Megacity planning: chaos, control? Part 2, clicks
By: David A. Smith
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
Halfway through Foreign Policy‘s great assembly of facts and graphics on Chinese and Indian urbanization, we come to a critical element they overlooked:
AHI’s Indian blog readers praying for insight
Broadband and the internet. The alternative to transportation is communication, and in this India has enormous advantages over China.
Start with language. The Internet runs on English, and if not English then on a language with an alphabet instead of a pictographic (radical-phonetic) alphabet. Most Indians speak English; it’s common everywhere in the country. As the world creates an information economy, especially with the outsourcing of services from high-cost cities and countries to low-cost ones, India has a huge head start on China.
Next is information. As Richard Stallman put it, information wants to be free:
A manifesto if not a business model
Not just low-cost but also instantly and infinitely transmitted. India censors nothing; China censors anything and everything.
For India, the internet cannot come fast enough. Outrace the back office, win the urbanization economic game.
The most important urban infrastructure may prove to be not the highway or the high-speed rail but the global broadband and the failure-proof server.
Chaos, control. Chaos, control. You like? You like?
Either way, cities will need:
Low-cost, highly efficient, and not green
Energy
It’s hard to understate what a massive impact the coming urbanization in China and India will have on energy markets.
And on arguments about climate change.
Demand for power in China’s cities will more than double from today’s level, accounting for roughly 20% of global energy consumption.
Meeting that need will call for huge investments in coal, of which China is already the largest international buyer.
For three years China has been the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, a gap that will only widen in the coming decades, whether or not we have carbon offset credits.
We’re not number one any more, and watch the gap widen.
India‘s power targets are also ambitious; the country hopes to add 62,000 megawatts to its grid by 2012. If trends continue, India’s carbon dioxide emissions will grow nearly sevenfold by 2030, while China’s will nearly double.
In this and so many other statistics, China’s urbanization is well ahead of India’s. In particular, China is much richer, especially in its cities:
Urban infrastructure expenditures, China 7x India’s.
The Price Tag
Urban growth will come with a high price tag – a whopping $35-$40 trillion in China and $2.2 trillion in India over the coming two decades. In addition to all the building and public infrastructure, China and India will need to invest heavily in delivering services – everything from education to health care to social security.
Very interesting that the authors do not list similar figures for China
I’ve already documented India’s massive housing shortage and its explosive slum growth. While India needs quality housing to grow its economy, China’s housing need is of a different dimension: not slum prevention per se but quality rental apartments at the beginning of adulthood and at its end:
As China’s over-65 population more than doubles and migrants flood its cities, government spending on health care will struggle to keep up, rising from 19% to 21% of GDP.
This will be a challenge without precedent in human history, China being so heavily gerontocratic.
Honor every one of us
Three years ago, I pegged China as heading for the world’s largest affordable housing crisis, and nothing since then has changed the prognosis. In the next fifteen years, China will add 145,000,000 elderly.
Even with China’s massive economic growth, paying the bill won’t be easy. Many of China’s largest cities are self-sufficient, but other smaller and newer areas are already running deficits.
All that stimulus will eventually leave an economic hangover.
India’s urban spending, meanwhile, is already very low by international standards.
If China’s economy crumples as I think it will, India’s messy democratic innovation may suddenly gain ground.
GDP on the rise
Regardless, the infrastructure and housing will be built – what will the new cities be like?
What Will It Be Like to Live There?
The megacity will be home to China’s and India’s growing middle classes – creating consumer markets larger than to-day’s Japan and Spain, respectively. In China, the number of urban middle-class households will quintuple; in India it will grow nearly fourfold.
Jobs moving to the cities
[Additional editorial complaint: the circles do not correlate with the numbers, and the visual result is to overstate China's urban job growth vis-à-vis India's. – Ed.]
India‘s wealthiest urban households – those earning more than 1 million rupees a year (about $22,000) – could number 11 million, more than the total number of households in Australia today.
More than Oz? Take that.
In both countries, the wealth gap between rural and urban areas will grow with urbanization. Urban GDP per capita will exceed rural GDP by 3.5 times in China and more than five times in India.
The rise in urban GDP relative to rural will not prevent the growth of rabbit warrens and slums – in fact it will deepen the intensity of India’s slum experience. (Never having been to China, I have no sense of China’s slum challenges, although the Chinese seem unruffled by palimpsest-style urban renewal.) That there will be slums is inevitable because of the next phenomenon:
Jobs
Jobs in the cities will be more prevalent, productive, and lucrative in urban China and India than in rural areas.
That has been true since the beginning of time.
Dreaming of a job in services?
China‘s ranks of university graduates – growing by 26% annually – will mostly work in cities, which will compete to recruit their skills.
In India, three-quarters of new urban jobs will be in the service sector.
Broadband, my friends, broadband – and freedom. Information infrastructure includes democratic and citizen-responsive government.
No way we’re relocating to Shanghai
Chaos, control. Chaos, control. You like? You like?
All this industry means:
Service Gap
China‘s biggest urban challenge may be water; already, it has little to spare. Some 70% of water use today traces back to agriculture, but demand from urban consumers and commercial enterprise is on the rise.
But will it be clean enough? Chinese water treatment plant
Water infrastructure is a substantial metropolitan expense, especially hard to retrofit into older cities that have grown much more populous.
Even if the sheer amount of water isn’t the problem, location will be; the country will need to spend more than $120 billion on water systems in the coming years to transport, store, and manage supplies. In India, service delivery will fall woefully short of demand in coming years across most urban infrastructure sectors.
What about in China?
The country’s population is also much younger than China’s. A mere 16% of India’s population will be over 55 in 20 years, while 28% of China’s will be.
And there’s one last area where India has a huge advantage over China:
Democracy and transparency
For all its messiness, democracy is self-organized and self-evolving. So too are markets, and for the same reason – citizen responsibility and accountability. For that reason, democracies seldom make mega-mistakes – enormous irreversible expenditures (like building new cities in the middle of nowhere).
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government … except all the others that have been tried.
– Sir Winston Churchill
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”
Democracies are also corruption-resistant; they self-repair through a cycle of scandal, outrage, resignation, and reform, characteristics that are not necessarily advantageous in an autocracy.
Recall that ten-day traffic jam I mentioned in yesterday’s post? As The Christian Science Monitor (in Rockwell) reports, it’s less caused by commuting and more by embedded corruption:
Trucks can be seen on a highway in Wanquan County in north China’s Hebei Province on Aug. 23.
[August 23, 2010 – Ed.] Thousands of trucks are packed nose to tail for more than 60 miles in a 10-day traffic jam northwest of Beijing that makes even the most trying morning commute in the US look like a breeze.
A driver opens the door to his cabin of a truck stuck in a traffic jam on an expressway heading east to Beijing on Aug. 18
What does such a snafu have to do with democracy?
In fact, the mega blockage – the second in two months on a stretch of road about 130 miles northwest of the capital – is a tale of deceit and criminality that speaks volumes about China’s breakneck economic development.
As former President Bush once mangled it, “Fool me twice and – well, you’d better not fool me twice.”
Stalls are set up on the road to sell food and water to truck drivers stuck in a massive traffic jam on an expressway heading east to Beijing on Aug. 18.
China relies on coal for 70% of its energy needs. For years, small illegal coal mines in the province of Shanxi provided Beijing and its surroundings with a good deal of coal but so many of the mines would collapse or explode, and so many miners would die (over 1,600 nationwide last year according to official figures) that the local authorities have closed most of them down.
That’s all very well, but China being China, the province of Inner Mongolia, to the North of Shanxi, has taken up the slack. And an awful lot of the trucks currently snarled on the G110 expressway to Beijing are carrying coal mined illegally in Inner Mongolia.
They are taking the G110, drivers explained to the daily Beijing News, because there are no coal checkpoints on that highway, so they don’t have to bribe any inspectors to turn a blind eye to their illegal loads.
The traffic jam is thus not an isolated occurrence but a systemic breakdown of a value chain that is deeply corrupt at every link.
Trucks are seen in the middle of a traffic jam on the National Highway 207 on Aug. 23.
We flip it around for variety.
Chaos, control. Chaos, control. You like? You like?
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