Adam, 36 McKinsey & Company, 249, 252 megacity, 21 Meng, Ben, 158, 159, 171–73, 175 Menger, Carl, 136 Merrill Lynch, 42 Mitsotakis, Kyriakos, 245 Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), 101–2, 104, 153, 228, 272–73, 274, 275 Monbiot, George, 244 Monsanto, 203, 215 Monte Carlo model, 94 Morgan Stanley, 49, 64, 95, 96, 230, 263 Morton, Timothy, 107 Muller, Peter, 95, 96–97 Munich Re, 260 Murdoch, Kathryn, 229 Musk, Elon, 123, 124, 177, 178, 191, 281, 282 Naked Capitalism website, 23, 180 National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), 84, 85, 93 National Intelligence Council, 30 National Security Council, 18, 23, 206 Nature journal, 202, 253 Neal, John, 267 Neidenbach, Stephan, 216 New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), 196, 199, 200–1 New Scientist magazine, 202–3 New Yorker, 58, 65, 77, 239 New York Times, 19, 34, 79, 103, 105, 111, 122, 262, 274 New York Post, 177 New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, 50, 60, 62, 73 Niederhoffer, Victor, 58–59 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 272 Nikkei index, 87 Niskanen Center, 230 Nocera, Joe, 103 Nordhaus, William, 230–31, 237 Norman, Joe, 20–23, 26, 164, 207–8, 217, 270 Obama, Barack, 33, 35, 122, 141 Occidental Petroleum, 251 oil industry global warming and, 246 Graham on Iran’s and Russia’s dependence on, 236–37 Kepos Capital’s investment in clean-energy companies and, 238–39 transition to clean energy from fossil fuels and, 248–49, 286–87 oil prices Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy (DICE) model on, 230 Russian invasion of Ukraine and, 223, 239, 272, 286 Orange County, California, bankruptcy (1994), 13, 48 O’Reilly, Brian, 286 Page, Larry, 124, 126 Paloma Partners, 61, 69, 72 pandemics.


pages: 102 words: 33,345

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, dematerialisation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invention of movable type, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, megacity, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, vertical integration

The homogenizing force of capitalism is incompatible with any inherent structure of differentiation: sacred-profane, carnival-workday, nature-culture, machine-organism, and so on. Thus any persisting notions of sleep as somehow “natural” are rendered unacceptable. Of course, people will continue to sleep, and even sprawling megacities will still have nocturnal intervals of relative quiescence. Nonetheless, sleep is now an experience cut loose from notions of necessity or nature. Instead, like so much else, it is conceptualized as a variable but managed function that can only be defined instrumentally and physiologically. Recent research has shown that the number of people who wake themselves up once or more at night to check their messages or data is growing exponentially.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Today, cities like London and New York have stopped growing, but cities like Lagos, Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) are growing rapidly. About 40 cities around the world have a population of over 5 million. Five million is what you need today to reach “megacity” status. About 80 per cent of these megacities are in poorer or developing countries, primarily due to influx associated with people seeking employment. The list of benefits for “city-augmented” people living in the largest cities of the world is extensive and includes: 1. Public security in the form of police, fire and emergency medical technicians who will show up within minutes of an emergency services call, and often already know your location by tracking the phone that originated the call. 2.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

The vast Greater New York metropolitan area sells only about 7 percent of what it produces to other countries—ranking it 93rd of the largest 100 U.S. metros.53 But the “built environment” solutions that all of the Applied Sciences campuses are working on could be in tremendous demand across the globe. As more and more people move to megacities in the coming decades, and the demand for energy soars, cities will need ways to build more efficient buildings in more efficient configurations. Take the smart parking systems that the researchers and students at CUSP in Brooklyn will work on. Rapidly urbanizing cities in Asia “face alarming predicaments over parking,” according to one report.54 Beijing and New Delhi add more than 1,000 new vehicles a day to their roads— without commensurate increases in parking spaces.55 (Beijing has 740,000 parking spaces for 5 million cars.)56 Drivers and transportation departments in these places will be very interested in acquiring this technology.

What would a twenty-first-century network of trading cities look like? The climate arena might provide some insight into what could transpire. In 2005 groups of local leaders, frustrated with the slow pace of national and global action on climate change, formed the C20 (now C40) Cities Climate Leadership Group, “a network of the world’s megacities taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Now led by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, the coalition is helping individual cities forge “innovative solutions to common sources of greenhouse gas emissions” to “provide proven models that other cities and national governments can adopt.”


pages: 431 words: 107,868

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The phalanx of electric cars and buses commissioned for the Expo stopped at a chain-linked frontier demarcating the boundaries of Wan Gang’s eco-wonderland and China 2010. Real life meant navigating manic waves of oil-burning SAICs, VWs, Audis, and Buicks. Indeed, the 100 million automobiles on China’s roads had become a distinctly mixed blessing. China’s megacities were stifled by putrid smog and gridlocked. No doubt, this is why in 2009 China’s government announced ambitious plans to leapfrog the West in developing and deploying electric vehicles. In two short years, Wan Gang promised that China would deploy 500,000 domestically produced EVs. But even in 2010, there were signs that this vision was faltering.

But there are conflicting signals from the country’s new rulers as to whether that is likely, or even conceivable. On the one hand, in the winter of 2013–14 China confronted a crisis of air pollution that was too damaging and painful to ignore. Researchers estimated that China’s people were losing about five years off their lives to air pollution.13 Although megacities throttled back car sales, many of the problems were already baked into the fiber of the Chinese economy. New policies were implemented to promote EV sales and these policies started to address some of the structural problems with the country’s prior EV effort. But steps were tentative. Indeed, they seemed to reflect China’s preference for slow, evolutionary reform—or as Deng Xiaoping called it, “crossing the river by touching the stones.”


pages: 615 words: 187,426

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping by Roger Faligot

active measures, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business intelligence, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, information security, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, union organizing, young professional, éminence grise

Its positioning within the WTO, the negotiation of intellectual property treaties, the definition of commercial strategies, the acquisition of new technologies, the creation of joint ventures—all these activities and many others demanded the deployment of economic intelligence techniques and expertise at a national level. On the international stage, this apparatus was augmented by parallel structures in megacities like Shanghai, Chongqing and Canton, as well as in provinces such as Shandong, where “siphoning” systems particularly effective for economic intelligence had been implemented. Committees for twinning cities and other forms of exchange were also exploited by regional structures. At the State Council, MOFCOM was overseen by Deputy Prime Minister Wu Yi, described in 2004 by Forbes magazine as the second most powerful woman in the world, after then US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

A former trade minister, he was part of the fifth generation of leaders since Mao Zedong had brought the CCP to power in 1949, a Red Prince who wanted to turn China into a superpower, even daring to hope that the country would overtake the US economically by 2030. The affair was even more delicate given that Bo was the brother-in-law of Jia Chunwang, the Guoanbu minister from 1985 to 1997. Taking his place in the family line, the ambitious and undeniably charismatic Bo Xilai was mayor of Chongqing, a megacity with 30 million inhabitants. He was the son of Bo Yibo, a veteran of Mao’s Long March, who had been a minister under Deng Xiaoping. Bo Junior took after his father. He managed to unite the two Chinese communist traditions, having built up a considerable fortune during his city’s rapid development and having profited from the inevitable cronyism that came with it, while still promoting neo-Maoist ideology, recalling the tormented period of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao dispatched hordes of Red Guards to attack party leaders deemed too reformist.

Indeed, following Zhou Yongkang’s failed coup in 2013, transfers, arrests and purges began to multiply rapidly in 2015 under Chen’s leadership. I have been able to identify the main Guoanbu regional directors, who will no doubt remain in their positions for years to come unless they, in turn, become the victims of denunciations. In alphabetical order of provinces and megacities: Hebei (Liu Zengqi), Heilongjiang (Chen Donghui), Hubei (Zhang Qikuan), Hunan (Liang Jianqiang), Jiangsu (Liu Yong), Liaoning (Wei Chunjiang), Shandong (Jiang Lianjun), Shanghai (Dong Weimin), Shanxi (Wang Xiuwen), Sichuan (Zhao Jian), and Zhejiang (Huang Baokun). In Beijing, Li Dong, a specialist in Russian affairs, has replaced Liang Ke, who is now in prison.


pages: 161 words: 37,042

Viruses: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Crawford, Dorothy H.

clean water, coronavirus, CRISPR, discovery of penicillin, Edward Jenner, Francisco Pizarro, hygiene hypothesis, Louis Pasteur, megacity, Nelson Mandela, stem cell

But as far as emerging virus infections are concerned, the most acute problem is literal around 5,000 to 10,000 years agoes6Ply lack of space. We have already seen how invading the territories of wild animals, be it to chop down the rain forest, hunt for food, or extend our cities, risks acquiring unknown, sometimes lethal, viruses. With over 50% of us now living in megacities, like Tokyo with over 35 million inhabitants, viruses, once acquired, find it very easy to spread between us. This is particularly so among poor city dwellers in resource-poor countries, with the inhabitants of shanty towns living in cramped, unhygienic shacks where the lack of fresh air and clean water, and absence of sewage disposal, provides easy access for microbes of all sorts.


pages: 396 words: 117,897

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, British Empire, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, megacity, megastructure, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, rolodex, X Prize

Preface: Why and How The story of humanity – evolution of our species; prehistoric shift from foraging to permanent agriculture; rise and fall of antique, medieval, and early modern civilizations; economic advances of the past two centuries; mechanization of agriculture; diversification and automation of industrial protection; enormous increases in energy consumption; diffusion of new communication and information networks; and impressive gains in quality of life – would not have been possible without an expanding and increasingly intricate and complex use of materials. Human ingenuity has turned these materials first into simple clothes, tools, weapons, and shelters, later into more elaborate dwellings, religious and funerary structures, pure and alloyed metals, and in recent generations into extensive industrial and transportation infrastructures, megacities, synthetic and composite compounds, and into substrates and enablers of a new electronic world. This material progress has not been a linear advance but has consisted of two unequal periods. First was the very slow rise that extended from pre-history to the beginnings of rapid economic modernization, that is, until the eighteenth century in most of Europe, until the nineteenth century in the USA, Canada, and Japan, and until the latter half of the twentieth century in Latin America, the Middle East, and China.

And while the mass of paper landfilled in the USA in 2010 was half of the total in 1990 (26.7 vs 52.5 Mt), during the same two decades the mass of discarded plastics rose by 70% and the total of buried polymers, 28.5 Mt, was greater than the combined annual production in Germany and France (Plastics Europe, 2012). Or another comparison: a destitute waste collector may spend a day collecting a mass of 1 kg of plastic shopping bags when rummaging the open garbage tips of Asia's megacities, while the USA buries nearly 80 000 t of plastic in its landfills every day. While in the USA only about 8% of discarded plastics were recovered in 2010 (with the rate ranging from 23% for PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles to less than1% for PP (polypropylene) waste), the EU's goal for 2020 is full diversion of plastic waste from landfills (EPRO, 2011).


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

As Swedish statistician Hans Rosling says, “The world will be normal again; it will be an Asian world, as it always was except for these last thousand years. They are working like hell to make that happen, whereas we are consuming like hell.” • It may be distracting, though, to focus just on the world’s twenty-four megacities—those with a population over 10 million. The real action is in what the United Nations calls small cities (fewer than 500,000 inhabitants; home to half of the world’s city dwellers) and intermediate cities (1 million to 5 million, where 22 percent of urbanites live). A UN report points out: “They are often the first places where the social urban transformation of families and individuals occurs; by offering economic linkages between rural and urban environments, they can provide a ‘first step’ out of poverty for impoverished rural populations and a gateway to opportunities in larger cities.”

When defense against raids by nomadic Apaches and Navajos became irrelevant after the conquest by whites, the Pueblos all dispersed into scattered buildings (except where high-rise density is maintained partly for tourists, as at Taos and Acoma). “The earliest meaning of ‘town,’ said the urban scholar Lewis Mumford, “is an enclosed or fortified place.” Agriculture, it appears, was an early invention by the dwellers of walled towns to allow their settlements to keep growing, as in Geoffrey West’s formulation. Today’s megacities rely on the same flow of innovation. A 2006 UN-HABITAT report proposed thatCities are engines of rural development. . . . Improved infrastructure between rural areas and cities increases rural productivity and enhances rural residents’ access to education, health care, markets, credit, information and other services.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries breakthroughs were common in the kind of places that gave rise to CRISPR: places like Berkeley, California or Cambridge, Massachusetts. Shenzhen, where He conducted the trials, didn't even exist until 1979; but when Lulu and Nana were born it was a megacity of 12.5 million people, host to the Chinese tech industry and now the first gene-edited human beings. It hints at something much wider than one experiment. The geography of ideas is shifting more rapidly than ever before; a new phase in the history of ideas is about to overturn our extant models and assumptions.

The majority of humans have been urban only since 2008, not quite long enough to feel the full impact.38 Nonetheless, formidable change is being wrought around us: according to the United Nations, over one hundred new cities will have more than a million people and ten will grow to more than 10 million in the next decade alone, including Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bogota and Johannesburg, the fastest changes yet.39 A process of urbanisation that took two centuries in Europe is happening at warp speed. Moreover many promising cities are not the familiar brand-name boomtowns – Shanghai and São Paulo, or even Lagos. Rather, by the century's end, cities like Dhaka, Khartoum, Kinshasa, Dar Es Salaam, Kabul, Baghdad and Karachi will be the largest global megacities, full of challenge and opportunity. Architectural and urban experimentation at scale is much more likely to be found on the Arabian peninsula and in the Indonesian archipelago than the old world.40 If we're only now feeling the full impact of the last forty years, it will be some time yet before we feel all this.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

It is clear that neither countries nor regions can flourish if their cities (innovation ecosystems) are not being continually nourished. Cities have been the engines of economic growth, prosperity and social progress throughout history, and will be essential to the future competitiveness of nations and regions. Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, ranging from mid-size cities to megacities, and the number of city dwellers worldwide keeps rising. Many factors that affect the competitiveness of countries and regions – from innovation and education to infrastructure and public administration – are under the purview of cities. The speed and breadth by which cities absorb and deploy technology, supported by agile policy frameworks, will determine their ability to compete in attracting talent.


pages: 481 words: 121,300

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

From about 10,000 years ago until today, humanity has thrived in the warmth of a prolonged interglacial we call the Holocene, but unlike the Eemian, the Holocene has witnessed the emergence of complex cultures and civilizations, the population explosion, the formation of states and empires, the growth of megacities, and the burgeoning of technology in countless forms. It has also seen wars and destruction on an unprecedented scale. With our human numbers approaching 7 billion and global warming opening the last niches for habitation, the question is: what happens when the ice returns, as it has more than two dozen times during the Pleistocene?

Sooner or later we will face extremes that come upon us quickly and will give us little time to find ways to cope with the consequences. For all our technological prowess, we still depend on nature to sustain us. We are living, in the words of the geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer, in the autumn of the interglacial Holocene, the brief epoch that has witnessed the transformation of our human world from small villages to megacities and from simple to complex cultures, from isolated communities to intercon- 86 WHY GEOGRAPHY MATTERS nected empires and from stone tools to spacecraft. On the scale of our lifetimes, it has all happened in the past few seconds, and our modern experience with the kinds of challenges nature can pose—from meteor impacts to glacia-tions—is virtually nil.


pages: 440 words: 128,813

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg

carbon footprint, citizen journalism, classic study, deindustrialization, digital rights, fixed income, gentrification, ghettoisation, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, loose coupling, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, postindustrial economy, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, urban renewal, War on Poverty

“The welfare state,” he explains, “is not just a mechanism that intervenes in, and possibly corrects, the structure of inequality; it is, in its own right, a system of stratification. It is an active force in the ordering of social relations.” For discussions of the role of the state in producing vulnerability to urban disasters, see the essays collected in Crucibles of Hazard: Mega-Cities and Disasters in Transition (Mitchell, ed. 1999). Davis has made this point in two of his recent books. He documents the role of the state in producing vulnerability to extreme climatic events in nineteenth-century India, China, and Brazil in Late Victorian Holocausts (2001), and for contemporary Los Angeles in Ecology of Fear (1998). 20.

Number our days. New York: Touchstone Books. Miethe, Terance. 1995. Fear and withdrawal. The Annals of the American Academy 539:14–29. Miller, Ross. 1990. American apocalypse: The Great Fire and the myth of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, James, ed. 1999. Crucibles of hazard: Mega-cities and disasters in transition. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Mitchell, Mary, and Gilbert Jimenez. 1995. CDC endorses county coroner’s heat findings. Chicago Sun-Times, 28 July, p. 12. Molotch, Harvey, and Marilyn Lester. 1974. News as purposive behavior: On the strategic use of routine events, accidents, and scandals.


pages: 428 words: 121,717

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

—JAMES FRANCK As night fell, a small boat docked near downtown. Ten men got off and climbed up onto the pier. Some hailed taxis. Others just blended into the mass of humanity, the twenty million people who crowded into the seaside city. Hours later it began, a three-day orgy of death and destruction that put one of the world’s megacities on lockdown. Eight thousand miles away, on the campus of Rutgers University in New Jersey, the massacre left American climate scientist Alan Robock fearing his theory was about to be tested. The men from the boat had taken automatic weapons and bombs from their backpacks and assaulted nine facilities, including the main train station, the two finest hotels, and a Jewish cultural center.

Supported by close air support and artillery, India’s armored corps would roll into the Pakistani Punjab and toward the major city of Lahore, just across the border in central Pakistan. In the south, Indian forces would speed across the salt plains of the Rann of Kutch and the Thar Desert toward Pakistan’s megacity of Karachi on the Arabian Sea. The Indian attack would stop, however, perhaps fifty miles into Pakistan. Cold Start would have limited objectives. The objective would be to damage Pakistan’s military and its economy and also to demonstrate that India was not deterred by Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.


pages: 381 words: 120,361

Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili

airport security, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bletchley Park, Carrington event, cosmological constant, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Attenborough, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, pattern recognition, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Turing test

He switched on the cabin’s exterior projection, so that the feed from the hundreds of tiny cameras covering the outer surface of the plane mapped onto the interior of the windowless fuselage, making it appear entirely transparent to the passengers. But it was a pointless exercise. Ordinarily, the panoramic view this gave as the plane came in to land would have been a quite dramatic experience, with the lights of the mostly still sleeping megacity spread out below. Instead, they were greeted by a wall of white thanks to the thick fog that often engulfed Indira Gandhi Airport at this time of year. They’d been circling in a holding pattern at three thousand metres for forty minutes now, waiting their turn to land. Suddenly several of his displays went blank.

Weaving her way carefully around the stationary cars blocking her path, she noted the bemused looks on the faces of the passengers, suggesting that whatever had stopped the traffic had only happened recently. None of the cars on the westbound side were moving either, so it had to be a problem with the city’s AI. But the Minds that ran the very largest megacities around the world simply didn’t go down. Ever. She felt a creeping unease. Pulling over, she dismounted and blinked on her AR. The feed was dead. No reason to freak out just yet, girl – just because the entire net is down! She steadied her breathing. Logic before panic. After all, she’d spent the last few days worrying about the Sun’s abnormal activity, but that did not mean that this internet blackout was in any way related.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

This build-out of China over the next two or three decades will be one of the defining forces not just for China but for the world economy. It is certainly one of the main explanations for a long-lasting boom in commodities. China’s urban population is growing very fast. In 1978 the country was only 18 percent urbanized. Today it is almost 50 percent urbanized, with more than 170 cities over a million people, and a number of megacities with populations exceeding 10 million. Every year another 20 million or so Chinese move from the countryside looking for work and housing and a higher standard of living. Asked by George W. Bush what worry kept him up at night, President Hu Jintao said that his biggest concern was “creating 25 million new jobs a year.”

Further out, there is the possibility of hydrogen-fed fuel cell–powered cars. There is another possibility as well: that new kinds transportation systems will emerge that challenge current assumptions about the ways people travel. This may be the necessary response to the impending gridlock that could paralyze so many of the world’s megacities. What we do know is that nothing fast will happen to change the world’s auto fleet. It is too large, and the turnover of the existing fleet is too slow—the average life of a car is 12 to 15 years. That is true in the developed world. In fast-growing emerging markets, however, where people who do not own cars are now acquiring them, the answer will be somewhat different—or perhaps very different—because they do not have a large existing stock of cars to replace.

And what kind of sound should it be? Carlos Ghosn has been among those at Nissan vetting sounds. “It should be something that sounds like an electric car,” he said, “pleasant, not too much, but enough.”23 ASIA FIRST? Given all of the various hurdles, where might be the first major market for EVs? Some Asian megacities present a combination of circumstances that appear conducive for the spread of EVs. Their physical infrastructure is still being built out, and thus is more ripe for “greenfield” development of chargingstations and other equipment than older urban areas in the United States and Europe. At the same time, air pollution in these cities can be stifling, and coughing, disgruntled citizens have been pressing governments to improve air quality.


pages: 172 words: 50,777

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

Reimagining the Workplace for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2020) McGilchrist, Iain, Ways of Attending: How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World (Routledge, 2019) Massey, Doreen, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, Marxism Today, June 1991, http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/91_06_24.pdf Russell, Bertrand, ‘In Praise of Idleness’, In Praise of Idleness and Other Stories (Routledge, 2004 [1935]) Saval, Nikil, Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace (Doubleday, 2014) Saxenian, Annalee: Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard University Press, 1996) Scarry, Richard, What Do People Do All Day? (HarperCollins, 2015 [1968]) Smil, Vaclav, Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities (MIT Press, 2020) Suzman, James, Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time (Bloomsbury, 2021) Usher, Neil, The Elemental Workplace (LID Publishing, 2018) Wajcman, Judy, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Wallman, James, Time and How to Spend It: The 7 Rules for Richer, Happier Days (W.


pages: 188 words: 54,942

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control by Medea Benjamin

air gap, airport security, autonomous vehicles, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, drone strike, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Jeff Hawkins, Khyber Pass, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, performance metric, private military company, Ralph Nader, WikiLeaks

Even when the Pakistani military declared many areas safe for families to return, the absence of reconstruction assistance and the persistence of drone attacks in the region have kept many from doing so. The flight of so many refugees has affected an even greater population—the people of the southern port city of Karachi. There are no visible drones flying over this mega-city of nearly 18 million people, but its squalid bursting streets have had to absorb massive numbers of families fleeing the conflict in the Northwest.214 A report produced by Amnesty International estimated the number of displaced at over one million. The influx sparked an outbreak of ethnic violence in Karachi between the city’s Muhajir, who are the descendants of original refugees from India, and the Pashtun, who include the recent immigrants from the Northwest provinces.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Sixteen years earlier, in 2004, the National Intelligence Council, a research organization in the U.S. intelligence community, had published a report titled Mapping the Global Future, which presented scenarios for the year 2020. One of the scenarios imagined was a pandemic in 2020. It was eerily prophetic, even as to the year: It is only a matter of time before a new pandemic appears, such as the 1918–1919 influenza virus that killed an estimated twenty million worldwide. Such a pandemic in megacities of the developing world . . . would be devastating and could spread rapidly throughout the world. Globalization would be endangered if the deaths rose into the millions in several major countries and the spread of disease put a halt to global travel and trade during an extended period, prompting governments to expend enormous resources.

By the end of 2017, over 50 percent of China’s city bus fleet was already electric.20 The New Energy Vehicles program is one of Beijing’s national industrial strategic priorities. It is switching from a “consumer-centric” model—subsidies for buyers—to a “producer-centric” one, establishing quotas for manufacturers. That means a rising share of automakers’ total production must be EVs. China also offers an enormous carrot. In the crowded megacities, one can only get a license plate through a lottery. In Beijing, the odds of winning a license plate for an oil-fueled car are tiny—1 in 907. Even then, the winner must pay a fee, which can be quite substantial—as high as $13,000. But there is a big exception: An electric car buyer can bypass the lottery and get the license automatically (although there may still be a waiting period), without having to spend money for the license.21 In 2019, almost a million EVs were sold in China—4 percent of new car sales there and more than half of all the EVs sold in the world.22 * * * — In India, there is also enthusiasm for greater electrification, which in the country encompasses the ubiquitous two-wheelers and three-wheelers as much as four-wheelers.


pages: 195 words: 58,462

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, do-ocracy, fixed-gear, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, plutocrats, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning

I have often thought of Istanbul as the bridge in between, theoretically connecting the two worlds but, in practice, not quite belonging in either, unwelcome anywhere. Anyone who visits Istanbul today will notice that in several areas the city resembles a massive construction site. In the last decade it has undergone radical transformation and gentrification. Initially, many people supported the growth, happy to see the megacity attracting foreign investors and global capital. Some of its lost cosmopolitanism was also restored. Expats and migrants arrived, visitors from ex-Soviet republics, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Balkans. An important LGBT movement flourished, organizing gay parades. The women’s movement increased its strength.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

“The idea that we are going to create a middle class in BRIC economies doesn’t make sense. Not everyone wants or should have 2.2 cars.” In the future, Berdish imagines a world where cars are more of a shared resource and more functional. “Cars will have to be more stripped down. In a sharing economy or mega-city, you don’t need satellite radio and fancy navigation systems; you just need cars to serve a function.” Berdish helped develop mobility solutions at Ford, which meant showing the company the value of business models built around car sharing and mass urban transport options like rail, metro, buses, and bicycles.


pages: 261 words: 57,595

China's Future by David Shambaugh

Berlin Wall, capital controls, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, market bubble, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent-seeking, secular stagnation, short selling, South China Sea, special drawing rights, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional

Today there are five cities with a population over 10 million; fourteen cities over 5 million; and 41 cities of 2 million or more.33 By 2025, McKinsey & Company estimates, 46 of the world’s 200 largest cities will be in China.34 There are plans to turn the greater Pearl River Delta—including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai—into one enormous megacity () of 42 million people,35 and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei triangle (known as Jing-Jin-Ji) into an even larger one covering 82,000 square miles and a total population of 130 million people.36 The new strategy to create megalopolises is a shift from just a few years ago when the government’s priority was to develop small and medium-sized cities.37 Creating “ecocities” and “green urbanization” are another part of the government’s plan—an appropriate goal given the environmental catastrophe that besets many Chinese cities.


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

In any case, once agreed, the division of responsibilities would need to be recorded as a formal constitution. Britain is sliding slowly into a quasi-federation or what they prefer to call ‘devo max’, to avoid that dreaded f-word. The new federal Britain would include Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and, maybe, five English megacities or regions. Progress is complicated by the fact that it would be hard to divide up England geographically, by city or region, while England on its own would be too dominant. Surveys also reveal that while the local bureaucrats enthuse about more devolution their citizens are not so keen, preferring that the big decisions are still taken at the centre.


pages: 182 words: 56,961

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbus A320, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, index card, John Snow's cholera map, megacity, RAND corporation, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche

Thinking of these essential requirements—simple, measurable, transmissible—I recalled one of my favorite public health studies. It was a joint public health program conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and HOPE, a charitable organization in Pakistan, to address the perilous rates of premature death among children in the slums of Karachi. The squatter settlements surrounding the megacity contained more than four million people living under some of the most crowded and squalid conditions in the world. Sewage ran in the streets. Chronic poverty and food shortages left 30 to 40 percent of the children malnourished. Virtually all drinking water sources were contaminated. One child in ten died before age five—usually from diarrhea or acute respiratory infections.


pages: 215 words: 59,188

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

Vast quantities of sand are dumped into the sea to reclaim land. Singapore, for example, has expanded its land area by more than 20% since the 1960s in this way. The Maldives and Kiribati have used sand to shore up their islands against rising sea levels. The UN forecasts that, by 2030, there will be over 40 “megacities” home to more than 10m inhabitants (up from 31 in 2016), which means more housing and infrastructure will need to be built. And sea levels will continue to rise. All of this means that sand will only become more sought after. So why is there a shortage, when sand seems so abundant? The trouble is that desert sand is too smooth, and cannot be used for most commercial purposes.


pages: 190 words: 62,941

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

As CEO of Uber, the world’s most valuable start-up, Kalanick has been visiting China about every three months for three years now. All the travel from his home base in San Francisco is part of a money-draining and quixotic gambit to replicate the global success of Uber’s disruptive ride-hailing service in the world’s most populous country. Kalanick has spent the previous three days in Tianjin, a megacity on the Yellow Sea, two hours southeast of Beijing. There he was a cochair of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) New Champions meeting, the so-called summer Davos. Weeks shy of his fortieth birthday, Kalanick was the toast of Tianjin, where he enjoyed the considerable fringe benefits of his newfound worldwide prominence.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

Though the once all-powerful government in Delhi has in recent decades ceded significant spending authority to chief ministers in India’s twenty-nine states, that power has not filtered down to the mayoral level, and it shows. Smaller cities struggle to grow, and when rural Indians do move to urban areas, they tend to choose the four megacities, with populations of over ten million: Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Bangalore. If China is a nation of boom cities, India is a land of creaking megacities, surrounded by small towns and not enough vibrant second cities. The Service Cities The rise of cities along trade routes that carry hard goods is today accompanied by the rise of cities at the center of various service industries.


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

One of them goes by the name of ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ or ‘generational amnesia’, which refers to the way we get used to new things and begin to see the world from a different perspective. An eight-lane motorway junction would probably have been unimaginable to my great-grandparents, but for my generation it is completely normal. To some of us, it even seems natural, safe and reassuring, depending on the circumstances. The distant lights of a megacity, an oil refinery glittering by the side of a dark freeway and bright airport runways lighting up the night skies are sights we are so used to that to many of us their absence would seem odd. The same goes for the comfort some people find in overconsumption, among other things. The once unthinkable can very quickly become a natural – and even irreplaceable – part of our daily lives.

All human activities are embedded and constrained by ecosystem processes and functions, and throughout our existence as a species we have manipulated and transformed land and its natural resources. However, in recent history the extent of human land use has altered those processes and functions with mostly adverse consequences for people and the planet. When we think of human civilization’s imprint on Earth, we tend to think of the world’s metropolises and megacities, interconnected by a dense network of roads, power grids and infrastructure. While these do represent pervasive land-use activities, they are almost negligible in terms of their ecological, economic and social influence when compared to agriculture. Globally, farming is the dominant form of land management today, and it is changing the face and the function of our planet.


Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations by Raymond Fisman, Edward Miguel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, blood diamond, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, crossover SUV, Donald Davies, European colonialism, failed state, feminist movement, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, mass immigration, megacity, oil rush, prediction markets, random walk, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, unemployed young men

The existence of the new lake is still a matter of intense speculation, and many experts remain unconvinced by the geological science underlying el-Baz’s claims.23 While only time will tell whether water for Darfur’s desperate millions will help end the conflict there, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of water in dousing violence in Africa. 135 Chapter Six ½ Death by a Thousand Small Cuts M A Gruesome Calculus urders, kidnappings, and car-jackings are part of daily life in the sprawling megacities of the developing world, causing the rich and privileged to retreat to lives behind high, barbed wire-topped walls. Kenya’s capital got the nickname “Nairobbery” for a reason. While civil war is violence played out on a grand and tragic scale, countries spared large-scale conflict can still suffer death by a thousand small cuts in the form of violent crime.


pages: 224 words: 69,494

Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future by John Whitelegg

active transport: walking or cycling, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, carbon tax, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, Donald Shoup, energy transition, eurozone crisis, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), megacity, meta-analysis, negative emissions, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-industrial society, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, Right to Buy, smart cities, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban sprawl

China and India have demonstrated that they can mobilise funds and political initiative for sustainable transport projects and projects that genuinely improve conditions for those not owning or using cars. After describing 3 strategies in China for encouraging motorised transport Gao et al (2014) discuss measures that are intended to restrain car use: “More strictly, strategies restricting purchase and use of private vehicles are now emerging in the megacities of China. For instance, the Beijing municipal government initiated the rationing of road space for the 2008 Olympics. Car use was curtailed according to the number on the license plates. Another example is limiting quota of new car registration in an attempt to curb unsustainable levels of automobile ownership (Song, 2013).


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Then we might realize that in terms of value creation, it just doesn’t pay to be a banker. New York City, 50 Years Later Half a century after the strike, the Big Apple seems to have learned its lesson. “Everyone in NYC wants to be garbage collector,” read a recent newspaper headline. These days, the people who pick up after the megacity earn an enviable salary. After five years on the payroll, they can take home as much as $70,000 plus overtime and perks. “They keep the city running,” a Sanitation Department spokesperson explained in the article. “If they were to stop working, however briefly, all of New York City would come to a standstill.”20 The paper also interviewed a city sanitation worker.


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Saudi Arabia As you enter King Abdullah Economic City, a multibillion-dollar building project due for completion in 2020, you pass through an enormous gate ornamented with the king’s image and the words, “The vision of our leader has embodied our dreams.”1 According to the city’s official Web site, its purpose is “To become the single greatest enabler of social and economical growth for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”2 Two million Saudis are expected to live, learn, and work within this desert fortress of state-of-the-art skyscrapers, schools, and shopping malls that will one day cover 150 square miles. This is just one of six megacities the Saudi government intends to invent over the next decade, projects imagined by state contractors and built largely by the Saudi construction and service companies that win lucrative government contracts. In Saudi Arabia, grand-scale state capitalism is a natural fit. Most authoritarian governments now recognize that change is inevitable.


pages: 212 words: 69,846

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

To Khan, tackling climate change is also a commonsense issue. Under him, London has taken some aggressive steps. Though Great Britain has stayed in the Paris Agreement (unlike the United States), Khan believes his country’s efforts and plans on climate change still fall short. So London will lead the way. It is the first megacity in the world to make the pledge to become carbon-neutral by 2050, and it’s already taken some significant steps toward reaching that goal. (Khan is also divesting the city’s pension funds of fossil fuel investments.) While London was once a laggard when it came to solar power, the city now outperforms the country in terms of new solar panel deployment.


pages: 274 words: 63,679

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, car-free, congestion pricing, COVID-19, crossover SUV, desegregation, Donald Trump, Elaine Herzberg, gentrification, global pandemic, high-speed rail, invention of air conditioning, Lyft, megacity, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, wikimedia commons

A 2017 report from the World Bank estimated that Tanzania could increase its gross domestic product 32 percent if it could reduce traffic injuries 50 percent over a twenty-four-year period.23 Although many of the trends are concerning—especially increased motorization and the growth of SUVs globally—there are reasons for hope around the world as well. Mexico City In Mexico City as recently as 2015, one thousand people were being killed every year in traffic. About half of those killed were pedestrians and cyclists.24 The streets in this North American megacity (population 8.8 million) are Darwinian. The Mexican driver’s licensing process essentially consists of having a picture taken. Not until 2005 did the government start using Breathalyzer tests to crack down on drunk driving (a move that caused an almost immediate 43 percent decline in fatalities).25 Most importantly, pedestrians simply are not respected on Mexico City’s congested streets.


Amazing Train Journeys by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, country house hotel, Donner party, high-speed rail, megacity, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, trade route, urban sprawl

Every step is an eye-opening cultural experience, from buying tickets and navigating hangar-sized stations to settling into one’s seat and gaping as the speedometer sometimes surpassing 248mph (400km/h). Engines of China’s economic development, high-speed (‘bullet’) trains power across dozens of routes, but the first and most significant line – that of the world’s fastest passenger train – moves more than half a million people a day between the megacities of Bĕijīng and Shànghăi. ❶ RIDING THE RAILS The numbers are practically beyond comprehension. Approximately 2600 high-speed train departures run daily between more than 200 cities spread across 32 of China’s 34 provinces. In 2016, these services carried nearly 1.44 billion passengers, up 24% from the previous year.


pages: 238 words: 75,994

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

To say that walkable, nongridded urban environments are somehow resistant to crime would make absolutely no sense in England. England is hardly a global hot spot for rationally gridded, car-centric towns, yet it boasts the highest rate of burglary in the entire European Union. Italy, another nation not known for its automobile-dependent, gridded megacities, is a close second for residential burglaries (in some years, it is actually worse than England). On paper, they should be nearly burglary-free. When seen through the eyes of a burglar, many architectural features take on an unexpected dual role. Such things as back doors and side windows often double as potential getaway routes, for example, and experienced burglars will often only target houses with at least two points of exit.


pages: 278 words: 74,880

A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", active measures, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, data science, distributed generation, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban sprawl, young professional

But whether or not Paris is selected, she intends to continue to pursue the goal of making Paris the world capital of social business. In the months since then, Mayor Hidalgo has taken a number of steps to achieve this objective, including having young people in Paris organize social business design competitions to address the problems of the city. Mayor Hidalgo is also the chair of C40, an association of global megacities that are committed to combatting the problem of climate change. Today the association has a membership of ninety cities with a combined population of 600 million. After this experience with Mayor Hidalgo, I cannot say that the world’s political leaders are not listening to the demands of young people for economic and social change.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Capitalism doesn’t work that well if people don’t have any money to buy things or if communities are degenerating into scarcity, anger, and despair. The question is, what is to be done? If we do nothing, society will become dramatically bifurcated on levels we can scarcely imagine. There will be a shrinking number of affluent people in a handful of megacities and those who cut their hair and take care of their children. There will also be enormous numbers of increasingly destitute and displaced people in decaying towns around the country that the trucks drive past without stopping. Some of my friends project a violent revolution if this picture comes to pass.


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

The manifesto that helped launch the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the early nineties championed a “civilization of Mind in cyberspace”—a kind of worldwide metabrain. But personalized filters sever the synapses in that brain. Without knowing it, we may be giving ourselves a kind of global lobotomy instead. From megacities to nanotech, we’re creating a global society whose complexity has passed the limits of individual comprehension. The problems we’ll face in the next twenty years—energy shortages, terrorism, climate change, and disease—are enormous in scope. They’re problems that we can only solve together. Early Internet enthusiasts like Web creator Tim Berners-Lee hoped it would be a new platform for tackling those problems.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

Despite this, it is crucial to remember that even now about 900 million Chinese live in rural areas and about 500 million in an urban environment. Change has been quick, and will quicken. By 2026 Beijing hopes to have moved another 250 million people, meaning that by then half of the population will be urban. To achieve this involves a mass uprooting of people, along with the destruction of villages and the building of cities, megacities, roads and high-speed railways. The majority of the movement continues to be from west to east, the west still tending to be more rural, with higher illiteracy rates; the east, especially towards the seaboard, is increasingly urban and oriented towards technology, industry and business. However, the mass migration to the cities reveals and exacerbates another gap within the urban population, again between rich and poor.


pages: 230 words: 71,834

Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality by Melissa Bruntlett, Chris Bruntlett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, ASML, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, intermodal, Jones Act, Loma Prieta earthquake, megacity, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, safety bicycle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, starchitect, Stop de Kindermoord, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Bringing teams of people together to shape a complete and inclusive system isn’t easy, but it is vital for success. “If you develop only one part, it won’t really work,” she concludes. While Copenhagenize Design Company’s work is focused primarily on the European context, Imbert sees the bike–transit merger as one that could be acutely applicable to sprawling North American megacities. “In the Netherlands, we’re talking about a national scale,” she concedes. “But in North America, it can be very relevant at the scale of the metropolitan area.” So relevant, in fact, that the least likely of locations are now integrating bikes and transit. Combining Bikes and Transit in Sprawling Atlanta In recent years, some North American urban planners have begun to explore ways to unlock Dutch-style multimodality, hoping to utilize the bicycle as a tool to increase public-transit ridership and decrease car dependency.


pages: 276 words: 78,061

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

When the South complained about the size of the flags the cheerleaders were going to bring, diplomats from the North stormed out of a meeting and cancelled the Beauties. The two Koreas remain as far apart and as close together as they always have been. War is a constant potential threat; everyone in the South’s megacity of Seoul knows they are within range of the North’s artillery, dug in along the 38th parallel, and the North’s nuclear programme frightens the entire region. Family quarrels can often be the most bitter, although in the case of both Koreas’ relationship with Japan and its flag, it’s sometimes hard to tell which goes deeper.


pages: 219 words: 74,775

Liquid: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives by Mark Miodownik

3D printing, airport security, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, mass immigration, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, The Design of Experiments

For instance, the Brazilian city of São Paolo experienced severe water shortages in 2015 when the strain of drought emptied its main reservoir. At the worst point of the crisis it was estimated that the city, with a population of 21.7 million people, had only twenty days of water left. Many other global mega-cities face similar problems imposed by climatic variations, increases in populations and, as wealth increases, a bigger water footprint per person. While we obviously all rely on water, we rely on other liquids too for a sustainable and healthy society. Some of these are surprising. For instance, liquid glass.


pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Lacy, Sarah, 1975- Bril iant, crazy, cocky: how the top 1% of entrepreneurs profit from global chaos / Sarah Lacy. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-470-58009-7 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-00778-5 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-118-00779-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-00780-8 (ebk) 1. Entrepreneurship. 2. Success in business. I. Title. HB615.L23 2011 658.4'21—dc22 2010034717 To all the brilliant, crazy, cocky entrepreneurs in megacities, slums, and villages around the developing world. You’ve inspired me more than you will ever know. And for my husband, Geoffrey, who supported this brilliant, crazy, cocky journey. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first thanks have to go to John Wiley & Sons, Inc.—the only publisher that would take a risk on this book two years ago.


pages: 318 words: 77,223

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

Finally—and as if I needed to convince you further of the challenges—politics around the world also needs to play catch-up with a number of consequential secular and structural transformations in society; these meaningful challenges face governments that find it inherently hard to disrupt themselves for the better (it is difficult enough for business and individuals to do so; for governments it is infinitely more so). These include wide-scale urbanization and the emergence of megacities, which render even more important the effective devolution of some power to cities and municipalities. Meanwhile, and perhaps more important, rapid technological innovations have enabled and empowered individuals like never before (something that we will return to later in the book). Today, so many more people in so many more places are enabled to connect and participate, and, soon, they will also be able to make a lot more things.


pages: 256 words: 76,433

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, clean water, East Village, export processing zone, feminist movement, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megacity, messenger bag, Multi Fibre Arrangement, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Skype, special economic zone, trade liberalization, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, Veblen good

In fact, Panyu is a city of more than 1 million people located within the boundaries of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, and the location of several of the factory meetings I had set up. I was finally connecting China’s very large dots. The three cities I was planning to zip back and forth between by cab form a single megacity bigger than any metropolis in the United States. Shenzhen has a population of around 14 million people. Dongguan, located between Shenzhen and Guangzhou, has more than 8 million, and Guangzhou has roughly 13 million. All told, Guangdong Province has at least 100 million inhabitants, almost a third of the United States’ population crammed into a space the size of Missouri.


pages: 240 words: 74,182

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

4chan, active measures, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, data science, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, mega-rich, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-truth, side hustle, Skype, South China Sea

She wanted to know more about the people who visited the site. What did they have in common? She travelled all across the country, to many towns and cities she’d never visited before. Bullog readers, it turned out, came from all sorts of backgrounds: from civil servants in the interior to fashion-conscious students in the coastal mega-cities; from self-made business people to housewives. They didn’t share much of a coherent ideology when it came to things like economics, but after conducting twenty-seven interviews Wu started to detect a pattern. Many had been voracious readers from a young age:6 not factual material necessarily, but fiction, plays and poetry.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

Fresh funding is the difference between survival and closure. Deep-pocketed WeWork and its China subsidiary are loaded with new capital: WeWork China pulled in $500 million in 2018 led by SoftBank, a huge $4.4 billion investor in WeWork itself, on top of $500 million the year before. WeWork has covered China with 60 locations across a dozen megacities, adding to its global presence in 23 countries worldwide. WeWork’s recent rebranding as We Company signifies its new direction into social lifestyles and even residential rentals, an elementary school, and a coding academy, and this concept could be brought to China. But WeWork has its work cut out for it in China battling interlopers with big visions.


pages: 314 words: 75,678

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

agricultural Revolution, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, fear of failure, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of air conditioning, Louis Pasteur, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, oil shock, performance metric, plant based meat, purchasing power parity, risk tolerance, social distancing, Solyndra, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, the High Line, urban planning, yield management

Planting mangrove trees is a great investment. They help prevent some $80 billion a year in losses from floods. We’re going to need more drinking water than we can supply. As lakes and aquifers shrink or get polluted, it’s getting harder to provide potable water to everyone who needs it. Most of the world’s megacities already face severe shortages, and if nothing changes, by mid-century the number of people who can’t get enough decent water at least once a month will rise by more than a third, to over 5 billion people. Technology holds out some promise here. We already know how to take the salt out of seawater and make it drinkable, but the process takes a lot of energy, as does moving the water from the ocean to the desalination facility and then from the facility to whoever needs it.


pages: 236 words: 73,008

Deadly Quiet City: True Stories From Wuhan by Murong Xuecun

Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, global pandemic, lockdown, megacity, Ponzi scheme, QR code, social distancing, TikTok

It took very little time for Xi Jinping to succeed in getting a third term. For many years to come, the Chinese people will have no choice but to submit themselves to his oppressive rule. Like leeks waiting to be harvested, as they say in China, an idiomatic phrase for suckers about to lose everything to a crooked stock manipulator. In prosperous megacities like Shanghai, or in remote mountain hamlets, people are forced at any time into a ‘state of silence,’ which means no timely medical care, no leaving home to buy food, in fact no leaving home at all, like fish unable to escape the tanks at a fish monger’s shop. For those who dare to break the rules, officers in full PPE will appear as soon as anyone pipes up.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

A UN estimate of ‘world migrant stock’ suggests that roughly one in every 30 people has moved to a new country of residence within a single lifetime.11 A Vatican document describes this as ‘the vastest movement of people of all times’.12 Ours is now a city planet. In 2014, more than half the world’s population already lived in cities, and UN projections suggest that the world’s cities will add another 2.5 billion people by 2020.13 These will be men, women and children from everywhere, especially in the ‘megacities’ with more than 10 million inhabitants. There are already at least 25 world cities where more than one out of every four residents was born abroad, and the 2011 Canadian census revealed that an astonishing 51 percent of the population of Toronto was foreign-born.14 This is before you even get to ‘postmigrants’, the children and grandchildren of migrants.

., 48, 189–90, 193, 194–95 Liechtenstein, 293 lifeblood, 77, 119–28 Lilburne, John (‘Free-Born John’), 372–73, 374 Lincoln, Abraham, 74 linguistic challenges, 95–96 Link, Perry, 45 Lippmann, Walter, 202 Lipstadt, Deborah, 158 Li Qiang, 106 literacy rates worldwide, 13, 15f Liu Xiaobo, 43, 46, 95, 373–74, 378 Lives On, 317 Lloyd, John, 191 Locke, John, 78, 84 Long Walk to Freedom (Mandela), 47 Lukashenko, Aleksander, 124 Lukes, Steven, 24 lumendatabase.org/chillingeffects.org, 53, 55, 168 Luther, Martin, 20, 278, 316, 376–78 Macao, 105 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 47, 224 MacCullough, Diarmaid, 272, 277 Machiavelli, 208, 210 ‘machine speech’/algorithms, 17, 364–67 machine translation, 95, 172, 175–76 MacKinnon, Catherine, 89, 247–48 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 48, 72 MacMaster, Tom, 314 Madison, James, 78 Mahabharata, 109 Mahmood, Syed, 72, 73–74, 239 Malamuth, Neil, 248 Malaysia, 67, 278, 281 Malcolm, Noel, 133 Malema, Julius, 136 malicious truth, 305–6 Malik, Kenan, 219, 224 Malik, Zubeida, 70 Mancini, Paolo, 197 Mandela, Nelson, 47, 89, 91, 110–11 Manji, Irshad, 274, 314 Mann, Heinrich, 96 Mann, Thomas, 246 Manning, Bradley (Chelsea), 337, 343 Mao Tse-tung, 38, 99, 160 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 247 Marat, Jean-Paul, 144 Margalit, Avishai, 209, 217–18 ‘marketplace of communities,’ 211 ‘marketplace of ideas,’ 75–76 Marks & Spencer, 312 Marsden, Christopher, 348 Mary (mother of Jesus), 269 masks and truth-telling, 316 Master Switch, The (Wu), 52 May, Erskine, 85 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, 162, 305, 309, 313 McGrath, Alister, 256 McLuhan, Marshall, 18 McNealy, Scott, 284 Mead, Walter Russell, 32 media, 182, 337; ‘baseline private,’ 188; convergence of, 187; criticising one’s own, 236–37; defined, 181, 342; diverse, 189–200; ‘ethical private,’ 188; ‘media literacy,’ 199–200; monopoly-owned, 190–95; need for diversity in and by, 235; ownership and control of, 189–94; pluralism of, 36, 144, 182, 189–97, 235–36, 389n91; political orientation of, 196; ‘premium standard,’ 188; public service, 196; systems of, 182; ‘totally unregulated,’ 188; trustworthiness of, 200–205, 343–44; uncensored within limits, 183–89 Media Standards Trust, 188 ‘megacities,’ 9 Mehta, Pratap Bhanu, 225 Meiklejohn, Alexander, 77 Mencken, H. L., 243–44 Mendes, Chico, 129 Merkel, Angela, 213, 231 mesomnesia, 305 Mexico, 334, 354 Michnik, Adam, 251, 288 Mickiewicz, Adam, 286 microphone-lurking, 311 Middle East, 45 Middleton, Kate, 295 Milani, Abbas, 185 Mill, John Stuart, 51, 75, 77, 80–81, 87, 88, 95–108, 114, 154, 156, 259, 371, 373; on grains of truth, 154 Miller, Judith, 344–45 Milošević, Slobodan, 133 Milton, John, 8, 26, 75, 80, 155, 181, 268, 373 ‘mindbugs,’ 232 minority voices, 189 Moldova, 334 Molnár, Péter, 220 Mondrian, Piet, 97, 223 money, distorting power of, 48–50, 59, 121, 169–70, 189–95, 296, 302, 367–69 Mongolia, 104f Montaigne, Michel de, 230 Montesquieu, 98, 208–10 Mooney, Randi, 56 Moore, Charles, 225–26 Moore, Gordon/Moore’s Law, 12 (12f) Moore, Suzanne, 92 ‘moral globalisation,’ 4 moralism, 86–87, 89, 218, 247 Morgenstern, Christian, 154 Morin, Edgar, 219 Mormonism, 259–60 Morocco, 19 Moroni (angel), 259 Morrisons, 312 Morsi, Mohammad, 64, 66, 69 Mortimer, Edward, 277 Mosley, Max, 288, 294–96 Mountain Language (Pinter), 122 movable type, 11 MoveOn.org, 60 movie ratings, 186 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 324 MSNBC, 197 Mubarak, Hosni, 183, 257, 315, 330, 363 Mugabe, Robert, 124 Muhammad, 19, 63, 67, 125–26, 134, 143–46, 160, 226, 244, 254, 266, 273, 275.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Some estimate 170,000, others say upward of a million.16 Whatever the real number is, it is an enormous area and a blank spot on the map until 2009. In fact, many government maps still identify Kibera as a forest. Even Google Maps reveals few details for one of the most crowded and impoverished slums on the planet. By itself Nairobi has some two hundred slums, few of which are on government maps. Some poor districts of the world’s megacities, like Nairobi, become what Bob Neuwirth calls “marquee slums”: they attract all the big nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and charity projects.17 Most of them were not on maps, until Primož Kovačič arrived. Kovačič decided to help launch a collective project to, at the very least, map the area.18 Gathering a group of volunteer “trackers” equipped with some basic consumer electronics, including cheap GPS devices and mobile phones, Kovačič and his colleagues “found” Kibera.


pages: 258 words: 83,303

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin

addicted to oil, air freight, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, BRICs, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, energy security, food miles, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Just-in-time delivery, low interest rates, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, profit maximization, reserve currency, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, work culture , zero-sum game

During the 1990s, the American economy lost two acres of farmland every minute. Tomorrow’s farm sector may be regaining those acres at the same pace. And you may run into your long-lost barista selling heirloom tomatoes at the local farmers’ market. If you believe in markets, you may be surprised by what the future looks like. Not personal spacecraft or gleaming megacities—those are the daydreams of the era of cheap energy. The future will look a lot like the past. And that means more farms. We have already seen that soaring transport costs and the subsequent collapse of commuter traffic will depopulate the suburbs. The farther they are from where people work, the emptier they will get.


pages: 329 words: 85,471

The Locavore's Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers, Hiroko Shimizu

air freight, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, food miles, Food sovereignty, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, intermodal, invention of agriculture, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, megacity, moral hazard, mortgage debt, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, refrigerator car, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl

Were they worse off in the city, they would move back to the countryside.39 Polèse also observes that it “should thus come as no surprise that attempts to slow down or to stop urbanization have failed miserably” and that in places like China where political authorities were able to do so temporarily, the result was “even greater rural-urban income disparities and an explosion of urbanization once the measures [were] lifted.”40 People should be given the alternatives that only large and prosperous, if chaotic and unsettling, cities can offer. As the economist Edward Glaeser observes: “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.”41 And reducing rural poverty, we suggest, is a great way to improve social capital. Higher Food Prices and Humanistic Pursuits The greatest social blow delivered by locavorism, however, is ultimately much reduced food diversity (for no location can produce more than a fraction of the world’s offering) and higher food prices that will either force people to cut down on overall consumption or switch to less interesting alternatives.


pages: 294 words: 87,429

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's by Joseph Jebelli

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, CRISPR, double helix, Easter island, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, global pandemic, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, phenotype, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, stem cell, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traumatic brain injury

It comes from the sheer lawlessness of biology, the ‘most lawless of the three basic sciences’, wrote cancer biologist Siddhartha Mukherjee. ‘There are few rules to begin with, and even fewer rules that are universal.’12 Nowhere else is this truer than in cell biology. We can imagine cells as microcosms of modern megacities–dynamic, ever-changing entities, constantly generating new and innovative trends in behaviour. With iPS cells, it’s like finding a city on another planet. And so for the time being, the nitty-gritty of how they actually work is a total enigma. Scientists are basically making it up as they go along.


pages: 292 words: 85,381

The Story of Crossrail by Christian Wolmar

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Crossrail, data acquisition, driverless car, Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject

The vital aspect of transport for the thousands of people expected to be employed in the newly expanding Docklands was considered rather belatedly. The Reichmanns originally envisaged that parking spaces would be needed to accommodate the majority of the workers. As Michael Schabas puts it: ‘In virtually all megacities, even Paris and New York, most top executives actually drive to work … it was only after they arrived in London that Olympia & York learned that inner London did not really have an “expressway system”’,11 unlike every US and Canadian city. However, a maximum of just 8,000 spaces was planned for by the Development Corporation.


pages: 290 words: 84,375

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, crony capitalism, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, low interest rates, megacity, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban planning, working-age population, zero-sum game

Moreover, land sales were equivalent to about 60% of what it collected in taxes, well above the national average. Demand from developers for new land continues unabated; in fact, it has been relentless. What’s driving demand is the plan made in Beijing—a two-hour drive away—to turn the capital into a megacity that will subsume peripheral towns like Liang’s. No one really knows what that will mean in practice, but the prospect sent housing prices soaring. Liang’s youngest daughter, who lives in Beijing, ended up buying an apartment near her parents’ village a year after swearing she wouldn’t. Prices were irrationally high, she had said.


pages: 241 words: 83,523

A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria's Oil Frontier by Michael Peel

banking crisis, blood diamond, British Empire, colonial rule, energy security, Golden arches theory, informal economy, Kickstarter, megacity, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, trade route, UNCLOS, wage slave

One of the boys’ sources of income is spurious ‘taxes’ that they apply to the trucks passing through their domains, bearing consumer goods bought with the proceeds of crude. As my friend puts it, ‘Everyone must have a pinch of that money. It’s just like a game.’ That contest, played for the stakes of oil cash, is at its hardest and most vital in Nigeria’s seething mega-city. On one level, Lagos is a macrocosm of the social forces that have pitilessly impoverished huge numbers of Nigerians and diminished their chances of survival. The World Bank estimated that in 2006 the country had a 10 per cent infant mortality rate. Nigeria ranked a lowly 154th out of 179 countries in the United Nations’ annual index of human development published in 2008.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

If the prototype neighborhood is successful, the next step might be to expand outward, eventually transforming the entire infrastructure of the metropolitan region of Toronto into a showcase smart city. The catch is that Google’s smart city experiment gives the internet giant its first foray into algorithmic governance over entire cities. In 2007, humanity reached a milestone, with a majority of human beings living in urban areas, many in megacities and suburban extensions with populations of 10 million or more.31 This was the year we became “Homo urbanus.” Jump a decade to today. Billions of human beings use Google’s search engine, Google Maps and Waze for location identification and navigation, YouTube videos, and countless other Google data-driven services, primarily in dense metropolitan regions.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

Imagine the economic consequences for the wider world, as stagnation gave way to a spreading crisis, a cycle of failing crops, falling consumption, failing markets in an interlocking world. And, finally, imagine the possible developments in Europe: either a breakdown in political authority, a retribalization pitting natives against immigrants, new megacities against the countryside, or else a kind of rapid adoption of the techno-authoritarian model being pioneered in China, in which liberal democracy ceases to decay and simply falls, replaced by the bureaucratic surveillance state that exists already within the liberal carapace but might, under these circumstances, break out and become the government in full.


pages: 266 words: 80,273

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

Chinese markets, whether or not one was the source of Covid-19, harbor other viruses, notably bird flu—we know because Chinese scientists find it there and have called for closing the markets because that has stopped outbreaks. Probably wet markets elsewhere should also be cleaned up. Yes, such markets have a long tradition, but those years of history didn’t take place alongside modern intensive agriculture, megacities, or our hyperconnected world, which magnify the risks they pose of swapping pathogens among species, including humans. We can find ways to provide these goods safely. Speaking of flu, in Chapter 5, we looked at the one virus we know is going to stage a pandemic, how it does this, and how the swine flu pandemic in 2009 precipitated an attack on the WHO that may have made it harder to react to Covid-19.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Meanwhile, there’s lots of wasted space.’ Our population figures are somewhat out of date because the last UK census was in 2011, but what we can deduce from the information we have is the country isn’t even particularly densely populated, despite what we might like to believe. Dorling points out that London is the lowest density mega-city on the planet; ‘the densest part of London is four times less dense than Barcelona.’49 In 2012, it was estimated that just 2.27 per cent of England’s landscape was built on.50 Population density is usually understood by dividing the number of people in a country by the land area of that same country, but urban studies specialist Alasdair Rae argues that this isn’t always the best way to make sense of population density.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

For starters, cities seem to be especially good at generating unusual combinations of technologies as measured by novel combinations of terms in patents—synergies at work.9 Even if spillovers are working better at a distance than they used to, they still mostly happen face-to-face; and as intangibles grow as a share of the capital stock, that advantage becomes more and more important. But the forward march of the world’s megacities had begun to falter well before COVID-19 forced office workers to work from their homes. In particular, rising housing costs are increasingly eating up the productivity benefits of big cities.10 As a result, the higher productivity that firms enjoy from being in thriving cities is less likely to translate into higher profits or higher disposable income for workers, because housing costs increase to consume the difference.


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

A properly designed system needs the benefits of efficiency and flexibility, which means it needs to be, as we noted in the Prologue, what engineers call multimodal, offering many different ways of getting from place to place, and multinodal, with routes that incorporate the maximum number of connection points. Whether small towns or megacities, the first key to multimodal/multinodal transportation is space: the two- and three-dimensional map of the transportation system—not just the roads and tracks, but the surrounding buildings and other structures and how they relate to one another. When the activities where people interact with one another—working, buying, selling, and so on—are largely in one place, the places where they live surround that one place, the center.


Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System by Alexander Betts, Paul Collier

Alvin Roth, anti-communist, centre right, charter city, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, failed state, Filter Bubble, global supply chain, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Kibera, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rising living standards, risk/return, school choice, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, trade route, urban planning, zero-sum game

South Africa’s initial solution to the mass influx of Zimbabweans was to claim that they were not refugees and to deport them. Jordan would far prefer Syrians to be in camps, because of both worries about terrorist infiltration and competition for jobs and resources. However, forcibly removing large numbers of refugees from the mega-cities of the global South is almost impossible and so most host countries begrudgingly tolerate the presence of urban refugees while doing as little as possible to welcome them, and sometimes as much as possible to deter their arrival. The humanitarian silo model is increasingly out of touch. It fails against almost any metric.


pages: 297 words: 89,206

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

Every city lost ground to the capital during this period. Nascent nationalist identities in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland are partly a response to this urban centrality. Within England, Evan Davis has argued that northern cities needed to overcome their parochial cultural differences for the greater good in the formation of a mega-city which could truly rival London in economic terms. This has fed into arguments about the need for a ‘northern powerhouse’. In fact, adding the value of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield together (by, for example, running high-speed trains between them) would create an urban core with only half the power of London – hardly a major rival.7 With such developments it is little wonder that The Economist argued that ‘economically, socially and politically, the north is becoming another country’.8 But in fact, it would be erroneous to see this as predominantly a north–south divide.


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

., Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, Harper & Row, 1973. 3Ehrenfeld, J. and Hoffman, A.J., Flourishing: A Frank Conversation about Sustainability, Stanford Business Books, 2013. 4Ibid. 5MIT’s SENSEable City Lab research team, interview with Navi Radjou, May 13th 2014. 6Ratti, C. and Kloeckl, K., “Rise of the Asian Megacity”, BBC, June 20th 2011. 7“Health and appiness”, The Economist, February 1st 2014. 8Wilby, P., “Moocs, and the man leading the UK’s charge”, Guardian, August 18th 2014. 9Subramanian, P., founder, CoLearnr, interview with Jaideep Prabhu, May 1st 2014. 10Bordoff, J. and Pascal, N., Pay-As-You-Drive Auto Insurance: A Simple Way to Reduce Driving-Related Harms and Increase Equity, Brookings Institution, July 2008. 11Verbaken, J., co-founder, gThrive, interview with Navi Radjou, August 18th 2014. 12Laskey, A., CEO, Opower, “How behavioral science can lower your energy bill”, talk at TED 2013. 13Rebours, C., CEO, InProcess, interview with Navi Radjou, March 14th 2014. 14“Philips Introduces ‘Lighting as a Service’”, SustainableBusiness.com, January 23rd 2014. 15“Meet Simple; A Worry-Free Alternative To Traditional Banking”, TraxonTech, March 14th 2013. 6Principle five: co-create value with prosumers 1Von Hippel, E., Democratizing Innovation, MIT Press, 2006. 2“Samsung ranks second in R&D spending for 2013”, GS Marena Blog, October 24th 2013. 3Dunn, E. and Norton, M., Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, Simon & Schuster, 2013. 4Norton, M., Ariely, D. and Mochon, D., “The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love”, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Vol. 22, 2012, pp. 453–60. 5Coase, R., “The Nature of the Firm”, Economica (Blackwell Publishing), Vol. 4, Issue 16, 1937, pp. 386–405. 6White House, “Remarks by the President at the White House Maker Faire”, Office of the Press Secretary, June 18th 2014. 7Dutcher, J., “Massimo Banzi: How Arduino is Open-Sourcing Imagination”, DataScience@Berkeley, April 22nd 2014. 8European Commission, “The Sharing Economy: Accessibility Based Business Models for Peer-to-Peer Markets”, Business Innovation Observatory, September 2013. 9Cortese, A., Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit from It, John Wiley, 2011. 10Nussbaum, B., Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire, HarperBusiness, 2013. 11“Giffgaff”, World Heritage Encyclopedia, November 25th 2009. 7Principle six: make innovative friends 1Safian, R., “Generation Flux: Beth Comstock”, Fast Company, January 2012. 2Comstock, B., senior vice-president and chief marketing officer, GE, interview with Navi Radjou, April 7th 2014. 3Groth, O., “Hacking Wicked Social Problems With Renaissance Thinkers and Gamers”, Huffington Post, February 18th 2014. 4Martin, T., “The (Un)examined Organization”, The Alpine Review, Issue No. 2, 2014. 5Martin, T., CEO, Unboundary, e-mail exchange with Navi Radjou, August 18th 2014. 6“Four Disruption Themes for Business”, The Altimeter Group, April 2013. 7Groth, op. cit. 8Marks & Spencer’s Plan A Report, 2014. 9Mulcahy, S., senior vice-president and managing director of financial services industry, Salesforce.com, interview with Navi Radjou, March 6th 2014. 10Rebours, C., CEO, InProcess, interview with Navi Radjou, March 14th 2014. 11Gertler, N., “Industrial Ecosystems: Developing Sustainable Industrial Structures”, MIT master’s thesis, Smart Communities Network, 1995. 12Corkery, M., and Silver-Greenberg, J., “Lenders Offer Low-Cost Services for the Unbanked”, New York Times Dealbook, July 22nd 2014. 13Fera, R.A., “American Express Spotlights the Issue of Financial Exclusion in Davis Guggenheim Doc ‘Spent’”, Fast Company, March 2014. 14Birol, J., serial entrepreneur and strategy consultant, interview with Navi Radjou, August 25th 2014. 15Wiseman, L., Thinkers50-ranked leadership expert, interview with Navi Radjou, August 18th 2014. 16“Pearson debuts new global accelerator class”, Pearson News, June 16th 2014. 17Coughlin, B., CEO, Ford Global Technologies, e-mail exchange with Navi Radjou, August 2014. 18Radjou, N., “Innovation Networks: Global Progress Report 2006,” Forrester Report, June 2006. 19Vandebroek, S., chief technology officer, Xerox, interview with Navi Radjou, August 25th 2014. 20Musk, E., “All Our Patent Are Belong To You”, Tesla Blog, June 12th 2014. 21Litzler, J-B., “Sébastien Bazin divise Accor en deux pour mieux le réveiller”, Le Figaro, November 27th 2013. 22Lacheret, Y., senior vice-president, entrepreneurship advocacy, Accor Group, interview with Navi Radjou, July 7th 2014. 8Fostering a frugal culture 1Hall, J., “Sir Stuart Rose on the ethical spirit of Marks & Spencer”, Daily Telegraph, February 1st 2009. 2Vasanthakumar, V., Senior Associate, Office of the Chief Education Adviser at Pearson, interview with Jaideep Pradhu, August 28th 2014. 3Datta, M., head of Plan A delivery, Marks & Spencer’s worldwide properties, interview with Jaideep Prabhu, May 9th 2014. 4Marks & Spencer’s Plan A Report, 2014. 5Faber, E., CEO, Danone, e-mail exchange with Navi Radjou, August 2014. 6Lawrence, J., senior sustainability adviser and in-house counsel to Kingfisher Group’s Net Positive strategy, interview with Jaideep Prabhu, February 21st 2014. 7Kingfisher, Net Positive Report, 2013/14. 8Ibid. 9Marks & Spencer, op. cit. 10Radjou, N., Prabhu, J. and Ahuja, S., L’Innovation Jugaad: Redevenons Ingénieux!


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

Just as Louis Sullivan’s original skyscrapers had defined the urban skylines of the first half of the twentieth century, Gruen’s shopping mall proliferated around the globe, first in suburban American towns newly populated by white flight émigrés from metropolitan centers. Shopping meccas like L.A.’s Beverly Center became cultural landmarks, and the default leisure activity of hanging at the mall would define an entire generation of “Valley girls.” But as mall culture went global, Gruen’s design became increasingly prominent in the downtown centers of new megacities. Originally conceived as a way to escape the harsh winters of Minnesota, Gruen’s enclosed public space accelerated the mass migration to desert or tropical climates made possible by the invention of air-conditioning. Today, the ten largest shopping malls in the world are all located in non-U.S. or European countries with tropical or desert climates, such as China, the Philippines, Iran, and Thailand.


pages: 287 words: 95,152

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

At Fuyun I meet an employee of Boshihao Electronic, a firm registered in the southern city of Shenzhen, which is planning to open its robot production workshop in Khorgas and expects to start exporting service robots to Europe in 2017. Everyone is too busy making a fortune to care about following the rules too strictly: perhaps the traffic lights will never be turned on. China’s youngest city brims with ambition. This is the new Wild West – quite literally, for the many young people flocking to Khorgas from the big Chinese mega-cities to the East. When you cross the border to the Kazakh side, things are more subdued. The Kazakh Khorgos (the name for the town is the same, but there is a difference in pronunciation) is still more or less what it has always been: a couple of dozen old houses congregated around a pretty mosque and a road running down to the border post.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

The uneven geographical development that results is as infinitely varied as it is volatile: a deindustrialised city in northern China; a shrinking city in what was once East Germany; the booming industrial cities in the Pearl River delta; an IT concentration in Bangalore; a Special Economic Zone in India where dispossessed peasants revolt; indigenous populations under pressure in Amazonia or New Guinea; the affluent neighbourhoods in Greenwich, Connecticut (until recently, at least, hedge fund capital of the world); the conflict-ridden oil fields in the Ogoni region of Nigeria; the autonomous zones carved out by a militant movement such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico; the vast soy bean production zones in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina; the rural regions of Darfur or the Congo where civil wars relentlessly rage; the staid middle-class suburbs of London, Los Angeles or Munich; the shanty towns of South Africa; the garment factories of Sri Lanka or the call centres of Barbados and Bangalore ‘manned’ entirely by women; the new megacities in the Gulf States with their star-architect-designed buildings – all of this (and of course much more) when taken together constitutes a world of geographical difference that has been made by human action. At first blush, this world would appear to be so geographically diverse as to escape principled understanding, let alone rationalised control.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

It is worth noting, however, that in many parts of the world, we’ve already exceeded this projected number. In North America, 82% of people live in urban areas. Latin America and the Caribbean are not far behind at 80%. In Europe, 73% of people live in urban areas. It is precisely in these urban areas, and especially in the world’s megacities (urban areas with 10 million residents or more), that the promise of crowd-based capitalism seems most salient. Cities are sharing economies. When you live in a city, you share public parks. You share transportation using taxis, buses, and the subway. You share common areas in your apartment building.


Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture by Deyan Sudjic

air gap, Alan Greenspan, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, low cost airline, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, Murano, Venice glass, Norman Mailer, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, young professional

It is a human act because design is a response to the needs of people, whether they are spiritual or material. The quality of that design affects the quality of all of our lives. His speech continued: Designers continually face new challenges, some caused by irresponsible past strategies, the threat of global warming and population growth. They affect the balance of an island nation as much as a mega-city on the Pacific Rim. The challenges are the same, only the scale varies. I passionately believe that we have to build more densely in urban areas and – a vital coupling – when we do that we have to improve the standard of urban living. It may mean building taller, but not always. It certainly means producing more housing of higher quality and at lower cost.


pages: 322 words: 89,523

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community by Karen T. Litfin

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collaborative consumption, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, degrowth, glass ceiling, global village, hydraulic fracturing, intentional community, megacity, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, publish or perish, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, urban planning, Zipcar

The mega-slums of Sao Paolo, Shanghai, Lagos, and other cities of the global South are swelling with people who can no longer eke out a living in their villages. The factors driving this mass exodus are complex, ranging from depleted soils to WTO trade rules, but policies that promote rural sustainability – including the ecovillage model – will also be helping cities. While mega-cities are new to the human scene, the village model has, at least until recently, withstood the test of time. This is why Sarvodaya, Colufifa, and other grassroots rural initiatives are so important. The nation My year of ecovillage living sensitized me to the vital role of human purpose. Every time I left an ecovillage for “the real world,” I underwent culture shock.


Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

Data Analytics: Giving Birth to the Field of Public Health The First Industrial Revolution (1760–1840) transformed the dependency on manual labor in the economies of societies to the deployment and reliance on steam-powered machines. Urban populations grew tremendously as people moved from the countryside seeking work in factories. London, perhaps the first mega-city, doubled its population between 1802 and 1850. With that growth came extreme poverty, a lack of proper housing and sanitation, and outbreaks of cholera (in 1832 and 1850s).25 Such outbreaks, it turns out, propelled early nineteenth-century data collection efforts, often in direct response to public health issues, living conditions, or poverty.26 In Britain, this interest resulted in the establishment of a number of statistical societies,27 the first of which, the Manchester Historical Society, was founded in 1833, at approximately the same time that the United Kingdom's Ordnance Survey started to create cadastral (detailed map) surveys of cities.28 Just a year later, in 1834, Charles Babbage co-founded the Statistical Society of London, which later became the Royal Statistical Society.


pages: 302 words: 96,609

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Big Tech, California gold rush, Cape to Cairo, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, energy transition, global supply chain, Google Earth, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, private military company, Scramble for Africa, social distancing, tech baron, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

As a result, it is always raining somewhere in the Congo, and the country has the highest frequency of thunderstorms in the world. The major cities of the DRC include the frenetic capital, Kinshasa, located near the southwestern edge of the country along the banks of the Congo River. It is one of Africa’s fastest-growing megacities and home to more than seventeen million “Kinois.” Mbuji-Mayi is capital of Kasai-Orientale Province, situated in the south-central part of the country and home to the largest diamond deposit in the world. The capital of Tshopo Province, Kisangani, is located near numerous gold mines and serves as a trading hub in the heart of the Congo River.


pages: 292 words: 87,720

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

., ‘Government won’t meet net-zero emissions without “massive change”, warns Defra chief scientist’, Civil Service World, 29 August 2019, www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/government-wont-meet-netzero-emissions-without-massive-change-warns-defra-chief-scientist. 15 Owen, ‘The efficiency dilemma’. 16 Smil, V., Growth, From Microorganisms to Megacities (Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2019), p. 201. 17 Schmitt, A., ‘What happened to pickup trucks?’, Bloomberg News, 11 March 2021. 18 Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy, ‘A new circular vision for electronics: time for a global reboot’, January 2019, https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_New_Circular_Vision_for_Electronics.pdf. 19 Statistic courtesy of Analog Devices. 20 McGrath, M., ‘Climate change: “dangerous and dirty” used cars sold to Africa’, BBC Online, 26 October 2020. 21 Xu, C., Dai, Q., Gaines, L. et al., ‘Future material demand for automotive lithium-based batteries’, Communications Materials, 1 (2020), 99, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43246-020-00095-x.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

New York: Routledge. Davis, Mike. 1986. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class. London: Verso. ———. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso. ———. 2004. “The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos.” Social Text 22, no. 4: 9–15. ———. 2015. “Marx’s Lost Theory: The Politics of Nationalism in 1848.” New Left Review 93: 45–66. Davis, Ralph. 1954. “English Foreign Trade, 1660–1700.” Economic History Review 7, no. 2: 150–66. Day, John. 1978. “The Great Bullion Famine of the Fifteenth Century.”


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

The human population is expected to increase to nine billion by 2042, most living in dense urban areas.20 The year 2007 marked a great tipping point in the history of human settlement, similar in magnitude to the agricultural era. For the first time in history, a majority of human beings live in vast urban areas, according to the United Nations—many in mega-cities with suburban extensions—some with populations of ten million people or more. We have become “Homo urbanus.” The urbanization of the world has been made possible by a tremendous increase in entropic flow. Urban societal structures maintain human life far away from equilibrium by pumping more and more of the Earth’s available energy and material through their arteries, to support ever more sumptuous lifestyles at the core of the infrastructure, while dumping ever more entropic waste at the margins and in the external environment.

Macpherson, Crawford Maddux, William Madonna Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds, The (Bowlby) Making of a Counter Culture, The (Roszak) Making of the Modern Mind, The (Randall) male sensitivity Man of Feeling, The (Mackenzie) Managed Heart, The (Hochschild) Mandela, Nelson Manifesto of the Communist Party, The (Engels and Marx) Margulis, Lynn market model market sector marriage companionate intermarriage Romantic movement and same-sex Martin, Gerry Marx, Karl Mask (film) Maslow, Abraham mass audiences mass collaboration mass extinction mass literacy Masson, Jeffrey materialism Matteucci, Carlo Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology May, Rollo Mayans MBA curriculum McDermott, Michael McEwen, Robert McGregor, Holly McKee, Annie McKenna, Katelyn McLuhan, Marshall McNeill, David McNeill, William Mead, George Herbert meaning beyond survival mechanistic approach media mediated association Meeks, Wayne A. mega-bands mega-cities Meltzoff, Andrew, Dr. Mencius mercantilism merchant capitalists Mercier, Louis-Sébastien Mesopotamia meta narrative metaphors dramaturgical electricity psychological methane method acting. See deep acting Mexico Michelangelo Middle Ages agriculture in birth of humanism in childhood in consciousness in energy revolution in entropy crisis in family life in guilds in print revolution in Middle East migration Milgram, Stanley Mill, John Stuart Millennial Generation Millennial Makeover (Winograd and Hais) Miller, G.


pages: 1,072 words: 237,186

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

A short one hundred thousand years ago, all members of the human race lived in eastern Africa.717 The 7.8 billion people alive today represent roughly one out of every fourteen people who have ever inhabited the Earth.718 In 1918, cities like London were smaller, with just over one million residents. Today there are twenty-six megacities in the world, each with more than ten million people.719 With this kind of tinder, experts like the WHO’s Klaus Stöhr have predicted a pandemic will “explosively” hit world populations “like a flash flood.”720 “The rapidity of the spread of influenza throughout a country is only limited by the rapidity of the means of transportation,” explained the 1918 New York State Health Commissioner.721 Back then, the fastest way to cross the world was by steamship.722 In the past, a trip around the world took a year; today we and our viruses can circle the globe in twenty-four hours.723 The number of human globe-trotters now exceeds one billion people a year.724 HIV left Africa on an aircraft, and the fear was that H5N1 may leave Asia the same way COVID-19 escaped, only a plane ride away.

The only animal industry with greater stocking density than poultry production is fish farming, where tanks routinely squeeze up to a ton of animals into a dozen cubic yards of water (9 m3).1163 Floating cages have been known to hold up to four times more.1164 The water can become so saturated with feed and feces that these fish-in-a-barrel operations may be more aptly dubbed fish-in-a-toilet. As the chief of the CDC’s Special Pathogens branch once pointed out, whether in a human megacity, a broiler chicken shed, or an aquaculture tank, any time one crowds a monoculture of a single species together, one is asking for trouble.1165 Combined with the stress associated with overcrowding and poor water quality, it is not hard to imagine how the factory farming methods associated with the so-called Blue Revolution expansion of fish farming in the 1980s1166 resulted in the emergence of another zoonotic disease.1167 Discovered first in an Amazon dolphin in the 1970s from which it got its name, Streptococcus iniae (inia is the Guarayo Indian word for “dolphin”1168) started wiping out fish stocks on intensive fish farms around the world with epidemics of acute meningitis.1169 By the 1990s, the dolphin wasn’t the only mammal discovered to be infected.


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Fan recognises the challenges of running such a system, so he has suggested it be started on an experimental scale with relatively small reserves.8 Unlike China’s Great Famine of 1958–1962, when the burden was borne most acutely by rural peasants, urban food security is the big challenge today. There are now more than 400 cities in the world with a population above 1 million, including 160 in China alone and 45 in India. That compares with less than 20 such cities globally 100 years ago. In the emerging world, megacities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Dhaka, Manila, Sao Paulo, Jakarta, Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, Mexico City, Lagos, Karachi, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires all have populations of 10 million or more. By 2050, when the world’s population reaches 9 billion, 6 billion people will live in cities.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

In one week at the end of 2017, without making any special effort, I came across stories from Louisiana, where government officials were already finalizing a plan to move thousands of people from rising seas (“Not everybody is going to be able to live where they are now and continue their way of life,” said one state official);17 from Hawaii, where a new study was predicting that, over the next few decades, thirty-eight miles of coastal roads would be chronically flooded and impassable, “jeopardizing critical access to many communities”;18 from Jakarta, Indonesia’s mega-city, where a rising Java Sea earlier that month had briefly turned “streets into rivers and brought this vast area of nearly 30 million residents to a virtual halt”;19 and from Boston, where a simple nor’easter in the first days of 2018 managed to flood some of the city’s priciest neighborhoods, floating Dumpsters and sedans through the Financial District.


pages: 316 words: 103,743

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China by David Eimer

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, megacity, offshore financial centre, open borders, South China Sea

In the north-east, south-west and west, China is surrounded by the most isolated countries of South-east Asia, the ’stans of central Asia, Afghanistan, Bhutan, India and Pakistan, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea and Russia. They are some of the most unpredictable states on the planet, and the conflicts that rage within them inevitably spill across the frontiers. To explore the border regions is to enter a very different China from the glittering mega-cities of Beijing and Shanghai, one that is often lawless and prone to violence. Now they are areas where some of the world’s most pressing problems confront China directly. The war against terrorism and on drugs, people smuggling and the exploitation of the environment all have their own unique Chinese aspect.


pages: 352 words: 98,424

Cathedrals of Steam: How London’s Great Stations Were Built – and How They Transformed the City by Christian Wolmar

Ascot racecourse, British Empire, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Crossrail, driverless car, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, pneumatic tube, railway mania

Christian Wolmar July 2020 ONE STARTING SLOWLY THE RAILWAYS CAME late to London, half a dozen years after the opening of the pioneering Liverpool & Manchester in 1830, but they quickly made up for lost time. Railways soon spread all around the capital and were a vital component of the rapid growth that turned London into the world’s first megacity. London not only acquired the world’s first underground railway network, beating all other cities across the globe by almost forty years, but also can boast today of having 598 railway stations and 756 route miles of line,1 and, most notably, more terminus stations than any other city in the world.


pages: 372 words: 101,678

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy

When Airbus looked across the Boeing product portfolio, Airbus decided that a competitive response at the XL end of the market made the most sense. In 2000 Airbus launched the A380, the largest passenger aircraft ever produced. With two full passenger decks spanning the entire length of the aircraft, the A380 aimed to carry 500+ passengers between the world’s booming megacities. The extra size also allowed for a variety of new amenities like swanky onboard bars and even showers for first-class passengers. The plane was hailed as the ultimate step forward for passenger comfort, but it also offered high-density seating configurations that were capable of ferrying more than 800 passengers at one time.


pages: 300 words: 99,410

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland by Ben Coates

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, drug harm reduction, Easter island, failed state, financial innovation, glass ceiling, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, megacity, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, short selling, spice trade, starchitect, trade route, urban sprawl, work culture

On top of a nearby sand dune sat four dilapidated satellite dishes, monstrous and skeletal, a relic of US army eavesdropping during the Cold War and a reminder that for all its current bleakness, this had always been one of the crossroads of Europe. A sign pointed with thick blue fingers towards distant megacities – New York: 5824 kilometres, St Petersburg: 1831, Shanghai: 8934. The road ran out at the seafront, disappearing under the sand. Around were the usual distractions of a North Sea holiday resort: ice-cream and hot-dog stands, a children’s fairground ride, shops selling sunglasses and wire baskets of beach toys.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

There, the twenty-first century’s answer to urban transportation was already on the streets—the minibus. Locals call them matatus, marshrutkas, jeepneys, angkots, or kombis. Carrying 6 to 16 passengers at a time, these nimble people-haulers are the primary means of transportation for many of the megacities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. They thrive where no government-run transit exists—earning them the wonkish label informal transit. Yet their ridership dwarfs that of buses and trains. In Mexico City, for instance, some 30,000 peseros ply 1,500 different routes, carrying more than 14 million people every day—all without any central ownership or formal coordination.


pages: 363 words: 98,496

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell, Kit Chellel

big-box store, coronavirus, COVID-19, drone strike, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, eurozone crisis, failed state, Filipino sailors, financial innovation, information security, lockdown, megacity, offshore financial centre, Skype, South China Sea, trade route, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

After it came to a stop on the beach, teams of men armed with saws and blowtorches clambered onto its decks, beginning the laborious task of taking the vessel apart from stem to stern by hand. Nothing of value would be allowed to go to waste. Of the materials on board, steel was the most important. Loaded into trucks bound for mills in Karachi, it would be rerolled and combined with other scrap, perhaps destined for new buildings in the ever-sprawling megacity. Though there was far less of it, copper would be another source of revenue, sold into a supply chain essential to meeting the world’s demand for new electronics. Any wood that had somehow survived the fire would also have its use: building more of the shanties to which shipbreakers returned at the end of each day.


pages: 897 words: 242,580

The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton

corporate governance, dark matter, forensic accounting, linked data, megacity, place-making, trade route

Kerensk had been one of the Big15 worlds during the Commonwealth’s first era; the super-capitalist engines which powered the Commonwealth’s expansion right up until the Starflyer War. Founded by Sergi Nikolayev, a Russian billionaire, to whom the human exodus from Earth finally provided a way to free himself and his money from Moscow’s grasp. Like the other Big15, it developed into an industrial world whose megacity produced an abundance of cheap heavy engineering and consumer products. Entire continents were strip-mined for raw materials, while those that weren’t plundered for their minerals were factory farmed. After the war the economic slowdown caused by financing the New47 worlds followed by the emergence of Higher culture saw the Big15 slowly lose their stature.

The Nikolayev Dynasty carried too much residual distrust and suspicion of the old central control ideology to knuckle under to Higher influences and ANA’s benign guidance. Following Far Away’s lead, it rejected both Higher and Advancer culture, removing its representative from the Senate and becoming an ‘observer’ nation. Those that stayed on in Kaluga, the old megacity, followed their own techno-economic imperative. The rest of the planet was effectively abandoned. Paula scanned the area around Kingsville curiously as the Alexis Denken descended out of a cloudless sky. The old military base was in the middle of a huge desert on the other side of the planet from Kaluga.


pages: 381 words: 111,629

The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, Dr. Elissa Epel

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive load, epigenetics, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meta-analysis, mouse model, persistent metabolic adaptation, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, survivorship bias, The Spirit Level, twin studies

Buy more house plants: two per one hundred square feet is ideal for keeping your air filtered. Good choices include philodendrons, Boston ferns, peace lilies, and English ivy. Support urban forestry with your money or your labor. Green spaces offer so many benefits to mind and body, as well as to healthy communities. One newer idea can be considered in dense urban megacities, where one cannot plant enough trees to rid the air of toxins. If you live in a city, consider lobbying your municipal government to install air-purifying billboards. These billboards do the work of 1,200 trees, cleaning a space of up to 100,000 cubic meters by removing pollutants such as dust particles and metals from the air.50 Stay up to date about toxic products by downloading the “Detox Me” app by Silent Spring: http://www.silentspring.org/.


pages: 424 words: 108,768

Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, bioinformatics, clean water, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, Google Earth, Khyber Pass, Malacca Straits, megacity, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, peak oil, phenotype, rewilding, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, supervolcano, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

‘A European population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete’, Nature Communications 4. Humphreys, D. (2014). ‘The mining industry and the supply of critical minerals’, Critical Metals Handbook, ed. G. Gunn, AGU/Wiley: 20–40. Jackson, J. (2006). ‘Fatal attraction: living with earthquakes, the growth of villages into megacities, and earthquake vulnerability in the modern world’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A–Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences 364(1845): 1911–25. Jacobs, J. (2018). ‘Europe’s half a million landfill sites potentially worth a fortune’, Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/0bf645dc-d8f1-11e7-9504-59efdb70e12f.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

My aversion to utopias goes even deeper. I have not met a speculative utopia I would want to live in. I’d be bored in utopia. Dystopias, their dark opposites, are a lot more entertaining. They are also much easier to envision. Who can’t imagine an apocalyptic last-person-on-earth finale, or a world run by robot overlords, or a megacity planet slowly disintegrating into slums, or, easiest of all, a simple nuclear Armageddon? There are endless possibilities of how the modern civilization collapses. But just because dystopias are cinematic and dramatic, and much easier to imagine, that does not make them likely. The flaw in most dystopian narratives is that they are not sustainable.


pages: 363 words: 105,689

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Adrian Hon, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, dark pattern, false flag, Internet Archive, megacity

Kali, intoxicated by the blood of the slain. Kali, who puts out the stars with her thumb and forefinger. Terror is her name and death is her breathing in and out. Her arrival in this world has been long expected. Any adjustment in understanding had come easily to the women under the motorway bridges of the megacity. The government sent in the army. The women of Delhi discovered a new trick. A jet of water, directed at the attacking forces, could be electrified. The women put their hands into the spouts and sent death from their fingers, like the Goddess walking the earth. The government cut off the water supply to the slum neighbourhoods, in the highest heat of the summer, when the streets stink of rot and the pregnant dogs wander, panting, in search of shelter from the sun.


pages: 353 words: 106,704

Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution by Beth Gardiner

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, connected car, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Hyperloop, index card, Indoor air pollution, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, white picket fence

Even in April, one of the cleaner months, I can see pollution shimmering in the streetlights at night, like the wispy smoke that floats from a campfire. By day, it’s a gauzy curtain hiding bridges and buildings. This place—Delhi in particular, India more widely, and South Asia as a whole—is air pollution’s ground zero, the epicenter of a health crisis of stunning proportions. In megacities across the subcontinent—Hyderabad and Kolkata, Karachi and Dhaka—hundreds of millions of people are assaulted with each breath by toxins from a mind-boggling multitude of barely regulated sources. India is home to 9 of the top 10 cities on the World Health Organization’s list of the most polluted.


Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

obsessed with material things: Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 24–25. With a million residents, Edo, as Tokyo was known: Sumie Jones and Kenji Watanabe, eds., An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-City, 1750–1850 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), 4. For many generations, department stores: Penelope Francks and Janet Hunter, eds., The Historical Consumer: Consumption and Everyday Life in Japan, 1850–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 268. Charles Tiffany harnessed Japanese flourishes: Hannah Sigur, The Influence of Japanese Art on Design (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2008), 154.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

The logic of market forces holds that as severe droughts and storms destroy the habitability of certain regions, both people and capital will flock to places that are more livable and safe. Simply stated, there may be another billion people on earth, but there will be fewer places for them to live, creating more megacities and slums. The countermeasure to this possibility is an international push to address the climate crisis over the next decade. This is an all-hands-on-deck issue that requires public and private investment, so that the world can resoundingly move away from carbon combustion as a means to power our world.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

v=M-rjVaPlZ4o Empress Market: Qaseem Saeed, “Karachi’s Empress Market—a Legacy Built upon the Ashes of Mutiny,” Geo.tv, November 2018, www.geo.tv/latest/220009-faded-glory-of-empress-empress-market-and-stains-on-history-history-of-empress Karachi’s population: World Bank Group, “Transforming Karachi into a Livable and Competitive Megacity,” 2018, openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/29376/211211ov.pdf for a bond: Laura Cooper and Simon Clark, “Egyptian Billionaire Sawiris Backs Bail for Abraaj’s Abdel-Wadood,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2019, www.wsj.com/articles/egyptian-billionaire-sawiris-backs-bail-for-abraajs-abdel-wadood-11557427009 the Bhatti Cousins: Staff reporter, “Pakistan: The Golden Boys,” Time, June 15, 1959, content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,892658,00.html “Good morning, God!”


pages: 366 words: 110,374

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Easter island, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kibera, low cost airline, megacity, off-the-grid, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, spice trade, tech bro, trade route, walkable city, women in the workforce

Slow-simmered curry, served with a side of sour soup made from roselle leaves. With it, you get fried, ground chilies, pickled bean sprouts—you get the idea.” SARABHA: Taunghi Villae of the Nyaung Oo Township, Tel +95 9968 172009 (entrées 5,500–8,500 kyat/US$3.50–$5.50) Nigeria Lagos * * * “Lagos: Nigeria’s megacity. One of the most dynamic, unrestrained, and energetic expressions of free-market capitalism and do-it-yourself entrepreneurship on the planet. Buy, sell, trade, hustle, and claw. Make your own way, any way you can. They say you have to have three hustles. “With a ridiculously overburdened infrastructure, [and] a history of egregiously bent leadership, they long ago learned, ain’t nobody going to help you in this world.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Others like the Happy Planet Index, the Inclusive Wealth Index, and the Social Progress Index are now also aiming to create an alternative international family picture in which the biggest-GDP nations do not automatically appear centre frame. Other strategic initiatives have sought to bypass national rivalry by championing city-to-city collaboration instead. The C40 network, for instance, now connects more than 80 of the world’s megacities in a shared commitment to tackle climate change. Home to over 550 million people and 25% of World GDP, these cities – and their economic vision – will be profoundly influential far beyond their city limits.66 New games help, but the compulsion of the old GDP game holds its grip because GDP brings both global market power and global military power.


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

In the United States, approximately 50.1 percent of total energy and 74.5 percent of electricity is consumed by buildings, which constitutes 49.1 percent of all US carbon-dioxide emissions.2 The extent of the habitat problem came home to us in 2007. The year marked a great milestone in the human journey. According to the UN State of the World’s Cities Report 2008/2009, for the first time in history, a majority of human beings were living in urban areas, many in megacities and suburban extensions with populations of 10 million or more.3 We have become Homo urbanus. Millions of people huddled together, stacked on top of each other in gigantic urban/suburban centers is a new phenomenon. Five hundred years ago, the average person on Earth might have met a thousand people in an entire lifetime.


pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

He returned with a promise of a billion dollars from Perigon Advisory, an investment fund based in Bahrain. For a while in 2009, Gulf investors showed signs of getting cold feet, as the credit crunch created the debt crisis that almost engulfed the region’s most visible totem of wealth, the desert megacity of Dubai. Some deals were quietly put on hold or dropped. Abu Dhabi’s Al Qudra Holding had promised in 2008 to acquire 1 million acres in a host of countries from Australia to Eritrea, Croatia to Thailand, and Ukraine to Pakistan. The first harvests, said CEO Mahmood Ebrahim Al Mahmood, would be shipped during 2011.


pages: 411 words: 114,717

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

In fact Nigeria generates just 162 kilowatt hours per year per person, ranking 175th in the world; by comparison Mexico generates fourteen times more power per person, and Kazakhstan generates thirty times more. Economists who look at these factors call Nigeria “underinvested,” but visitors encounter it as just plain chaos; Lagos, one of the fastest-growing megacities in the world, has ten million people and counting. Visitors are jostled everywhere and constantly have to work around the power failures, which are likely to shut out the lights in the middle of meetings or trap the unprepared in elevators. Those in the know always take the stairs. The luxurious Federal Palace Hotel in Lagos has multiple backup generators, but the lights still go out for five to ten minutes a couple of times a day while the generators crank into operation.


pages: 366 words: 117,875

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

There is another, even more damaging popular myth about the arrival city, which holds its cluttered streets responsible for spiraling urban growth, overcrowding, and sprawl. People look at the new shantytowns covering the hillsides, the migrant neighborhoods being ploughed into forest, and they imagine that the tide of people from the countryside is creating unmanageable megacities. In fact, rural-to-urban migration, in spite of its huge scope, is not the major cause of urban growth. For each 60 million new city-dwellers in the developing world, 36 million are born to established city-dwellers. Only 24 million come from villages, and only half of these have actually migrated; the rest become urbanites because their village, like Liu Gong Li, has been incorporated into the city.8 Arrival cities are not causing population growth; in fact, they are ending it.


pages: 298 words: 43,745

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising by Jim Jansen

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, bounce rate, business intelligence, butterfly effect, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, data science, en.wikipedia.org, first-price auction, folksonomy, Future Shock, information asymmetry, information retrieval, intangible asset, inventory management, life extension, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine translation, megacity, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, PageRank, place-making, power law, price mechanism, psychological pricing, random walk, Schrödinger's Cat, sealed-bid auction, search costs, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, software as a service, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the market place, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

However, with sponsored search, advertisers can specifically target individual consumers. What does the power law tell us? The power law describes phenomena where large events are rare, but small events are quite common. For example, there are a few very large earthquakes, but there are many small earthquakes. There are a few megacities, but there are many small towns. Within the English language, there are a few words (e.g., a, as, and, the) that occur very frequently, but there are many words that rarely occur (e.g. obdormition, tanquam). A power law is much different than the normal distribution, which many people are used to dealing with in statistics.


Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

The three-day event unfolded in a sprawling conference center next to the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton, and its 3,500 attendees included big-name money managers, corporate CEOs, investment bankers, and government officials from dozens of countries, making it a veritable Who’s Who of the global business elite. The center was filled with virtual rollercoasters, spherical holograms featuring roaring lions, and interactive robots. The kingdom used the event to announce three new megacities meant to represent its new direction. The first was a sprawling entertainment complex called Qiddiya to be built near Riyadh that would bring together movie theaters, concert venues, theme parks, and perhaps a space tourism site. The second was a sprawling eco-tourism project on the very islands that Branson had visited a few weeks before.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

Dating back to the early years of the Tang Dynasty, the city is surrounded by some of the most stunning landscapes in China: sprawling red sandstone hills, lush greenery and giant outcrops carved by centuries of erosion. With just over a million people living within the city’s three main districts,1 Shaoguan was tiny by the standards of Guangdong province, less than a tenth the size of Shenzhen, the sprawling megacity to the south. Like its much larger neighbours, however, the city had been transformed by an influx of migrant workers from all over China, who moved from the provinces to seek employment in the hundreds of factories that sprang up in Guangdong as its GDP grew almost fivefold between the start of the millennium and 2010.2 In 2009, the Xuri Toy Factory in Shaoguan’s central Wujiang district employed around 16,000 migrant workers.3 Mostly in their teens or early twenties, they lived in cramped dorms, working long hours and sending much of their meagre paycheques home.


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

The larger island of Java is one of the world’s most densely populated pieces of land, with a dazzling constellation of cities, many of which are thousands of years old, but Batavia was never an important city for any of its local kingdoms. It was an outpost of the major pepper port of Banten when the Dutch East India Company, one of the most important organizations in the development of both global capitalism and colonialism, took over in 1619.2 The mega-city that exists now was largely a Dutch construction, and it still feels different from the rest of Java. Francisca’s father thrived as an architect, and was able to afford a nice home in the city. He did so well, in fact, that Francisca was able to attend colonial school with Dutch children. At home, she loved to spend time in her father’s library, reading the children’s books he had bought for her.


pages: 500 words: 115,119

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

At a more profound and perhaps less obvious level, there is, as the French philosopher Pierre Manent intimates, a growing emphasis on city-states and the half-hidden traditions of empire, even while the problems of modern states increase.[17] I mean that powers such as the United States, China, Iran, and the European Union, while not officially empires, have many of the frustrations and challenges of former imperiums. Meanwhile, on almost all continents, cities grow into both megacities and region-states of their own. Isn’t this all, then, to a much more amplified and enlarged, high-tech extent, a version of early modernism? Just as the young Henry Kissinger saw an answer to the possibility of nuclear armageddon in the 1950s in concentrating on the post-Napoleonic court diplomacy of Metternich and Castlereagh, Noel Malcolm’s answer to where so-called postmodernism is heading is to concentrate on the early modern exploits of an extended, multinational family amid a world more multicultural and purely geopolitical than we realize.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

And in a neatly Borgesian maneuver, the touchscreen controller and the onboard RAM let us fold a map that would otherwise span some 30 miles from side to side, if the entire world were rendered at the highest level of detail, into an envelope small and light enough to be gripped in a single hand and carried everywhere. The maps we see on the screen of a smartphone help us rebalance the terms of our engagement with complex, potentially confounding spatial networks, allowing newcomers and tourists alike to negotiate the megacity with all the canniness and aplomb of a lifelong resident. By furnishing us with imagery of places we’ve never yet been, they can help to banish the fear that prevents so many of us from exploring unfamiliar paths or districts. They are the most generous sort of gift to the professional lover of cities, and still more so to everyone whose livelihood and wellbeing depends on their ability to master the urban terrain.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Source ISBN: 9780007523085 Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780007523115 Version: 2015-01-22 Dedication FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER, FAND THEIR KITCHEN TABLE Author’s Note IN LATE 2010 I started to feel sick. At first I put the constant nausea down to a bout of malaria and a stomach bug I’d picked up during a trip a few months earlier to cover an election in Guinea, but the sickness persisted. I went back to the UK for what was meant to be a week’s break before wrapping up in Lagos, the Nigerian megacity where I was based as the Financial Times’s west Africa correspondent. A doctor put a camera down my throat and found nothing. I stopped sleeping. I jumped at noises and found myself bursting into tears. At the end of the week I was walking to a shop to buy a newspaper for the train ride to the airport when my legs gave way.


pages: 257 words: 56,811

The Rough Guide to Toronto by Helen Lovekin, Phil Lee

airport security, British Empire, car-free, glass ceiling, global village, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, place-making, urban renewal, urban sprawl

The bicameral federal government meets at the nation’s capital, Ottawa, on the Ontario/Québec border. The city achieved its present geographical dimensions in 1998 when, much to the chagrin of many locals, the six semi-independent boroughs of what had been Metropolitan Toronto were merged into one megacity. Its combined population is around 2.3 million, making it the largest city in Canada by a long chalk – its nearest rival being Montréal, with some 1,800,000 inhabitants. reminder of the nineteenth-century city, its handsome neo-Romanesque stonework overlooking Roy Thompson Hall, the home of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.


pages: 540 words: 119,731

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

* * * — “I AM ASHAMED TO be Korean,” a shop owner named Mr. Park told me as he bagged my goods at a store around the corner from my apartment. Mr. Park’s convenience store—up the hill from the nearby U.S. military base—was the regular start of my hour-long morning walk through Seoul, a helter-skelter neon-lit megacity of brick homes, hills, and mountains. I would pass the military base and stroll through the rowdy drinking district of Itaewon, walking by the transgender prostitutes finishing assignations from the previous night, approaching the modern glass headquarters of Samsung’s in-house advertising agency, Cheil.


pages: 518 words: 128,324

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Looking back on his secret diplomatic mission to China in the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger—the secretary of state who played a key role in reopening China to the West—said, “Remembering China in 1971, if anyone had shown me a picture of what Beijing looks like and said in 25 years Beijing will look like this, I would have said that’s absolutely impossible.”27 The village of Shenzhen is today a mega-city of more than ten million people, with real estate prices that rival Silicon Valley’s. Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, an astute China watcher, has described the country’s explosion as “the English Industrial Revolution and the global information revolution combusting simultaneously and compressed into not 300 years, but 30.”28 When Americans complain about how long it takes to build a building or repair a road, authorities often reply that “Rome was not built in a day.”


pages: 403 words: 132,736

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bretton Woods, call centre, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, demographic dividend, digital divide, dual-use technology, energy security, financial independence, friendly fire, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, job-hopping, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

As Sanjay Gandhi showed during the state of emergency in the 1970s, not only does simply throwing slum dwellers out of the city violate human rights, but it does not work either. People find a way of coming back in larger numbers. It is estimated that by 2026,26 New Delhi will be one of a handful of global megacities with a population of thirty million or more. “This is a vast, impossible city,” says Dikshit. “In my job you have to run and run in the hope you might stand still.” She concedes that the more infrastructure is improved, and the more jobs New Delhi can generate (in addition to the many it has created in recent years), the more people will want to move there.


pages: 651 words: 135,818

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence by Robert I. Rotberg

barriers to entry, BRICs, colonial rule, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, low interest rates, megacity, megaproject, microcredit, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Scramble for Africa, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, trade route, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Chinese Businesspeople: What Sort of Difficulties Have You Had in Doing Business in Lagos? Number responding 6 5 4 3 2 1 Power failure Insecurity Transport infrastructure Source: See note to figure 13-1. and poor transportation modes. Three respondents worried about “insecurity” and the “security problem” in Lagos, referring to the growing criminality in the megacity as well as to occasional political unrest. Another important clue toward a fuller understanding of the Chinese community in Lagos came in response to a question about how and why Chinese businesspeople decided to come to Nigeria. Personal ties seem to be the dominant link through which the Chinese are coming to work in Lagos: four of the eight indicated that family members had brought them to Nigeria, while an additional two said that friends had persuaded them to come.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

In a relatively small footprint, a city not only provides living quarters and occupations in a minimum of space, but it also generates a maximum of ideas and inventions. Stewart Brand notes in the “City Planet” chapter of his book Whole Earth Discipline, “Cities are wealth creators; they have always been.” He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida, who claims that forty of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18 percent of the world’s population, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.” A Canadian demographer calculated that “80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities.” The raggedy new part of each city, its squats and encampments, often house the most productive citizens.


pages: 492 words: 141,544

Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson

artificial general intelligence, basic income, blockchain, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Ken Thompson, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, megacity, Neil Armstrong, precariat, quantum entanglement, Schrödinger's Cat, seigniorage, strong AI, Turing machine, universal basic income, zero-sum game

Now he was also seeing evidence that those people whose household registration was located in rural areas nearest to the growing cities were staying at home, even when formal jobs would have allowed them to change their registration into the cities. Presumably this was because they hoped to get paid to leave their land, to make room for urban development. So now rings of population stability surrounded all the fastest-growing cities, especially the Jing-Jin-Ji megacity, formerly a great source of migrant labor, now stabilized by anticipation. Both inside and outside these rings the movement was as turbulent as ever, violent crosscurrents of exploitation and suffering, the ultimate result of sannong weiji, the three rural crises, which were behind all the migration out of the rural areas: that people’s lives were bitter, that the countryside was really poor, that agriculture was in crisis.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

But his image was dwarfed by the party’s modern icon: Jayaram Jayalalithaa, a diminutive but powerful woman, whose unsmiling face stared down from four giant billboards, one of which stood almost as tall as the building itself. The commercial capital of the south, Chennai had a different vibe from the rest of urban India. It was still a megacity, with seven million people and steamy, fetid weather, but the pace was slower than in Mumbai or New Delhi, with a downtown of hushed streets and low-rise buildings, rather than half-finished glass towers. The local elite viewed themselves differently too: a people who rose early, spent frugally, and venerated pursuits of the mind, from calculus to “Carnatic” classical music.


pages: 502 words: 128,126

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

In the late 1980s, that is what happened to the USSR, with Russia left as a weakened country, dominated by Moscow. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated after the First World War, with a little help from Western imperialists splitting its dominions up between them. Istanbul is today one of the three mega-cities on the edge of Europe because of that legacy, the other two being Moscow and London. There is no oversized city within Europe in between these three. They are the three most populous cities of Europe because they are each the former heart of a bygone empire. Britain has the opportunity to buck the trend if it accepts that its empire status and pretensions are truly over, but the portents are not good.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

Today they are competing for converts in areas of the world, like the road from Kano to Jos, that are already explosive. Across the global south, their main theater of conflict, populations are growing faster than the resources to support them and the average age is getting younger. People are abandoning their traditional villages for ramshackle megacities (the home of half the people of the Middle East, for instance). Large numbers of young men have few traditional structures to keep them under control. Governments in many places are incapable of providing security and welfare services, leaving their unstable and rootless populations ripe for recruitment by religious entrepreneurs.


Ukraine by Lonely Planet

Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, gentrification, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, low cost airline, megacity, Skype, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Designed as a kind of mini–St Petersburg, this grand city contrasts with the surrounding bucolic scenery and is well worth half a day’s exploration. The final stop of the express is Kharkiv, a huge student city of 1.5 million. Essential viewing here is the world’s second-largest city square, which is dominated by the mammoth, Stalinist-era Derzhprom building. From Kharkiv it’s a smooth roll south to another of Ukraine’s eastern megacities – Dnipropetrovsk – still a major centre for Ukraine’s rocket and aviation industries (so be careful what you aim your camera at!). Take a stroll by the Dnipro River before continuing south to Zaporizhzhya, an ugly industrial city but also the location of Khortytsya Island, where the Ukrainian Cossacks once gathered at the sich (fort).


pages: 447 words: 141,811

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

The flourishing field of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long pre-agricultural era. Even today, scholars in this field claim, our brains and minds are adapted to a life of hunting and gathering. Our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality are all the result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-industrial environment, with its mega-cities, aeroplanes, telephones and computers. This environment gives us more material resources and longer lives than those enjoyed by any previous generation, but it often makes us feel alienated, depressed and pressured. To understand why, evolutionary psychologists argue, we need to delve into the hunter-gatherer world that shaped us, the world that we subconsciously still inhabit.


pages: 489 words: 136,195

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demand response, Google Earth, Lewis Mumford, megacity, Minecraft, oil rush, out of africa, planetary scale, precariat, sovereign wealth fund, supervolcano, the built environment, The Spirit Level, uranium enrichment

The distant passage of trains vibrates the walls. Sleep takes time to arrive. Lying there with bedrock in all directions, I wonder at what will remain of our cities as the Anthropocene unfolds over deep time – the stratigraphic markers that will endure in the rock record. Over millions of years, the inland megacities of Delhi and Moscow will largely erode into sands and gravels, to be spread by wind and water into unreadable expanses of desert. The coastal cities of New York and Amsterdam, those claimed soonest by the rising sea levels, will be packed more carefully into soft-settling sediments. It is the invisible cities – the undercities – that will be preserved most cleanly, embedded as they already are within bedrock.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

It may appear at first an odd timeline to end on, but it is one of the clearest demonstrations of what a complete slowdown looks like—what the future will hold elsewhere as slowdown continues. It is not one of the originals drawn by Kawashima; it was made later by another academic, Ushijima Chihiro, and redrawn here in the style of all the other timelines in this book. It is the ROXY timeline of Tokyo—now the world’s most stable mega-city. The method does not always show convergence: for instance, Finland, when tested two decades ago, was still seeing a continued spatial concentration of population toward the center of Helsinki, and a continued spiraling around between suburbanization and concentration similar to Tokyo in earlier decades.23 However, in Japan, where the method was invented, it now appears to be showing convergence and a settling down.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

See photo by Jonathan Bachman, Reuters, at https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2017/02/13/blogs/the-worlds-best-photo/s/13-lens-WPress-slide-JSQ0.html. 45 Keiko Morris and Elliot Brown, ‘WeWork Surpasses JPMorgan as Biggest Occupier of Manhattan Office Space,’ Wall Street Journal, September 18 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/wework-surpasses-jpmorgan-as-biggest-occupier-of-manhattan-office-space-1537268401; ‘WeWork Locations,’ archived November 2017, https://www.wework.com/locations. 46 ‘The We Company’, United States Securities and Exchange Commission, 14 August 2019, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1533523/000119312519220499/d781982ds1.htm. 47 Rani Molla, ‘“Co-living” is the new “having roommates” – with an app’, Vox, 29 May 2019, https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/29/18637898/coliving-shared-housing-welive-roommates-common-quarters. 48 Henny Sender, ‘Investors embrace millennial co-living in Asia’s megacities’, Financial Times, 28 January 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/c57129f8-40d9-11ea-a047-eae9bd51ceba. 49 ‘Coliving is city living made better’, Common, https://www.common.com; Society, http://oursociety.com; ‘Join the global living movement’, The Collective, https://thecollective.com; Winnie Agbonlahor, ‘Co-living in London: Friendship, fines and frustration,’ BBC, April 24, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-43090849. 50 Common, https://www.common.com/why-common/; ‘The 4 Co’s of Coliving’, Ollie, https://www.ollie.co/coliving. 51 Jessica Burdon, ‘Norn: the offline social network reviving the art of conversation’, The Week, 30 April 2018, https://www.theweek.co.uk/93266/norn-the-offline-social-network-reviving-the-art-of-conversation; Annabel Herrick, ‘Norn rethinks co-living for a new generation of nomads’, The Spaces, https://thespaces.com/introducing-norn-the-startup-taking-co-living-to-new-heights/. 52 See comment at: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

“Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long,” Tierney wrote. “He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about ‘Frankenfoods’ and embrace genetic engineering.”[11] Despite the fact that Tierney had neatly summarized an obvious book idea, Brand was still focused on writing about how to be wealthy and socially responsible. The next day Brockman circulated a two-page proposal written by Brand for How to Be Rich Well.


Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Indonesia Highlights Surfing by day, partying at night and absorbing amazing culture in Bali (Click here) Ascending the ancient Buddhist stupa of Borobudur (Click here) before trawling the batik markets of bustling Yogyakarta (Click here) Peeking at komodo dragons at Komodo (Click here) in Nusa Tenggara Paying primate-to-primate respects to the ‘man of the jungle’, the orang-utans (Click here) native to Sumatra and Kalimantan Diving the pristine walls and coral canyons beneath seas of dimpled glass at Pulau Bunaken (Click here) in Sulawesi Exploring the lovely time capsule that is Maluku’s Banda Islands (Click here) Hiking along raging rivers and scaling exposed ridges to reach interior Papua’s remote tribal villages in the Baliem Valley (Click here) JAVA The heart of the nation, Java is an island of megacities and mesmerising natural beauty. It’s the economic powerhouse of Indonesia, as well as the political epicentre, an island with complex, profound cultural traditions in art, dance, spiritualism and learning. Many of the cities are pretty uninspiring; pollution levels are high and they’re plagued by environmental issues.

There are buses to Bogor from Cianjur (without/with air-con 14,000/20,000Rp, two hours) and the highway by Cipanas every 20 minutes; angkot ply the route on Sundays. * * * BANDUNG Big, burly Bandung is like a bat to the back of the head after the verdant mountains around Cibodas. Once dubbed the ‘Paris of Java’, this is one of Indonesia’s megacities (the Bandung conurbation has over seven million inhabitants), with a city centre that’s prone to Jakarta-style congestion. Few travellers make a concerted effort to come here, but rummage through the concrete sprawl and odd pockets of interest remain, including some Dutch art-deco monuments, the quirky fibreglass statues of Jeans St, and some cool cafes popular with the thousands of students who call this city home.

Philippines Highlights Drift among the limestone cathedrals and azure lagoons of the Bacuit Archipelago around El Nido (Click here) Trek through the skyscraping rice terraces around Banaue (Click here)and Bontoc (Click here) in North Luzon’s Cordillera Mountains Have a night out in Manila (Click here), a city that never sleeps Explore sunken WWII wrecks and kayak amid the myriad islands around Coron (Click here) Sun, sea sports and dancing till dawn on the stunning beaches of Boracay (Click here) Hop from natural spring to coral reef, to volcano, to waterfall around lush Camiguin Island (Click here) Discover unheralded Dumaguete (Click here), in range of an enviable mix of adventures and getaways Take Cebu (Click here) by storm: partying in Cebu City, then detoxing on idyllic Malapascua Island MANILA 02 / POP 11.5 MILLION Manila’s moniker, the ‘Pearl of the Orient’, couldn’t be more apt – its cantankerous shell reveals its jewel only to those resolute enough to pry. No stranger to hardship, the city has endured every disaster both man and nature could throw at it, and yet today the chaotic 600-sq-km metropolis thrives as a true Asian megacity. Skyscrapers pierce the hazy sky, mushrooming from the grinding poverty of expansive shantytowns, while gleaming malls foreshadow Manila’s brave new air-conditioned world. The congested roads snarl with traffic, but like the overworked arteries of a sweating giant, they are what keep this modern metropolis alive.


pages: 2,313 words: 330,238

Lonely Planet Turkey (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, James Bainbridge, Brett Atkinson, Steve Fallon, Jessica Lee, Virginia Maxwell, Hugh McNaughtan, John Noble

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, country house hotel, Exxon Valdez, Kickstarter, megacity, Mustafa Suleyman, place-making, restrictive zoning, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

Hatay Archaeology Museum Reopened in new premises that do justice to Antakya’s great collection of classical mosaics. Cities Turks are a regionalist bunch; they will invariably tell you their town is en çok güzel (the most beautiful) – but these are the best places to experience urban Turkey. İstanbul The world’s only city on two continents, the megacity was once the capital of empires. Antalya The classically beautiful and stylishly modern gateway to the Turkish Riviera. İzmir Turkey’s third-largest city is right on the Aegean; its kordon (seafront promenade) is a joy. Antakya (Hatay) The site of the biblical Antioch has a distinctively Arabic feel.

While there are many constants throughout Turkey and the food is certainly excellent everywhere, this is an incredibly diverse country offering varied experiences. Each region has its own charms, so choose wisely and you could find yourself hiking across snowy mountains in wild northeastern Anatolia, sauntering through cosmopolitan İstanbul or sunbathing on a Mediterranean beach. Regions at a Glance İstanbul Imperial Grandeur The megacity formerly known as Constantinople and Byzantium was the capital of a series of empires. The Aya Sofya, a church-turned-mosque-turned-museum, is the grandest remnant of the Byzantine Empire; Ottoman landmarks include the Blue Mosque and Topkapı Palace. Beyoğlu Bars Beyoğlu is an exhilarating melting pot between the dusk and dawn calls to prayer, when up-for-it crowds swirl through its hole-in-the-wall cocktail bars, rooftop watering holes, pedestrian precincts and bohemian nightclubs.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

If present rates persist, China’s economy could surpass America’s in 2014 in terms of domestic purchasing power and by 2020 in current dollar terms.22 Indeed, in some ways the Asian century has already arrived. China is on the brink of surpassing the American share of global manufacturing, having overtaken Germany and Japan since the new century began. China’s biggest city, Shanghai, is already far larger than any American city and sits atop a new league table of non-Western megacities. In sheer numbers, of course, Asia has long been the world’s most populous region. But the rapid growth of Africa’s population makes the decline of the West a near certainty. In 1950 the West as defined by Samuel Huntington – Western Europe, North America and Australasia – accounted for 20 per cent of the world’s population.


pages: 541 words: 146,445

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

airport security, Colonization of Mars, Great Leap Forward, invention of writing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, rolodex, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

* * * * * It was a nuanced courtship, slow, old-fashioned (or semi-Martian, perhaps), during which Diane and I discovered each other in wholly new ways. We were no longer straitjacketed by the Spin nor were we children blindly seeking solace. We fell in love, finally, as adults. These were the years when the global population topped out at eight billion. Most of that growth had been funneled into the expanding megacities: Shanghai, Jakarta, Manila, coastal China; Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Maputo; Caracas, La Paz, Tegucigalpa—all the firelit, smog-shrouded warrens of the world. It would have taken a dozen Archways to dent that population growth, but crowding drove a steady wave of emigrants, refugees, and "pioneers," many of them packed into the cargo compartments of illegal vessels and more than a few of them delivered to the shores of Port Magellan already dead or dying.


pages: 618 words: 160,006

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert

bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, different worldview, Donald Trump, joint-stock company, Malacca Straits, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, rising living standards, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS

The success of Crete and Ugarit demonstrated that, although the great land powers could control territory, they could not control the sea or the maritime cities that delivered key resources.19 Sea states bartered trade and tribute for relative independence. However, everything depended on benign trading conditions. Cretan trade with the Hyksos kingdom of Egypt, based in the Nile Delta at Avaris, the commercial mega-city of the era, proved short-lived. Nilotic Egyptian elites at Thebes destroyed the Hyksos, their capital and the connection with Mediterranean trade, shifting power back to the centre of the country, and restoring old inward-looking cultural models. The economic impact of these changes may explain why Cretan society ceased to be sea-based around 1500 BC, when mainland agendas from Mycenean Greece became dominant.


pages: 526 words: 155,174

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

carbon credits, different worldview, dumpster diving, energy security, full employment, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kim Stanley Robinson, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, urban decay, Works Progress Administration

It was the impact of all the other economic activity that was the danger, including strip-mining, coal power generation, deforestation, urbanization of river valleys, cement production and steel manufacturing, and use of dangerous pesticides banned elsewhere. All these factors were combining downstream, in the eastern half of the country, impacting the big river valleys and the coasts, and the many megacities that were covering what farmland they had. Fengzhen said many were seeing signs of a disaster unfolding. Cumulative impacts, Anna thought with a sigh. That was one of the most complex and vexing subjects in her own world of biostatistics. And the Chinese problem was an exercise in macrobiostatistics.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

If this project goes to plan and overcomes local planning concerns in Liverpool, there is a remarkable prize. The developers happen to own the Manchester Ship Canal, and are tilting the marketing of their project to meet the appetite for Chinese-style mega-investments of tens of billions of pounds. Think Chinese funding for a mega-city connecting Liverpool and Manchester, and you might begin to understand the ambition and the spoils that are up for grabs. This is the sort of scale of project that is required by Chinese financiers used to funding ports built on artificial islands, 30-kilometre bridges, and entire new cities. When I asked Jin Liqun of the China Investment Corporation if China was going to pay for Britain’s infrastructure, he giggled like one of the more avuncular Bond villains.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

A 2019 study of the most and least politically intolerant counties in America found almost all to be Democrat, with Boston, Massachusetts, the most prejudiced and unforgiving to people with different views;15 and so unfortunately William Buckley’s famous quip that he’d rather be ruled by the first five hundred people in the Boston phonebook than the faculty of Harvard is rather out of date. Perhaps the growth of cities and megacities, while initially leading to the rise of liberal tolerance, eventually creates a less forgiving environment. Conservatism is rural, and liberalism is urban, yet people in cities are less open-minded in some ways, because they can find their clique or niche. If you live in a small town you’re basically stuck with a group of people with whom you’ve got little in common and so you just learn to accept people’s differences.


pages: 535 words: 149,752

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Chapter 10 Deals The United Airlines jumbo jet hurtled westward over the Pacific Ocean, carrying Tim Cook and other prospectors hungry to do business in Beijing. By 2014, China had solidified its place as the world’s preeminent growth market. Farmers across the country had uprooted from their tiny rural outposts and migrated to megacities that were exploding with higher-paying jobs and frenzied construction. A half dozen of them were as big as or bigger than New York. Brand-conscious consumers were spending more on Huggies diapers and Penfolds Cabernet Sauvignon than were people in the United States. Every day, planes ferried executives from California and beyond to the threshold of Tiananmen Square, where they eagerly worked the halls of power to extract a sliver of the country’s commercial boom.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Or, visit http://media.lonelyplanet.com/ebookmaps and grab a PDF download or print out all the maps in this guide. Plan Your Trip Welcome to Eastern USA Top Experiences Need to Know If You Like... Month by Month Itineraries Road Trips & Scenic Drives Travel with Children Regions at a Glance Top of section welcome to Eastern USA Flanked by mega-cities New York City and Chicago; landscaped with dune-backed beaches, smoky mountains and gator swamps; and steeped in musical roots, the East rolls out a sweet trip. Times Square (Click here), New York City RICHARD I’ANSON/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Mighty Metropolises New York, New York is top of the heap, as Frank Sinatra famously crooned.

Eating »Get messy eating scrumptious Maryland blue crabs at open-air restaurants along Chesapeake Bay. »Turn the clock back a few generations at the retro 1950s Ellen’s Stardust Diner in NYC. »Heft a slice of deep-dish pizza (and scrawl your name on the wall) at Gino’s East in Chicago. Top of section regions at a glance New York City is the East’s hub. More than eight million inhabitants pile into the megacity, a world center for fashion, food, arts and finance. The crowd thins out in neighboring New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where beaches, mountains and literal horse-and-buggy hamlets join the landscape. New England arches north to rocky shores, clapboard fishing villages and Ivy League universities. The Capital Region begins the march south through voluptuous valleys and a slew of historic sites.


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

While riding on the streets of Lagos, Packer’s driver was stopped by an agbero, who demanded money to help the driver negotiate another bribe, with the official traffic police. The traffic cop intervened, if only to collect the bribe—not doing so, it seemed, would actually make the police officer look as if he were derelict in his duty. See George Packer, “The Megacity: Decoding the Chaos of Lagos,” New Yorker, November 26, 2006. See also Adewale Ajayi, Nigerian Tribune, March 2, 2007; and Osise Dibosa, “Olubunmi Peters and Ferma,” This Day, June 12, 2007. take their place: Benjamin A. Olken and Patrick Barron, “The Simple Economics of Extortion: Evidence from Trucking in Aceh,” NBER Working Paper No. 13145, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2007.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

There are exciting developments in the arts today, such as how arts organizations are embracing collaboration through the invention of new art forms. Our faith and religion are moving into a period of change and smart leaders know this. Sunlight has exposed Catholic priests and bishops around the world and churches everywhere are coming to grips with concepts of transparency and integrity. The world’s cities are also under stress, with megacities such as São Paulo and Johannesburg paralyzed by population influx, lack of infrastructure, traffic congestion, pollution, and crime. In the United States and elsewhere, many cities built up since the Second World War are dysfunctional and getting worse as the industrial economy collapses. Detroit has lost more than half its population from its heyday, with large swaths of the city now wasteland, populated by wild animals.20 Yet everywhere there are bold new collaborative initiatives for reinvention.


pages: 564 words: 168,696

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

Aztec architects had designed the temple to align perfectly with the rising and setting of the Sun on key feast days. Moctezuma himself would attend ceremonies, praising the gods and offering tribute in the form of flowers, animal skins, and sometimes human sacrifice. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Tenochtitlan had grown to an unprecedented size. With a population of over 200,000, this Aztec megacity was much larger than most European capitals, including London and Rome. Over the following decades, the Aztec Empire continued to expand, stretching right across the Mexican plateau and incorporating over three million people.3 All this was made possible thanks to the advanced state of Aztec science and technology.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Just as the internet has changed the volume, source, and availability of content, it also has wrought dramatic changes in how this information is used. THE ELECTRIC BRAIN AWAKENS The ten killers snuck into Mumbai’s port aboard inflatable boats on November 26, 2008. Once ashore, they split up, fading into the megacity of some 18 million people. The attacks started soon after: a staccato of massacres at a railway station, a tourist café, a luxury hotel, and a synagogue. Over the next three days, 164 civilians and police officers would be killed. Another 300 would be injured. The tragedy would mark the deadliest Indian terror attack in a generation.


Never Bet Against Occam: Mast Cell Activation Disease and the Modern Epidemics of Chronic Illness and Medical Complexity by Lawrence B. Afrin M. D., Kendra Neilsen Myles, Kristi Posival

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, epigenetics, Helicobacter pylori, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, megacity, microbiome, mouse model, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, pre–internet, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

., the mean corpuscular volume, or MCV) rises greatly compared to normal, and many of the neutrophils take on an odd appearance with five or more lobes to their nuclei instead of the usual three or four. The blood cell precursors in the megaloblastic bone marrow can look so weird that doctors sometimes can be fooled into thinking that a leukemia is present. Megestrol acetate “Meh´-ges-trol as´-eh-tāt.” Probably more widely known by its most popular U.S. trade name Megace (“Meg´-ās”), megestrol acetate is a drug that has some chemical similarity, and thus some similarity in biological action, to the natural hormone progesterone. Megestrol acetate is commonly used to help stimulate appetite in patients who suffer from poor appetite for various reasons, but it’s not entirely clear that this effect on appetite is reliable, and megestrol acetate has other disadvantages including increasing the risk for abnormal clotting.


pages: 583 words: 182,990

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

He thought about that for a while. He walked a lot, it was easy in Zurich, a form of entertainment. That was true in many cities, as far as he knew. There were a few that were unwalkable, like Los Angeles, for which planners had struggled to invent new names, like conurbation or agglomeration or megacity; but in most cities walking still worked, at least in their central districts and their various nodes. Anyway it was no great deprivation to get back on foot, if you lived in a city like Zurich. Of course it was good to get out of town sometimes, see something different. That meant trains and trams, but the watts used could be calculated there too; the 2,000 Watt Society had provided its members with lots of graphs to estimate individual use.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

At the end of four weeks, traffic flow had improved significantly at the intersection, with no increase in accidents or injuries. Portishead is no outlier. Several other experiments with such “naked streets” show similar results. There is a debate on the practicality of naked streets in large cities, and a complete lack of traffic lights is unlikely to be workable at the busiest intersections in megacities. Nevertheless, it is hard not to conclude from these experiments that technology, by taking away initiative and judgment from humans, sometimes makes things worse, not better. The same is true when it comes to production tasks. Human intelligence derives its strength from being situational and social: The ability to understand and successfully respond to one’s environment, enabling individuals to fluidly adapt to changing conditions.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

As a consequence of overcrowding, measures such as social distancing are nearly impossible to execute. Consider Dhaka: the city itself has more than 10 million residents, and 21.5 million people live in the greater Dhaka area, making it one of the most densely populated cities on the planet. Around 4 million people inhabit more than 5,000 slums scattered around the megacity, with around 75 percent of those households constrained to a single room. In these sprawling shantytowns, sanitation is abysmal and the spread of communicable diseases commonplace—perfect conditions for the rapid spread of a deadly virus.3 The country’s health care system was also in no position to handle a major outbreak.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Although I have said that this “second unbundling” process transferred manufacturing to the global south, that is not quite right. High-tech global manufacturing went to Korea, so much so that Korea is now a full member of the global north, alongside Japan, as well as Taiwan. It went, above all, to parts of China—but specifically to the growth-pole megacities of the Pearl River Delta, Shanghai, and Beijing, and secondarily to the coasts, but not to the interior. It also went to India—but overwhelmingly to Maharashtra and Karnataka, not to Uttar Pradesh. It went to Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, and is now going to Vietnam. It went to Poland, next door to the manufacturing powerhouse of Germany, whose firms found enormous benefits in spreading out their value chains to make use of the low-wage labor found next door.


pages: 686 words: 201,972

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

This blizzard of print was directed at white Protestant men and women in the old western and northeastern states. These people were believed to resent the changes that were occurring in America and to be ready to accept that drunkenness might be behind such phenomena as industrialization, the rise of megacities, and their population with hordes of Roman Catholic immigrants. In consequence, ASL periodicals, pamphlets, and its touring speakers made eugenics a central theme in their case against drink. The speakers peppered their discourses with racism and images of the decline of the breed. According, for example, to Richmond Pearson Hobson, the ASL’s star orator, “In America we are making the last stand of the great white race, and substantially of the human race.


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

This race of elegant mutants was the creation of a twenty-first-century biologist named Samuel Lann, who began his project by experimenting on his own children. The conceptual breakthrough of Slan was portraying “normal” human beings not as saviors but as the enemy. As the story opens, the book’s genetically modified protagonist, Jommy Cross, and his kind are being hunted to extinction in the decaying streets of a sprawling megacity called Centropolis. Jommy’s mother is forced to sacrifice her own life so that Jommy may live; with the help of a crafty old homeless woman, the boy takes shelter in an underground society surviving in the nooks and crannies of the urban landscape. Reprinted as a stand-alone novel after World War II, Slan caused a sensation.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

Randers's book forecasts that Pakistan will run out of resources “well before 2052,” leading to increased internal conflicts, which could be especially perilous given the country's nuclear arsenal.70 Along with the human catastrophe of failed states and the misery of billions in overwhelmed coastal megacities, the nonhuman world will be suffering its own form of collapse. Natural ecosystems will be reduced to islands of conservation habitats surrounded by vast agribusiness plantations and urban sprawl. Tropical rain forests will only survive as degraded, shrinking remnants in national parks. Cameron and Jude might not, however, consider this situation as gravely as we do, given their reduced expectation of the natural world from shifting baseline syndrome, as well as their ability to experience vastly enhanced virtual-reality immersions in wildlife reservations, enabling them to feel closer to nature in some ways than do many urban residents in today's world.71 On the other hand, might Cameron and Jude be more profoundly disturbed by the convulsions of their world than an equivalent couple in today's society would be?


pages: 812 words: 205,147

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

British Empire, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, global reserve currency, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, land reform, lone genius, megacity, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, spice trade, surveillance capitalism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile

Not for nothing are so many English words connected with weaving – chintz, calico, shawl, pyjamas, khaki, dungarees, cummerbund, taffetas – of Indian origin.44 It was certainly responsible for a much larger share of world trade than any comparable zone and the weight of its economic power even reached Mexico, whose textile manufacture suffered a crisis of ‘de-industrialisation’ due to Indian cloth imports.45 In comparison, England then had just 5 per cent of India’s population and was producing just under 3 per cent of the world’s manufactured goods.46 A good proportion of the profits on this found its way to the Mughal exchequer in Agra, making the Mughal Emperor, with an income of around £100 million,* by far the richest monarch in the world. The Mughal capitals were the megacities of their day: ‘They are second to none either in Asia or in Europe,’ thought the Jesuit Fr Antonio Monserrate, ‘with regards either to size, population, or wealth. Their cities are crowded with merchants, who gather from all over Asia. There is no art or craft which is not practised there.’ Between 1586 and 1605, European silver flowed into the Mughal heartland at the astonishing rate of 18 metric tons a year, for as William Hawkins observed, ‘all nations bring coyne and carry away commodities for the same’.47 For their grubby contemporaries in the West, stumbling around in their codpieces, the silk-clad Mughals, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power – a meaning that has remained impregnated in the word ‘mogul’ ever since.


pages: 746 words: 221,583

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge

air gap, combinatorial explosion, epigenetics, indoor plumbing, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, power law, random walk, risk tolerance, technological singularity, the scientific method, Vernor Vinge

The Tropics had been in the whole disk images only, and there had been only a few breaks in the jungle cloud cover, but, “What we saw back then was not so crowded and somehow—well, it looked simpler.” She watched silently for a moment, wondering. Down Here there was no possibility that the Choir itself was super-intelligent. For that matter, there wasn’t even the communication technology to support wide-area cognition: Mindsounds would take minutes to percolate across the megacity. And yet, there was some form of group activity. The mob seemed to have greater and lesser densities, and not just where Tines gathered around the piles of rotting vegetation that filled many of the smaller plazas. There were places where she could see the ground, where members were separated by meters of empty space.


pages: 857 words: 232,302

The Evolutionary Void by Peter F. Hamilton

clean water, information retrieval, Kickstarter, megacity, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, plutocrats, trade route, urban sprawl

Even after the development of Higher culture and ANA, the wormhole network was maintained, giving it a strategic importance above most Inner worlds. As such, eight River-class and two Capital-class warships were patrolling the star system. Planetary defenses were at condition-one alert, with powerful force fields covering the wormhole generators and transfer stations along with the megacity. After waiting for three minutes to confirm that no sensors had located the ship, the Delivery Man ordered it to fly in to the Leo Twins. They were the companions to Alpha Leonis: Little Leo, an orange dwarf, around which a red dwarf, Micro Leo, orbited. Scanning them with passive sensors, he found something else there.


pages: 840 words: 224,391

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by Max Blumenthal

airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, cognitive dissonance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, European colonialism, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, intentional community, knowledge economy, megacity, moral panic, Mount Scopus, nuclear ambiguity, open borders, plutocrats, surplus humans, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, urban planning, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The skyscrapers rising up around Tel Aviv lent it the feeling of any other thriving center of capital, but there was something about the city that was truly distinct from anywhere else. For all its trappings of cosmopolitanism, Tel Aviv was intentionally planned to be one of the most ethnically exclusive mega-cities in the world. It may have been situated in the heart of the Middle East, yet Tel Aviv had far fewer Arab residents than Chicago, the largest city in the American Midwest. And Huldai was determined to keep it that way, not only in a demographic sense by, for instance, supporting the construction of the separation wall that obstructed Palestinian workers from reaching Tel Aviv from the West Bank, but in a symbolic sense as well.


PostGIS in Action, 2nd Edition by Regina O. Obe, Leo S. Hsu

business logic, call centre, crowdsourcing, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, functional programming, Google Earth, job automation, McMansion, megacity, Mercator projection, Network effects, null island, openstreetmap, planetary scale, profit maximization, Ruby on Rails, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, SQL injection, traveling salesman, web application

When you want to load these in an R session, you run the command load("filepath"). Listing 16.4 Saving PostgreSQL data in an R data format with PL/R CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION ch16.save_places_rdata() RETURNS text AS $$ places_mega <<- pg.spi.exec(" SELECT name, latitude, longitude FROM ch16.places WHERE megacity = 1 ") Store results in R variables B nb <<- pg.spi.exec(" SELECT name, latitude, longitude FROM ch16.places WHERE ST_DWithin(geog,ST_GeogFromText('POINT(7.5 9.0)'),1000000) ") save(places_mega, nb, file="C:/Temp/places.RData") Save variables return("done") to R data file $$ LANGUAGE 'plr'; C In listing 16.4 you create two data sets that contain world places, one based on attributes and one based on a spatial data.frame B.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

Davison, Lee, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn, and Robert B. Shoemaker, eds. (1992). Stilling the Grumbling Hive: Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dawisha, Adeed (2009). Iraq: A Political History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. de Gramont, Diane (2014). “Constructing the Megacity—The Dynamics of State-Building in Lagos, Nigeria, 1999–2013.” Unpublished MPhil dissertation in government, University of Oxford. Dean, Trevor (1987). Land and Power: Ferrara Under the Este, 1350–1450. New York: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1999). “The Rise of the Signori.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History, edited by David Abulafia, vol. 5, 1198–1300.


pages: 1,318 words: 403,894

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

air freight, airport security, autism spectrum disorder, book value, crowdsourcing, digital map, drone strike, Google Earth, industrial robot, informal economy, Jones Act, large denomination, megacity, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, ransomware, restrictive zoning, scientific management, side project, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, South China Sea, SQL injection, the built environment, the scientific method, young professional

Not fast enough to make a difference. “Sorry,” Richard said, as they were making eye contact. Then he pulled the trigger and blew Jabari’s head off. SEAMUS HAD DEVELOPED a set of instincts around timing and schedule that owed a lot to his upbringing in Boston and his postings in teeming Third World megacities such as Manila, which was to say that he always expected it would take hours to get anywhere. Those habits led him comically astray in Coeur d’Alene at six thirty in the morning. They reached the municipal airport in less time than it took the SUV’s windows to defog. The chopper place was just inside the entrance.


pages: 1,445 words: 469,426

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

It is oil that makes possible where we live, how we live, how we commute to work, how we travel—even where we conduct our courtships. It is the lifeblood of suburban communities. Oil (and natural gas) are the essential components in the fertilizer on which world agriculture depends; oil makes it possible to transport food to the totally non-self-sufficient megacities of the world. Oil also provides the plastics and chemicals that are the bricks and mortar of contemporary civilization, a civilization that would collapse if the world's oil wells suddenly went dry. For most of this century, growing reliance on petroleum was almost universally celebrated as a good, a symbol of human progress.


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Lothal possessed a substantial dockyard and several anchors have been found there. It traded in several directions, for there were contacts with the Neolithic peoples living further south along the west coast of India as well as with the Persian Gulf.40 So much attention has concentrated on the mystery of how the two highly organized mega-cities came to be built along the Indus river system that rather little interest has been shown in other places, and even the assumption that these were the twin capitals of a single empire is pleasant speculation. Rigid central control was in place, for, as the archaeologist Stuart Piggott observed, the size of bricks used to build the two great cities, the highly standardized pottery, and the weights and measures show ‘absolute uniformity’: ‘there is a terrible efficiency about the Harappā civilization which recalls all the worst of Rome’, while he also observed ‘an isolation and stagnation hard to parallel in any known civilization of the Old World’.