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Jun302015

Ambitious Schemes Hope to Advance Economic Development

Tuesday, June 30, 2015 at 11:46AM

Sometimes it takes a bold, fresh start to speed up economic and human development goals. Taking a large-scale approach has been used around the world, either establishing new trade zones or even a new city.

Two recent examples in Nigeria and Afghanistan are attempting to speed economic development in their respective countries, with both receiving help from experienced Asian practitioners of rapid economic development.

The role models for this approach are the so-called “Asian Tigers”: they include Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. They are admired because each country rose from extreme poverty to become some of the Earth’s richest nations. Importantly, what they did stands as proof that extreme poverty can be escaped from; people can become much wealthier in just a decade or two.

The pioneer of using trade zones to speed development is the Asian city state of Singapore (http://www.gov.sg/government/web/content/govsg/classic/home)..Fifty years ago it was one of Asia’s poorest countries. With its port (http://www.mpa.gov.sg/) it had a way to turn things around but it also realized in the early 1960s it could not just compete by having cheap labour, something that was plentiful across the developing world (http://www.mti.gov.sg/MTIInsights/Pages/Economic-History-and-Milestones.aspx). It needed unique technical skills that could not be found elsewhere.

The country was unable to create products and services that it could export and compete in global markets because of a lack of skills, the Government determined. Authorities employed a mix of measures to make the country attractive to foreign companies to boost skills. These included fair enforcement of local laws, tax incentives and upgraded infrastructure, much of it paid for with an infrastructure tax, rather than borrowing. With the influx of new thinking and high-quality skills, new technologies and new ways of doing things, in time, a culture of innovation became hardwired into the way things were done in Singapore.

Beginning in 1961 with the Jurong Industrial Estate (http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_246_2004-12-16.html), the Singapore government set aside land to develop the economy by attracting international businesses and boosting its existing port facilities. It also established the Economic Development Board (EDB) in 1961 and the Singapore Tourism Promotion Board (STPB) in 1964.

By creating favorable conditions for international businesses to come in and operate, Singapore quickly developed to become one of Asia’s wealthiest trading and manufacturing centres.

This is a strategy China successfully implemented in the 1980s and 1990s and in turn generated the largest and quickest population shift out of poverty in human history, turning the country into an economic powerhouse.

The secrets to making this strategy work include understanding what modern infrastructure requirements are necessary for international businesses. These days, this means speedy and generous bandwidth for the Internet, modern airports, roads, security, and quality housing and food.

One of the biggest contemporary challenges is competition. Whereas Singapore was a pioneer in its day, now, many countries across the global South are pursuing this strategy to spur growth. An international company has many options to consider, and will more than likely gravitate towards the country that makes the best offer with the least risk.

Trade zones are places ripe with opportunity for innovators. New places tend to be seeking the latest in information and communication technologies, the latest in transportation options, modern housing and office facilities. All of these changes require innovators with fresh thinking to make them work. It is also often easier to introduce new ways of doing things to places that are not coping with legacy infrastructure and old habits and ways.

Billing itself as a “new model city,” the Lekki Free Zone Lagos, Nigeria (lekkizone.com) in West Africa is trying to bring a fresh start to the city and the region. It is a joint partnership between investors from China and Nigeria.

Its goal is to better connect regional markets to the global economy. The free trade zone hopes to remove barriers to growth and to attract international investment, becoming the top destination for inward investment in Africa. The project is being run by the Lagos State Government but funded with private capital investment.

Nigeria has been looking into Free Zones since 1982, as it sought additional ways to earn income apart from oil exports. The Export Processing Zone Act 63 was passed in 1992 and the Calabar Export Processing Zone was eventually set up in 1999 (http://www.nepza.gov.ng/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=34). Since then, a slew of Free Zones have been set up, or are in the works.

The Lekki Free Zone is envisioned as a high-tech zone that will eventually lead to the creation of 2 million jobs. The Zone’s investors are targeting businesses working in oil and gas, petrochemicals, electronics, light and heavy equipment, machinery and automobiles, pharmaceuticals, textiles, shopping and banking and financial services.

Lagos State is home to 21 million people, and the current city of Lagos is on course to become the third-largest megacity in the world. Officials claim the area has an economic growth rate of 16.8 per cent per year.

The 16,500 hectare Lekki Free Zone, to the southeast of the city, is divided into two parts: an industrial zone and a residential zone. The residential zone will include apartments and villas, shopping malls and plazas, hospitals and clinics, schools and research and development centres and a hotel, tour and recreational centres, golf courses, gyms and water sports facilities.

Located on the southern coast of Nigeria with connections to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Guinea, the Lekki Free Zone says it will give companies access to the largest consumer market in Africa, with a potential reach of 500 million people.

The companies will also be able to draw on Nigeria’s natural resources, including oil, natural gas, timber, rubber, cocoa, Arabic gum and sesame seeds as examples.

Another new beginning is being sought in war-torn Afghanistan, which is working on building a new city close to the capital, Kabul.

Kabul New City started construction in 2013 and is planned to be a city of canals, parks and villas. It will be home to 1.5 million people, cost US $33 billion and take 15 years to complete. It is being partly funded by Japan.

It is a very ambitious scheme for a country that has been mired in conflict for decades. It is hoped the initial seed capital invested by Japan will attract other investors to fully fund the project. Japan got the project going with a commitment to contribute US $106 million between 2009 and 2015.

The site of Kabul New City is 19 kilometres from the existing Kabul, near the Bagram airbase used by NATO forces in the country.

Foreign military forces are looking to leave Afghanistan in 2014 and the new city offers a fresh start for the country after years of conflict.

Located in an area surrounded by the Marko mountains, it is in “one of the safest areas of Afghanistan,” Abdul Habib Zadran, Chief Financial Officer of the Dehsabz-Barikab City Development Authority (http://www.dcda.gov.af/), the agency in charge of the project, told The Sunday Times.

The project could be a significant leap ahead in modernization from the current conditions in Kabul, where the streets are in poor condition and buildings in disrepair. Kabul was originally built for 800,000 people, according to The Sunday Times, but now has over 4 million residents. Projections forecast the city growing to 6.5 million people by 2025. Kabul will experience extreme pressure to handle this growing population and find the resources to serve it.

The homes would receive electricity from solar panels and renewable energy sources. Kabul New City will need to tackle the problem of access to enough water to service the growing new city’s population. Plans are afoot to provide water from rivers north of the city.

The master plan for the new city has been designed by Zahra Breshna (breshna-consulting.com), an Afghan-German company which has also built the new Kabul Bank headquarters. The company calls the project “a new beginning for Kabul.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: May 2013

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.

Follow @SouthSouth1

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Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challenges-may-2013-issue

Southern Innovator Issue 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q1O54YSE2BgC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 2: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ty0N969dcssC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQNt4YmhZagC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 4: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9T_n2tA7l4EC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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David South |

Global South Eco-cities Show How the Future Can Be

Thursday, June 25, 2015 at 8:48AM

The world is currently undergoing a high-stress transition on a scale not seen since the great industrial revolution that swept Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Today’s urban and industrial transition involves many more people and is taking place on a greater proportion of the planet. With rapid urbanization comes a demand for middle class lifestyles, with their high-energy usage and high consumption of raw materials.

This is stretching the planet’s resources to breaking point. And as many have pointed out, if the world’s population is to continue past today’s 7 billion to reach 9 billion and beyond, new ways of living are urgently required. Radical thinking will be necessary to match the contradictory goals of raising global living standards for the world’s poor with pressured resources and environmental conditions.

But there are innovative projects already under development to build a new generation of 21st-century cities that use less energy while offering their inhabitants a modern, high quality of life. Two examples are in China and the Middle East.

Both projects are seen as a way to earn income and establish viable business models to build the eco-cities of the future. Each project is seeking to develop the expertise and intellectual capacity to build functioning eco-cities elsewhere. In the case of the Masdar City project in the United Arab Emirates, international businesses are being encouraged to set up in Masdar City and to develop technologies that can be sold to other countries and cities – in short, to create a green technology hub akin to California’s hi-technology hub ‘Silicon Valley’. Masdar City is also being built in stages as investors are found to help with funding. Both projects hope to prove there is money to be made in being green and sustainable.

The Tianjin Eco-city (tianjinecocity.gov.sg) project is a joint venture between China and Singapore to build a 30 square kilometre city to house 350,000 residents.

Tianjin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianjin) is a large industrial city southeast of China’s capital, Beijing. It is a place that wears the effects of its industrial expansion on the outside. Air pollution is significant and the city has a grimy layer of soot on most outdoor infrastructure.

China has received a fair bit of criticism for its polluted cities as the country has rapidly modernized in the past two decades. This sprint to be one of the world’s top economic powers has come at a cost to the environment. In this respect, China is not unusual or alone. Industrialization can be brutal and polluting, as Europe found out during its earlier industrial revolution.

But China is recognizing this can’t go on forever and is already piloting many initiatives to forge a more sustainable future and bring development and high living standards back in line with what the environment can handle.

Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city is the second large-scale collaboration between the Chinese government and Singapore. The first was the Suzhou Industrial Park (http://www.sipac.gov.cn/english/).The Tianjin project came up in 2007 as both countries contemplated the challenges of rapid urbanization and sustainable development.

The project’s vision, according to its website, is to be “a thriving city which is socially harmonious, environmentally-friendly and resource-efficient – a model for sustainable development.”

The philosophy behind the project is to find a way of living that is in harmony, with the environment, society and the economy. It is also about creating something that could be replicated elsewhere and be scaled up to a larger size.

The city is being built 40 kilometres from Tianjin centre and 150 kilometres from Beijing. It is located in the Tianjin Binhai New Area, considered one of the fastest growing places in China.

Construction is well underway and can be followed on the project’s website (http://www.tianjinecocity.gov.sg/gal.htm). It will be completed in 2020.

This year, the commercial street was completed and is ready for residents to move in.

Residents will be encouraged to avoid motorized transport and to either use public transport or people-powered transport such as bicycles and walking.

An eco-valley runs down the centre of the city and is meant to be a place for pedestrians and cyclists to enjoy.

The basic building block of the Eco-city – its version of a city block – is called the Eco Cell. Each Eco Cell measures 400 metres by 400 metres, a comfortable walking distance. Four Eco Cells make a neighbourhood. Several Eco Neighbourhoods make an Eco District and there are four Eco Districts in the Eco-city. It is a structure with two ideas in mind: to keep development always on a walkable, human scale and also to provide a formula for scaling up the size of the Eco-city as the number of residents increases.

It is a logical approach and seeks to address one of the most common problems with conventional cities: sprawling and unmanageable growth that quickly loses sight of human need.

Agreement was also reached on the standards that should be achieved for a wide variety of criteria, from air and water quality to vegetation, green building standards, and how much public space there should be per person.

An ambitious project in the United Arab Emirates is trying to become both the world’s top centre for eco cities and a living research centre for renewable energy. Masdar City (http://www.masdarcity.ae/en/)is planned to be a city for 40,000 people. It is billed as a high-density, pedestrian-friendly development where current and future renewable energy and clean technologies will be “marketed, researched, developed, tested and implemented.”

The city hopes to become home to hundreds of businesses, a research university and technology clusters.

This version of an eco-city is being built in three layers in the desert, 17 kilometres from the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi. The goal is to make a city with zero carbon emissions, powered entirely by renewable energy. It is an ambitious goal but there are examples in the world of cities that use significant renewable energy for their power, such as Reykjavik, Iceland in Northern Europe, which draws much of its energy from renewables and geothermal sources.

Masdar City is designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster (fosterandpartners.com) and will be 6.5 square kilometres in size.

The design is highly innovative. The city will be erected on 6 metre high stilts to increase air circulation and reduce the heat coming from the desert floor. The city will be built on three levels or decks, to make a complete separation between transport and residential and public spaces.

The lowest deck will have a transportation system based on Personal Rapid Transport Pods. These look like insect eyes and are automated, controlled by touch screens, using magnetic sensors for propulsion. On top of this transport network will be the pedestrian streets, with businesses, shops and homes. No vehicles will be allowed there, and people will only be able to use bicycles or Segway (segway.com) people movers to get around. An overhead light railway system will run through the city centre, all the way to Abu Dhabi City.

“By layering the city, we can make the transport system super-efficient and the street level a much better experience,” Gerard Evenden, senior partner at Foster + Partners, told The Sunday Times. “There will be no car pollution, it will be safer and have more open spaces. Nobody has attempted anything like this.”

Masdar City is being built in stages as funding comes, with the goal of completion by 2016. It hopes to achieve its aspiration to be the most technologically advanced and environmentally friendly city in the world. As for water supplies in the desert, there is a plan: dew collected in the night and morning and a solar-powered desalination plant turning salt water into drinking water.

Electricity will come from a variety of sources. Solar panels will be on every roof and double as shade on alleyways. Non-organic waste will be recycled, while organic waste will be turned into fuel for power plants. Dirty water will be cleaned and then used to irrigate green spaces. Because of the design, the planners hope the city will just use a quarter of the energy of a conventional city.

To keep the city smart and the project on top of developments in renewable energy, the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (http://www.masdar.ac.ae/) will specialize in renewable energy technology.

The cost for the city was pegged at US $22 billion in 2009.

The chief executive of Masdar – Abu Dhabi’s renewable-energy company – is Sultan Al Jaber. He sees the city as a beacon to show the way for the rest of the Emirate to convert from a highly inefficient consumer of energy to a pioneer in green technology.

“The problem with the renewable-energy industry is that it is too fragmented,” he told The Sunday Times. “This is where the idea for Masdar City came from. We said, ‘Let’s bring it all together within the same boundaries, like the Silicon Valley model (in California, USA).’”

The project needs to gather much of its funding as it progresses. The United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (http://cdm.unfccc.int/)is helping with financing. Companies can earn carbon credits if they help fund a low-carbon scheme in the global South. The sultan is ambitious and sees this as a “blueprint for the cities of the future.” It has been able to bring on board General Electric (GE) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to sponsor the university.

It is possible to visit Masdar City and take a tour (http://www.masdarcity.ae/en/105/visit-masdar-city/) and it is also possible to view online what has been built so far (http://www.masdarcity.ae/en/32/built-environment/).