Cambodian Bloggers Champion New, Open Ways

The Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia has had a very difficult history over the past few decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was seen as a glamorous and vibrant place. Dynamic, ambitious and newly independent from French colonial rule, Cambodia embarked on an extensive programme of building that is now called “New Khmer Architecture.” It is the most visible legacy of this modernizing time.

The book Cultures of Independence: An Introduction to Cambodian Arts and Culture in the 1950s and 1960s says architects of the period showed “a willingness to expand and incorporate new elements, looking both outside and inside the newly independent nation …. Whether consciously or not, most of their work took up questions of how to create forms that would be recognised as both Cambodian and modern.”

But with the war in nearby Vietnam worsening in the 1970s, the destabilising effect of the conflict gave rise to the Khmer Rouge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge), a radical and genocidal movement under the dictator Pol Pot which killed an estimated 2 million Cambodians. It came to an end when newly independent Vietnam invaded the country to overturn the Khmer Rouge regime and end the genocide that had raged between 1975 and 1979.

By the early 1990s, the United Nations was helping Cambodia make the transition to democracy and redevelop its economy after the trauma of the Khmer Rouge years.

Today’s Cambodia is a country with a fast-growing economy – at 5.5 percent in 2010 according to Prime Minister Hun Sen – but still trying to come to grips with the pain and damage of the Khmer Rouge period.

On the internet, pioneering bloggers are trying to bridge the gap between reluctance to speak out about those years and the need for the country to modernize and open up. In the past, keeping quiet in public was the best survival strategy and outspoken voices could end up dead.

The internet is still in its infancy in Cambodia, with only 78,000 users in 2010 (Internet World Stats) – up from 6,000 in 2000, but still tiny in a population of 14,805,358 (World Bank). Cambodia still has high levels of illiteracy of 26 percent (ILO) and poverty, leaving access to the internet and computers a minority pursuit.

The first connections to the internet in Cambodia were set up in 1994 and internet cafes have been flourishing since the mid 2000s.

One role model can be found at the Blue Lady Blog (http://blueladyblog.com/). Its author, Kounila Keo, blogs about her daily frustrations, passions, and life as a young woman who has been working as a newspaper journalist. Her blog tackles anything Cambodian, from education and politics to lifestyle, press freedom, culture and problems facing the country. She is a passionate explainer of Cambodia’s blogging culture.

She started the Blue Lady Blog in 2007 and in a talk at Phnom Penh’s TEDx in February (http://tedxphnompenh.com/) described how she found blogging has transformed her life in three ways:

1) Freedom of speech: She could now fully express herself and venture opinions she could not do even as a journalist.

2) Self-education and self esteem: she has had to learn things on her own and in turn this has boosted her confidence.

3) Knowledge and new perspectives: blogging connects her with people around the world she would not normally have contact with. And blogging is becoming the new voice of a new generation of youth, allowing them to redefine the country’s development challenges in their own terms.

Keo found blogging altered the challenges facing youth, posing the question “What can young Cambodians do for Cambodia?” She believes Cambodian youth should do something rather than wait for opportunities to come to them. Young people have told her her blog has spurred them into action.

“Cloggers” – Cambodian bloggers – are a group of young internet users championing the use of information technologies in everyday life.

In 2007, the first Clogger Summit (http://cloggersummit.wikispaces.com/) brought together bloggers, webmasters, media representatives and NGOs for the first time to exchange ideas and share and debate. Since then, there has been a proliferation of blogs in the Cambodian language.

Developing a vibrant – and open – information technology sector has many advantages. Pioneering work by the United Nations in Mongolia as it made its transition to free markets and democracy led to the country becoming one of world’s freest for internet use.

A vibrant and free information technology sector enables businesses to quickly modernize, connect with customers and markets around the world, spread information and ideas quickly, react to crises and build market efficiencies.

Honduras, Mali, and Mongolia (http://www.yuxiyou.net/open/) were highlighted as being some of the freest places in the world for the internet in a recent report by Reporters Without Borders (http://en.rsf.org/).

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: March 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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China Consumer Market: Asian Perspective Helps

The rise of China since 1989 has been the most remarkable development story of our times. The number of people lifted out of poverty is historically unprecedented: 65 percent of Chinese people lived below the poverty line in 1981; in 2007 it was 4 percent (World Bank).

Many commentators have focused on China’s astonishing work ethic, vast labour resources and ability to export great quantities of products. But while China has been busy meeting the needs of the world economy, domestic Chinese consumption has received less attention.

Yet, with the Chinese firmly established as keen savers and very ambitious to improve their living standards, a vast new opportunity has emerged: the Chinese consumer market. But it will be a tricky market to tap. Chinese consumers are notorious bargain hunters and prefer to save and invest rather than consume. Poor rural families earning less than US $200 per person a year still are able to save 18 percent of their income.

This makes a lot of sense: social supports have been stripped away as China’s economy embraced the market system. If you do not save and invest, then you will not have the resources to meet the costs of education and health care, for example. China has also seen a dramatic move to urban areas, with over 43 percent of the population now urban.

China, despite all the hype, is still a marketplace that is difficult to easily enter for Western brands and businesses. And this makes for an opportunity for local brands to raise their game.

In order to compete in the consumer market, businesses need to do more than compete on price: they need to also offer something more and that usually involves building a strong brand.

The Chinese urban consumer market could grow from around US $570 billion in 2005 to around US $4.7 trillion by 2025 (PWC) (http://www.pwc.co.uk). Fast growth will be seen in discretionary spending, things other than food, clothing and utilities.

While Chinese businesses have focused on export markets and meeting the needs of the global marketplace – a focus which has been very successful and led to remarkable wealth gains – the Chinese consumer has come lower down the list of priorities. 

 Growing the domestic consumer market offers a substantial wealth-creating opportunity. Since the global economic crisis erupted in 2008, it has become apparent that the old model of exporting vast quantities of products to Western consumers alone will not be enough to keep living standards rising. Western economies are highly indebted and will take many years to recover from the mistakes and debts from the boom years and the economic crisis. 

 This is an opportunity for South-South trade, which made up 20 percent of global exports by 2010. Foreign direct investment to developing economies rose by 10 percent in 2010 due to a rapid economic recovery and increasing South-South flows. 

 One company successfully targeting this market is the Singapore-based Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts brand (www.banyantree.com), which bills itself as specializing in luxury sanctuaries to rejuvenate the body, mind and soul. It is notable for deliberately not competing on price but on its brand reputation and for tailoring its offering explicitly to Asian tastes. The company claims its resorts are “naturally-luxurious, ecologically sensitive, culture-aware experiences for the discerning, responsible traveller.” 

 The first Banyan Tree resort was built in Phuket, Thailand in 1987. It now employs 8,200 people from 50 nationalities in 26 resorts. Founder and executive chairman Ho Kwon Ping focused from the start on the business’s brand as critical to driving the growth of the company. 

 He told INSEAD Knowledge: “The difference between us and some others is that, for many other companies having a strong brand is a reward for being successful in many things that you do but it’s sort of coincidental. It comes afterward; it’s a reward for success in other areas. For us, we’ve always said from the very beginning – having a strong brand is imperative for our survival.” 

 Banyan Tree has also eschewed quick-growth models, instead trying to do as little environmental damage as possible and to include community development and environmental projects at each resort. 

 Its Banyan Tree Ringha resort in China’s Yunnan province tries to bring the atmosphere of the fictional earthly paradise of Shangri-La to China. Ringha Valley sits near the Temple of the Five Wisdom Buddhas, 3,600 meters above sea level. The resort has 15 one-bedroom suites, 11 two-bedroom lodges, and six spa suites, decorated in a Tibetan style. The area is home to the Naxi people who trace their origins to nearby Tibet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxi_people). 

 The accommodation is rustic and the resort is located in the middle of a village. Visitors can see farmers at work right from the resort. Overlooked by Tibetan mountains and settled in a lush, fertile valley the sight was picked for its tranquillity and isolation. The appeal of the area to tourists is clear: mountain peaks, deep canyons, rivers, valleys, streams and tranquil lakes. And in polluted urban China, it is an area free from pollution. 

 The resort is built from transplanted Tibetan farm houses and offers hikes, mountain lakes, hot springs, gorges, forests. There are Asian touches like a welcome at the resort of Tibetan horns, songs and a tea ceremony. 

 Tourism is transforming the area. Towns and villages have been renovated to showcase traditional architecture. 

 The hotel and resort chain gets its name from the tradition of ancient merchants gathering under the branches of the banyan tree to conduct business in the cool shade.

“The 21st century is really going to be the age of Asia – both India and China,” said Ho Kwon Ping. “The huge consumer markets are going to be Asian … Now there’s a real opportunity for people of Asian origin, who have an instinctive cultural feel for where their consumers are moving towards, to come out and create a brand which can be primarily rooted in their own Asian context, but have a global relevance.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: March 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Disaster Recovery, Ten Years After: The Gujarat, India Experience

In the past decade, there have been many devastating natural disasters, from Iran’s 2003 Bam earthquake and the Asian tsunami of 2004 to Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005 and the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti in 2010. All of these events received extensive media attention and drew a large aid response. Those who track natural disasters have noticed a serious increase in frequency over the past decade (http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article26290.html).

But rapid aid and media attention do not necessarily lead to long-term recovery. More than a year after the earthquake in Haiti, pace of recovery remains slow. Numerous media stories highlighted the lack of progress.

For the people caught up in these tragedies, quickly returning to a normal life is paramount for psychological and physical health. But this is often the hardest part. Some countries do this well and others do not.

On January 26, 2001, an earthquake laid waste to a large region of the Indian state of Gujarat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Gujarat_earthquake). Ten years later there is a remarkable recovery that has taken place. So how did they do it?

The 7.9-magnitude quake killed an estimated 20,000 people, injured 150,000, made a million homeless, and destroyed around 8,000 villages. It devastated the Kutch district capital, Bhuj, and other major towns.

In the decade since the earthquake, the state has averaged double-digit growth. Despite having only five percent of the country’s population, Gujarat racks up impressive economic achievements: it has a fifth of India’s exports and a sixth of its industrial production. It has a long-standing entrepreneurial culture based on trade. It can draw on a well-connected global diaspora that ensures a steady inflow of new thinking and investment. Members of this diaspora also contributed to the US $130 million in aid that poured into the region after the quake.

One of the factors contributing to the successful recovery is effective government action.

The disaster has been turned into an opportunity to jolt the region out of the “Middle Ages and into the modern world,” NGO worker Navin Prasad told the BBC.

All the media attention, support and cash at the time forced the Indian government to pay attention to a region it had ignored in the past.

The army came in to help with the emergency and the Indian government allocated US $2 billion to the reconstruction that followed.

Aid was used well and in the first two years many of the damaged villages were rebuilt. And not just rebuilt to what they were, but completely modernized. New houses were constructed to high standards, with more rooms and lots of light. They also came with running water and a toilet. New facilities like medical centres and communal areas were put in place.

The district capital of Bhuj was levelled in the earthquake. But new plans for the city were drafted in the following years. Now Bhuj has two new ring roads, a new airport, parks and shops. Streets were widened and new water and sewage works installed.

But along with the new infrastructure and plenty of cash, came something more important for the region’s long-term recovery: economic growth. The Indian government created tax-free zones drawing in private investment. An astonishing US $10 billion in private investment has come in with US $7 billion more to come, according to the BBC.

One miraculous turnaround is in the former tiny fishing port of Mundra. Prior to the earthquake, it sat in the middle of a salt marsh. It is now India’s largest private port and rivals Mumbai with its Mundra Port and Special Economic Zone (http://www.portofmundra.com/), incorporated in 2003. The Adani Group, a very large Indian private company with global interests (http://www.adanigroup.com/index.html), owns the port now worth US $7 billion, hiring many people once dependent on aid agencies for income.

The head of the Adani Foundation the charitable wing of the Adani Group, Sushma Oza, told the BBC how the company is spending its profits on further developing the area: “Our own budget for social development in this region is $6m a year, so you can imagine how we are trying to change the lives of people to live in a better way,” she said.

In the western portion of the state, in the administrative district of Kutch which is home to Bhuj, around 300 businesses have been established, including the Welspun towel factory (http://www.welspun.com/content.asp?Link=Y&SubmenuID=24). The biggest towel factory in the world, it was built in just nine months and makes 250,000 towels a day. An ambitious firm, it bought the British company Christy (http://www.christy-towels.com/), maker of the official Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championship towels.

So why towels in Kutch? Welspun chairman Balkrishan Goenka laid down the incentives to the BBC: “There were no local taxes for the first five years and no excise duties. Nor were there indirect taxes to government – they were exempted for five years.”

“Those were the primary benefits,” he said. “More than that there was huge support from the local government so industry can come faster.”

Since the earthquake, 110,000 jobs have been created in Kutch alone. More importantly for the area’s future, it is has gone from neglected backwater to a significant pillar of the Indian economy.

Another driver of recovery was the growth of the dairy industry. The Bhuj dairy plant collapsed in the earthquake and was then rebuilt by the National Dairy Development Board (http://www.nddb.org/). The plant can now process 50,000 litres of milk a day and is run by the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (http://www.amul.com/organisation.html), India’s largest food products marketing organization. It has 2.9 million producer members and represents 15,322 village societies.

Not everyone has turned their lives around, however. Aid workers estimate thousands are still living in temporary shelters. They defecate in the open and few have clean water. Just getting two meals a day is a problem.

There are complaints about the landless and tenants not receiving the same help.

“Many are tribal, others are low-caste communities, some are Muslims – but they all have one thing in common: poverty,” Bharat Parmer, program coordinator for ActionAid International in Kutch, told Alertnet.

“A large number of these people were tenants and did not own land and so it has been much harder for them to claim their rights as rehabilitation was very much focused on home and land owners.”

But local authorities say rehabilitation schemes have been comprehensive, covering all those who were hit by the quake.

“I don’t think that there are people who did not get what they were due – there may be a rare case here and there but we have rehabilitated all that were in need,” said Gunvant Vaghela, the second-most senior civil servant in Kutch district.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: February 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Chilean Eco-Buildings Pioneering Construction Methods

Across the global South, the search is on for new ways to build without extracting a high price from local environments.

More and more people are recognizing the advantages of energy-saving methods like prefabrication. Prefab building techniques involve assembling a structure from pre-assembled parts or modules made in a factory, or transporting a completed, factory-made structure to a site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefabricated_building). Pre-fabrication has many advantages, especially now that information technologies bring precision to the building process. Prefabrication means the construction process can be tightly controlled, helping to avoid waste, time delays, weather problems, or any of the other idiosyncrasies of a building site. It can also allow large numbers of dwellings to be built quickly by maximizing skills and efficiencies in an assembly-line model of production.

In South America, a Chilean architecture company has pioneered innovative methods to build and deploy accommodation for tourists in an ecologically fragile area. The prefabricated wood cabins also use many emerging saving technologies and clever design tweaks to protect privacy when located close together.

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island) sits 3,500 kilometers off the Chilean coast and is well known for its iconic, giant head ancient stone statues, or moai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai). Around 3,791 people live on the island – one of the most isolated inhabited islands in the world – which is both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a popular tourist destination.

Tourism is vital to the local economy and many people make their living from it. Enterprises making money from tourists range from dive shops and craft stores to restaurants and hotels.

The island has had a good connection between tourism and improvements in living conditions, with tangible improvements made since the increase in tourism in the 1960s. Clean water and electricity were provided and a hospital and a school built.

In the past few years, more flights from Peru and Chile have increased opportunities to visit the island and lowered flight times. The island’s only airport is being expanded to further increase the capacity of flights, a project due to be completed by 2015.

But tourist numbers in 2010 declined from 2009 and this has been attributed to ongoing conflicts between Chilean authorities and the indigenous Rapa Nui people over ancestral lands.

Here as elsewhere, the challenge is to balance tourism with the fragile local environment. Any further expansion of tourism will need to sit lightly on the land and respect the rights of the Rapa Nui people.

The brief for the Morerava eco cabins (http://www.morerava.com/) was to provide environmentally sensitive accommodation that uses few local resources. Built by Santiago-based Chilean architects AATA Associate Architects (http://aata.cl/), the cabins were prefabricated in a factory and shipped to the island during 2010.

The architects specialize in industrial, commercial, educational and institutional, residential and interior design. They pay attention to environmental conditions and the use of resources.

The cabins are arranged around an elliptical courtyard reflecting the shape of the island’s flag design. They have an open-plan set-up and are long and skinny, with rooms arranged in a line from end to end. Nine cabins accommodate six people each. Cleverly, they are designed to retain privacy while being close together. Privacy is maintained through a strategic use of window placement. On one side of the cabin, the windows are high, while they are low at foot level on the opposite side. This prevents there being a direct sight line into the next cabin, while allowing plenty of light to stream in.

Having the cabins built on the Chilean mainland avoided using up local vegetation and resources. Easter Island once was covered with a palm forest. But over the centuries of human habitation, the forests were cut down and the island became almost barren.

Propped up on stilts, the cabins hover over the moist grass floor to avoid damage from rot. The roof is sturdy and made from zinc steel.

They use little water and energy to function. Cross-ventilation airs the cabins and avoids mechanical systems like energy-gobbling air conditioners. Electricity on the island is generated from expensive petrol, so any means to avoid using it means a big savings.

With a mild climate, the cabins do not need insulation.

Water is captured from rainfall on the roof and is then drained into a storage tank below the cabins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainwater_harvesting), and hot water is provided by solar heaters placed on the rooftops. This system circulates the hot water without electricity by using a technology called thermosiphon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosiphon) which exploits the natural phenomenon of heated water being less dense and rising while cooler water flows downward through the force of gravity.

At the other end of the construction spectrum, one of the most notoriously energy-wasting of structures – an office building – has been given a green makeover. Another Chilean pioneer in green architecture is the Santiago headquarters of Empresas Transoceanica (http://www.transoceanica.cl/), a private investment company in real estate, hotels and tourism, agro-industry and logistics. Its new campus HQ – part park, part office building – maximizes light through the building’s long and bulbous shape.

Designed to reduce energy demand while improving work spaces, it favours natural light while avoiding excess heat build up through wooden slats outside the building.

Geothermal energy comes from a well 75 metres below ground. This provides water cooled at 12 degrees Celsius, to cool the building. The building has been built following the strict environmental guidelines laid down in the LEED guidelines (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) – an internationally recognized green building certification system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_in_Energy_and_Environmental_Design).

Extensive planning and design work went into making sure the building’s structure, orientation, lighting, insulation and landscaping reduced energy use and need for energy-intensive mechanical solutions. Skylights bring natural light into the building’s public spaces. There are three stories above ground and two stories below providing underground parking.

The landscaped park around the building is actually the roof for the underground parking garage. The whole edifice creates a seamless connection between the building and the greenery and water features surrounding it.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: February 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Cited in Chile in Transition: Prospects and Challenges for Latin America's Forerunner of Development by Roland Benedikter and Katja Siepmann (Springer, 2015)

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Model Cities Across the South Challenge Old Ways

Pioneering thinking about how resources are used and how people live their lives is taking place in the dynamic economies of the global South. Facing a vast population surge to urban areas, these include attempts to build “green” cities and low-waste, smart and digital communities.

These model cities are clever solutions for the world’s growing – and urbanizing – populations coping with a stressed and damaged environment. Unlike one-off technologies and ideas developed in isolation, the model cities approach starts from scratch. They become living laboratories on which research and development take place at the heart of the community, not just the preserve of aloof academics hidden away in labs.

This is critical work because the world is rapidly urbanizing and needs solutions to ensure this process does not lead to chaos and misery. How these cities turn out could hold the fate of humanity and much is at stake. According to a report by the International Institute for Environment and Development, Africa now has a larger urban population than North America and 25 of the world’s fastest growing big cities. Getting to grips with urban development will be critical for the future of the continent and the wellbeing of its people.

By 2025, Asia could have 10 or more cities with populations larger than 20 million (Far Eastern Economic Review). People will be living in densely populated cities and they will need to be smart cities if they are to work.

In the United Arab Emirates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Dhabi), Masdar City (http://www.masdar.ae/en/home/index.aspx), is a model city not only being built, but being used as way to develop commercially successful environment technologies – renewable energy solutions and clean technologies – that will turn into future income for the city and Abu Dhabi.

The traditional approach in other countries has been to keep scientists and innovators disconnected from the living, breathing city. They toil away in labs or universities and only really get to test their technologies and theories after going through lengthy testing and approval by a city’s government. As Masdar’s website says, this city will develop “from research to commercial deployment – with the aim of creating scalable clean energy solutions.”

The planned community will be 6 square kilometres in size and wants to be “one of the most sustainable cities in the world”. Located 17 kilometres from Abu Dhabi, it hopes to be a pedestrian-friendly town home to 40,000 residents. At the heart of Masdar City is the Masdar Institute: a research university developed with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The students are the city’s first residents and a range of top international companies are planning to locate in there as well. German technology company Siemens will place its Middle East headquarters in Masdar and its Center of Excellence in Building Technologies R&D centre. Others joining them include GE, BASF, Schneider and the Korea Technopark Association.

The Surbana Urban Planning Group (www.surbana.com) spent five decades developing its experience with the rapid growth of Singapore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore): a city-state boasting the highest quality of life in Asia (Economist Intelligence Unit) which took itself from an impoverished city to one of the world’s leading export and manufacturing economies. Surbana built 26 planned townships in Singapore that now house 85 percent of the city’s 4.5 million residents. It specializes in designing, implementing and maintaining complex urban areas.

Singapore has pioneered a number of ways to house a large population within a small territory. This experience is now being put to work in China at the Tianjin Eco-City development (http://www.tianjinecocity.gov.sg/masterplan.htm). Known for high pollution levels due to heavy industry Tianjin will undergo a big change. The project aims to develop a template that can be used for other cities throughout China and around the world.

The 30-square-kilometre Tianjin Eco-City is being built around a wetland and river. The idea is to offer its residents an environment with easy access to recreational spaces and the natural environment. The transport system will avoid cars and instead use a light rail system as the main mode of transport. It should be home to 350,000 people.

Cleverly, each suburban area will have commercial sub-centres to enable as many people as possible to work locally and avoid the need to commute long distances. The Eco-City will be built by assembling “eco-cell” – like a bee’s honeycomb – neighbourhoods self-contained with schools, child care, commercial and work areas, and parks. This set up is geared to collecting a common mistake in other new developments that only consider housing, forgeting about how people work, shop and recreate.

There will be seven distinct neighbourhoods: Lifescape, Eco-Valley, Solarscape, Urbanscape, Windscape, Earthscape and Eco-Corridors (http://inhabitat.com/tianjin-eco-city-is-a-futuristic-green-landscape-for-350000-residents/). An “Eco-Valley” will run through the city as a green spine connecting north and south.

It is hoped the city will be completed by 2020. Just 10 minutes’ drive from the Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area (http://en.investteda.org/) business parks, the residents should be well served for jobs.

In South Korea, the Digital Media City in Seoul (http://dmc.seoul.go.kr/eng/index.do) bills itself as a “harmony of nature, high-tech, and culture”. The Seoul municipal government devised the DMC in the 1990s to capitalize on the economic and social benefits of being the world’s most digitally wired nation.

The DMC project serves the nation’s larger goals of transitioning from a manufacturing to an innovation economy and promoting Seoul as an east-Asian hub for commerce. The DMC is about creating new business opportunities.

But this isn’t just about business and research and development: it is a comprehensive digital economy experience, with schools, housing for the affiliates of international firms, moderate and lower-income housing, commercial and convention facilities, entertainment zones, and the city’s central rail station are all located in or near the Digital Media City.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: February 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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