#mega-cities

GLOBAL CITIES:  A new typology

A new report, “Redefining Global Cities,” by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program provides detailed data on the 123 largest global cities based on their metro economies, as noted recently by Richard Florida in The Atlantic City Lab (6 Oct 2016).

The report, released as part of the Global Cities Initiative (a joint project of Brookings and JP Morgan Chase), develops data on economic output, productivity, globalization (via foreign direct investment), innovation (based on patents and venture capital investment), talent (population with tertiary education), and global connectivity (via measures of airline passengers and Internet connectivity). The report uses these data to create a new typology of the seven types of global cities. The first three are the world’s leading economic power centers.

Global Giants: These are the world’s leading economic and financial centers, its foremost global cities. They include New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Osaka-Kobe.

Knowledge Capitals: These are world’s leading knowledge and tech hubs. They include 19 cities centers such as San Jose (the Silicon Valley), Boston, Seattle, San Diego, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta, Portland, and Denver in the U.S. and Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Zurich in Europe.

Asian Anchors: These are Asia’s five established and rising economic power centers: Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul-Incheon, Shanghai, Beijing—and Moscow. Their ability to attract foreign direct investment makes them serious global power players despite having lower levels of economic output than the Global Giants.

In addition to the global economic powerhouses, the report identifies four other types of global cities in the U.S. and around the world which occupy the middle ranks of the world economy. Some are growing in sync with globalization, others are more challenged by it.

American Middleweights: These are 16 mid-sized U.S. metro areas, including places that are growing via connections to the global economy, including Miami and Rustbelt metros like Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, which have up until now have seen their major industries challenged by global competition.

International Middleweights: This group includes 26 mid-sized metros outside the U.S., including Toronto and Vancouver in Canada; Brussels, Rome, Milan, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, and Barcelona in Europe; Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth in Australia; and Tel Aviv in the Middle East. Many of these cities are aspiring tech and knowledge hubs and serve as centers for talent, as well.

Factory China: This set includes 22 second- and third-tier Chinese cities that are manufacturing powerhouses. Even though these metros have experienced rapid growth based on export-intensive manufacturing, they remain relatively poor.

Alarm bells toll for human civilization as world’s 12th largest mega-city to run out of water in just 60 days

(NaturalNews) The city of Sao Paulo is home to 20 million Brazilians, making it the 12th largest mega-city on a planet dominated by shortsighted humans. Shockingly, it has only 60 days of water supply remaining. The city “has about two months of guaranteed water supply remaining as it taps into the second of three emergency reserves,” reports Reuters. [1]

Technical reserves have already been…

Mega-cities are blooming into mega-regions. More than half of all mega-cities are in Asia (list of all mega-cities), and China has the most and fastest growing mega-regions.

(For context, a dense Boston to Washington DC corridor would be a single mega-region.)

Mega-regions are a necessary progression from the mega-city, but to succeed, the region must have many complementary city centers -- very few mega-regions do. With the planning flaw, comes challenges.

A few articles on the challenges of the current designs:

China's Mega-Cities are Combining to Mega-Regions, But They're Doing It Wrong 

China's New Megalopolis Would Be Bigger Than Uruguay and More Populous Than Germany

Showing an image of sprawled-out Mexico City,Ricky Burdett, Professor of Urban Studies, London School of Economics, told the crowd at the Innovative Metropolis conference hosted by the Brookings Institution and Washington University in St. Louis that we are now living in the era of the “endless city.” These cities are endless because they are humungous and also joining up together into megapolises, region-cities. But within the endless city, there are differences. As an example, Burdett said the average commute in Mexico City is 4 hours each way, while it’s just 11 minutes in Hong Kong. In other words, some are strained to the max and not very efficient while others work pretty well.

I found the part about Sao Paulo to truly describe a dysfunctional city. Over 1,000 people commute by helicopter in Sao Paulo, which is the same number as do in New York City and Hong Kong.

Many growing cities are chewing up their ecological functions. “Sao Paulo’s extraordinary city center has only grown outwards, pushing the poor out of the city.” The result: the edges have now been decimated, with people living in shacks right up to the city’s water reservoirs. Parks have almost all been totally consumed. The same story could be told for many other developing world cities.

The article concludes by stating, "Well-connected density is more likely to occur through tighter urban redevelopment projects than through more amorphous sprawled shapes," and that reducing distances between where people live and where people work is paramount in a city that works well.

The problem/opportunity in many cities, especially prairie cities is that there are no natural barriers that hem the city in. Higher density is confusing for folks who can travel 10 minutes to the edge of the town and watch their dog run away for three days (you know, the old saying). The flat plains do nothing to determine the limits of a city.

by Rachel Nuwer

In the urban canyons, pedestrians shuffle in shadowed gullies carved between skyscrapers. Enclosed by hundreds of stories of steel and concrete, the hapless passersby feel the buildings loom over them like dark sentries.

It may sound like a scene from Blade Runner, but some researchers are concerned that mega-cities like New York, Tokyo or Hong Kong darken more than pedestrian walkways. The built environment, some believe, may be an additional source of anxiety in an urbanite’s day-to-day life, as much as pressure from work and relationships.