The fabled Asian century comes with unprecedented resource strains
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 at 12:02AM 
FT op-ed by Kevin Brown.
It has become a truism, buttressed by the hard realities of economic performance, that the 21st century will belong to Asia. But there is a big problem to overcome first, and it is not the flashpoints in North Korea, the Taiwan Straits and Kashmir. It is the region’s dangerous pace of population growth, and the health, environmental and security problems caused by urbanisation on a scale unique in human history.
The United Nations is forecasting that the world’s population will rise by more than 40 per cent to 9.3bn by 2050, with the proportion living in cities increasing to 70 per cent from slightly more than 50 per cent today. But the impact will be concentrated in Asia, where two-thirds of the world’s population lives, and where rapid economic growth is accelerating the natural process of urbanisation. While Europe is dealing with the problems of ageing, Asia (excluding Japan) will be trying to cope with a rush to the cities estimated at nearly 140,000 people a day.
How well it succeeds will have a huge impact on whether this really does turn out to be the Asian century. So far, the signs are not good.
The quintessential logic behind my mantra that the "New Core sets the new rules." It was my primary take-away from the NewRuleSets.Project work I did on the future of globalization with Cantor Fitzgerald. Once Asia is pulled into globalization fully, we reach a tipping point from which there is no turning back. The resulting evolution is necessarily rapid and will have global influence--and it will be centered primarily in cities.
It's why I see megacity mayors as the natural political leaders of this century.
Great line in the piece from head of UN's economic and social commission for Asia and the Pacific: governments in Asia "simply do not have the luxury of growing first and cleaning up later."
Asian integration, development | in Citation Post | Email Article | Permalink | Print Article 
Reader Comments (1)
You might be very interested in reading Stewart Brand's latest book, "Whole Earth Discipline". Brand was the editor of the old "Whole Earth Catalogs" which you might remember from many, many years ago. Brand is a long-time environmentalist who is being viewed as somewhat of a traitor for coming out in favor of megacities and nuclear power as ways of dealing with current environmental issues