How Asia’s Transformation Could Shape the World’s Urban Future
Asia is ground zero for the most significant challenge of the 21st century: sustainable urbanization. If the billions of people cramming into the cities of the Pacific Rim and South Asia can not only maintain their breakneck growth but do so without cooking the planet, mankind will have dodged a major bullet. The scale of the challenge for Asia is only growing: Just under half of all Asians live in cities, compared to roughly 82 percent of Americans and 74 percent of Europeans. Asians are on the move to catch up — but can they leapfrog at the same time?
The continent’s rapidly modernizing cities are driving the region’s accelerating connectivity and growth. Each subregion of Asia has a growing number of thriving urban hubs: Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Riyadh and Doha in the Gulf region; Istanbul, Tel Aviv and Tehran in West Asia; Karachi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai in South Asia; and all of East Asia and Southeast Asia’s metropolises, from Tokyo to Shanghai, Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh City and Manila to Jakarta. Nine of the 10 busiest international flight connections in the world are between Asian cities, with only the pairing of New York and Toronto representing North America on the list. The ancient Silk Road routes are back in hyper-drive, with airlines, high-speed railways and highways augmented with internet cables.
Additionally, Asia has had nearly 50 years of the “Tiger economies” — South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore — which took off by establishing special economic zones (SEZs) to attract foreign investment into factory towns and climb the rungs of global value chains. China caught on 40 years ago, when Deng Xiaoping made Shenzhen the country’s first SEZ; within a decade, China had become the world’s factory floor. Now the model has spread to Vietnam and Indonesia, India and Oman, with countries across Asia designating SEZs as entry and exit points for intermediate and finished goods. Like holes in a weaving board, these nodes capture the threads of commerce that tie Asians closer together.
For sure, Asia is also home to the most ambitious “smart city” projects, from the United Arab Emirates’ Masdar to India’s Amaravati and China’s Tianjin Eco-City, districts aiming to go completely green with driverless electric cars and zero-emissions buildings. But the combined population of all of these startup cities could fit inside one neighborhood of China’s Chongqing city.
Whether Asians can scale the innovations of their experimental zones to the level of their many megalopolis cities is therefore the question whose answer will hold lessons for the rest of the world too.
Asia’s megacities have already reached a scale that is unimaginable in the West, where the largest metropolises rarely exceed 10 million residents. Asia’s mammoth cities are sprawling archipelagos spanning vast areas, home to upwards of 60 million people, and they experience nearly a million new arrivals every week, about two-thirds of the global total.
For the most part, Asia’s spectacular city growth has been good for its residents. Many larger Asian cities are becoming richer, and the overall quality of life for city dwellers is improving. Japan, South Korea and China’s wealthy coastal provinces have accumulated the fiscal capacity, political will and technological know-how to deploy quality infrastructure, housing, utilities and services for the masses.
But sprawl, congestion, unemployment and slums are critical impediments in Asia’s even bigger swath of high-growth countries stretching from Pakistan through India and all of Southeast Asia to the Philippines. The South and Southeast Asian regions have a combined population of more than 2.5 billion, eclipsing that of China. But New Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai, Karachi, Dhaka and Manila all rank among Asia’s densest and least-developed cities.
