Reading 1

Unit 2- Reading 1

Page 18

The new magalopolis

Our focus on cities is wrong. Growth and is innovation come from new urban corridors.

China isn’t the world’s most ferocious new economic competitor—the exploding east-coast corridor, from Beijing to Shanghai, is. India as a whole is not developing high-tech industries and attracting jobs, but the booming mega-region stretching from Bangalore to Hyderabad is.

Across the world, in fact, nations don’t spur growth so much as dynamic regions—modern versions of the original “megalopolis,” a term coined by the geographer Jean Gottman to identify the sprawling Boston-New York-Washington economic power corridor in the United States.

The New Megas are the real economic organizing units of the world and the major sources of global wealth, attracting a large share of its talent and generating the most innovation. They take shape as powerful complexes of multiple cities and suburbs, often stretching across national borders— forming a vast expanse of trade, transport, communications, and talent.

Yet, despite the fact that the rise of regions has been apparent for more than a decade, no one has collected systematic information on them—not the World Bank, not the IMF, not the United Nations, not the global consulting firms.

That’s why a team of geographers set about building a world map of the New Megas shaped by satellite images of the world at night, using light emissions to define the outlines of each region, and additional data in categories such as population and economic growth to chart their relative peak strengths and dynamism.

The map makes it clear that the global economy takes shape around perhaps 20 great Megas scattered throughout the world.

These regions are home to just 10 percent of total world population, 660 million people, but produce half of all economic activity, two-thirds of world-class scientific activity, and three quarters of global innovations. The great urbanologist Jane Jacobs was the first to describe why megalopolises grow. When people migrate to one place, they all become more productive.

And the place itself becomes much more productive, because collective creativity grows exponentially. Ideas How more freely, are honed more sharply, and can be put into practice more quickly.

There is, however, a tipping point. The forces of price and congestion begin pushing people away from the center. But make no mistake, this has nothing to do with the “decentralization of work,” as many have argued.

The huge economic advantages of clustering still guide the process, which is why second cities emerge near big cities or in the corridors between them, not in the middle of nowhere. The first region to achieve Mega status and still the biggest Mega in economic terms is the Boston-to-Washington corridor in the U.S.

In 1961 it was home to about 32 million people; by 2025 its population is expected to rise to 58 million, or about 16 percent of all the U.S. population. The region generates (2.6 trillion in economic activity, making it the world’s fourth largest economy, bigger than France or the United Kingdom.

Next in line is Chi-Pitts, the great Midwestern Mega running from Chicago to Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, with $2.1 trillion in economic activity. Three of the power centers of the U.S. economy even stretch beyond American borders: So-Cal runs from Los Angeles to San Diego across the Mexican border to Tijuana; Tor-Buff-Chester sprawls from Toronto, Ontario, to Rochester, New York; and Cascadia runs from Portland, Oregon, to Vancouver, British Colombia.

Aside from the island-bound financial center of Greater London, Europe’s major economic engines do not rely on old borders to define themselves. The Euro-Lowlands cuts across four nations: the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France. The Euro-Sunbelt stretches from Barcelona to Marseille, attracting people and firms with competitive costs and the Mediterranean lifestyle.

Japan is less a country than a network of linked Mega-regions, anchored by Greater Tokyo: indeed, a close look at the light-emissions map shows that its three major metro regions are blurring into a megalopolis of more than 100 million people.

While Mega-regions power advanced economies, they literally define the emerging nations.

The world’s largest concentration of megacities, one of ten mega-comdors in India, stretches from northwest India to Bangladesh across the Indo-Gangetic plain and links a dozen major metropolitan areas. If you removed its Megas, China would be virtually meaningless as an economic category.

What matters are the Shang-King (Shanghai to Nanjing) and Hong-Zen (Hong Kong to Shenzhen) corridors and the area of Greater Beijing. Their combined regional populations totaled more than 274 million people in 2010. These three Megas account for most of Chinese economic output, attract most of its talent, and generate the great majority of its innovations.

Instead of technology helping to spread economic opportunity and lift many more boats, economic power is concentrating in a small number of key regions. It’s time for political and economic leadership to wake up to this new reality. It makes little sense to dwell on individual cities or countries anymore, when the real engines of survival, innovation, and growth are the New Megas.