China’s cities are at the precipice of an economic boom, should they identify how their unique traits catalyze innovation. The outdated approach of blunt-instrument government intervention stifles the flexibility and serendipity that stimulates innovation. Infrastructure…
As the United States and the European Union retreat from their foreign-aid commitments, only one country has the resources and the interest to assume the mantle of global development leadership. The world will have to…
Natural disasters are having increasingly disruptive effects on social, environmental and economic systems. Wildfires, floods and similarly recurrent challenges have relatively clear policy interventions. By contrast, earthquakes are largely unpredictable, and there is no certain…
ASEAN’s 21st century call-to-action should be the pursuit of higher development standards and their normalisation across rural and urban areas – on issues like personal security, health, education, housing, and basic services. A robustly financed commitment…
With deepening links between technology and urban management, the means to innovate, scale-up, and implement “smart city” initiatives reside primarily with governments and corporations. The individual citizen is outside the conversation, as in the bygone…
For Trump, business and politics are a universe of “winners” and “losers,” “weak” and “tough.” According to this market-based worldview, players have only themselves to blame for losing; competition rewards the tough and punishes the…
When costs to the environment and public health are found to outweigh the benefits of growth, will governments embrace smarter infrastructure or ignore environmental and social welfare? So far, economic expediency continues to drive the…
The global implications of domestic political dynamics can and should shape the practical proposals of the city-state movement. As the world’s “strong-man” authoritarians consolidate and strengthen their domestic power, the last hope for international economic,…
China now views the developing world as a market for infrastructure services via development aid. It appears to have adopted a two-pronged approach: direct intervention through investments in hard infrastructure and indirect intervention through the…
Broadband infrastructure must be developed and managed as a regional resource, lest cross-country performance gaps widen. In the collective spirit of the recently implemented ASEAN Economic Community, institutions and infrastructure underpinning economic growth are “everybody’s…
