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91. Beyond Borders

Author:
David A. Andelman
Publication Date:
03-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
World Policy Journal
Institution:
World Policy Institute
Abstract:
Civilization marks its beginnings to the moment, more than 14,000 years ago, humans first gathered into settlements, leaving behind their days as nomadic hunters and gatherers. Known as sedentarization, this phenomenon likely debuted in the Fertile Crescent of the Levant, followed by the Yangtze and Yellow River basins two millennia later, and eventually in Mexico, South America, and finally the eastern shores of the United States. At each point sprang up villages, cities, and eventually, nations. Over thousands of years, fixed boundaries were codified and defended, often at great cost. Many borders have been drawn wisely, following natural formations like barriers of mountains or rivers. Many follow linguistic, ethnic, religious, or tribal boundaries. But others have been haphazardly imposed by outsiders with the stroke of a pen on some distant map. As empires fell and the speed of global trade and migration increased, boundaries became complex barriers to the free movement of people and ideas. Today, some provoke violent wars and revolutions, while others can be breached by brave individuals and new technologies—issues that World Policy Journal explores in our spring cover theme.
Topic:
Demographics, Development, Nationalism, International Affairs, Border Control, and Urbanization
Political Geography:
United States, South America, and Mexico

92. Foreign Policy for an Urban World: Global Governance and the Rise of Cities

Author:
Peter Engelke
Publication Date:
08-2013
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Atlantic Council
Abstract:
Cities are shaping our collective fate in nearly every respect. As the predominant locus of human settlement, cities already wield considerable power and will continue to increase their influence in the decades to come. Cities generate most of the world's wealth. They are the places where citizenship and political participation are defined, redefined, and contested. They are the sites where global challenges ranging from climate change and natural resource depletion to international security problems are felt. In other words, we have seen the future, and it is urban. If humankind's most pressing challenges are to be solved during this century, the world's foreign and security policy establishments must not only become more cognizant of mass urbanization, but begin creating the processes that will productively integrate cities within global governance structures. These policy establishments are already behind the curve, for cities have been going about building parallel global governance structures on their own for some time now. They have become important actors in shaping global politics, helping to forge new patterns of transnational relations.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, International Security, Governance, and Urbanization

93. The Security of Cities: Ecology and Conflict on an Urbanizing Planet

Author:
Peter Engelke
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Atlantic Council
Abstract:
Humankind recently crossed a historic threshold: over half of all human beings now live in cities. In contrast to most of human history, cities have become the default condition for human habitation almost everywhere on earth. Urbanization is proceeding rapidly and at unprecedented scales in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. These regions are poised to join Latin America, Europe, North America, and Australia as having more people living in cities than in rural areas. Between 2010 and 2050, the world's urban population is expected to grow by 3 billion people—a figure roughly equal to the world's total population in 1950—with the great majority living in developing-world cities.3 Our species, in other words, is already an urban one and will become even more so throughout this century.
Topic:
Demographics, Development, Environment, Natural Resources, Urbanization, and Developing World
Political Geography:
Africa, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Latin America, Australia, and North America

94. Le désordre ordonné : la fabrique violente de Karachi (Pakistan) (Ordered Disorder : the Violent Fabric of Karachi)

Author:
Laurent Gayer
Publication Date:
09-2013
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI)
Abstract:
With a population exceeding twenty million, Karachi is already one of the largest cities in the world. It could even become the world’s largest city by 2030. Karachi is also the most violent of these megacities. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources. These struggles for the city have become ethnicised. Karachi, often referred to as a “Pakistan in miniature”, has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially. Notwithstanding this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Despite what journalistic accounts describing the city as chaotic and anarchic tend to suggest, there is indeed order of a kind in the city’s permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi’s polity is predicated upon relatively stable patterns of domination, rituals of interaction and forms of arbitration, which have made violence “manageable” for its populations – even if this does not exclude a chronic state of fear, which results from the continuous transformation of violence in the course of its updating. Whether such “ordered disorder” is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachi works despite—and sometimes through—violence.
Topic:
History, Sociology, Urbanization, Conflict, and Political Science
Political Geography:
Pakistan, South Asia, Asia, and Karachi

95. Worldwide Cost of Living 2012

Publication Date:
02-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
For the first time in at least two decades of reporting the worldwide cost of living survey Zurich sits atop the ranking as the world's most expensive city. An index swing of 34 percentage points pushed the Swiss city up 4 places compared to last year to overtake Tokyo which remains in 2nd place. Geneva, the other Swiss city surveyed saw a 30 percentage point rise in the cost of living to move up six places into joint third alongside Osaka.
Topic:
International Relations, Demographics, Economics, Markets, and Urbanization
Political Geography:
Tokyo

96. Keeping Up with an Urbanizing World

Author:
Michele Acuto
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Diplomatic Courier
Abstract:
In 1951, Isaac Asimov, father of science fiction, opened his most famed book Foundation with a graphic portrayal of the planet that was leading an imaginary galaxy mastered by humankind in all its width. “Its urbanization, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All the land surface was a single city.” A few years later, J.G. Ballard, in another of the columns of modern-day fictional literature, depicted a similar atmosphere in his dystopian novel The Concentration City, where the urban settlement in question encompasses everything known to its inhabitants, which cannot do anything more than accepting the view “that the City stretches out in all directions without limits.” No escape is offered to the impuissant protagonist, who travels endlessly along rail lines, only to get back to the point of origin without ever leaving a disturbing conurbation.
Topic:
Urbanization
Political Geography:
Japan

97. Questioning Homeownership as a Public Policy Goal

Author:
Morris A. Davis
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
For decades U.S. housing policy has focused on promoting homeownership. In this study, I show that the set of policies designed to further homeownership has been ineffective and expensive and that homeownership as a public policy goal is not well supported.
Topic:
Economics, Government, Markets, and Urbanization
Political Geography:
United States

98. Global Urban Market-Based Livelihoods in Oxfam GB: Lessons and experiences from Kenya, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Colombia, Haiti, and Russia

Author:
Sheilah Meikle, Tim Chambers, Alex Frediani, and Tom Goodfellow
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
More people in the world now live in urban areas than in rural areas. It is estimated that as many as one billion people, 15 per cent of the world's total of seven billion, currently live in urban slums, and this number will likely double within 20 years. Until recently however, Oxfam, like other development agencies, focused primarily on rural poverty.
Topic:
Demographics, Poverty, and Urbanization
Political Geography:
Bangladesh, Kenya, Russia, Colombia, Haiti, and Guatemala

99. Best cities ranking and report

Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
Earlier this year the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) teamed up with data sharing company BuzzData to host a competition offering users the opportunity to combine data from the Worldwide Cost of Living and Liveability surveys with other sources to provide a ranking of their own. Here Jon Copestake, the Editor of the EIU's Cost of Living and Liveability surveys, discusses his experience of the competition.
Topic:
Demographics, International Trade and Finance, Culture, and Urbanization

100. Supersized cities: China's 13 megalopolises

Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
The rise and decline of great cities past was largely based on their ability to draw the ambitious and the restless from other places. China's cities are on the rise. Their growth has been fuelled both by the large-scale internal migration of those seeking better lives and by government initiatives encouraging the expansion of urban areas. The government hopes that the swelling urban populace will spend more in a more highly concentrated retail environment, thereby helping to rebalance the Chinese economy towards private consumption.
Topic:
Communism, Demographics, Development, Economics, Migration, and Urbanization
Political Geography:
China and Israel