Chartered Territory

On a bright November morning in Manhattan, several hundred luxury goods executives filed into the basement auditorium of the Morgan Library expecting to hear Paul Romer speak about China and innovation. Courtly, earnest and reserved, Romer is an academic economist by training, and it shows. Before the crowd’s caffeine could kick in, he offered a modest proposal: Rather than start the next Louis Vuitton, we should knock off Hong Kong. Cities can be startups too, he said. “We can build new ones much faster than people think.”

That’s what China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping thought in 1979 when he designated Shenzhen as the country’s first special economic zone. In less than 30 years, Romer explained, the fishing village across the border from Hong Kong had become a capitalist enclave larger and more populous than New York. Shenzhen, in turn, kicked off China’s transformation from a rural backwater to an export-driven powerhouse. Hong Kong and its copies, Romer likes to say, have done more to eliminate poverty than all the foreign aid put together, and he may be right. China lifted 660 million of its citizens out of absolute poverty between 1981 and 2008 – more than the rest of the world combined.

Romer’s appearance that morning was a favor to the hosts, his new colleagues at New York University’s Stern School of Business. A year ago, Stern lured the eminent economist back to academia with a $10 million gift for the Urbanization Project, a personal think tank devoted to creating new “charter” cities and massively expanding existing ones, thus planting the school’s flag in what dean Peter Henry believes will be a $20 trillion market in financing urbanization – and the next line of work for Stern graduates.

“We will do more urbanization in this century than we’ve done in all of history,” Romer said from the stage. “Whatever we do will establish the pattern that will last forever.” Expecting a day of social media tips and fireside chats with CEOs, the audience sat stunned – who decides that what the world needs now are mega-cities built from scratch in the its poorest places?

The rest of this story can be purchased at Next American City.