City Planet
This blog post will address the following article from Deloitte University Press: http://dupress.com/articles/bus-trends-2014-city-planet/.
This article discusses the massive trend of urbanization around the world, but particularly in India and China. People in rural and suburban areas are flocking to cities at an all time high. With the large influx of people to these cities, new problems are arising in areas such as education, energy and clean water. But at the same time, the influx of people allows for a growing pool of talent and innovation. Therefore urbanization is also allowing the transfer of new information and ideas along the same networks formed through urbanization.
Secondly, the article discusses how cities across the globe are becoming specialized in their own ways. Cities are now forming connections and networks with other cities to drive innovation and solve problems. For example, Singapore has become home to one of the world’s fastest growing biotechnology research center, and New York City has become known as the real estate capital of the world. As a result, these two cities have formed connections with each other to leverage each other’s strengths. There are big cities scattered across the world, and all of these cities share similar problems. Cities are forming connections with other cities across the globe to help solve their specific problems.
The trend of urbanization can be expressed in terms of a network. In this network, nodes represent cities and rural/suburban areas and edges represent the flow of people. The edges in this network are directed edges, since they indicate the movement of people in only one direction. Additionally different edges may represent the flow of ideas and innovation from rural areas to large urban centers. These urbanization networks tend to form in clusters, or network components. A network component is a section of a larger network that is not connected to any other sections in the network. This just means that people in rural/suburban areas will migrate only toward a city that is in close proximity to them, and not to cities far away.