"megacorporations/megaregions/megacities/urbanization - the control grid"
http://globalistnews.blogspot.com/2014/04/megacorporationsmegaregionsmegacitiesur.html
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Floyd: Bring on ‘new urbanism,’ but don’t demonize suburbs
Jacquielynn Floyd jfloyd@dallasnews.com
Published: 26 June 2014 08:31 PM
Updated: 26 June 2014 09:46 PM
My husband daydreams about living in a high-rise apartment downtown. He thinks it would be paradise.
He’d trade his long daily DART ride for a walk to work. We could hop a quick shuttle to hockey games, he says, or cross the street for a burger and a cold beer. There would be a little grocery store at street level on the corner and a homey pizza cafe with tables on the sidewalk — all just an elevator ride away.
I don’t see him giving up his treasured pickup — let’s not go crazy here — but he could leave it parked in a garage for weeks at a stretch.
Me, I dream about living in a rustic house in the woods with decks and twisty wooden stairs. It would be at the end of a long dirt road with deer wandering through a yard shaded by oak trees. We would stay linked to the broader culture by occasional trips to town and a reliable Wi-Fi connection.
As an imperfect compromise, we live in a peaceful Denton County suburb. He gets — to a degree — convenience and proximity. I get — as much as possible — quiet and space and a woodsy backyard view of trees and wild grapevines.
So why do I feel so defensive? Because suburbs are the devil.
Well, they’ve been the devil for decades, but there seems to be a fresh urgency to the hostility — in these parts, anyway. As a spirit of “new urbanism” is making serious inroads in Dallas, its satellite communities are fielding the blame for a host of woes: not just freeways and sprawl but such elemental human failings as greed, bigotry and mindless consumerism.
This is a shame, because I share the excitement surrounding the changes occurring in center-city Dallas. I would love to see downtown as a destination so lively and interesting that we could jump on the train with no specific event in mind but be sure of finding plenty to see and do.
Opinions vary about how rapidly it’s happening, but central Dallas really is evolving. And I appreciate that more freeways, more subdivisions and more sprawl are the signature of our postwar past, not our future.
But please, por favor, could we dispense with the haughty stereotype of suburban cities as unenlightened wastelands? If we really want to make our lives more “walkable” and “sustainable,” we need to quit pretending there’s one narrow model for virtuous existence, and no others need apply.
There’s a lot going on in Dallas, as illustrated by the discussions that surrounded last week’s back-to-back meetings here of the New Cities Summit and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Both groups, theoreticians and politicians alike, voiced similar enthusiasm for designing cities for people rather than cars and for fostering street-level life that extends beyond office hours.
We don’t get there by building a wall at the city limits to keep the suburban parasites out or by pretending that this won’t continue to be, for the foreseeable future, a region dependent on automobiles.
I have a hard time really grasping the us-vs.-them mentality, since to me, this really is a “region,” not an amalgam of discrete municipalities. Over the last 30 years, I have lived in Dallas, Fort Worth and places in between. I have lived in a city while working in a suburb and vice versa. Like many of the 6.5 million or so residents of our metro region, I’m a veteran commuter.
It would be wonderful to be less car-dependent. The growth of transit-oriented developments near DART stations is a trend not just in Dallas but in suburban cities as well. The term “suburb,” in fact, should be used advisedly. Many of our “satellites” are full-blown, fast-growing cities with employment centers of their own.
My Flower Mound neighborhood sure isn’t the grim, conformist Zombieville the dreaded word “suburb” evokes. It’s multiethnic; it’s integrated into the town’s 33-mile network of greenbelt walking trails; we see a surprising amount of wildlife. Our local high school had the second-highest number of national merit finalists in the state this year. It’s a good place to live.
I think we’re blurring the boundaries between city and suburb, residential and commercial, high-density and low. It means more options for more people and a better life for everybody.
But there’s more than one way to live. None of us has to be the devil.
here:
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/columnists/jacquielynn-floyd/20140626-bring-on-new-urbanism-but-dont-demonize-suburbs.ece
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The rise and rise of the Asian megacity (and why 'metacities' are the next big thing)
Asia's rapid urbanisation is changing the very shape and nature of what we think of as a city, writes Vanessa Collingridge, in the first of a three-part series
A FISHING VILLAGE JUST A FEW DECADES AGO, SHENZHEN IS NOW A BUSTLING MEGACITY. PHOTOS: AFP; IMAGINECHINA; REUTERS; XINHUA
Looking out from any one of the skyscrapers that dominate Shenzhen's central business district, it seems as though the city never ends.
As far as the eye can see, there's an almost unremitting jumble of shiny tower blocks and lower-rise offices, warehouses and arterial highways with their nose-to-tail traffic. These are the classic hallmarks of an urban landscape that, in the words of Disney's Buzz Lightyear, seems to stretch "to infinity and beyond!"
But what's less obvious is that this cityscape represents one of the most remarkable changes in human history - in any era. In the West, you get large cities such as London and Paris but, in Asia, witness the rise - and rise - of the megacity.
Megacities are generally defined as those with more than 10 million inhabitants. Back in the early 1950s, there were only two on Earth - New York and Tokyo; by 2010, according to United Nations figures, this number had shot up to 24 - and by 2025, the UN predicts, there will be 39 of these supersized cities. These numbers tell a remarkable story about the way we are choosing to organise our lives but, look deeper into the data, and an equally fascinating trend reveals itself: the new urban areas are growing fastest not in the traditional powerhouses of Europe and America but in Asia and the "global south".In 2010, just nine of the world's megacities were located in Asia; scroll forward 15 years and 21 of the projected 39 megacities will be situated here, with the biggest growth in population expected to take place in the new or lesser-known cities in South and East Asia.
But it's not just the rapid increase in their numbers or their sheer size that makes these megacities fascinating. They look, feel and behave differently, too.
more here:
http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1530748/larger-life-rise-and-rise-asian-megacity
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Megacities of Asia Part II: Perils of the concrete jungle
Unprecedented levels of migration from rural areas have led to a host of logistical and environmental problems, writes Vanessa Collingridge.
QIANHAI, WHICH WILL HOUSE SHENZHEN’S NEW INTERNATIONAL FINANCE DISTRICT BY 2020. PHOTOS: IMAGINECHINA; BIOSPHOTO; JONATHAN WONG; CHRIS WEBSTER
One hour’s drive from Hong Kong takes you to a construction field of reddish brown mud. Here, amid the snaking tracks of dump trucks, men in hard hats discuss the transformation of 15 sq km of wasteland into what’s fast becoming known as the “Manhattan of the Pearl River Delta”.
Qianhai – or, to give it its formal title, the “Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Modern Service Industry Cooperation Zone” – is the very model of a modern urban centre.
On paper, it looks like something out of Star Wars: an arc of skyscrapers rising from reclaimed coastal lands and standing sentinel round a circular harbour. Wide boulevards and geometric patterns proclaim a sense of order and good governance: a safe place for the world’s capital.
For this has been designated a special economic zone, the site of Shenzhen’s new international finance district by 2020 and a nascent competitor to the global greats of Hong Kong’s Central, Wall Street and the City of London.
“It’s a hot topic of debate whether Qianhai will be in competition with Hong Kong,” says Marcos Chan, head of research for Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan for real-estate multinational CBRE. “Here we have a big piece of land in Shenzhen with potentially up to some 150 million square feet of office space that effectively transforms it into a new strategic centre for commerce, finance and the professional services. And there are enormous incentives for companies to set up business here.
It’s leveraging on the fact that while it might be physically in mainland China, for the first time ever there’s a chance that Hong Kong’s legal framework can be applied in certain business aspects.”
In the past 12 months, more than 10 sites have been sold and their developers have broken ground.
“These sites are huge in scale,” says Chan, “and as a result developers are often paying very good sums – accommodation values ranging from 8,000 yuan [HK$10,000] to 28,000 yuan per square metre. And it’s not just in Qianhai that we’re seeing interest: there’s anecdotal evidence to suggest that people in Shenzhen are already speculating on the residential properties nearest to Qianhai, even though it’s still pretty much a construction site.”
more here:
http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1536089/perils-concrete-jungle
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Megacities of Asia Part III: grey areas
Urbanisation is changing the face of Asia but what’s next for the continent’s city dwellers, asks Vanessa Collingridge, in the last of a three-part series
AN ARTIST’S IMPRESSION SHOWS WAVE CITY IN GHAZIABAD, A “SMART CITY” IN INDIA. PHOTOS: CORBIS; SCMP; AYONA DATTA
“Never in the history of urbanisation have we found ourselves living in cities this big!” proclaims Professor Chris Webster, dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. Despite a 30-year career studying the built environment, he still manages to sound impressed.
“What we have now is a completely new discussion about transport, communication and the structure and systems of cities; even about the meaning of international borders.”
The new urban structures to which Webster refers are what he calls “megaclusters” or “megaregions” – the startling phenomenon of supersized cities expanding into one another to create vast urban corridors from Delhi to Mumbai, or Hong Kong to the furthest reaches of the Pearl River Delta. It’s a phenomenon that is happening worldwide but particularly in Asia and the so-called “global south”, where the speed and scale of urbanisation are leaving analysts stunned and urban governments swamped.
And it’s little surprise. Four years ago, the world reached a tipping point; humans became an urban species, with more than half of us living in towns and cities. According to the United Nations, Asia’s urban population is set to soar from 1.9 billion in 2011 to 3.3 billion by 2050, while Africa and Asia combined will account for 86 per cent of the increase in the world’s urban population. It’s a shift, not only in terms of population but also in terms of potential, that has sent ripples of anxiety throughout the corridors of power.
“Because of the ambiguity of the situation and the speed of development, onlookers like the United Nations and World Bank are seriously concerned that some cities are grossing out – they’ve got too nebulous, too large – and it’s causing a kind of urban existential panic,” says Webster.
more here:
http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1540813/megacities-asia-part-iii-grey-areas
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Robert Moran
Who's Your Megacity? The 21st Century Metropolis
Posted: 06/18/2014 2:09 am EDT Updated: 06/18/2014 8:59 am EDT
Although the Richard Florida vs. Joel Kotkin debate over America's urban-suburban future rages on, the future of cities is a critically important subject for American policymakers, urban planners, and citizens.
In fact, aside from global aging, one of the greatest global trends in 21st century life is urbanization. America industrialized and urbanized in the late 19th century and early 20th and then pioneered suburbanization. But, globally the story is very different. The world is urbanizing rapidly.
To better understand the implications of this as a public opinion researcher and a futurist, I attended the New Cities Summit as a representative of the World Future Society. Held this year in Dallas, Texas, the New Cities Summit is a tour de force of urban evolution.
When it comes to 21st century urbanism, there are a plethora of emerging trends, weak signals and alternative futures. There are discussions around green cities with vertical farming, resilient cities capable of taking economic and environmental shocks, walkable cities, cultural hub cities and even the city as aerotropolis -- a city built around a global hub airport.
But, on a global level, the reality of 21st century urban life is far less exotic. While the West and developed nations that made the rural to urban shift decades ago focus on the non-material aspects of city life, the Rest (developing nations) will undergo extremely rapid urbanization and focus on far more basic issues. For example, in 2014 the world's population was 50 percent urban with 23 megacities (a megacity has a population of over 10,000,000). By 2025 60 percent of the global population will be urban and the world will have 37 megacities. And it is highly likely that these megacities will not only shape their inhabitants' attitudes, but will shape national and global governance.
We see this now in America today with highly distinctive urban, suburban and rural voting patterns. But, more challenging is the rise of the globally integrated megacity. In reality, if you live in an American city today you live in either a regional, national or global city. And this makes an enormous difference in your tastes, political beliefs and the ideas you bump into. Regional cities are regional banking and health care hubs servicing a regional market and attracting a regional workforce. National cities are larger, with greater air travel service and attracting a national level workforce. But global megacities (like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc.) are fully integrated into the global economy, with ample non-stop airline service to other global cities and a global workforce. And this is where it gets interesting, because these global megacities house a globally connected elite that is pulling away from the traditional nation-state. As one panelist, Arturo Sarukhan the former Mexican ambassador to the United States, observed, "we are going back to the early Renaissance where city-states are playing an increasing role." This is undoubtedly true. Megacity mayors routinely lead trade delegations and influence the political dialogue of their respective nation-states. Michael Bloomberg and Boris Johnson come leaping to mind as obvious examples.
If the idea of globally integrated megacities rivalling the nation state or the idea of megacity mayors conducting peer to peer diplomacy (what Parag Khanna called "diplomacity"), it shouldn't. The US National Intelligence Council (NIC), the long term strategic analysis arm of the Director of National Intelligence seriously considers this exact scenario in its Global Trends 2030 report under a scenario titled "Non-State World." In this scenario the nation-state is forced to share power with megacities, NGOs and transnational groups. And, quoting directly from the study, "Mayors of mega-cities take a lead in ramping up regional and global cooperation."
Richard Florida's famous book asks provocatively "Who's your City?" But, the New Cities Summit suggests that a better question is "Who's your megacity?"
source-links here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-moran/whos-your-megacity-the-21_b_5505919.html
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New Cities Summit: Cultural districts are multiplying rapidly, all over the world
By Michael Granberry
mgranberry@dallasnews.com
2:52 pm on June 18, 2014 |
It’s no coincidence that the international New Cities Summit is being held this week in the Dallas Arts District. Such districts are exploding internationally, with more than $250 billion being targeted over the next 10 to 15 years in building cultural districts around the globe.
Adrian Ellis, founder of AEA Consulting and director of the Global Cultural Districts Network, moderated Wednesday’s panel on “Cultural Districts as Engines of Urban Transformation.” They are being used as such vehicles, he said, not only in the United States but also Taiwan, Brazil, China and the Middle East.
“The motivation for much of that investment is the branding or ID’ing of cities,” Ellis said.
But the problem, say the panelists, is that regardless of where the new cultural districts are located, not all are as inclusive of the population as a whole as they should be. Nor are their creators as mindful as they should be of how to use their architecture — their “hardware” — serve the needs of the city as a whole.
Manal Ataya, director general of the Sharjah Museums Department for the government of Sharjah, cited a competition in the Middle East to build such districts, to draw in tourists but also the community at large.
Jamie Bennett, the executive director of ArtPlace America, said he found himself surprised to be on such a panel, since “in a lot of ways, the mission of my organization is to be anti-cultural district.”
For instance, he said, it’s important to concede that art “exists everywhere,” not just in the artistic cathedrals being built by private or government philanthropy in the center of cities.
“Every community in this country has artists and music and stories,” Bennett said. The danger in building cultural districts is to leave the outlying community with the feeling “that we have built a cultural ghetto. Let that happen over there.”
He prefers to see art as something shared by an entire community made up of diverse peoples.
Even so, such districts can help enormously in building cultural identity. People around the world, for instance, can identify two streets in New York City – Wall Street and Broadway.
Jeffrey Johnson, founding director of the China Megacities Lab at Columbia University and the co-founding Principal of SLAB, noted that around the world governments are investing heavily in cultural infrastructure. That in turn has led to a boom in the growth of museums, especially in China.
China, he said, has built “up to 400 museums per year over the last four years.” In the United States, even during the museum boom years of the early 1990s, the growth was around 30 per year. He, too, cited a danger in building centers that are too “top down,” that fail to embrace the entire city and its people, regardless of wealth or standing.
Ataya said another shortcoming in the growth of museums and cultural districts is that “the planning is never planned enough.” She advocates “absolute engagement” with all the people in the city but regrets the fact that “it doesn’t happen nearly enough … We so need to hear from the local population.”
Jamie Bennett praised the presence of Klyde Warren Park and the free general admission instituted by Dallas Museum of Art director Maxwell Anderson.
It’s that kind of inclusiveness, he said, that needs to be embraced by any city longing for its own cultural district.
here:
http://artsblog.dallasnews.com/2014/06/new-cities-summit-cultural-districts-are-multiplying-rapidly-all-over-the-world.html/
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If You Want to Understand Cities in the 21st Century, Read This Essay
Annalee Newitz
Thursday 6:26pm
In 2008, a young model from rural Canada was brutally murdered in a Shanghai apartment building. The story of how her assailant was (maybe) caught, chronicled by journalist Mara Hvistendahl her engrossing essay And the City Swallowed Them, reveals how 21st century cities are changing the world.
What seems like a cut-and-dried crime story becomes, in Hvistendahl's capable hands, a tale of two young adults adrift in a city far from their rural homes. Diana O'Brien traveled to Shanghai from a small island off the cost of British Columbia, on a dubious modeling contract with a fly-by-night company. Chen Jun, the man convicted of her murder, was also a migrant to the city. He came to Shanghai from rural China, drifting between low-paying jobs at companies just as sketchy as Diana's modeling agency.
The story of how Diana and Chen's lives collided is as bewildering and complex as Shanghai itself, one of the world's biggest and fastest-growing megacities. Home to roughly 25 million people, the city seems like a land of opportunity to people all over the world. But as Diana's parents discovered after her murder, it's also a place where foreigners can get dangerously lost.
Looking for clues, the police discover that the modeling agency that hired Diana has disappeared overnight from its "offices" in an abandoned apartment building. But with the Olympics around the corner, they're under pressure to find a suspect — any suspect — to blame. People from rural China are often arrested for crimes in Shanghai, Hvistendahl notes, because they are far from family and have few connections. With a government that demands a set number of convictions from law enforcement each year, sometimes it's easier to convict strangers than it is to find the truth. Even after Chen confesses to the crime, we never know for sure whether he actually did it.
Hvistendahl is no stranger to difficult topics that raise thorny ethical questions. She published a fascinating book a couple of years ago called Unnatural Selection, about what happens when parents use reproductive technologies to choose the genders of their children. A large part of that book focused on China's one child policy, and Hvistendahl exhaustively researched how that policy and others led to highly skewed gender ratios in many parts of the world. In And the City Swallowed Them, she's used her familiarity with Chinese cultures and her unflinching investigative perspective to tell a story that's just as incendiary.
more here:
http://io9.com/if-you-want-to-understand-cities-in-the-21st-century-r-1596771497
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World 101 - India: The World's Largest Democracy Emerges As A Global Economic Force
June 24, 2014
Experts Saeed Khan, Lecturer in the Department of History and Near East & Asian Studies at Wayne State University and Michael Kugelman, Senior Program Associate for South and Southeast Asia Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars discuss India's current election, the real impact of India's caste system on women's issues and India as an emerging economy.
While India has the 10th largest economy in the world, it's social issues keep it on the front page of the global news. The country with the population of 2.2 billion is a patriarchal society that struggles with women's rights issues. Recent sexual assaults have made scholars look at the correlation between the caste system and rampant gang rape.
POPULOUS STATE India's population will (probably) overtake China's in 2028. According to UN estimates, India will become the most populous country in the world in just 14 years' time, when it will have about 1.45 billion inhabitants. For many in India, becoming the most populous country will be an achievement, marking the country's progress in its rivalry with China.
For others, particularly from the older generations, it represents a failure of the country's decades-old attempts to bring its population under control - which included a controversial and counter-productive mass sterilisation campaign during the 1970s. In fact, birth rates have fallen significantly in almost all parts of India, driven by female education, rising household incomes and greater availability of contraception though this has been partially offset by increased life expectancy.
India's population is likely to reach about 1.6 billion in the 2060s, before decreasing to about 1.5 billion by the end of the century. By then, according to the UN study, Nigeria may have overtaken China as the second most populous country.
audio and more here:
http://wdet.org/shows/craig-fahle-show/episode/world-101-india/
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U.S. Government Plans to Push Americans Out of Suburbs to Move in Planned Cities (video)
Jul 2nd, 2013
http://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/u-s-government-plans-to-push-americans-to-leave-suburbs-and-move-in-planned-cities-video/
The Big Texas Plan to Copy Japan's High-Speed Rail Success
Texas Central Railway intends to build a Houston-Dallas line with private money.
AMY CRAWFORD @amymcrawf 7:30 AM ET
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/06/the-big-texas-plan-to-copy-japans-high-speed-rail-success/372984/
Cities, get ready — the tiny houses are coming
30 Apr 2014 8:06 AM
By Eve Andrews
http://grist.org/cities/cities-get-ready-the-tiny-houses-are-coming/
"chinese urbanization lead to WWIII? - 06.16.2013"
http://globalistnews.blogspot.com/2014/04/chinese-urbanization-lead-to-wwiii.html
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