Mapping the Future of Global Civilization | Nat Geo Live

That world of political geography is not going away. But, at the same time, we are engaging in this topographical engineering. These very robust engineering systems by which we modify the planet to suit what we want it to do, what our various economic and political activities are. This is a very different way of thinking about how we map and what we map and what matters most on the map. (audience applause) Connecto-graphy, connect-ography. I've already heard it pronounced a thousand which ways. But of course, what I'm talking about is the fusion of connectivity and of geography.

And all of that "connectivity revolution," as I call it, falls into three particular categories that I liken to three systems in the human body. And what we have here is the world's highways and railways, oil and gas pipelines, electricity grids, internet cables. All of this infrastructure that has massively, exponentially accelerated our ability to move people and goods and resources and knowledge and technology and ideas around the world. And that revolution is in, by many measurements or metrics, really just getting underway.

As I said, we are just in the early phases of this incredible build-out of global infrastructure. By some estimates, we'll spend not just the $4 trillion per year on infrastructure that we spend today but rising to $7-8 trillion in the coming years. Meanwhile, military spending worldwide, though it's rising in quite a few geographies, as an aggregate, is relatively steady at around $2 trillion.

So, what happens when we build out all of this infrastructure, as these infrastructures sort of envelop and wrap around the world? I believe that we evolve beyond one of the most ancient adages and phrases that we all know: "Geography is destiny." Instead, we think of the arc of history as really taking us in a certain direction. And that direction is more and more and more connectivity.

There's a term in this for academia: extra-statecraft, in which that infrastructure is so real, where so many borders are considered artificial, that it has an authority, a gravity if you will. And when countries build infrastructure like a highway, or a railway, or an electricity grid—something really basic, you know, that they share with each other—it winds up being something that is almost an irrevocable bond. It's obviously positive sum.

And the more of those that you have, the less one thinks about not sovereignty as guiding their relations, but this connectivity really shaping how they relate to each other. And so, that's the shift that's happening now: from political geography being the most paramount feature of the map, which is again the borders, to the functional geography, which is the infrastructures and the supply chains.

Gradually, what I believe happens next is what I call the "Global Network Civilization" that eventually emerges from all of this infrastructure. Within that, you still have empires, you still have nations, you have city-states, you have all of these various actors. But it all adds up to a sort of co-existing civilization. The Sijori growth triangle. Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia are trying to optimize their space.

And what you have here is a case where you have a country, Singapore, which has very—almost no land, but a lot of capital. A country like Malaysia that has quite a bit of land and labor and some capital. And Indonesia, which has a lot of land and a lot of labor and very little capital. So, you take these three countries that are all very close to each other, and they said starting in the 1970s, in the 1980s, "Let's start to take Singaporean money and Malaysian and Indonesian land and Indonesian labor and put it on some islands that nominally belong to Indonesia, and let's start building ships that are owned by Singaporean companies. But, let's optimize our geography; let's treat it like we are connected by one supply chain."

And that's what they started to do. And you wouldn't know that there is one set of rules in one place and another because now people can increasingly move seamlessly around them. And that's how places, one by one, gradually... neighbors shift, transition from political geography to functional geography. But the supply chains are, in fact, the original worldwide webs. And they are that system of transactions that gets any one thing from one place to any another place.

And in many cases, in the global supply chain today, we no longer really know where something is made. And so, I believe that the labels on everything from clothing to computers and so on should really be made everywhere. If you look at where the design is done, the manufacturing is done, the production, the marketing, the distribution, the insurance, the repair of any given product, it involves companies and sub-contractors and so forth from all over the world. There's very little that is made exactly where the label says it is, in fact.

And that's what happens when we get to the supply chain world. You can see it in the fact that trade now reaches every corner of the planet. You can see it in the ways in which people in the financial industry are affected by the financial crisis of 2008. Collapse of manufacturing as a result of the financial crisis. Automobile workers and manufacturing workers around the world simultaneously lose their jobs.

You may not have noticed it because that may not be your circuit. But, people who work in that industry all over the world simultaneously affected. Such is the nature of that connectivity among this project. It is a very human thing because each and every one of us belongs to some kind of circuit. And we move, we gravitate towards the supply chain, towards these circuits.

We want to be part of them, and when the supply chain, and when infrastructure doesn't come to you, you go to it. Right, and that is why so many people today— that's why there's more migrants than ever in history today. People are on the move. One of the ways in which economists or others would measure the extent of globalization is, they would say, "Well, X and Y number of people have crossed borders any given year." That's not the correct way to measure globalization in my view.

It's how many people are connected, and to get connected you don't have to move across an international boundary. Most people will never leave the country they were born in. But if you move to a city, you have access to services. You may work in a factory of a foreign company; you're connected to supply chains; you'll have a mobile phone. All of these things connect you to the world even though you have never left the country.

So, to me, the rate of urbanization is the greatest measurement of the extent to which mankind is getting connected. And of course, we live in a rapidly, rapidly urbanizing world. Now, most of the world's population does live in cities already. Part of this global network civilization, part of this move from political to functional geography, is that, perhaps not surprisingly, cities can be seen as more important in many ways than countries.

So, what is on this map is every human being in the world. You have the entire world's population here, and you have the population density as well. And you have these ovals showing you the kind of outlines of where the largest, most populous mega-city clusters are. And then the large circles tell you what percentage, what share of the national economy those cities represent.

So, what you're seeing here is not only where mankind is concentrated but of course, just how significant those particular clusters are and where they're located. And so, 30 or 40 of these represent a growing share of the world economy. And by the year 2030, most projections estimate there will be about 50 mega-city archipelagos. And these really represent the preponderant share of the world economic activity.

So, I've put kind of all of them up on one map here. And again, I ask the question: you're trying to understand how the world works. It's not a naive question; I wonder which map tells you more. This one, or the conventional ones? Or maybe some mix of the two. But certainly not one that ignores this. Because a map that ignores this is not actually capturing who we are, where we are and what we do.

Part of this story is what I call 'pop-up cities.' Special Economic Zones. Fifty years ago we had almost no Special Economic Zones in the world; today, geographies, industrial parks that were set aside and designated primarily for the purpose of attracting in foreign investment, bringing in technology, training workers, boosting exports, allowing countries and their labor force to rise up the value chain. Today, we have 4,000 such Special Economic Zones in the world today.

It is the most rapidly expanding type of city. China has become an empire of such mega cities, each of which has almost a designated economic function in the global supply chain. And if you think about it, it's fascinating. It's very, very instructive in the shift from political to functional geography. That the world's oldest continuous civilization, with very diverse provincial and linguistic histories in many of its provinces, would say, "That's all fine and good. You can keep your dialects and your culture and so on. But, we need to organize the country in a new way so that each of these mega-city clusters has an internally viable economy.

So, it has anywhere from 20 to 100 million people. So that it has lots of services and transactions going on among people, so it's not dependent just on exporting one kind of widget or product. But, at the same time, each one is very connected to each other through high-speed rail networks and highways and so forth, and internationally to the global economy. And this process of reorganizing the sort of the management of a country is something that we're starting to see around the world.

This is how I believe it should happen in the United States. What I'm basically saying is that the 50 United States that we have are very, very useful when you're trying to win an election. When you're out there campaigning. But, it tells you absolutely nothing about how to properly govern America's geography to be an economically competitive superpower. Right, what we need is for these mega regions, if you will, that have certain common internal economic characteristics like agriculture or industry, to be much more seamlessly connected to each other and to the outside world.

They need to be built around urban economies at their core, and they need to be connected to each other through freight rail corridors, high-speed rail networks and so forth. So, if you take this layering of the natural economic geographies, these big patches, and the urban clusters that are in white that are gonna be the economic hubs, and then the infrastructural connectivity. That's how you would turn the United States of America into United City-States of America. And that would be one, that would be far more efficient, far more viable, far more sensible, and certainly far more competitive.

The optimistic note that I want to end on and that I end the book on is this idea that we are actually returning to a fairly ancient model. We are a coastal urban network civilization. Right, a world in which people are more interested in trade and commerce with each other than conquest. And this is what I call the Pax Urbanica, a peace among cities in which, if we think about the way cities view the world versus the way countries view the world.

Cities are interested in trade and connectivity, whereas we think of countries being interested in territorial aggrandizement. And so, the more we move into a world in which that mentality of inter-urban connectivity in sharing lessons with each other, trading with each other, positive sum relations, the more peaceful ultimately, the entire world system can be. But, the punch line really is that if you want to have this world, you actually have to build it. And it starts with what we're doing today and what we could do a lot more of.

Which is investing, first and foremost, in connectivity. Connectivity for countries, connectivity for cities, and connectivity for people. And with that, I'll stop. Thank you so very much. -(audience applause) -Thank you.