According to United Nations estimates, Asia’s urban population will double between 2000 and 2030, adding 1.3 billion people. Asia’s urban transformation has tremendous implications for the countries of the region and for the rest of the world. This growth is occurring as Asian societies have become more intertwined in global webs of trade, investment, and production, and as Asia’s economies have steadily grown, producing more than a third of world gross domestic product. The urban expansion that has accompanied these changes and the increasing importance of cities as sites of corporate investment and production in the global era have given rise to urban development schemes of fantastic ambition. Governments and developers have proposed (and sometimes implemented) the construction of entire new towns designed for populations of between half a million and a million people in China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, while scores more such projects with populations in the mere tens or hundreds of thousands are being planned around almost every major city in Asia.
What does it to mean to think about a global future when one looks at the world from the vantage point of Berlin?
In the 1950s, the northwestern coast of the Arabian Peninsula was a barren wilderness. A mere collection of huts dotted the expansive desert sands. But in the past 60 years, and especially in the last quarter century, a very different landscape has emerged. The region now teems with burgeoning cities, some of which have become desirable destinations for wealthy tourists, Fortune 500 companies, and leading academic institutions from the United States and elsewhere.
In the summer of 2007, the Tate Modern’s Global Cities exhibit in London publicly marked an urban threshold recently crossed: for the first time in history, one out of every two people on the planet is living and moving around in cities. This already proves challenging for those whose job it is to make sure the urban half can move around and gain access to their daily needs, preferably safely, sustainably, equitably, and affordably.
Ever since the United Nations declared the International Decade on Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation in the 1980s, water and sanitation issues have remained high on the policy agenda of multilateral and bilateral agencies, national governments, and civil society organizations in developing countries. The policy interventions are aimed at enhancing access to water and sanitation facilities to promote the quality of environmental health for the most environmentally deprived communities in low-income cities, towns, and rural settlements all over Africa and much of the developing world. More recent targets have been set for reducing the share of the world’s population without adequate water and sanitation within the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Yet it is not quite clear what these targets and the indicators that have been set at the global level mean to local people in deprived communities in Africa’s cities.
In a pocket defined by the intersection of the massive state-planned Fifth Ring Road and Airport Expressway, which took visitors into the city of Beijing and to the “One World, One Dream” Olympic venues this August, sits the urban village of Caochangdi. Screened from view by swaths of some of the three billion trees now being planted in Beijing as part of a Central Party urban afforestation mandate, Caochangdi is a thriving early twenty-first-century urban space of mostly illegal structures being built by entrepreneurial farmers and contemporary art dealers and artists.
The opening line of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens portraying life in London and Paris during the French Revolution—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”— applies equally well to today’s burgeoning cities throughout much of the developing world. Whether it is Lagos, Mumbai, São Paulo, Karachi, or Shanghai, life within or on the periphery of such cities mixes economic opportunity with deprivation, social solidarity with exclusion, and ecological blessings with burdens. With this year marking the epochal transition of humanity from a rural to a majority urban species, it is a propitious moment to ponder how the future of global urbanization, predominately in the low- and middle-income countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, may evolve over the next few decades in regard to size, velocity, shape, and functioning.
A few years ago a former prime minister of Armenia visited University of Michigan’s campus. In addition to a public lecture, Mr. Hrand Bagratian visited my undergraduate class on the Republic of Armenia. Bagratian’s visit coincided with the week when we were discussing economic reforms and economic transitions in general. As was the case with the position of prime ministers in most post-Soviet republics, prime ministers were mainly responsible for the economic and social spheres. Bagratian had been responsible for the radical effort to transform the state-owned and centrally commanded economy into a free market economy (1993–1996).
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a Rip Van Winkle awakening in 2009 will find sub-Saharan Africa's political landscape profoundly changed. Many more Africans now enjoy basic political rights, and a clear yet partial move toward accountable governance offers a better platform for tackling the region's steep challenges of economic development and poverty reduction.
On the front page of newspapers daily, at the heart of foreign policy agendas, at the center of debates, democracy is a central theme of our times. And in its international salience, in the confidence with which it is parlayed across the globe, it is often taken as a truth held to be self-evident, easily defined by its most prominent features, including free and fair elections, a multiparty system, and freedoms of expression and the press.
For how frequently the term is used, and for the consequence of that use, democracy’s meaning should be simply evident. Of course scholars can deconstruct any term and debate any operationalization, but democracy’s connotation is more than academic. Authorities of various sorts allocate resources depending on a nation’s association with it. Activists can sacrifice their lives to realize it.
Everyone understands that there is a crisis in American newspapers but not everyone realizes there’s a crisis in American journalism. The crisis is masked because, right now, we’re living through a time of journalistic riches—we have the best of two worlds, the old world of newspapers and the new world of the Internet. But that’s not a situation that’s going to last. What will emerge at the end of the day? How will the news, the basic information we require for decisions large and small, be different?
In our increasingly globalized world, visionary politicians and activists have promoted ideas such as human rights, democracy, development, and peace as shared global ideals. Among them, few can claim the level of worldwide acceptance that the concept of human rights enjoys. Economic development had a period of high approval, but concerns about environmental damage have dampened enthusiasm around it. Environmentalism, in turn, has been growing in popularity, but some still claim rights for development over environmental protection, and others argue that the environmental crisis is overstated. Peace has always been a distant goal or a utopian ideal, as terrorism, nuclear diffusion, territorial disputes and other hard power issues constantly undermine the Kantian perpetual peace. Democracy as a global ideal has a complicated status. While it is embraced by many as the most desirable governance system, many others reject it as an imposition by western nations. The second Iraq War and the associated neoconservative ideology of diffusion of democracy by force may have amplified the latter image. Compared to these other global ideals, human rights seems to enjoy the highest level of consensus and the most fully developed international instruments. The number of international human rights treaties and parties, as well as the growing number of international nongovernmental human rights organizations, serve as evidence for this observation. How did human rights achieve this status? Can and should democracy become such a global ideal?
Far from the big-city museums and tourist destinations of Warsaw and Cracow that honor Poland’s Jewish heritage and the martyrology sites of World War II, the Sejny-Suwałki region has been marked by history on a smaller, but no less painful, scale: anti-Lithuanian riots, destruction of its large Jewish population during the Holocaust, anti-Semitic pogroms, and hostility toward ethnic Belarusians, Russian Old Believers, and Roma. Housed partly in the reclaimed Jewish structures of Sejny—a northeastern Polish town that has no living Jews—the non-governmental organization (NGO) Borderland Foundation and Borderland Centre of Arts, Cultures, and Nations combine hands-on cultural activism with literary, public intellectual, and scholarly endeavors that center on the recovery and celebration of rich East-Central European regional heritage.