Asian Megacities: Giants of Tomorrow

Asia will urbanize on an unprecedented scale in the next 15 years, a trend that will have enormous economic and energy impacts around the world.  Over the next twenty years, global growth is going to be led by a group of cities many have never even heard of.  The future of growth will not necessarily be led by New York, London, or Paris, but by Surat, Goiânia, Semarang, and Suzhou.  Cities that have not been widely thought about, like Baoding, Dezhou, Daedoek, Kunming, and Hyderabad are all currently competing to stake their claim as the green tech hub of Asia.  In contrast to North America and Europe, where the primary challenge is greening legacy systems, these cities feature new systems of almost every-kind and will determine the respective countries approaches to urbanization, energy, and construction. 

As these cities grow in size and influence, they will increasingly lead in the development of policies, standards, and regulations governing economic development.  As a consequence, businesses and policy leaders will be well-served to look to these places as creative engines and leaders in innovation where future growth is going to take place.  Garten Rothkopf has identified this as one of the dominant trends that will increasingly come to shape the world of the coming century, and this is just the first in a series of briefs on the Asian Megacities that are driving global transformations of the Twenty-First Century. 

Full article here.