Cartographie. Les villes prennent le pouvoir Les mégalopoles sont les nouveaux moteurs de l’économie mondiale. De la Californie au delta de la rivière des Perles, en Chine, l’avenir s’écrit dans des pôles urbains tentaculaires. D’ici à 2025, il y aura au moins quarante de ces villes ultra-connectées dans le monde. Par-delà les frontières, elles inventent une autre forme de gouvernance et d’économie, affirme Parag Khanna, l’auteur de Connectography : Mapping The Future of Global Civilization (éd. Penguin Random House, avril 2016, non traduit en français). Dans ce livre, l’auteur, que le New York Times décrit comme “l’homme le plus connecté du monde” en raison de ses collaborations avec des universités du monde entier, décrit un futur où les frontières nationales reculeront et où les agglomérations – ainsi que les personnes – les plus connectées prendront le pouvoir. Ce constat, c’est aussi celui de l’Institut Mc Kinsey.
Do international NGOs still have the right to exist? | Global Development Professionals Network It’s highly unlikely that corporate bosses regularly ask themselves if their businesses have a right to exist. Their goal is to sell stuff and make a profit. But if your goal is to alleviate poverty and human suffering – in the face of statistics showing mixed outcomes – is this, in fact, the most important question an International NGO can ask of themselves? At the BOND conference last week, in a session entitled How can INGOs survive the future, Penny Lawrence, the deputy CEO of Oxfam stated bluntly: “we need to earn the right to survive the future.” Plagued with concerns about accountability and effectiveness, alongside an NGO backlash both at home and abroad, there is clearly something afoot. Prof Robert Chambers in his book, Development: Whose Reality Counts? Power, ironically, is what may be holding INGOs back from achieving impact. If devolving power is what’s needed, it’s one thing to acknowledge it. INGOs are, thankfully, starting to confront these home truths.
Lessons from the World’s Largest Megacity If a product says “Made in China,” chances are that product, or parts of it, came from the Pearl River Delta. This region in southern China is the world’s largest megacity: eight major urbanized zones with a combined population of 55 million people, spread in a horseshoe-shaped ring around a complex watershed ecosystem. Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou dominate the region, which, incorporating five other emerging cities, has experienced explosive growth over the past 30 years. The region has risen on the back of China’s meteoric manufacturing sector, which produces many of the household and retail commodities sold throughout the world. In the Pearl River Delta, we can see, writ large, the issues that many urban areas across the globe are currently — or will soon be — facing. For most people, issues related to Chinese manufacturing and urbanization barely percolate into the subconscious.
The Rebirth of the City-State — How We Get To Next Taking the long view, nation-states are a recent invention in human history. To summarize the bulk of an undergraduate politics module in a sentence or two, nation-states as we know them were directly preceded by kingdoms and empires that spanned large geographic territories and encompassed various cultural and ethnic groups who, while recognizing themselves as subjects of the empire, did not share a sense of collective identity. With the nation-state came formal borders, centralized administration, a unified economy, and in cultural terms a sense of “nationhood.” The idea — albeit contested, even today — was that the citizens of the state constituted one people. Yet for millennia before that, the political geography of human civilization was dominated by a smaller unit of organization. Those were urban settlements with a self-governing political structure and sovereign authority inside their borders, a version of what we now know as city-states. I talked to Dr.
Redefining Global Cities | Brookings Institution The world’s largest metropolitan areas concentrate the drivers of global prosperity, but there isn’t one way to be a global city—this report defines seven types of global cities, providing a valuable lens through which to understand an evolving global economy. As societies and economies around the world have urbanized, they have upended the classic notion of a global city. No longer is the global economy driven by a select few major financial centers like New York, London, and Tokyo. Today, members of a vast and complex network of cities participate in international flows of goods, services, people, capital, and ideas, and thus make distinctive contributions to global growth and opportunity. And as the global economy continues to suffer from what the IMF terms “too slow growth for too long,” efforts to understand and enhance cities’ contributions to growth and prosperity become even more important. Seven types of global cities Remapping the 123 largest global cities Developing the typology
Governments make fast progress on blockchain adoption Blockchain technology creates a digital ledger on which transactions are recorded chronologically and publicly. Nine in ten government organisations across the world are planning to invest in blockchain technology by 2018, according to a survey of public sector leaders. In a report based on the survey, technology firm IBM said that the emerging technology has the potential to help civil servants deal with the pressure of constrained resources and ageing populations. Government bodies also have a key role in the wider adoption of blockchain across society, according to the report. It said: “Government organizations, like those in any industry, are wise to take the long view on blockchains. But unlike other industries, because they shape the regulatory and legal environment, they can’t afford to stay on the sidelines. “Government organizations don’t just stand to benefit from the greater trust promised by blockchains; they are uniquely charged to create it for the benefit of all.” See also:
New York City At Night - Aerial Photos of New York City There's something about New York City and the way it pulses. When you're in the middle of it, you feel it, but it's nearly impossible to capture the electricity of the ever-beating grid. Photographer Vincent Laforet found a way to do just that with his impressive series of aerial images of New York City, shot out of an open-door helicopter in the middle of the night. As Laforet said on his blog: This was an incredible adventure—and to be honest—self-imposed. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below See for yourself: Vincent Laforet [H/T: Laforet Visuals]
Los Angeles, la métropole californienne aux mille visages Los Angeles n’est pas une ville traditionnelle, avec un centre et une banlieue, mais plutôt un regroupement de quartiers qui ont tous une identité propre. La grande variété ethnique de L.A. compte d’ailleurs parmi les facettes qui rendent cette ville plus intéressante, plus authentique et plus raffinée que son image superficielle le laisse souvent croire. L’agglomération de Los Angeles compte une population de 18,5 millions d’habitants. En hiver, on peut jouer au volleyball sur la plage et voir au loin les sommets enneigés des montagnes où l’on pratique des sports de glisse. Los Angeles, ville de cinéma Vous pourrez vous imprégner de l’histoire de la capitale mondiale du cinéma en visitant les studios de Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures ou Universal. Sur le Hollywood Boulevard, vous pourrez arpenter le fameux Hollywood Walk of Fame et découvrir le majestueux Kodak Theatre, la maison de la cérémonie des Oscars. Ce texte est tiré du guide Los Angeles d’Ulysse.
San Francisco, métropole inégale La question des inégalités a pris une place inédite dans le débat national aux États-Unis ces toutes dernières années : alors que Barack Obama a présenté les inégalités comme « un enjeu essentiel de notre époque » dans son discours sur le « State of the Union » du mois de décembre 2013, le Capital au XXIe siècle (2014) a constitué un succès de librairie retentissant outre-Atlantique et son auteur, l’économiste français Thomas Piketty, y est devenu une véritable star. Plus largement, près des deux tiers des Etats-Uniens considèrent aujourd’hui que les inégalités sont devenues l’un des défis sociaux les plus importants (Desilver, 2014). Comment mesurer les inégalités socio-économiques ? Figure 1 : San Francisco, la 16e grande ville la plus inégale selon l’indice de Gini (2012) source : Ted Egan, 2014 Un autre indice des inégalités consiste à calculer le ratio entre les revenus de la population la plus riche avec celui de la population la plus pauvre.
Territoires Md° : dodo internet et inégalités accès mondiale Scientists track Internet usage as it pulses across the globe daily Contact: Robert Perkins at (213) 740-9226 or perkinsr@usc.edu Researchers studying how big the Internet is have found that it “sleeps,” almost like a living creature. The finding will help scientists and policymakers develop better systems to measure and track Internet outages, such as those that struck the New York area after Hurricane Sandy. Understanding how the Internet sleeps will help them avoid confusing a sleeping Internet with an Internet outage. “The Internet is important in our lives and businesses, from streaming movies to buying online. While the Internet is always up and running for some—such as those with broadband access in the United States and Europe—in other areas, people’s access to the Internet varies over the course of the day, notably in Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe. When the Internet Sleeps from USC Viterbi on Vimeo. There are 4 billion IPv4 internet addresses. The team’s work is ongoing.