City-Scale Development: A Look into How New Cities Ease the Infrastructure Burdens of the 21st Century
Karachi, Pakistan, houses 13 million residents and presides over 95% of Pakistan’s foreign trade, but poor infrastructure destines the overcrowded megacity to endure everlasting poverty. The Karachi Mega Development Project report of 2005 blatantly acknowledges that the deteriorated quality of Karachi’s infrastructure “impacts adversely on the country’s economic growth and development prospects.” Households allege to only having running water for a few hours every other day. Pipe leakages lose an estimated 50% of all drinkable water and the leaks’ detriments to water pressure only exacerbate the problem. Nonetheless, the shortfalls of the sewage systems make the water network admirable in comparison.
Only one quarter of Karachi’s sewage successfully journeys through “undersized and broken sections” of the sewage network to the city’s wastewater treatment plants. Once there, the plants suffer from operating at 50% overcapacity. The Mega Development Project report asserts that “annual flooding causes both damage to homes and infrastructure, and constitutes a significant health risk from floodwaters contaminated by the raw sewage which flows in the drainage network.”
Unfortunately, the infrastructure problems that plague Karachi are not unique. Growing urban populations across the globe expose the limitations and the finite durability of ever thinly-stretched city infrastructure. Many existing water pipes, inner-city roads, and sewage systems, often built for the cities of yesteryear and a pre-seven billion inhabitant world, have already surpassed or are approaching their maximum capacities. Sadly, fixing existing problems tends to be too costly a burden for city and national governments, and cost-cutting maneuvers lead to poorly constructed, short-term solutions.
However, instead of expensively retrofitting infrastructure through piecemeal reconstruction, a modern trend has provided governments a long-term, cost effective way to house expanding populations: New City construction.
Thoroughly engineered, decongested cities allocate resources more efficiently through their fully integrated infrastructure – an indispensable trait that will prove a matter of survival in a sustainable 21st century. As efficiency demands increase and technologies speed globalization, master planned cities also add needed economic benefits by defining clear regional roles in the world economy. Planners, engineers, and architects now design cities specifically to give industries naturally built advantages.
As the world hastily industrializes and urban populations relentlessly grow, the overcrowding problems that infected the dreary, 20th century rapidly industrializing cities now reach every corner of the globe. Yet decentralized, new urban systems help mitigate population growth to rates manageable enough for cities to address infrastructure demands. New cities can alleviate these increasing pressures while joining populations to an international, globalized world economy.
Chapter I
"The urban population of developing countries is expected to grow by a million people every five days."
More than half the world’s population lives in urban areas. For the first time in history, humanity crossed the 50% threshold of urban dwellers in 2008 and reached a total world population of 7 billion in 2011. If current growth rate trends continue, by 2050, 70% of all humans will live in urban areas. In the developing world, population growth is even more exponential. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Unit, the least developed countries are urbanizing at a rate of 3.97% per year. By 2015, the worldwide number of city dwellers alone will grow by 350 million people.
As populations continue to grow, pressures on existing infrastructure increase. Every week the world will need to accommodate another million new urban dwellers, infusing the population of New York City to urban areas every month and a half. Greg Lindsay, the leading voice of New City development and author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, writes, “China is already building the equivalent of a Rome every few weeks to absorb the 400 million migrants streaming in from the countryside.” In providing the landscape for humanity to survive, new city development will pave the future for urban living.
Chapter II
Britain’s Industrial Villages & New Town Movement
The modern day practice of building new cities borrows many themes from Britain’s Garden City and post-WWII New Town movements. In reaction to London’s public health problems caused by overpopulation during the industrial revolution and the social and criminal deviancy that accompany congested urban living, the British government fell in love with Garden Cities.
Ebenezer Howard, an early 20th century planning idealist, envisioned bringing the economic opportunities of London to a countryside suffering from an agricultural depression. In an attempt to introduce industrial production to zones outside of London’s greenbelt, Howard directed England to build “industrial villages.” His ambitious Marxist dream for these new communities was the “purchase of farmland by a community, at agricultural values, so that the increased values, which would follow from the construction of a town, would automatically pass back to the community coffers.”
Even though the idealistic Garden Cities that sprouted in the British countryside fell to the hands of private ownership, the “industrial village” concept never died. Under the Greater London Plan and the New Towns Act of 1946, England promoted the construction of a string of satellite cities, now called New Towns. To create a decentralized urban system and to alleviate inner-city congestion, “the Greater London Plan proposed a ban on additional industrial development” within the Capital’s center. With mandates to build at least 20% middle-class housing, England successfully constructed 28 new towns (some developed with government backing and others, particularly since the Thatcher administration, developed privately).
Since Britain’s experiment with New Town construction, industrial villages have slowly become the model for development and decentralization throughout the world. Revolutionizing the New Town movement from its caterpillar infancy, Oscar Niemeyer architected Brazil’s newly built capital, Brasilia, in 1956. Brasilia moved the central governmental to a politically neutral territory, expanded commerce to a previously devoid agricultural province, and sought to decongest the polluted Rio de Janeiro. Although other cities like Washington DC and Canberra, Australia spawned from previous master plans, these capitals were results of political compromise. Brasilia, on the other hand, marked a turning point for New Towns by reigniting the urban decentralization movement as the first of a 20th century string of instant cities. Islamabad, Pakistan and Chandigarh, India quickly followed in Brasilia’s footsteps. Webs of small industrial villages graduated to a national scale of interconnected urban systems. Brasilia exposed the world to modern city-scale development.
Chapter III
“New cities are free from the constraints of having to deal with an established population, old infrastructure and bureaucracy.”
In reaction to steep population growth, cash strapped governments are discovering the true costs of retrofitting infrastructure to accommodate the masses. Latin America’s population is expected to grow 100 million inhabitants over the next 15 years. To compensate for the increased numbers of people, the McKinsey Institute estimates that water pipelines, sewage systems, gas and electric lines will account for $3 trillion in needed investment. That’s almost the entire aggregate GDP of every South American country combined.
Locally, in the 1990s, Boston underwent its own urban make-over with its Big Dig highway project. The momentous engineering feat tore into a city of only 574,000, but the infrastructure reconstruction cost upwards of an astonishing $14.6 billion. For the same astronomical price tag of burying a highway underground, the United Nations could build enough infrastructure to satisfy its Millennium Development Goals for water: halving the world population that does not have sustainable access to clean drinking water. More often than not, as the real estate thinking goes, renovation proves more expensive than new development.
With high costs to maintain and adapt strained infrastructure in the new millennium, building new urban areas makes economic sense. New Songdo City is the crown jewel of South Korea’s effort to build a decongested alternative to Seoul and to provide an aerotropolis closer connected to international commerce. Projected to be the size of Boston, the city will only cost $35 billion in private funds to build – that’s just over twice as much as the Big Dig’s single underground highway project cost to build an entire city of the same size – not to mention that Songdo’s construction also includes a 7.6 mile long overwater bridge and 1,500 acres of land reclamation.
Chapter IV
“There are several theories of why cities exist. Many revert around agglomeration externalities driven by returns to specialization…[our research] suggests the presence of returns to market specialization in cities.”
China, a nation absorbing into urban areas its one billion citizens who flood away from rural homes at a rate of 2.62% per year, has become the capital of new city construction. In 2014 the red state plans to unveil another 500,000 resident city, the Guangzhou Knowledge City. Guangzhou will be an eco-city concentrated on sustainability. As the global economy trends towards specialization, the Knowledge City represents just one of the world’s new niche urban centers. The Portuguese PlanIT Valley, another green city, projects to house 150,000 people, and cost less than a third of Songdo, at $10 billion.
Naturally as cities evolve they develop their own distinguishing characteristics and economies of agglomeration (the urban economic benefit received when businesses of related industries are located in closely concentrated proximity). Detroit lays claim as an auto manufacturing center, Silicon Valley a high-tech incubator, New York City a financial services capital, Washington DC a political capital, and Houston a petro-producing port city. But in nations where a single, overbearing primate city suppresses and dominates the economic structure of the entire region, all resources (such as people, wealth, and means of production) naturally gravitate towards the dominant center of commerce. These primate megacities do not differentiate between industries, as all sectors occupy the urban terrain. As Dr. Salah El-Shakhs, a retired professor of urban planning at the Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy, wrote in The Urban Challenge in Africa: Growth and Management of Its Large Cities, “Unregulated spontaneous dispersal can be costly as well as wasteful in its indiscriminate use of valuable land resources.” Unfortunately, if growth is unguided and infrastructure not maintained, these primate cities begin to lose their productivity advantages when over-densification creates detrimental congestion. Thus, political and economic decentralization becomes necessary for the economic growth of both the individual cities and of the region.
Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud realizes the importance of decentralized economic power. Construction is underway in Saudi Arabia for four specially tailored cities in the desert. The first of these Saudi castles in the sand, King Abdullah Economic City, is a special economic zone that projects to create one million jobs and four million new homes. As peak oil faces an uncertain future, the Saudi King hopes to compete with the successes of China’s Special Economic Zones and those of the neighboring United Arab Emirates’ Dubai. But King Abdullah is not alone in his ambitions. In 2007, the World Bank estimated that are more than 3,000 Special Economic Zone projects underway in 120 different countries.
Three other Saudi cities, Knowledge Economic City, Prince Abdulaziz bin Mousaed Economic City, and Jazan Economic city, will respectively concentrate on scientific research, heavy industry, and agriculture. Together, these four specialized cities will create a national urban system in Saudi Arabia that takes advantage of decentralization and of economies of agglomeration. In total, King Abdullah plans to “increase non-oil GDP by almost 50% in barely a decade” and “house and employ nearly half of the 10 million Saudis under the age of 17.”
India, another world stage hopeful, announced plans to develop 24 industrial cities along a new railway connecting Mumbai and New Delhi. “India needs 30 years or so of near-10 percent economic growth if it is to bring its massive population out of poverty.” Rapid industrialization is the only plausible strategy for the Hindu republic to accomplish its goal. One of the first seven city projects already underway as part of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor will become an “integrated logistics hub” with an industrial sized train station, an airport, cargo terminals, and warehouses. Another will be a “Knowledge City” concentrating on research and technical training. A third will be an agribusiness center that will meld industrial practices with India’s rich history of agriculture. India hopes that this rapid push to industrialize can transform a nation of subsistence farmers to a world leading power.
Chapter V
Deserted Desert Cities
Critics cite individual failed developments as monstrosities of overeager speculation and forced resettlement. China’s Kangbashi city district in never filled empty houses and apartments, but China’s 800 cities, which house 600 million inhabitants and include the Special Economic Zones Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Shanghai as well as troves of smaller new cities, should outweigh the missteps of outlying brethren.
When Egypt sought to decentralize Cairo in the 1980s, the capital city suffered from congestion of 14 million inhabitants overloading infrastructure built for only 4 million city dwellers. To absorb pressures from overpopulation, Egypt responded by building eight satellite cities and new towns as part of a program promoting “New Desert Cities.” But mismanagement led to initial shortcomings of the nascent urbanizations. Dr. El-Shakhs, also a founding member of the Greater Cairo Planning Committee, Cairo’s urban planning wing, views Egyptian government officials’ miscalculations as causing devastating effects on the desert cities. “The Ministry of Development and New Communities, which promoted and built [new Sadat City] to absorb some of the national capital functions, spearheaded by the ministry itself, opted to stay in Cairo instead. The city was thus perceived as a dumping ground for those not important or powerful enough to stay in the capital, a reaction that has adversely affected the New Desert Cities programme.”
While not every city-scale development starts as a success story, when properly managed, new cities can relieve overcrowded urban centers. As Dr. El- Shakhs suggested, “Proper planning, especially during stages of rapid mega-city growth, would help spark a step-wise process of decentralization and reduce growth pressures on the central city.” Another of Egypt’s New Desert Cities, 6th of October, helps alleviate the burdens of Cairo by addressing Egypt’s need to build 2 million new houses over the next 10 years. The constantly expanding city today already has a million residents with plans on the table for the rapid expansion to 3 million by the end of the decade.
Chapter IV
The Future of New Cities: "Designing an entirely new city from the ground up provides a unique opportunity to create an ideal technological infrastructure."—Bill Gates
With budget conscience governments pushing for cost-effective ways to control growth and to accommodate infrastructure for the 21st century, new “smart” cities provide popular solutions. In these smart cities, both public and private sectors can pursue jointly beneficial projects that spur economic growth and seek to ensure long-term stability. In an uncertain age where globalization opens borders to world-wide competition, cities must foster the underlying infrastructure that best facilitates economic growth for citizens. With growing populations, this translates to mitigating the deteriorating effects of overuse of essential infrastructure. To do this, current trends suggest that the future consists of developing smart cities that efficiently connect resources with people and businesses.
Resources like water and fossil fuels, which once freely flowed from the earth, now face scarcity in the new millennium. Forward-looking cities are starting to approach and manage these scarce resources with ever more caution. While no clear successor to oil as the standard source of energy has emerged, sustainability (in the form of more efficiently designed infrastructure) will maximize the distribution of resources and play a larger role in future city development.
In response to the growing demand for smart-infrastructure, unexpected companies like IBM and Cisco are joining the city-scale development industry. Technology firms plan to install sensors to fully integrate infrastructure through networks and computers. The companies seek to control both hardware and software markets for systems that monitor traffic accidents, track peak-usage, or instantly identify pipe leaks. The digital programs then respond in real time by optimally rerouting traffic, electricity, or water accordingly. To prove the effectiveness of fully integrated smart grids, IBM analyzed peak time electric usage in Washington. Their conclusion: if managed efficiently, the US could erase the demand for 30 coal-powered electric plants.
PlanIT Valley, the new Portuguese city, markets the smart-city movement as a push to “combine technology and urban development.” Smart growth, smart cities, and smart infrastructure are part of the new wave of “service-oriented architecture” or “urban operating systems” – they truly epitomize the intersection of infrastructure with network technology. Technological integration provides the ability to adjust “soft” infrastructure (like road signs or electric grid routings) instantaneously. Advanced data collection then allows humans to accurately assess currently immeasurable urban problems and maximize their solutions. “Most of [New Songdo City] will be wired with digital synapses—from the trunk lines running beneath the streets to the filaments branching through the walls and fixtures,” writes Greg Lindsay on the movement towards smart cities. “Imagine if a city operated like an iPhone—and [technology companies] could sell apps for everyday life.”
Cities of the future will become truly interactive, not just driven by the economic and physical forces of the past. As data mining leads to improved statistical models, computer control centers will make new, 21st century smart cities respond almost organically to inhabitants. As the world moves towards improving infrastructure’s efficiency, new cities provide the cheapest and most likely approach for developing nations to quickly leapfrog into the future. Expect to see more new cities. And expect them build around interactive, smart infrastructure.
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