London

Economies with Anglo-Saxon Roots Dominate Technology

Nima Sanandaji — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A systematic mapping of where the world’s global leading companies in deep tech are located shows that the UK is second best in the world. More importantly, the four dominant deep tech countries all have economic models based on an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition – shows the Deep Tech Index.

Currently Santa Clara Valley by itself hosts a fifth of all globally leading deep tech companies. The region has had a first-movers advantage, since Thomas Edison created the world’s first industrial innovation laboratory there 150 years ago. This massive lead is gradually normalizing, due to rising costs and talent shortage. Other parts of the US, and more importantly other parts of the world, compete with growing deep tech companies.

The USA has fully 62 percent of the world´s leading 500 deep tech companies, a large but falling share. The UK is second best in the world, hosting 6.6 percent of all global deep tech. In the areas of fintech and clean tech, the UK is world leading. Also, in photonic & electronic as well as space & advanced materials, a relatively large share of the world´s leading deep tech companies are found in the UK.

Further 5.6 percent of the deep tech companies of the world are located in Canada and 5.4 percent in India. These four countries which share an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition dominate global deep tech, far surpassing any rivals. Adding in Australia and Ireland, fully 80 percent of the deep tech companies in the world are found in these four nations.

It is astonishing that four out of five world-leading technology companies exist in Anglo-Saxon economies.

The five urban regions with most share of global deep tech companies are Santa Clara Valley, Boston, New York, London and Los Angeles. London is the only top 5 deep tech region outside of the USA. Other leading regions outside of the USA include New Delhi, Vancouver, Mumbai, Singapore and Toronto. These regions all exist in countries with an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition.

Zurich, Eindhoven, Tel Aviv and Stockholm are examples of globally leading deep tech hubs that exist in countries that have a legal tradition other than Anglo-Saxon.

There is a close link between having a high share of globally leading deep tech companies per million adults, and having a high share of the world´s leading top 100 universities in mathematics and engineering. Currently 23 of those top universities exist in the USA, 4 in Canada, 5 in India and 8 in the UK. Further 6 are found in Australia, a nation which is very successful in attracting students from abroad. Combined with an Anglo-Saxon business tradition and competitive taxation, Australia is likely to keep growing with deep tech in the coming years.

The UK and countries that used to be its colonies and therefore have an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, have a strong lead in knowledge when looking at the university level. They have an even more impressive lead when looking at the level of deep tech company success. While other parts of the world are catching up gradually, this strong Anglo-Saxon dominance can explain why English is the predominant business language.

Historically, the Anglo-Saxon business model has had a strong focus on venture capitalists interacting with entrepreneurial capitalists. This model, popularized today in tv-series such as The Dragon´s Nest, existed in early form already during the industrial revolution. The strong venture capital sector and its interaction with specialized technology firms can explain why countries with Anglo-Saxon legal tradition have such a massive lead in global deep tech.

Already the world´s first entrepreneurs, the tamkãrum of ancient Babylonia and Assyria, had a division between those entrepreneurs who were manufacturers and traders, and those who were investors. This concept existed already some 4 000 years ago, but in today´s modern economy it is Anglo-Saxon countries that do it best. The key is allocating capital to technology development, and keep the funds growing to fund more technology. This form of investment capital is very sensitive to taxation, since so high risks are involved risk and reward have to be balanced. This form of innovation ecosystem ultimately flourishes if the revenues are taxed once they are finalized, not if return from one project is invested in another innovation activity. Building a tax environment conductive to innovation funding remains a challenge for many countries that do not have an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, and explains the strong continued dominance.

Author: Nima Sanandaji, Director European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform

Lead image: by Andrew Bossi; aerial view of London central business district via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

Britian is Committing "National Economic Suicide"

Robert Bryce — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0500

If you want to know what’s happening in a place, ask a cab driver.

On a Sunday afternoon, during a short ride to the British Museum, I asked our cabbie about his energy bills and what he thinks of the British government. For the next 12 minutes, we got an earful. Our driver, Adrian, who was in his 50s, ranted about the British government and its climate policies.

He explained that over the past four years, his energy bill has gone “from three hundred pounds a month to now a thousand pounds a month...Yeah, a thousand pounds a month just to keep the lights on in my house.” When I asked why the prices were increasing, he replied, “It’s the energy policy on green renewables right? It's not letting the market dictate things. We've got, I think, we've got the most expensive energy in the world now. It’s a suicide policy.”

Adrian isn’t far off. As Matt Ridley pointed out last month on Twitter/X, Britain now has the most expensive electricity in the OECD. “That’s what happens,” Ridley said, “if you try to rely on using the landscape to try to extract useful energy from the thin, weak, dispersed and unreliable source that is wind.”

Adrian, the cab driver, isn’t the only Briton talking about suicide. At the ARC conference on Tuesday, Sir Paul Marshall delivered a scathing assessment of Europe’s infatuation with alt-energy. He said Britain’s push for net zero -- and the staggering energy costs that have come with it -- are “acts of national economic suicide.”

After spending a week in London, the signs of the country’s decline and the frustration of Britain’s citizens are apparent.

Near the entrance to the British Museum is a room that discusses the museum’s future. Near an impressive model of the envisioned additions, a placard on the wall talks about the museum’s “ambitious cultural redevelopments” and notes that among the next steps is to “build a new Energy Centre to make the Museum more sustainable and pave the way to reach net-zero targets.”

While Britain’s elites are talking about net zero, the country’s industry is heading for the exits. And despite massive oil and gas resources, the British government refuses to allow more drilling and continues its idiotic ban on hydraulic fracturing.

Last September, Tata Steel closed the last two blast furnaces in Britain. The shuttering of the Port Talbot steelworks in Wales resulted in the loss of 2,800 jobs. However, the symbolism may be as significant as the job losses. By closing the blast furnace, Britain, the home of the Industrial Revolution, will no longer be able to produce virgin steel from iron, coal, and limestone. Instead, it must now rely on electric arc furnaces that recycle scrap steel. The union that represented many of the workers at Port Talbot called the closure of the blast furnaces “industrial vandalism.”

In mid-January, INEOS closed the Grangemouth synthetic ethanol plant in Scotland, which resulted in the loss of several hundred jobs. The facility was one of only two in Europe that produced synthetic ethanol, which is used in the production of numerous pharmaceuticals. Here’s how one trade publication described the closure:

High energy prices and high carbon taxes have forced the closure of this strategic UK asset. The UK, which used to be a major force in chemicals, employing a large and highly skilled workforce, has seen the closure of ten large chemical complexes in the last five years alone and, in complete contrast to the USA, has not had one new chemical plant built for a generation. Energy prices have doubled in the UK in the last five years and now stand five times higher than those in the USA. The UK cannot compete with such a huge disadvantage.

When the plant closed, the chairman of INEOS, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, said, “We are witnessing the extinction of our major industries as chemical manufacture has the life squeezed out of it.”

Britain has enormous oil and gas resources and could quickly reduce its energy prices if it began drilling. Earlier this month, Deloitte published a study commissioned by Egdon Resources, which estimated that the shale formations in Lincolnshire, in a formation known as the Gainsborough Trough, could contain 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough fuel to supply all of Britain’s gas needs for several years. Deloitte estimated the gas field could generate some $180 billion in GDP for Britain and dramatically reduce its need for imported gas.

The Labour government quickly pooh-poohed the idea of producing domestic shale gas. A spokesman for the government said, "We intend to ban fracking for good and make Britain a clean energy superpower to protect current and future generations. The biggest risk to our energy security is staying dependent on fossil fuel markets and only by sprinting to clean power by 2030 can the UK take back control of its energy and protect both family and national finances from price spikes.”

This is national insanity. As seen above, 20 years ago, thanks to drilling in the North Sea, Britain was self-sufficient in gas. Since then, production and consumption have been falling, and the country now relies on imports for nearly half of its gas needs.

Further, the idea of “sprinting to clean energy” is not working. As I reported here on February 5 with the launch of the Global Renewable Rejection Database, rural Britain is in an uproar over the encroachment of massive alt-energy projects. Local regulators rejected four solar projects in January alone, including ones in Wakefield, Springwell, Norfolk, and Kelham.

At the ARC conference on Tuesday, Marshall, who owns GB News, The Spectator, and Unherd, said Britain and Germany are “the patsies of Net Zero.” (My speech at ARC on energy humanism was also on Tuesday. The video has not been posted on YouTube yet.)

Marshall noted that electricity prices for British industry are five times higher than those in the US and seven times China’s. He said renewables are “essentially a parasitic form of energy.” In the 1990s, he said, nuclear energy provided a quarter of Britain’s electricity, “but now Britain only has five remaining plants, four of these are slated for closure in the next five years.” And this: Britain and Germany, he said, are “the patsies of Net Zero.”

Britain, he noted, has “enough gas reserves in the North Sea to cover 35 years of consumption, yet since 2019, the UK has refused to grant any new oil and gas licenses and we’ve even levied a specially designed windfall tax on the existing producers.” He concluded that net zero is immiserating and its main victims are the poor...Cheap and abundant energy is the foundation that underpinned our prosperity. Industry knows this. America knows this. Nations in the Gulf know this. And China knows this.” He went on, saying that unless Britain changes course, it will “simply continue down the path to unilateral economic disarmament.”

During our stay in London, I have asked numerous people about energy costs. In nearly every instance, the response has been a shake of the head or a raising of hands in despair. A bartender at the pub across from our hotel said his energy bill has doubled over the past four years, Our friend, Maddie, who is in London studying journalism, told us she is paying $150 per month to heat her tiny flat.

British citizens understand what is happening to them but feel powerless to do anything about the situation. They have been betrayed by the current Labour government and the Tories. In November, the Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, traveled to Azerbaijan to the UN climate meeting to declare that Britain would aim to cut its emissions by 81% by 2035. The BBC noted that the new “target updates a 78% pledge by 2035 under the previous Conservative government.” Starmer claimed that the British government would not “tell people how to live their lives” and that the “race is on for the clean energy jobs of the future.”

What total and utter bullshit.

While the rest of the world is awakening to the disaster that is alt-energy, Starmer continues to push the discredited notion that “clean energy” creates jobs. It doesn’t. It destroys jobs. Britain is now losing jobs at the fastest rate since the 2008 financial crisis.

While at the British Museum on Sunday, I struck up a conversation with an American who lives in Britain. He runs a private equity firm and splits his time between New York and his place in the English countryside. I asked him about Britain’s economy. He replied, “The last place people are putting money these days is in central Europe. The second-to-last place they are putting it is in Britain.”

London, of course, is as charming as ever. The pubs and shops seem busy, and there appear to be plenty of tourists on the streets, even in the gray days of February. The manager at our hotel told me that 90% of his rooms are booked. But tourism doesn’t create durable, high-paying jobs.

Britain became a world power by making ships, steel, and automobiles. Today, it’s becoming a place that has to rely on sales of pub grub and hotel beds. Short of a massive course correction on energy – that exceeds what President Trump is doing in the US -- it’s clear that Britain’s days as an industrial and economic power are finished.

‘Tis a pity.

This piece first appeared at Robert Bryce Substack.

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: courtesy Robert Bryce Substack

Why London is Beating American Cities

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 01 May 2024 20:28:58 -0400

As America’s cities continue to decline, as even ardent boosters warn of “an urban doom loop”, how does London remain a global powerhouse? The straightforward answer is that it retains an old advantage: its origins as a former imperial capital.

Unlike the high-rise “transactional” cities of New York, Chicago and San Francisco, all groaning under record levels of vacancy and massive investor losses, London never had an official “downtown”, with all major business clustered in dense formations. Rather, as one observer noted in 1843, London’s development occurred organically, surrounding “itself suburb by suburb like onions 50 to rope”. Of course, parts of central London have suffered significant losses — see Canary Wharf and Spitalfields — but the capital’s archipelago of villages have mostly survived. Far more than its great American rivals, London is actually increasing its population.

This, let’s not forget, comes in the wake of Brexit, which many feared would turn the City into a tertiary player. Yet even here, despite the loss of listings from some prominent firms such as ARM, London is thriving: it has since welcomed the financial powerhouses of Bloomberg, Citadel and Alantra into its embrace.

Crucial to London’s success is its prospering technology and media industries, which, notes Tony Travers, a visiting professor at LSE, increasingly drive the capital’s economy. Its creative sector, for instance, now accounts for almost 15% of jobs in London, up from 11% in 2010. In the realm of tech, one recent study suggested that London beats New York and San Francisco. Indeed, Microsoft plans to open an AI hub in the city, part of a $2.5-billion investment strategy, following other firms such as OpenAI. According to the Harvard Business Review, this makes London both first in the world for talent attraction and the top destination for foreign investment in financial and professional services.

None of this is to say that London’s streets are paved with gold. Flick through the capital’s Evening Standard and you’ll find report after report about surges in crime. Even so, notes Munira Mirza, who served as policy director for former prime minister and London mayor Boris Johnson: “London is doing better in many ways than a lot of US cities… But for Londoners, the perception is that crime, street cleanliness, housing costs, road congestion, etc, have been getting worse because public services and infrastructure have not expanded to match the growing population.”

“London is doing better in many ways than a lot of US cities.”

And yet, she observes, overall crime rates have fallen under London’s last three mayors and, in terms of crime and anti-social behaviour, levels are well below the national average. Travers partly credits this to the fact that the UK has not experienced an American-style “opioid crisis” or “defund-the-police moment”. As a result, London saw 104 homicides last year, equivalent to 12 per million people, compared to 45.4 per million in New York, one of America’s safer cities.

A similar story is playing out in London’s classrooms, particularly when it comes to ethnic-minority performance. In one diverse district in Chicago, not one student can do grade-level math. According to data from the Illinois State Board of Education, 30 schools last year, 22 of which are in the Chicago area, failed to lift even one student to grade-level reading.

In London, by contrast, state schools are consistently improving, particularly in recently developed free schools. Moreover, immigrants are actually lifting the performance of London’s state schools above their counterparts in the rest of the country. “London’s schools are better now because of the immigrants,” suggests Mirza. The proximity of world-class universities — in London, Cambridge and Oxford — not only helps jumpstart elite industries such as tech and media, but has also attracted generations of ambitious foreigners who then choose to stay in London.

It is difficult to imagine how any rival city-states — including Singapore — could operate so successfully without the interference of a powerful central bureaucracy. In Dubai, there is no real recourse from the wrath of Sheikh Mohammed. In India, corruption, pollution and lower life expectancy make Mumbai or Delhi less than likely locales for rich investors and skilled professionals. Beirut was once promising, but is now largely a sectarian ruin. As for Latin America, even business-friendly Sao Paolo is now in poor repute.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London - by U.S. Embassy London via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Landing in London Without a Connection

Samuel J Abrams — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 20:28:58 -0400

On a recent visit to London, my phone did not connect to the networks abroad when I landed. Within seconds, I was filled with anxiety; as someone who is constantly texting, using social media, and consuming information on my device, I felt empty and exposed and couldn’t let loved ones know that I made it over the pond. I had visited London on many occasions and knew exactly where I was going, but being disconnected felt awkward and isolating and I was truly uncomfortable as I made my initial way from Heathrow into central London. While en route, however, my unease began to abate. After about thirty minutes, I was overtaken by a feeling of euphoria that I had not felt since years ago when constant connectivity was not the norm and I had to interact with the real, physical world around me as opposed to consuming a constant flow of stimulus from a tiny screen.

Well over a decade ago, when I would visit a place other than home, I talked to as many others as I could, I did not rely on various sites and social media companies to tell me where to go and what to see, and I did not feel the need to check in and document every moment of my experience—I was living in and paying attention to the world and people around me rather than a small screen in front of me. I had this experience once again in London, where I managed to talk to so many and hear some amazing life stories in public and third-place settings as varied as pubs to the tube, on a host of experiences ranging from the then-upcoming Queen’s Jubilee and geopolitics to the unusually warm British weather and the football season. While many were surprised that I was not staring at my phone with a headset on and actually wanted to talk, after some initial shock, most were quite happy to open up. I felt connected to others and places in a way that I had not for quite some time. And despite missing various “insider tips” from digital sources, a sense of wonder, opportunity, and joy returned for the day I had no phone service.

The next day, I was able to fix my SIM card and suddenly resumed my usual habits of fixating on my phone rather than the people and places around me. Although I was riding a different transit system and eating or shopping in vastly different locales, my use of the phone actually kept me cocooned and isolated from real people and experiences. Of course, this is not to say that there is no real value to digital products and technology, nor that socialization and connections are not improved in some cases by virtue of omnipresent connectivity. But having a working smartphone changed how I was thinking about London and its streetscape and how I engaged with the many others around me. I was still in London, but the sense of spontaneity—a bit of danger and unknown—and being able to connect and explore changed; I was notably less social and less open to connecting with others.

I share this experience because so many—from academics to public officials—are concerned with how to reinvigorate the civil sphere and rebuild communal social capital in this era of division and polarization. One simple step that could help create connections to space, place, and people would be to put one’s phone down and actually talk to others and experience life in various settings. This statement has nothing to do with the polarizing views and echo chambers of social media—although that remains a huge problem that impacts our discourse and ideas about our fellow Americans. Rather, it is a call for pausing our addiction to technology and being online at all times. We need to look up and speak with others in real space and time, where we can create more meaningful connections, share ideas outside of 180-character tweets, and perhaps find common ground and shared humanity as I did for a brief moment of cellular disconnection in London.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: Rawpixel, under CC 2.0 License.

Focusing on World Megacities: Demographia World Urban Areas, 2021

Wendell Cox — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

The 2021 edition of Demographia World Urban Areas includes current population estimates for the 985 identified built-up urban areas (Note 1 describes the background and methodology) with at least 500,000 population.This is a smaller number than last year, due to a methodology that rendered somewhat lower populations for some urban areas. Demographia World Urban Areas has largely converted (80%) to estimates based on the 250-meter grid square population estimates from the European Commission Global Human Settlement (GHS2015) 250-meter database.

The 500,000 and over urban areas have a combined population of 2.24 billion, about 51.4% of the world’s urban population or 28.9% of the combined world urban and rural population.

The Megacities

The most populous urban areas are the 36 megacities, each with more than 10 million residents. Megacities receive outsized attention due to their influence in media, finance and tourism, but they have only 14.8% of the urban population and 8.3% of the world population. The other urban areas in Demographia World Urban Areas (between 500,000 and 10 million) account for 20.5% of the world population, while smaller urban areas have 27.3% and rural areas 43.9% (Figure 1).

Figure 2 shows the 2021 estimated population for the megacities. The three largest megacities are considerably larger than the others. Tokyo continues its lead as the world’s largest urban area, with 39.1 million residents.Tokyo has been ranked as the world’s largest urban area since 1955, a 75 year record that falls somewhat short of London’s century long primacy, but is more than double the three decade reign of New York (below).

Tokyo holds a nearly 10% lead over second ranked Jakarta, at 35.4 million. Population estimates for the Jakarta urbanhave usually not reflected the entire built-up urban area (Note 2: Underestimation of urban area densities), Jakarta is nearly 10% larger than third ranked Delhi (31.9 million), which has emerged over the last decade as India’s largest, now holding a 10 million (30%) lead over perennial leader Mumbai.

There is a much larger 25% gap between Delhi and fourth ranked Manila (24.0 million), an urban area that, like Jakarta, has often had its population substantially under reported (Note 2). Manila is six percent larger than fifth ranked Sao Paulo, with a population of 22.5 million), which is South America’s largest urban area as well as in the Western Hemisphere.

From sixth rank on, the margins between adjacently ranked urban areas is smaller. The population gap between fifth ranked Sao Paulo and tenth ranked Guangzhou-Foshan is less than five percent. Seoul, ranked sixth with 22.4 million has also been characterized by other sources as having a much smaller population (Note 2).

Mumbai, which some predicted would become the world’s first or second largest urban area, ranked well below that, at 7th in 2021. Mumbai’s 2021 population was a full three million short of a 2020 forecast made in the mid-2000s.

Shanghai is eighth, with 22.1 million. This is well below the United Nations 2020 projection made mid-decade (27 million), population growth was virtually stopped by public policy. The Guardian attributes “gentrification” to be a major cause both in Shanghai and Beijing (below), as lower income areas are redeveloped with newer, less dense housing.

Mexico City, another urban area that had been predicted to become the world’s largest had been forecast before 1980 to reach 31 million residents by 2000. Yet, Mexico City’s 2021 population is only 21.5 million and still ranks only 9th largest in the world.

Guangzhou-Foshan continues to grow strongly and is now estimated to be China’s second largest urban area and 10th largest in the world at 21.5 million. New York, which was the world’s largest urban area for about three decades (starting in the 1920s). ranks 11th, at 20.9 million. New York is a combined urban area that includes the continuous urbanization stretching to New Haven, Connecticut.

Cairo, at 19.7 million ranks 12th and is the largest urban area in Africa. Beijing ranks 13th, with 19.4 million and like Shanghai, had its population growth slow due to population control policies.Beijing had been the world’s largest agglomeration in the early 19th century, and reached one million residents at that time.

Kolkata, which had been India’s largest urban area until 1975, ranked 14th, at 17.8 million. Moscow ranked 14th has 17.7 million, and is the largest urban area in Europe.

Los Angeles ranked 21st, at 15.5 million, dropped out of the top 20 for the first time since before 1950. Los Angeles stood as 12th in 1950, and reached as high as 6th largest from 1965 to 1975. London, with all of the urban area inside the greenbelt (urban growth boundary), has been growing in recent years and achieved megacity status for the first time. London ranks 34th and has a population of 11.2 million, having replaced #35 Paris as the largest urban area in Western Europe. London had been the world’s largest agglomeration for about 100 years to the 1920s.

Highest and Lowest Megacity Densities

Megacity urban population densities (Figure 3) range from a high of 36,900 per square kilometer in Dhaka (95,700 per square mile) and Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) at 33,200 per square kilometer (83,600 per square mile) to the least dense megacity (Figure 2, above), New York, at 1,700 per square kilometer (4,500 per square mile). In recent years, considerable peripheral development has been occurring in Dhaka, which used to have a population density well above 40,000 per square kilometer (100,000 per square mile).

Seoul has the highest urban population density among the high-income megacities, at 8,100 per square kilometer (20,900 per square mile). The highest density urban areas in the high income world are in China, Macau (27,300 per square kilometer or 70,600 per square mile) and Hong Kong (25,500 per square kilometer or 66,100 per square mile).

Largest and Smallest Urban Footprint (Urban Land Area)

New York --- often seen as the epitome of dense urbanism --- in reality has the largest urban footprint of any built-up urban area, covering 12,100 square kilometers (4,700 square kilometers). New York covers nearly 50 percent more land area than much larger Tokyo-Yokohama and 90 percent more land area than Los Angeles and 27 times the land area of Dhaka.

Dhaka has smallest urban footprint, at 456 square kilometers (176 square miles), followed closely by Kinshasa, with 466 square kilometers and 180 square miles (Figure 4).

Disruptions: The Pandemic and Remote Work

There are reports that the Covid-19 pandemic has severely impacted large urban areas, with many households relocating to smaller urban areas elsewhere or nearer the urban fringe. Much of this has to do with the rise of remote work, the practicality of which was proven by its success, and muted the economic losses that would have occurred had remote workers lost their jobs rather than continuing to work. In the years to come, pandemic related disruptions to the world’s largest urban areas will become clearer. We will continue to follow these developments.

Description of Tables

Demographia World Urban Areas contains five tables that provide summary and ranking information:

Schedule 1: World Summary: Built-Up Urban Areas Over 500,000

Schedule 2: Largest Built-Up Urban Areas in the World
Schedule 3: Built-Up Urban Areas Ranked by Land Area (Urban Footprint)

Schedule 4: Built-Up Urban Areas Ranked by Urban Population Density

Schedule 5: Alphabetical List of Built-Up Urban Areas

Note 1: Demographia World Urban Areas is in its 17th year of publication. It was established to provide consistency to the estimation of urban density, in the all too frequent erroneous anecdotal data. The built-up urban area is the only level at which there is sufficiency consistency and sufficient data to estimate the densities of the urban organism at anything approximating international standards.

There continues to be considerable confusion about the measurement of urban densities. The key is in comprehending the differences between urban areas and metropolitan areas. Built-up urban areas are continuously built-up development that, by definition excludes rural lands (all of the world’s land is either in urban areas or rural). This is illustrated by the Paris built up urban area and the Paris metropolitan area in Figure 5. Built-up urban areas are the city in its physical form, as opposed to metropolitan areas, which are the economic or functional cities (the labor and housing markets). These terms are defined by Cheshire, et al. of the London School of Economics (see: “People rather than places, ends rather than means: LSE economists on urban containment”).

Demographia World Urban Areas uses base year population estimates, principally from the European Commission Global Human Settlement (GHS2015) 250 meter database (grid square estimates). National statistical authority base year estimates are used where identified and consistent with international definitions.These figures are then adjusted to account for population change forecasts, principally from the United Nations and the national statistics bureaus for a current year estimate.

Demographia combines extensions of continuously built-up areas, where they are a part of a larger labor market (such as New York, Bridgeport-Stamford and New Haven, Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino and Mission Viejo and Toronto, Hamilton and Oshawa).

Demographia World Urban Areas is a continuing project providing “state of the art” data. Revisions are made as more accurate satellite photographs and population estimating resources become available. As a result, Demographia World Urban Areas is not intended for trend analysis.

Note 2: Underestimation of urban area populations: Demographia World Urban Areas was the first to identify the under-estimation of population in some of the largest urban areas, by other sources. For example, Demographia’s early population estimates for the Jakarta, Delhi, Manila, Seoul-Incheon and Kuala Lumpur built-up urban areas were far higher than reported by others at the time. Other sources have revised their estimates upward. The earlier, lower estimates of others were, in actuality, municipal estimates that did not sufficiently take into consideration the spread of urbanization beyond city or other geographical limits. Demographia’s larger population estimates resulted from satellite map examination to determine the extent of individual built-up urban areas.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photograph: Cover, 17th Annual Demographia World Urban Areas: Buenos Aires: Retiro Railway Station with the Rio de la Plata in the background (by author)

Brexit and the Future of the Anglosphere

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 20:29:28 -0500

The triumph of Brexit opens a new page not just in British history, but in the emerging configuration of the global society. It represents not just a rejection of universal globalism embraced by our political and business elites, including in Britain itself, but potentially the rise of new trans-national blocs held together not just by markets and capital, but culture and common beliefs.

This evolution was predicted neatly a quarter-century ago in Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations.”

At a time when the embrace of globalism was at its height, Huntington suggested, correctly, that the world would divide along historical, religious and cultural lines. These national divisions have become increasingly evident not only here but in China, the UK, India, Turkey, Russia and in other parts of Europe. The rise of nationalism is shattering the globalist structures and creating the basis for new forms of association.

No surprise then that in a post-EU world, Britain is looking to the United States for a new trade relationship which, according to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, could be in place by the end of the year. This new alliance would supplant the bureaucratic torpor of Brussels and provide a timely response to the Beijing-dominated Sinosphere that now extends itself throughout much of the world.

How the clash has changed

When Huntington wrote his famous thesis, he envisioned the rise of several cultural groups — Hindu, Japanese, Buddhist, African, Islamic, Orthodox, “Western” and Sinic.

Yet over the past 25 years, the trajectory of these “civilizations” has shifted in ways Huntington could not have foreseen. Once fearsome Japan has declined and there’s no break from continued chaos in the Islamic countries, while the Russian Orthodox world, Africa and Latin America have all failed to achieve anything close to global competitiveness.

Only China’s role has waxed and only its emerging system of alliances has gained power globally. In contrast, the Western alliance has weakened, as is clear from the EU’s internal divisions, particularly in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as with Brexit. This has left the U.S., with an administration widely despised around the world, as China’s only competitor in terms of economic growth, cultural power and military strength.

Given the failure of the EU, it makes sense for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to reach out to the U.S. as his primary partner in the post-EU future.

This could be followed up with efforts to join other English-speaking democracies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. These are all far more politically compatible with British values than post-democratic continental Europe, where popular votes against EU intrusions have been repeatedly ignored by the ruling bureaucracy. Besides sharing a common language and history, these countries also can offer access to critical natural resources which, for the most part, Britain itself lacks.

The Chinese challenge

Dissatisfaction with the EU’s intrusive bureaucracy may have sparked Brexit, but the primary driver toward building a powerful Anglosphere lies in the rise of China. A quarter-century ago there was no such clear competitor; Tokyo and Brussels mattered much more than Beijing, and both were allied to Washington and London.

Today China easily surpasses everyone outside the United States in economic, military and technological power. It also has developed a powerful alternative to the West’s liberal institutions. China’s authoritarian system, its massive surveillance apparatus and widespread repression,appeals to dictators now thriving in an increasingly illiberal world where dissatisfaction with democracy is on the rise.

China’s influence represents a challenge even to Anglosphere. Nowhere is this clearer than in Australia, a country whose trade of supplying natural resources to China have underpinned the fact that Australia hasn’t experienced a recession for almost 30 years.

“Our whole standard of living is virtually tied to our exports to China,” noted billionaire businessman Kerry Stokes in The Australian.

Under the current right-of-center government, curbing Chinese influence now has become a priority item. But Australia cannot hope to resist Chinese domination without allies, suggesting to some it’s time to once again strengthen ties with the Anglosphere, as well as with democratic Asian countries, notably India and Japan, that are also worried about Chinese expansionism and political meddling.

The future of the Anglosphere

The ability to absorb and incorporate other cultures may threaten some nativists, but it is the key to the Anglosphere’s long-term prospects.

Great societies, rather than turning inward, are by nature expansive and inclusive.

Rome’s greatness, suggested the historian Edward Gibbon, rested in part on tolerating religious heterodoxy and providing outsiders, including former slaves, a chance to rise above their station. In contrast to Athens, where the citizenry was restricted to the native-born freemen, Rome expanded its citizenry to its furthest possession and by 212 all free people were eligible to be citizens. “The grandsons of Gauls, who besieged Julius Caesar at Alesia,” Gibbon noted, “commanded legions, governed provinces and were admitted into the Senate of Rome.”

This ecumenical approach, made possible by the commitment to rule of law and democracy, also makes the Anglosphere attractive to other countries — India, Japan, South Korea — whose constitutional order was in large part shaped, or even imposed, from the English-speaking countries. All this is happening as the world learns more about the failures and excesses of the communist dictatorship, as evidenced by such things as its inability to deal with the coronavirus, the disturbances in Hong Kong and the systematic oppression of the Uighurs.

Those with the good fortune to live in pluralistic Western-style democracies, rooted in classical culture, should recognize how rare such open societies have been through history and how singularly attractive they remain.

Now that Britain has acted boldly, it’s time for its offspring to embrace again the promise of the Anglosphere, whose brightest future may still lie in the years ahead.

This piece first appeared on The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. He authored The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, published in 2016 by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He is executive director of NewGeography.com and lives in Orange County, CA. His next book, “The Coming Of Neo-Feudalism,” will be out this spring.

Photo Credit: T P via Flickr under CC 2.0 license.

Paris, London Lead European Metropolitan Areas: Latest Data

Wendell Cox — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 01:30:38 -0400

Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union (EU) indicates that Paris is the largest metropolitan area in the EU, Switzerland and Norway, with 12.8 million residents, according to the latest estimates. This is slightly more than number two London --- which may soon be outside the Union --- with 12.4 million residents.

Metropolitan areas are labor markets, as former principal planner of the World Bank Alain Bertaud has shown. They are also housing markets. Metropolitan areas are the generic economic definition of cities and are called “functional urban areas” (FUA’s) by Eurostat.

FUA’s are defined similarly, but not exactly like metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada and Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (GCCSA’s) and significant urban areas in Australia. Most countries do not delineate metropolitan areas, while there are significant variations among the nations that define them. The biggest difference is the size of the geographic “building blocks” that include the historic “city proper” (the term for the historic core municipality used by the United Nations), the built-up urban area and the overwhelmingly rural urban fringe from which a significant percentage of workers commute into the urban area.

Eurostat’s data is reported for various years from 2009 to 2018, and dates for the latest data varies by metropolitan area. It is reported for nations within the European Union, as well as Norway and Switzerland. A broader definition of Europe, which would include more eastern European nations such as Russia and Turkey would push Paris and London down by two positions, with Moscow and Istanbul being larger.

There is a considerable gap between number two London and third ranked Madrid (at 6.8 million). The fourth through seventh ranked metropolitan areas hover around the 5,000,000 mark. This includes Berlin (5.21 million), Milan (5.15 million) the Rhine-Ruhr (5.12 million) and Barcelona (4.99 million).

The Rhine-Ruhr is notable for not having any very large municipalities, with Essen, Dortmund, Duisburg, and Bochum, with 350,000 to 600,000 population and a number of others over 100,000 population.

Rome and Athens have 4.4 million and 3.8 million residents respectively. Naples ranks tenth, with a population of 3.4 million.

A total of 14 metropolitan areas have more than 3,000,000 residents, and 14 have between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 residents. Finally, there are 36 metropolitan areas with between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 residents.

Germany accounts for 14 of the 64 metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population. The United Kingdom has 8, and France 7, while Italy and Spain have five each.

The Eurostat data shows 64 metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population (Table). This accounts for approximately 31 percent of the total European Union, Switzerland and Norway population.

Comparison European and US Metropolitan Areas

Europe’s 64 metropolitan areas over 1,000,000 population have a combined population of 163 million, and an average size of 2.5 million residents. This compares to the 53 metropolitan areas of the same size in the United States, which had 184 million residents in 2018, with an average population of 3.5 million. Paris and London are somewhat smaller that second ranked US metropolitan area Los Angeles (13.3 million) and a full one-third smaller than New York (20.0 million). The major metropolitan area population in the United States constitutes a higher percentage than in Europe, at 56 percent (Figure 1).

However, European and US metropolitan areas are not strictly comparable. The have different commuting criteria. US metropolitan area are comprised of entire counties, which average 200 times land area of municipalities (communes) that comprise European metropolitan areas. One such county, San Bernardino (Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area) covers more land area than five EU nations as well as Switzerland. Being composed of much smaller geographical units, European metropolitan areas are much more precisely defined than in the United States.

European, US and virtually all other formally defined metropolitan areas share the characteristic of having more rural than urban land. For example, the major metropolitan areas of the US are more than 90 percent rural by land area.

Metropolitan Growth

For nearly two centuries, urban footprints been expanding beyond the historic cities proper. In his classic history of British urban planning (Genesis of Modern Urban Planning), William Ashworth noted that by the 1881 census, there was a tendency for populations to “settle more and more on the fringes of the existing largest centers.” Suburbanization, in Europe, as well as the United States, made for much larger labor markets, as commuters were liberated by trams (streetcars) for longer commutes, interurban and commuter railways and finally the automobile. In short, this was the genesis of the metropolitan area (also see: Metropolitan America).

Because of the intermittent nature of Eurostat metropolitan area reporting, it is difficult to compare growth rates with metropolitan areas in the United States. However, since 2010, the reported annual growth rates for the five largest European metropolitan areas (Paris, London, Madrid, Berlin and Milan) has been 0.35 percent. The top five US metropolitan areas (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston) has been substantially higher, at 0.95 percent. Virtually all of that difference is represented by the strong growth rates of Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, which have been growing at about two percent annually. The growth rate for the top three US metropolitan areas is actually less than the top three European metropolitan areas. The fastest growing metropolitan area in Europe’s top five is Milan, which had average annual growth of 0.70 percent.

Metropolitan Areas in Europe over 1,000,000 Population
(Functional Urban Areas)
Rank	Metropolitan Area	Nation	Population in Millions	Year
1	Paris	France	12.788	2015
2	London	United Kingdom	12.346	2017
3	Madrid	Spain	6.792	2018
4	Berlin	Germany	5.208	2017
5	Milano	Italy	5.146	2018
6	Ruhrgebiet (Rhine-Ruhr)	Germany	5.119	2017
7	Barcelona	Spain	4.991	2018
8	Roma	Italy	4.429	2018
9	Athina	Greece	3.828	2011
10	Napoli	Italy	3.407	2018
11	Manchester	United Kingdom	3.330	2017
12	Hamburg	Germany	3.282	2017
13	Warszawa	Poland	3.101	2014
14	West Midlands	United Kingdom	3.078	2017
15	Lisboa	Portugal	2.976	2018
16	Budapest	Hungary	2.965	2017
17	München	Germany	2.879	2017
18	Amsterdam	Netherlands	2.772	2016
19	Stuttgart	Germany	2.758	2017
20	Frankfurt am Main	Germany	2.671	2017
21	Brussells	Belgium	2.652	2017
22	Leeds	United Kingdom	2.605	2017
23	Katowice	Poland	2.562	2014
24	Bucuresti	Romania	2.447	2017
25	Wien	Austria	2.406	2014
26	Stockholm	Sweden	2.269	2017
27	Praha	Czechia	2.203	2017
28	Lyon	France	2.067	2015
29	Köln	Germany	1.988	2017
30	København	Denmark	1.929	2013
31	Glasgow	United Kingdom	1.823	2017
32	Rotterdam	Netherlands	1.819	2016
33	Dublin	Ireland	1.794	2011
34	Torino	Italy	1.760	2018
35	Marseille	France	1.751	2014
36	Valencia	Spain	1.734	2018
37	Sofia	Bulgaria	1.550	2017
38	Sevilla	Spain	1.546	2018
39	Düsseldorf	Germany	1.545	2017
40	Liverpool	United Kingdom	1.527	2017
41	Lille	France	1.505	2015
42	Helsinki	Finland	1.490	2018
43	Kraków	Poland	1.396	2014
44	Toulouse	France	1.374	2015
45	Dresden	Germany	1.342	2017
46	Zürich	Switzerland	1.334	2016
47	Nürnberg	Germany	1.333	2017
48	Hannover	Germany	1.306	2017
49	Oslo	Norway	1.279	2013
50	Porto	Portugal	1.272	2018
51	Bremen	Germany	1.270	2017
52	Bordeaux	France	1.227	2015
53	Zagreb	Croatia	1.222	2017
54	Sheffield	United Kingdom	1.182	2017
55	Mannheim-Ludwigshafen	Germany	1.178	2017
56	Newcastle upon Tyne	United Kingdom	1.169	2017
57	Gdansk	Poland	1.142	2014
58	Antwerpen	Belgium	1.106	2017
59	s' Gravenhage (The Hague)	Netherlands	1.070	2016
60	Bilbao	Spain	1.040	2018
61	Leipzig	Germany	1.027	2017
62	Palermo	Italy	1.026	2018
63	Nice	France	1.017	2015
64	Göteborg	Sweden	1.007	2017

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. Speaker of the House of Representatives appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photograph: Paris looking east from the Eiffel Tower (by author)

Pulling the Plug on HS2 (London-Birmingham High Speed Rail)?

Wendell Cox — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 00:33:38 -0500

High speed rail may be proposed as a climate change panacea here and elsewhere, but the results on the ground are less than promising. California Governor Gavin Newsom announced this week that the California high speed rail project would be scaled back to the route between Bakersfield and Merced, in the San Joaquin Valley (which the state has enough money for). In his “state of the state” speech the Governor said “…let’s be real. The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency.” Thus the expensive hope of linking the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area with high speed rail, already substantively abandoned by the California High Speed Rail Authority, has finally been buried.

Britain’s proposed high-speed rail megaproject (HS2) may be joining California’s on the road to oblivion (Map: Figure 1). A senior government official told Channel 4’s Dispatches public affairs program (aired February 11): "The costs are spiraling so much we've been actively considering other scenarios, including scrapping the entire project" (Video: Summary of Dispatches program).

Such an action would not only cancel the two northern extensions (to Manchester and Leeds), but also the already under construction first leg to Birmingham (in the West Midlands). Parliament has not yet approved the extensions beyond Birmingham. Professor Stephan Glaister, former head of the Office of Rail and Road, told Dispatches “you just really have a white elephant if you only go to Birmingham.”

HS2 would be Britain’s second high speed rail line. The first high speed rail line was HS1, which operates from London's St. Pancras International Station to Paris and Brussels, through Channel Tunnel (Note). St. Pancras International is just over one-half mile from the planned terminus of HS2, Euston Station.

Cost Blowouts

Liam Halligan in The Spectator wrote HSR was slated to cost £33 billion ($44 billion), but the costs have escalated to at least £56 billion ($75 billion). Consultant Michael Byng told BBC Radio 4 that the segment to Birmingham is already at £56 billion ($75 billion), which would consume the entire projected budget, including the money needed for extensions to Manchester and Leeds. Daily Mail transport editor James Salmon reported that: “A string of reports have warned that Britain’s biggest ever infrastructure project will blow its £56 billion budget with experts estimating it could cost as much as £104 billion.” In Dispatches, Halligan questioned --- in view of the cost blowouts --- the validity of the cost benefit studies that justified the project.

Government officials, present and former have raised questions. According to The Independent, former transport minister John Spellar called HS2 an “ever-deepening bottomless pit”. A cabinet minister told The Spectator ‘The case for HS2 is and always was nonsense.” Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling expressed “grave doubts.” The Spectator suggested that it would be better to invest the money in improvements in the North, rather than a high speed line to London. This theme has been frequently echoed by others, as opposition has grown.

Doubling Down on Costs

HSR2 Chief Executive Mark Thurston told Dispatches that the entire project would be delivered for the budgeted £56 billion. After challenged by Halligan about the cost overrun reports, he doubled down, saying that “the budget for this scheme is £56 billion."

Slowing Trains, Running Less Frequently?

The pressure to deliver the project within the current budget has become so strong that the leadership is now considering slowing down the trains and operating them less frequently to save costs. This might be a way to preserve the present budget target, but camouflages the cost escalation. When the volume of corn flakes in the box is reduced, while the price remains the same, it is still cost escalation, though better hidden.

Walking Between High Speed Trains?

One of the cardinal rules of planning is to coordinate land use with transport. Yet, HS2 doesn’t even coordinate transport, with Britain’s two high speed rail lines terminating little more than one-half mile apart at Euston Road stations, without connecting (Euston Road Map, Figure 2). That this would be planned for London, among New York as one of the world’s two most important cities, is astounding.

Not surprisingly, critics complain that HS2 does not connect to HS1, “so doesn't provide the possibility of getting on a train in the North and getting off in Brussels or Paris.” Thus, a Manchester resident might make the connection, walking from Euston to St. Pancras International. Other options would be a trip to the next stop on the London Underground or a cab. It is an open question which would be fastest. None of these options is likely to be convenient, making some believe it would probably be better to fly. A government report says: “There is a strong case for improving the walking route between Euston and St Pancras,” but dismisses a through route. A walking route? What century are they planning for?

Opposition

There has long been opposition to HS2, much of it due to concern about cost escalation. Penny Gaines, chair of Stop HS2 told the Bucks Herald that “HS2 is a vastly expensive white elephant, with all the signs of busting its massive budget, it's time to cancel HS2…” adding that “Then the Department for Transport can get on with dealing with the rail and road issues that affect millions of people across the whole country rather than enabling a few people to get to a bit faster.”

Similarities to California

To Californians, all of this may sound like local news. Like HS2, the proposed California high speed rail project has experienced massive cost escalation. Like suggested for HS2, California has already rejiggered its plans to lower costs, by slowing trains in the largest urban areas and sharing tracks with non-high speed rail suburban trains. Like with the HS2, there was doubling down about costs until the reality could no longer be denied, and it was necessary to curtail system performance (See: California High Speed Rail: Updated Due Diligence Report).

The similarities are not surprising, and were identified as systemic problems in Megaprojects and Risks: An Anatomy of Ambition(2003), by Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University, Nils Bruzelius of and Werner Rothenberger of the University of Karlsruhe and former chairman of the World Conference on Transport Research. The authors examined decades of major transportation projects, including high speed rail, in Europe and North America and identified a general pattern of pervasive cost-escalation. Professor Flyvbjerg says: “Underestimation cannot be explained by error and is best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying” (see: “High Speed Rail: Toward Least Worst Projections”).

Time to Pull the Plug: The Telegraph

It seems likely that the “doubling down” will soon end and that the reality of the higher costs is waiting to dawn, as so often happens with these projects. The Daily Telegraph editorialized: “It’s time to pull the plug on this project. The money freed could go on desperately needed infrastructure projects, such as improving the roads. HS2 has only persevered because politicians and civil servants are drawn to any grand, large-scale project that burnishes their ego. But it is the public that picks up the tab and, just as with Brexit, the public is running out of patience.” (As it just has in California.)

Note: HS1 is used by Eurostar trains that operate from St. Pancras International to Paris and Brussels. In 2017 (before adding service to Amsterdam), ridership remained about 60 percent below the levels originally projected for 2006, with only modest growth since 2010.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. During that time, he authored the amendment that created the Proposition A 35% set aside that established the first local funding for the rail system. His involvement on the Commission is detailed in Transit in Los Angeles.

Photograph: St. Pancras Station (by author)

The Grenfell High-Rise Fire: A Litany of Failures?

Wendell Cox — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 01:38:06 -0400

At this writing, the London (Kensington) Grenfell high-rise fire has taken a confirmed 58 lives, with an unknown number missing and many more sent to hospitals. The 24 story low income housing tower block caught fire on Wednesday, June 14. It was virtually all consumed, as shown in the photograph above.

There is much to be concerned about here. This building was not owned by any of those private developers who politicians seem to blame for every all that's wrong with housing in severely unaffordable Britain. The building, now a burned out shell, is owned by the affluent Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (a local government unit within the Greater London Authority).

This is how the structure appeared before the recent refurbishment (photo by R Sones).

Government Failure?

It is not as if the council had not been warned. The Grenfell Action Group has been monitoring problems at Grenfell Tower on behalf of tenants for years. On June 15, they published a blog with links to their previously expressed concerns about fire safety in the building, including one entitled KCTMCO Playing with Fire that details the frustrations of dealing with the Council's tenant manager. The post, from last November included called the conditions, including the management of the KCTMO (Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation) and the Borough "a recipe for a future major disaster." Of course, that's how it turned out.

There is talk of criminal proceedings, and doubtless the private contractor who installed the cladding (exterior building facing) currently thought to have spread the fire quickly will be at greatest risk. However, the installation was procured by the KCTMO, the agent of the RBKC Borough Council, including an approved award to the contractor. Further, all of this was related to a refurbishment of the building, in which the RBKC did not require include installation of sprinklers, which would have "prevented the fire from developing." The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea council is being barraged with criticisms, including from members of Parliament, for its administration of the Grenfell Tower over recent years.

A Great Planning Disaster?

Worse, in a larger sense, the Grenfell fire may turn out to be one of the world's great planning disasters. One headline put it this way: "Report: Grenfell Tower Fire May Have Been Caused By Panelling Installed To Make Rich Neighbors Happy." Only slightly less incendiary was The Independent headline, which read "Grenfell Tower cladding that may have led to fire was chosen to improve appearance of Kensington block of flats."

According to planning documents obtained by The Independent:

“Due to its height the tower is visible from the adjacent Avondale Conservation Area to the south and the Ladbroke Conservation Area to the east,” ... “The changes to the existing tower will improve its appearance especially when viewed from the surrounding area.”

The Independent also reported that the planning document made repeated references to the "appearance of the area" and that this was the "justification for the material used on the outside of the building, which has since been claimed to have contributed to the horror." The materials were chosen, according to the planning document "to accord with the development plan (our emphasis added) by ensuring that the character and appearance of the area are preserved and living conditions of those living near the development suitably protected,”

One expert indicated apparent frustration at the use of flammable cladding materials: "We are still wrapping postwar high-rise buildings in highly flammable materials and leaving them without sprinkler systems installed, then being surprised when they burn down."

The extent and spread of the fire was unusual for a high rise building. London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton told The Engineer: “This is an unprecedented situation, with a major fire that has affected all floors of this 24 storey building, from the second floor up. In my 29 years with London Fire Brigade I have never seen a fire of this nature.” According to the Evening Standard: "...flames engulfed the block from the second floor upwards “within seconds”

Concern in Australia

While the Grenfell fire's severity has been attributed to the flammable cladding installed during renovation, similar cladding is being used on new high rise buildings elsewhere. For example, according to The Age the Melbourne Fire Brigade found that the fire at the contemporary LaCrosse building ignited external wall cladding, which quickly spread to the top of the building through the "combustible material located in the wall structure." Two days after the Grenfell fire, The Guardian ("Former fire chief says Melbourne's Lacrosse Tower still poses risk") reported that the cladding had still not been replaced, though the building has been reoccupied. Peter Rau, a former Melbourne Fire Brigade Chief told The Guardian that "he would not allow his children to live there."

Australians may have plenty of reason to be concerned. Planning policies throughout Australia have sought to convince households to live in central city high-rises, seeking to entice them from their preferred suburban detached housing. In a June 15 story, The Age ("London tower fire could happen here: Australian buildings cloaked in flammable cladding") reported that Australian buildings are clad in "millions of square meters" of flammable cladding. This is not a new problem. According to The Age building code authorities were advised of the problem seven years ago.

Tony Recsei, President of Save Our Suburbs in Sydney expressed concern in a Sydney Morning Herald letter. Referring to the New South Wales government policy that seeks to increase high rise living, Recsei said "But this calamity starkly reveals there can be long-term consequences. It is to be hoped that the Greater Sydney Commission will seriously consider all the implications of its current strategy of imposing density quotas onto local neighborhoods."

The extent of the concern in Australia is indicated in this video and article from news.com.au.

New Zealand and the United States

Even in New Zealand, where officials recently strengthened external materials fire regulations, the government asked local authorities to check buildings constructed before the regulatory reform to see if there are any with combustible cladding.

According to the Times of London, the cladding used on Grenfell Tower has been illegal in the United States for five years.

Further Developments in London

Meanwhile, back in London, there remains considerable anger. London Mayor Sadiq Kahn visited the site on June 16 was questioned and heckled by survivors. On the same day, Prime Minister Theresa May also visited the scene and was criticized for meeting only with emergency services personnel, but not with any residents.

The fatality count could go much higher. Fears of a building collapse are slowing inspection efforts. Metropolitan Police Commander Stuart Cundy told The Independentthat "he hoped the death toll would not be in “triple figures”.

No Clean Hands?

Of course, final assessments will have to await more formal inquiries. But there is plenty of reason to be concerned. Save the fire brigade, which has been roundly praised for its work, including being on the scene within six minutes, there may be no clean hands. Cities, from the days of ancient Rome, have been vulnerable to fiery disasters like this one; policies that encourage densification while failing to provide adequate safety procedures are creating the potential for more such disasters.

Grenfell fire photo by Natalie Oxford.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Globalization's Winner-Take-All Economy

Aaron M. Renn — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:33:38 -0500

“If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.”

This statement by Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and venture capitalist, unsurprisingly caused a stir, given that he made it in Chicago. Simon Kuper had made a similar observation in the Financial Times when he described how young Dutch up-and-comers had their sights set on London, not Amsterdam. “Many ambitious Dutch people no longer want to join the Dutch elite,” Kuper wrote. “They want to join the global elite.”

Populist movements in Europe and the United States have fueled talk of social and economic division, of a small class of winners at the top and a far larger group of increasingly disaffected lower-skilled workers at the bottom. This attitude seems to flow through to places as well, with global city winners like London and post-industrial losers like Flint, Mich.

Because these divides cleave along social class, educational and cultural lines, they are clear and easy to see. But there’s another -- less visible -- divide cutting across the seemingly monolithic group of the successful. This one separates those who are indisputably winners from those whose success is ambiguous, more qualified and more contingent. This difference is the one between the hedge fund principal, raking in wealth seemingly effortlessly, and the young adult struggling to pay urban rent despite possessing an excellent degree and professional employment. It’s the difference between New York and Cincinnati -- or even Chicago.

The same forces of globalization that have pulled top Midwest talent into Chicago from below are also acting on the city from above, drawing its talent further up the global city hierarchy. The knowledge economy favors the college degreed over the less educated, but those with the highest and most differentiated skills are most favored, while those whose skills are second tier -- less perfectly in tune with the emerging economy -- are more vulnerable to competitive pressures.

It’s easy to see that the Flints of this world have struggled. Less visible are the stresses put on second-tier cities -- the Chicagos and Cincinnatis -- from a system that is disproportionately giving the greatest rewards to those at the very top of the hierarchy while threatening even the seemingly successful cities with being left behind.

Economist Richard Florida calls this phenomenon “winner-take-all urbanism.” It’s the superstar athlete or celebrity effect transposed into the urban world. Just as A-list stars earn far more than the merely famous, the top business talent and the top cities are reaping disproportionate riches over the merely prosperous.

This divide is harder to spot because the people and places involved are often superficially similar. The people in both possess university degrees. They share similar cultural norms, aspirations and politics. The places they live in all have their farm-to-table restaurants, tech startups, artisanal coffee roasters and bicycle commuter infrastructure. As with a sports team, they all wear the same uniform. But some are all-stars while others are role players who are more easily replaced.

When young workers or artists struggle to find an affordable apartment in a global capital, this isn’t just proof of a failure to deregulate housing development. It’s also a marketplace sending a powerful signal that their position among the winners of society is much more precarious than they might imagine. Most would agree that there are some businesses and people who shouldn’t be in New York or San Francisco. We shouldn’t expect a peanut butter spread of talent and economic activity across the country. The nature of the industries concentrated in these places produces a higher-end specialization. So there will be some economic value line below which it isn’t viable to be there.

There’s an argument to be made that building more housing to reduce rents can draw the line lower. But that still presumes a line. When aspirational millennials -- or even older people like me -- can’t afford the current rent, that’s a signal that they are near or below that line. In a time in which rewards seem to be skewed to the top, that should be worrisome to them personally, not just to the poor or working classes.

Similarly, cities that remain a notch below the top tier should be worried. Chicago’s financial crisis, population loss, violent crime spike and other problems suggest fundamental structural challenges facing the city. And if even Chicago is not fully achieving the global-city status it craves, shouldn’t other cities be worried?

Yet the leaders of these cities, and the ambiguously successful people who live in them, have tended to identify themselves as among the winners. They haven’t really grappled with the fact that the global economy puts them at risk. It’s not just people in Flint or Youngstown, Ohio, who are being buffeted by globalization. If these people and cities ever came to view themselves as at risk, they could become a powerful voice for reforming the system to be more equitable while retaining its fundamentally open character. They are the exact potential champions for change in a system that badly needs it so that we can broaden the pool of success.

Unfortunately, those among the ranks of the second-tier successful have instead sided with the global capitals and the global elite to defend the economic status quo, leaving the reform fight to the populists who prefer an overly closed system. They may yet discover to their chagrin that the very system they so vigorously supported will ultimately become their own undoing.

This piece originally appeared in Governing Magazine.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Photo: Kevin D. Hartnell (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons