Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng — How Cities Are Saving China

China is finding its way alone as new type of socio-economic system on the scene that also has to interact with the current world order. It's doing all right, and even great as far as development economics goes.

Project Syndicate
How Cities Are Saving China

Andrew Sheng, Distinguished Fellow of the Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong and a member of the UNEP Advisory Council on Sustainable Finance, former chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and currently an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing; and Xiao Geng, President of the Hong Kong Institution for International Finance, and a professor at Peking University HSBC Business School and the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Business and Economics

Jeff Desjardins — The Megacity Economy: How Seven Types of Global Cities Stack Up

The Urban Age within The Global Era.

Visual Capitalist
The Megacity Economy: How Seven Types of Global Cities Stack Up
Jeff Desjardins

Steve Randy Waldman — The economic geography of a universal basic income

UBI and the productivity puzzle.

Interfluidity
The economic geography of a universal basic income
Steve Randy Waldman

CNBC — Building the city of the future — at a $41 trillion price tag

Cities around the world could spend as much as $41 trillion on smart tech over the next 20 years.

"But, but, where will the money come from?"

That's going to take a whole lot of electricity, too.

CNBC
Building the city of the future — at a $41 trillion price tag
Aneri Pattani, special to CNBC.com

Chang Ka Mun and Jaana Remes — Why China’s Cities Will Drive Global Growth

According to McKinsey’s 2016 Global Sentiment Survey of more than 22,000 consumers in 26 countries, China’s working-age population has the world’s highest propensity to spend additional income, rather than save it or use it to pay off debt.

Just like Western baby boomers, Chinese urban consumers – who have grown up in post-reform China and have different views from their parents about saving versus spending – will make a generational break from the past. That shift in mindset will fuel China’s transition to a consumer-led economy.…

The coming replacement for the legendary American consumer who is not tapped out?

Project Syndicate
Why China’s Cities Will Drive Global Growth

Chang Ka Mun, managing director of the Fung Business Intelligence Centre of the Li & Fung group of companies, and Jaana Remes, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, based in San Francisco

Zhang Jun — China’s Painful Structural Transformation

China's economy has slowed as it shifts from exports and investment toward domestic consumer demand. But rapid growth could return if urbanization accelerates and the authorities implement the structural reforms needed to enable emerging service sectors to thrive.

Urbanization is the key to growth and development of an economically strong "middle class" of domestic consumers.

Project Syndicate
China’s Painful Structural Transformation
Zhang Jun | Professor of Economics and Director of the China Center for Economic Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai

Brian Resnick — Watch 6,000 years of people moving to cities

Urbanization in only 3:20.

VOX
Watch 6,000 years of people moving to cities

Brian Resnick

Reuters — The myth of China’s ghost cities

There is hardly a single new urban development in the country that has yet gone over its estimated time line for completion and vitalization, so any ghost city labeling at this point is premature: Most are still works in progress. But while building the core areas of new cities is something that China does with incredible haste, actually populating them is a lengthy endeavor.

When large numbers of people move into a new area, they need to be provided for; they need public services like healthcare and education. Therefore, a population carries a price tag and there is often an extended period of time between when cities appear completed and when they are actually prepared to sustain a full-scale population. This could be called the “ghost city” phase.

Most large new urban developments in China eventually move through this phase and become vitalized with businesses and a population. Essential infrastructure gets built, shopping malls open, and places where residents can work are created. In many of the biggest new cities, new university campuses will emerge and government offices and the headquarters of banks and state owned enterprises will be shipped in, essentially seeding these fresh outposts of progress with thousands of new consumers. From here, more businesses are attracted — often drawn by favorable subsidies like free rent — and more people trickle in as the city comes to life.

Some of China’s most notorious ghost cities saw phenomenal population growth in recent years, according to a report by Standard Chartered. In just a two year period from 2012 to 2014, Zhengdong New District’s occupancy rate rose doubled, while Dantu’s quadrupled and Changzhou’s Wujin district increased to 50 percent from 20 percent. Though there is still an excess of vacancies in these places, when urban areas of high-density housing are even half full there’s still a large number of people living there — more than enough for the place to socially and economically function as a city.

It generally takes at least a decade for China’s new urban developments to start breaking the inertia of stagnation. But once they do, they tend to keep growing, eventually blending in with the broader urban landscape and losing their “ghost city” label.…

Reuters – April 22, 2015
The myth of China’s ghost cities
Wade Shepard

Jeremy Smith — The key policy issue for China's leadership - urbanization

Chin'a leaders explain their plan for development.

Huge task. Test of central planning.

Prime
The key policy issue for China's leadership - urbanization
Jeremy Smith

See also Pepe Escobar, The Chimerica Dream: Two Nations, Two Dreams, One Pacific

Parag Khanna — The Human City

The tangled web of international organizations that constitutes global governance has become so remote and ineffective that few count on it to deliver results anymore. Now, after decades of turf wars and self-marginalization, international organizations must rally around an increasingly pressing global priority: sustainable urbanization.

The world is undergoing an unprecedented and irreversible wave of urbanization, with the share of the global population living in cities set to reach 60% by 2030. But rapid urbanization is driving up industrial fossil-fuel consumption and household water consumption, and is increasing demand for food in areas where arable land is scarce. In short, the current urbanization trajectory is not sustainable.

Project Syndicate
The Human City
Parag Khanna | Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Director of the Hybrid Reality Institute

Khanna cites Singapore as an example of better management. Does this argue for a more planned approach?

Marilyn Katz — Republican Death by Demographics

The important message here is not so much about politics as it is about demographics and what that tells us about national and global trends socially, politically, and economically.

The Republican leadership and most political commentators describe us as a nation evenly and forever, divided between red and blue states. We are not. While a  superficial look at the maps of the November 2012 will show the nation as a patchwork quilt of red and blue. If you look further will find something more interesting—we are a nation of blue states and blue cities in those states that are red. In fact in the 24 states that voted Republican, in only four—Alaska, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia—did Obama fail to capture the states’ urban areas.

America’s cities and their suburbs, from New York City to Boise Idaho, have always been more progressive than their rural counterparts. What has made them ever more so is the increasing diversity of their populations as immigrants, and racial and ethnic minorities (the only expanding segments of the U.S. population) settle in urban areas.
The nation’s cities and their suburbs produce 85 percent of U.S. exports, are the sites of the nation’s cultural, educational and health care institutions, are the font of virtually all new patents and home to 89 percent of working-age people with a post secondary degree. For the young, born in the city or beyond, for immigrants, for minorities, for the educated, urban areas are where opportunity is and will be found.

And our nation is becoming and will continue to become ever more urban.

Urbanization has been the trend since the beginnings of history lost in the mists of times. Cities were already flourishing by the time of the most ancient extant records. "Civilization" comes from the Latin root civ- signifying a city — Latin civis. The English terms "politics" and "policy" derive from the Greek root pol- also signifying a city or city state — Greek polis. As humanity comes more  civilized it becomes more urban and also more urbane (sophisticated) in that cities have been the centers of culture and creativity.

For example, the developed world is already highly urbanized, the underdeveloped world is not, and the emerging world is quickly urbanizing. The urbanization of China has been nothing short of phenomenal as entire cities are built before people are moved in, just like houses.

The trend toward urbanization means that people are less self-sufficient than they were in the country, but they are more prosperous in terms of goods, education and opportunities. People are more interdependent in cities than in the country, which means that the the tendency is to think more universally and feel more empathetically. These are huge shifts not only demographically and developmentally but also in the rate of evolutionary change, increasing adaptability and coordination.

This shift will bring great changes to all aspects of life, individually, socially, politically and economically as personal attitudes change and institutions are adapted to cultural realities. Moreover, the rate of change is increasing, in many areas of the world exponentially, putting stress on systems to adapt quickly enough.

In These Times
Republican Death by Demographics
Marilyn Katz