"This is the most accurate map that’s ever been made of where people are and the economic value of what they do. Our team took the entire world’s population and plotted it by density, and they superimposed the largest urban archipelagos, the mega-cities, with those ovals to show the value of those cities vis-à-vis the national economy. [Note: You can click on the maps to enlarge them.] The map tells us that the world economy is much more structured according to the gravity of these 40 or 50 megacities than the world’s 200 sovereign nations. In almost all countries, cities have all the economic mass and most of the population, and people are moving to cities by the hundreds of millions.
The example of Johannesburg and Pretoria, the capital cluster of South Africa, is revealing. It represents something like 35 to 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and South Africa is a very large country, with more than 50 million people. So much of the population is there, and the country’s connectivity depends on that city, because that’s where all the multinational corporations are headquartered. It’s the same logic in Lagos — there is practically no Nigeria without Lagos. It applies to Sao Paulo in Brazil, Jakarta in Indonesia, Moscow in Russia, Istanbul in Turkey, and every single dot and oval you see on the map..."
W hen I read through to the comments I thought FR had been transplanted.
What absolute Gobbledygook!
The world is getting crowded. Time to blow the top off the yeast bottle.
Umm, no. I think the US has plenty of water, its called the Atlantic and the Pacific. Technology can make it potable.
Ana Swanson, the author of this article, is a member of Wonkblog.
No kidding.
This is a wonk’s idea of an unworkable utopia.
And when everyone lives in the teeming urban areas, where will the food come from? Also, all one has to do in a war is knock out the electric grid, destroy the water treatment plants, and bomb the bridges and major highways leading to the cities, and the war is over. Think about it.
What a bunch of crap. This is a complete Federalist point of view. Because hey, if we get rid of all those nasty, hard to control states and only have eight "states", things will be so much easier to control.
These people make me want to puke.
“Parag Khanna” sounds like a fecal-borne bacteria that kills 3rd worlders.
God bless America and everyone else can go to hell.
By the way this point you make is sweet:
The good news for America is we have so many major cities that we have a distributed economy.
That is good news. It means that it is time for a limited nuclear war that blows all the Second and Third world Mega-cities off the map (if you'll excuse the expression) . The USA will come out the winner
Canada is going to potentially be the world’s largest food producer in 20-25 years as a result of climate change.
I'd like to be on hand to collect on that bet. Four degrees Celsius is 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Does anyone who has ever actually farmed expect that is going to turn the frozen tundra into Kansas?
This isn't new thinking, it's ancient thinking with a new coat of paint. City-states have been around for millennia. They succeed insofar as their supporting resources can manage: water, soil, and energy. Against the advantages of urbanization are the disadvantages of an increasing need to gather resources, which is where city/states tend to employ things such as armies. We've been dancing this dance since ancient Sumeria.
I haven't actually seen this big a mess of New Age megalomania outside the realm of 19th-century science fiction. Powered dirigibles with wooden ship hulls have been replaced by that monument to high-cost, low-value transportation miracles, high-speed rail. This, in the Internet age? Willy Green, where are you now?
Yes, I suppose it's Congress's fault that the country is yet to be re-sculpted along the lines of urban power centers, meaning a certain dereliction in tossing the Constitution out and reorganizing the whole place without so much as a vote - not happening - linking the governments of three different societies such that if La Raza needs a public swimming pool in Mexico City (there will be no private ones) they will cheerfully pipe the water down from the Canadian Rockies. Urban big-thinkers in Los Angeles have already displayed a dismaying propensity for solving their own resource issues by expropriating those resources - water, electricity - from neighboring states. The solution to this is not to dissolve the local government of the intended victims.
The year 2050 or 2100 seems like light-years away.
I digress for a pet peeve - a light-year is a unit of DISTANCE, and in an article whose science the author apparently hopes we'll take seriously that's a pretty bonehead freshman error.
Oh, there's more to this Big Thought:
They play a very significant role in geopolitics. The world has four significant maritime choke points, three of which are geopolitically sensitive — the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca.
There are more, the straits of Gibraltar being one, but the only one really worth mentioning in the context of geopolitical sensitivity is none of those, it's the stretch of geography now known as the Turkish straits connecting the Black Sea to the Aegean/Mediterranean. Which body of water has been fought over by city-states for four millennia of recorded history. We know how that story came out. Perhaps what they really needed was high-speed rail.
I'll have to pass on the book, thanks.
Eh... the dramatic “heartbeat” audio on the “world population 1 CE - present” video is overly dramatic, and the climate change assumptions reduce the entire essay to excrement.
bump
The Central Planners did way with East German states and crated "Districts"
And look how wonderful that turned out.
Go to one of our major cities, let’s say Los Angeles. Drive around, and ask yourself, what are all these people producing? Retail shops are not a sign of production. They are a sign of consumption. Restaurants are not a sign of production. They are a sign of consumption. Housing is not a sign of production. It is a sign of consumption. Etc.
Most of the folks you see in the cities now are on a government check, one way or another. In other words, all they are producing is debt. More, and more, and more, and more, debt.
What a load of crap.
The only ‘connectography’ I’m worried about is that which connects my rifle with the head of anyone who tries to implement this bull***t.