that world of political geography is not
going away at the same time we are
engaging in this topographical
engineering these very robust
engineering systems by which we modify
the planet to suit what we wanted to do
what our various economic and political
activities are this is a very different
way of thinking about how we map and
what we map and what matters most on the
map connect Dogra ‘they connect dog Rafi
I’ve already heard it pronounced a
thousand which way is but of course what
I’m talking about is the fusion of
connectivity and of geography and all of
that connectivity revolution as I call
it falls into three particular
categories that I liken to three systems
in the human body and what we have here
is the world’s highways and railways oil
and gas pipelines electricity grids
internet cables all of this
infrastructure that is massively
exponentially accelerated our ability to
move people and goods and resources and
knowledge and technology and ideas
around the world and that revolution is
in by many measurements or metrics
really just getting underway they said
we’re just in the early phases of this
incredible build-out of global
infrastructure by some estimates will
start will spend not just the four
trillion dollars per year on
infrastructure that we spend today but
rising to seven or eight trillion
dollars in the coming years meanwhile
military spending worldwide though it’s
rising in in quite a few geographies as
an aggregate is relatively steady at
around two trillion dollars so what
happens when we build out all of this
infrastructure as this as these
infrastructure sort of envelop and wrap
around the world I believe that we we
evolved beyond one of the most ancient
adages and phrases that we all know
geography is destiny instead we think of
the arc of history as really taking us
in a certain direction in that direction
is more and more and more connectivity
there’s a term in this for for academia
extra statecraft in which that
infrastructure is so
real where are so many borders are
considered artificial that it has an
authority a gravity if you will and when
countries build infrastructure like a
highway or a railway or an electricity
grid something really basic you know
that they share with each other it winds
up being something that is almost a you
know irrevocable bond
it’s obviously positive some and the
more of those that you have the less one
thinks about not sovereignty as guiding
their relations but this connectivity
really shaping how they relate to each
other and so that’s the shift that’s
happening now from political geography
being the most paramount feature of the
map which is again the borders to the
functional geography which is the
infrastructures and the supply chains
gradually what I believe what happens is
what I call the global network
civilization that eventually emerges
from all of this infrastructure within
that you still have empires you still
have nations you have city-states you
have all of these various actors but it
all adds up to a of you know coexisting
civilization the surgery growth triangle
singapore malaysia and indonesia are
trying to optimize their space and what
you have here is a case where you have a
country singapore which has very almost
no land but a lot of capital country
like Malaysia that has quite a bit of
land and labor and some capital in
Indonesia which has a lot of land and a
lot of labour and very little capital so
you take these three countries that are
all very close to each other and they
said starting in the 1970s 1980s let’s
start to take Singaporean money and
Malaysian and Indonesian land and
Indonesian labor and put it on some
islands that nominally belong to
Indonesia and let’s start building ships
that are owned by Singaporean companies
but let’s optimize our geography let’s
treat it like we are connected by one
supply chain and that’s what they
started to do and you wouldn’t know that
there’s one set of rules in one place
and another because now people can
increasingly move seamlessly around them
and that’s how places one by one
gradually their neighbors shift
transition from political geography to
functional geography
but the supply chains are in fact the
original world-wide-web
and they are that system of transactions
that gets any one thing to one one thing
from one place to any other place and in
many cases in the global supply chain
today we no longer really know where
something is made and so I believe that
you know the labels on everything from
clothing to computers and so on should
really be made everywhere if you look at
where the design is done the
manufacturing is done the the production
the marketing the distribution the
insurance the repair of any given
product it involves you know companies
and subcontractors and so forth from all
over the world there’s all there’s very
little that is made exactly where where
where the label says it is in fact and
that’s what happens when we get to the
supply chain world so you can see it in
the fact that trade now reaches every
corner of the planet you can see it in
the ways in which people in the
financial industry are affected by the
financial crisis of 2008 collapse of
manufacturing as a result of the
financial crisis automobile workers and
manufacturing workers around the world
you know simultaneously lose their jobs
you may not have noticed it because that
may not be your circuit but people who
work in that industry all over the world
simultaneously affected such as the
nature of that connectivity among
explosion it is a very human thing
because each and every one of us belongs
to some kind of circuit and we move we
gravitate towards the supply chain
towards these circuits we want to be
part of them and when the supply chain
and when infrastructure doesn’t come to
you you go to it right and and that is
that is why so many people today why
that’s why there’s more migrants than
ever in history today people are on the
move one of the ways in which you know
economists or others would measure the
extent of globalization is they would
say well x and y number of people have
crossed borders any given year that’s
not the correct way to measure
globalization in my view it’s how many
people are connected and to get
connected you don’t have to move across
an international boundary most people
will never leave the country they were
born in but you if you move to a city
you have access to services you may work
in
in a factory of a foreign company you’re
connected Center to supply chains you’ll
have a mobile phone all of these things
connect you to the world even though
you’ve never left the country so to me
the rate of urbanization is the greatest
measurement of the extent to which
mankind is getting connected and of
course we live in a rapidly rapidly
urbanizing world now most of the world’s
population does live in in cities
already part of this global network
civilization part of this move from
political to functional geography is
that perhaps not surprisingly cities can
be seen as more important in many ways
than countries so what is on this map is
every human being in the world you have
the entire world’s population here and
you have you know the population density
as well and you have these ovals showing
you the kind of outlines of where the
largest most you know most populous
megacity clusters are and in the large
circles tell you what a what percentage
or chair of the national economy those
cities represent so what you’re seeing
here is not only where mankind is
concentrated but of course just how
significant those particular clusters
are where they where where they’re
located and so you know 30 or 40 of
these represent a growing share of the
world economy and by the year 2030 most
projections estimate they’ll be about 50
megacity archipelagos and these really
represent you know the preponderance
share of the world economic activity so
I put kind of all of them up on one map
here and again I asked the question
you’re trying to understand how the
world works it’s not a not a naive
question I wonder which map tells you
more this one or the conventional ones
or maybe some mix of the two but
certainly not one that ignores this
because a map that ignores this is not
actually capturing who we are where we
are and what we do part of this story is
what I call pop up cities especially
economic zones 50 years ago we had
almost no special economic zones in the
world today geographies industrial parks
that were set aside and designated
primarily for the purpose of attracting
in foreign investment bringing in
technology training workers
King exports allowing countries and
their labor force to rise up the value
chain today we have 4,000 such special
economic zones in the world today it is
the most rapidly expanding type of city
so this is a very significant trend in
the world today China has become an
empire of such mega cities each of which
has almost a designated economic
function in the global supply chain and
if you think about it’s fascinating it’s
very very instructive in the shift from
political to functional geography that
the world’s oldest continuous
civilization with very diverse
provincial and linguistic histories in
many of its provinces would say that’s
all fine and good
you can keep your dialects and your
culture and so on but we need to
organize the country in a new way so
that each of these megacity clusters as
an internally viable economy so that is
anywhere from twenty to a hundred
million people so that has lots of
services and transactions going on among
people so it’s not dependent just on
exporting one kind of widget or product
but at the same time each one is very
connected to each other through
high-speed rail networks and highways
and so forth and internationally to the
global economy and this process of
reorganizing the sort of the management
of a country is something that we that
we’re starting to see around the world
this is how I believe it should happen
in the United States what I’m basically
saying is that the 50 United States that
we have are very very useful when you’re
trying to win an election when you’re
out there campaigning but it tells you
absolutely nothing about how to properly
govern America’s geography to be an
economically competitive superpower
right what we need is for these mega
regions if you will that have certain
common internal economic characteristics
like agriculture or industry to be much
more seamlessly connected to each other
and to the outside world they need to be
built around urban economies at their
core and they need to be connected to
each other through freight rail
corridors high-speed rail networks and
so forth so if you take this layering of
the natural economic geographies these
big patches and the urban clusters that
are in white that are gonna be the
economic hubs and then the
infrastructural connectivity that’s how
you would turn the United States of
America into United city-states of
America and that would be one that would
be far more far more efficient far more
viable far more sensible and certainly
far more competitive the optimistic note
that I want to end on and then I in the
book on is this idea that we are
actually returning to a fairly ancient
model we are a coastal urban network
civilization right a world in which
people are more interested in trade and
commerce with each other than conquest
and this is what I call the pox or
banika right a peace among cities in
which if we think about the way cities
view the world versus the way the
countries view the world
you know cities are interested in in in
trade and connectivity
whereas we think of countries being
interested in in in territorial
aggrandizement and so the more we move
into a world in which that mentality of
interurban connectivity and and sharing
lessons with each other
trading with each other positive some
relations the more peaceful ultimately
the entire world system can be but you
know the punchline really is that if you
want to have this world you actually
have to build it and it starts with what
we are doing today and what we could do
a lot more of which is investing first
and foremost in connectivity
connectivity for countries connectivity
for cities and connectivity for people
and with that I’ll stop thank you so
very much thank you
you
going away at the same time we are
engaging in this topographical
engineering these very robust
engineering systems by which we modify
the planet to suit what we wanted to do
what our various economic and political
activities are this is a very different
way of thinking about how we map and
what we map and what matters most on the
map connect Dogra ‘they connect dog Rafi
I’ve already heard it pronounced a
thousand which way is but of course what
I’m talking about is the fusion of
connectivity and of geography and all of
that connectivity revolution as I call
it falls into three particular
categories that I liken to three systems
in the human body and what we have here
is the world’s highways and railways oil
and gas pipelines electricity grids
internet cables all of this
infrastructure that is massively
exponentially accelerated our ability to
move people and goods and resources and
knowledge and technology and ideas
around the world and that revolution is
in by many measurements or metrics
really just getting underway they said
we’re just in the early phases of this
incredible build-out of global
infrastructure by some estimates will
start will spend not just the four
trillion dollars per year on
infrastructure that we spend today but
rising to seven or eight trillion
dollars in the coming years meanwhile
military spending worldwide though it’s
rising in in quite a few geographies as
an aggregate is relatively steady at
around two trillion dollars so what
happens when we build out all of this
infrastructure as this as these
infrastructure sort of envelop and wrap
around the world I believe that we we
evolved beyond one of the most ancient
adages and phrases that we all know
geography is destiny instead we think of
the arc of history as really taking us
in a certain direction in that direction
is more and more and more connectivity
there’s a term in this for for academia
extra statecraft in which that
infrastructure is so
real where are so many borders are
considered artificial that it has an
authority a gravity if you will and when
countries build infrastructure like a
highway or a railway or an electricity
grid something really basic you know
that they share with each other it winds
up being something that is almost a you
know irrevocable bond
it’s obviously positive some and the
more of those that you have the less one
thinks about not sovereignty as guiding
their relations but this connectivity
really shaping how they relate to each
other and so that’s the shift that’s
happening now from political geography
being the most paramount feature of the
map which is again the borders to the
functional geography which is the
infrastructures and the supply chains
gradually what I believe what happens is
what I call the global network
civilization that eventually emerges
from all of this infrastructure within
that you still have empires you still
have nations you have city-states you
have all of these various actors but it
all adds up to a of you know coexisting
civilization the surgery growth triangle
singapore malaysia and indonesia are
trying to optimize their space and what
you have here is a case where you have a
country singapore which has very almost
no land but a lot of capital country
like Malaysia that has quite a bit of
land and labor and some capital in
Indonesia which has a lot of land and a
lot of labour and very little capital so
you take these three countries that are
all very close to each other and they
said starting in the 1970s 1980s let’s
start to take Singaporean money and
Malaysian and Indonesian land and
Indonesian labor and put it on some
islands that nominally belong to
Indonesia and let’s start building ships
that are owned by Singaporean companies
but let’s optimize our geography let’s
treat it like we are connected by one
supply chain and that’s what they
started to do and you wouldn’t know that
there’s one set of rules in one place
and another because now people can
increasingly move seamlessly around them
and that’s how places one by one
gradually their neighbors shift
transition from political geography to
functional geography
but the supply chains are in fact the
original world-wide-web
and they are that system of transactions
that gets any one thing to one one thing
from one place to any other place and in
many cases in the global supply chain
today we no longer really know where
something is made and so I believe that
you know the labels on everything from
clothing to computers and so on should
really be made everywhere if you look at
where the design is done the
manufacturing is done the the production
the marketing the distribution the
insurance the repair of any given
product it involves you know companies
and subcontractors and so forth from all
over the world there’s all there’s very
little that is made exactly where where
where the label says it is in fact and
that’s what happens when we get to the
supply chain world so you can see it in
the fact that trade now reaches every
corner of the planet you can see it in
the ways in which people in the
financial industry are affected by the
financial crisis of 2008 collapse of
manufacturing as a result of the
financial crisis automobile workers and
manufacturing workers around the world
you know simultaneously lose their jobs
you may not have noticed it because that
may not be your circuit but people who
work in that industry all over the world
simultaneously affected such as the
nature of that connectivity among
explosion it is a very human thing
because each and every one of us belongs
to some kind of circuit and we move we
gravitate towards the supply chain
towards these circuits we want to be
part of them and when the supply chain
and when infrastructure doesn’t come to
you you go to it right and and that is
that is why so many people today why
that’s why there’s more migrants than
ever in history today people are on the
move one of the ways in which you know
economists or others would measure the
extent of globalization is they would
say well x and y number of people have
crossed borders any given year that’s
not the correct way to measure
globalization in my view it’s how many
people are connected and to get
connected you don’t have to move across
an international boundary most people
will never leave the country they were
born in but you if you move to a city
you have access to services you may work
in
in a factory of a foreign company you’re
connected Center to supply chains you’ll
have a mobile phone all of these things
connect you to the world even though
you’ve never left the country so to me
the rate of urbanization is the greatest
measurement of the extent to which
mankind is getting connected and of
course we live in a rapidly rapidly
urbanizing world now most of the world’s
population does live in in cities
already part of this global network
civilization part of this move from
political to functional geography is
that perhaps not surprisingly cities can
be seen as more important in many ways
than countries so what is on this map is
every human being in the world you have
the entire world’s population here and
you have you know the population density
as well and you have these ovals showing
you the kind of outlines of where the
largest most you know most populous
megacity clusters are and in the large
circles tell you what a what percentage
or chair of the national economy those
cities represent so what you’re seeing
here is not only where mankind is
concentrated but of course just how
significant those particular clusters
are where they where where they’re
located and so you know 30 or 40 of
these represent a growing share of the
world economy and by the year 2030 most
projections estimate they’ll be about 50
megacity archipelagos and these really
represent you know the preponderance
share of the world economic activity so
I put kind of all of them up on one map
here and again I asked the question
you’re trying to understand how the
world works it’s not a not a naive
question I wonder which map tells you
more this one or the conventional ones
or maybe some mix of the two but
certainly not one that ignores this
because a map that ignores this is not
actually capturing who we are where we
are and what we do part of this story is
what I call pop up cities especially
economic zones 50 years ago we had
almost no special economic zones in the
world today geographies industrial parks
that were set aside and designated
primarily for the purpose of attracting
in foreign investment bringing in
technology training workers
King exports allowing countries and
their labor force to rise up the value
chain today we have 4,000 such special
economic zones in the world today it is
the most rapidly expanding type of city
so this is a very significant trend in
the world today China has become an
empire of such mega cities each of which
has almost a designated economic
function in the global supply chain and
if you think about it’s fascinating it’s
very very instructive in the shift from
political to functional geography that
the world’s oldest continuous
civilization with very diverse
provincial and linguistic histories in
many of its provinces would say that’s
all fine and good
you can keep your dialects and your
culture and so on but we need to
organize the country in a new way so
that each of these megacity clusters as
an internally viable economy so that is
anywhere from twenty to a hundred
million people so that has lots of
services and transactions going on among
people so it’s not dependent just on
exporting one kind of widget or product
but at the same time each one is very
connected to each other through
high-speed rail networks and highways
and so forth and internationally to the
global economy and this process of
reorganizing the sort of the management
of a country is something that we that
we’re starting to see around the world
this is how I believe it should happen
in the United States what I’m basically
saying is that the 50 United States that
we have are very very useful when you’re
trying to win an election when you’re
out there campaigning but it tells you
absolutely nothing about how to properly
govern America’s geography to be an
economically competitive superpower
right what we need is for these mega
regions if you will that have certain
common internal economic characteristics
like agriculture or industry to be much
more seamlessly connected to each other
and to the outside world they need to be
built around urban economies at their
core and they need to be connected to
each other through freight rail
corridors high-speed rail networks and
so forth so if you take this layering of
the natural economic geographies these
big patches and the urban clusters that
are in white that are gonna be the
economic hubs and then the
infrastructural connectivity that’s how
you would turn the United States of
America into United city-states of
America and that would be one that would
be far more far more efficient far more
viable far more sensible and certainly
far more competitive the optimistic note
that I want to end on and then I in the
book on is this idea that we are
actually returning to a fairly ancient
model we are a coastal urban network
civilization right a world in which
people are more interested in trade and
commerce with each other than conquest
and this is what I call the pox or
banika right a peace among cities in
which if we think about the way cities
view the world versus the way the
countries view the world
you know cities are interested in in in
trade and connectivity
whereas we think of countries being
interested in in in territorial
aggrandizement and so the more we move
into a world in which that mentality of
interurban connectivity and and sharing
lessons with each other
trading with each other positive some
relations the more peaceful ultimately
the entire world system can be but you
know the punchline really is that if you
want to have this world you actually
have to build it and it starts with what
we are doing today and what we could do
a lot more of which is investing first
and foremost in connectivity
connectivity for countries connectivity
for cities and connectivity for people
and with that I’ll stop thank you so
very much thank you
you
Please follow and like us: