In The New Megalopolis, Richard Florida (The Flight of the Creative Class) argues that our focus on national development is wrong:
China isn’t the world’s most ferocious new economic competitor — the exploding east-coast corridor, from Beijing to Shanghai, is. India as a whole is not developing high-tech industries and attracting jobs, but the booming mega-region stretching from Bangalore to Hyderabad is. Across the world, in fact, nations don’t spur growth so much as dynamic regions — modern versions of the original “megalopolis,” a term coined by the geographer Jean Gottman to identify the sprawling Boston-New York-Washington economic power corridor.
He argues that there are 20 great “Megas” in the world, half in the United States:
These regions are home to just 10 percent of total world population, 660 million people, but produce half of all economic activity, two thirds of world-class scientific activity and three quarters of global innovations. The great urbanologist Jane Jacobs was the first to describe why megalopolises grow. When people cluster in one place, they all become more productive. And the place itself becomes much more productive, because collective creativity grows exponentially. Ideas flow more freely, are honed more sharply and can be put into practice more quickly. Later, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas dubbed these forces “human capital externalities,” and explained why they seem to override “the usual economic forces,” like prices: “What can people be paying Manhattan or downtown Chicago rents for, if not to be around other people?”There is, however, a tipping point. The forces of price and congestion begin pushing people away from the center. But make no mistake, this has nothing to do with the “decentralization of work,” as many have argued. The huge economic advantages of clustering still guide the process, which is why second cities emerge near big cities or in the corridors between them, not in the middle of nowhere.