[Huffpoo] The world’s population is moving into urban centers at a dizzying pace.An estimated 66 percent of people will live in cities by 2050. And as the number of residents swell, urban boundaries will expand into the territory of other densely populated areas until entire regions coalesce into super-metropolises, author Parag Khanna posits in his new book Connectography.
D.C. is already sucking the life out of the rest of the country. I'll be long gone by 2050, enjoy !
Khanna calls these areas "megacities." While that term is usually used to describe individual cities with populations over 10 million -- of which there are dozens around the world, including New York, Mexico City, Beijing and Mumbai -- Khanna writes that megacities shouldn’t just be defined by how many people they hold.
He sees future megacities not as individual entities but as clusters linked by advanced infrastructure systems. These clusters, he says, would be major drivers of economic growth.
"We should spend time building cities that are viable, connected and stable," Khanna told The Huffington Post. "It’s about improving livelihoods and infrastructure, and building a path to stability."
In Connectography, which was published in April, Khanna says 40 of these interconnected megacities will form in the next decade, with many concentrated in fast-growing regions in Asia.
In the map below, some of these potential megacities are marked by dotted lines. For instance, there’s "Abu-Dubai," a merging of the cities Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. In Japan, there’s "Tokyo-Osaka."