The Smart Megacity System of Indo-Pacific: Emerging Architecture and Megacities Studies

Abstract

In 2016 as per UN-HABITAT, there were about thirty-one gigantic cities/urban agglomerations/conurbations/megalopolises of population size ten million and above-called megacities in the universe which is likely to be 41 in 2030. Twenty million population and above cities are called meta cities which were eight in 2016 and will have eleven in 2030. Most of the megacities and meta cities are in the Indo-Pacific, amounting to a total of twenty-one out of 41 in 2030. They all form a close-knit and integrated system manifesting the spatial system of the global economy. Most newly emerging megacities built with newer industrial revolutions and technological basis are in the Indo-Pacific region. These megacities are functionally, spatially, and economically interconnected by sea and air routes and fiber-optic internet networks, generating daily economic interactions of great significance. The individual megacities in the system can be called wise to various degrees. Indo-Pacific region envelopes the boundary of the Indian and the Pacific Oceans, which are contiguous and most extensive of all oceans of the universe. The region can be called a combination of the homogeneous, program, and polarized regions for conducting various Indo-Pacific-specific designed economic activities and functions. These cities are genuinely global, work based on the ever-changing dynamics of global politics based on international diplomacy against national bureaucracy faithfully local the set of policies, programs, regulatory laws, and budgets of cities in the sub-national and below following a democratic pattern of governance with mixed economy or capitalist economy of various proportions, by largely local self-government in a Federal Governing setup such as in India, the USA or even to some extent Russia and China with autocracies in position. This local self-governance must be transformed uniquely to use the global megacity system’s international and regional economic development. The Indo-Pacific megacity system is defined as an interconnected urban network functionally and economically by twenty-one megacities in the Indo-Pacific, servicing sub-national regions and servicing countries some thirty-one and above outside sharing the same megacity gateway physical infrastructure and related economic, institutional, and physical infrastructure of megacities of the Indo-Pacific. In this region, these megacities have a disproportionately higher NDP share as well as disproportionately higher average household income; they have distinct income and expenditure patterns than more miniature cities and villages of the respective Nations and assume a significant role in regional and international economic development and politics of the Indo-Pacific. In the Indo-Pacific region, all leading economies of the world are situated, such as the US, the People’s Republic of China, India, Russia, Japan, Australia, South Korea, and ASEAN countries as well as SARC countries, and many other countries grou**s. Others situated outside the Indo-Pacific, like France, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, and the European Economic Community have substantial economic and security concerns in this region and long-term historical connections to the legacy of colonialization that connects them to the Indo-Pacific and have their independent National Strategies for the Indo-Pacific. Ships carrying goods and aero planes carrying Indo-Pacific persons of rare servicing capabilities and entrepreneurial force crisscross the Indo-Pacific every instant which also uses sea routes carrying many Trillian dollars’ worth of manufactured goods annually a large world share and home for major fiber-optic internet cable networks of the world. These gigantic habitats are significant because it has all the potential to configure themselves into a system of intelligent and global megacities for their sustainability and rapid economic development, as well as collectively participating in major concerns like a war against the COVID-19 pandemic, other disaster management such as Tsunami, earthquake, forest fires, and floods, climate change issues and other security challenges like piracies and aggressions of certain countries for territorial expansion. This creative configuration of megacities into intelligent and global megacities resulted from two books, Smart Global Megacities, published by Springer Nature in 2021, through city case studies and edited by the author, articulating how such cities function. The vast population, cultural and ecosystem diversity, diverse institutional endowments, diverse political systems such as capitalist and socialist, and autocratic governing systems, supply chains connectivity, global linkages, and size of income and expenditure in these megacities create many opportunities for configuring an intelligent global megacity and then a system of smart global megacities which is the subject matter of this book. These two books mentioned above tried to understand the smart global nature of megacities and surveyed their growth, development, distribution, and distribution across geographic regions. Now this book explores further a single system of megacities in the Indo-Pacific. These cities are significant contributors to the Gross Domestic Product of their home nation. Theories of global cities are briefly studied and finally end up with broad approaches to configure these megacities into smart and global megacities systems sustainably based on the dynamics of international politics, which drives the dynamics of the worldwide economy. The second part of this book uses megacity case studies that specifically study the role of a few individual megacity cases in the megacity system of the Indo-Pacific. This chapter serves as a background for the Regional Development of Indo-Pacific area and several megacity case studies across countries in this book. This book is a continuation of the above two books, which looks at how these megacities, a sizable number in the universe located in the Indo-Pacific, work together as a system to promote an open, accessible, and prosperous region in the world for the next century.