Instant Cities for Sale

Tim Harford, the “undercover economist” (i.e. Britain’s answer to the Freakonomics dynamic duo) asks “is it time to outsource cities?” He correctly notes (as I told BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh last month) that cities are white-hot at the moment, alternately seen as the key to cracking climate change, as a tool for lifting millions out of poverty, and as they next great technology investment opportunity.

Harford mentions the aerotropolis in passing, then dismisses transportation infrastructure as less important than regulations, using Paul Romer’s charter cities as his primary example. But Romer would be the first to tell you (as he told me) that a charter city in the middle of nowhere (as defined by neoliberal economic geography) with the perfect rules will still fail to attract foreign investment without the necessary infrastructure, and that for any sufficiently advanced economy, that infrastructure is air travel. There’s a reason why Songdo is much further along than, say, Sejong City, the phantom future capital of Korea. Connectivity matters.

Harford points to Romer as a perfect example of the “real radicalism and the real insight: that building cities could become a business in its own right.” And yet he completely overlooks the real actors in this regard: technology companies like Cisco and Living PlanIT (which I’ve covered at length elsewhere) building smart cities at the behest of local and national governments, and mega-developments like Lavasa, which is the product of Cisco, Wipro, and the Hindustan Construction Corp., which expects to float the city in an IPO. And then there’s Singapore, which is consulting on a pair of “eco-cities” in China and is advising other cities and nations on how they can be more like Singapore – it’s franchising itself, in other words. Harford’s definitely right to pick up on the “instant city” trend, but there’s a lot more to it than what he mentions.