BRENT SCOWCROFT CENTER ON INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
Atlantic CouncilBRENT SCOWCROFT CENTERON INTERNATIONAL SECURITYSTRATEGIC FORESIGHT INITIATIVEBy Peter EngelkeForeign Policy for an Urban World:Global Governance and the Rise of CitiesCities are shaping our collective fate in nearlyevery respect. As the predominant locus of humansettlement, cities already wield considerable powerand will continue to increase their influence in thedecades to come. Cities generate most of the world’swealth. They are the places where citizenship andpolitical participation are defined, redefined, andcontested. They are the sites where global challengesranging from climate change and natural resourcedepletion to international security problems are felt.In other words, we have seen the future, and it isurban. If humankind’s most pressing challenges areto be solved during this century, the world’s foreignand security policy establishments must not onlybecome more cognizant of mass urbanization, butbegin creating the processes that will productivelyintegrate cities within global governance structures.These policy establishments are already behindthe curve, for cities have been going about buildingparallel global governance structures on their own forsome time now. They have become important actors inshaping global politics, helping to forge new patternsof transnational relations.The US National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) GlobalTrends 2030 report, released in December 2012,focused on how relatively certain megatrends anduncertain disruptive factors will shape the worldof 2030.1 The report recognized that cities will bekey points of convergence for these trends acrossa variety of contexts. For instance, urbanization1National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds(Washington, DC: National Intelligence Council, December 2012).FUTURESCAPE: Transatlantic Partnershipfor the Global FutureThe Transatlantic Partnership for the GlobalFuture brings together experts from government,business, academia, and the science andtechnology communities to address critical globalchallenges and assess their effects on the futureof transatlantic relations. The Partnership is acollaboration between the Brent Scowcroft Centeron International Security’s Strategic ForesightInitiative and the Government of Sweden. Together,we seek to make foresight actionable by connectinglong-term trends to current challenges to informpolicy and strategy choices.The Strategic Foresight Initiative, which strivesto forge greater cooperation on futures analysisamong its main partners around the world,has rapidly become a hub for an expandinginternational community of strategic planners ingovernment and the private sector.FutureScape is a signature series of issue briefsfrom the Strategic Foresight Initiative dedicatedto exploring and analyzing the societal, political,and economic effects of emerging technologies onour future, with research and insights from leadingtechnologists and policy-centered actors.is hastening the global diffusion of power. Citiesthemselves are increasingly important nodes of power.Economically, cities produce the goods that citizensprocure. Ecologically, cities are where most of thePeter Engelke is a senior fellow for the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative, a program of theBrent Scowcroft Center on International Security.
world’s resources are consumed and much of its wasteproduced. But cities also foster power diffusion byenabling individual empowerment. Cities provideindividuals with easier access to education, services,economic opportunity, and ideas. At the same timethey erode traditional social structures and build newidentities, forming the conditions in which citizensbecome engaged in politics. If the best-case 2030scenario (“Fusion”) outlined in the Global Trends2030 report is to be realized, the bulk of the world’scities will have to provide a wide range of services andopportunities for billions of people within a contextof constrained natural resources and a more volatileclimate.In April 2013, the Atlantic Council’s Strategic ForesightInitiative, in partnership with the Governmentof Sweden, convened a workshop to address howpolicymakers can come to grips with this fundamentalglobal transformation. The insights by the workshop’sinvited experts—Tim Campbell of the Urban AgeInstitute, Billy Cobbett of the Cities Alliance, Reta JoLewis of the US Department of State, and Jaana Remesof the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI)—informed thisIssue Brief.Our Demographic DestinyCities are ancient phenomena—long predating thenation-state—but it was not until 2008 that more thanhalf the world’s population lived in them. While theword “city” has multiple definitions, demographersagree that more humans now live in citylike areas(consisting of some combination of core cities,adjacent suburbs, and peri-urban areas) than in ruralareas.2 This moment signaled the most importantdemographic turning point in human history, markingthe statistical end of a long, rural-delineated age22The term “city” is used here to describe what demographers variouslyrefer to as an “urban agglomeration,” “metropolitan area,” or“metropolitan region,” all of which are typically defined as contiguousbuilt-up areas including a city center with adjacent suburbs and peri-urbanareas. For instance, as defined by the United Nations, an “urbanagglomeration” is a “contiguous territory inhabited at urban density levelswithout regard to administrative boundaries.” See United NationsDepartment of Economic and Social Affairs/Population Division, WorldUrbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision (New York: United Nations,2012), 45. Similarly, McKinsey & Company has defined cities as “integratedmetropolitan areas rather than specific city jurisdictions.” See RichardDobbs et al., Urban world: Mapping the economic power of cities (SanFrancisco: McKinsey & Company, March 2011), 38.and the beginning of an urban-delineated one. Itformalized in numbers what was already obvious,that the city has become our species’ permanent andirreversible home.The rural-to-urban transformation has accelerateddramatically over the past two centuries. At thedawn of the Industrial Revolution around 1800, onlyabout three percent of the world’s population livedin cities. But over the next century and a half, drivenby industrialization, hundreds of millions of peoplemigrated from farm and field into the city. By 1950,the share of city dwellers had risen to around thirtypercent of the global population. Urbanization rateswere highly uneven, with much higher rates in Europe,Latin America, North America, and Australia than inother regions. Between 1950 and the present, however,urbanization enveloped the rest of the world, with themost rapid growth shifting to Asia and Africa. Nor isthis process finished. Demographers estimate that by2030 cities will be home to 60 percent of the world’stotal population. Shortly thereafter, every one of theworld’s inhabited continents will have more peopleliving in cities than in rural areas. In terms of absolutescale, current trends almost defy belief. Globally, citiesare now growing by about 70 million people annually,equivalent to adding roughly thirty-five Stockholmsor two Tokyos to the world every single year. By 2050,urban residents will count for 6.3 billion people out ofa global population of 9 billion. That means the world’surban population in 2050 would be nearly as large asthe world’s total population today and about ten timesthe size of the world’s population in 1950. 3Futures of Light and ShadowThe urbanization of our species will be a storycontaining elements of both light and shadow.On the one hand, as Jaana Remes said at the April2013 Atlantic Council workshop, the urbanizationmegatrend could be one of the most positivedevelopments in human history. When functioningat their best, cities encourage trade and technicalinnovation, the arts and education, and socialtolerance and political citizenship while imposing lowburdens on local, regional, and global ecosystems.3United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs/PopulationDivision 2012, 1-14 and Tables 1, 2, 6.AT L A N T I C C O U N C I L
Shanghai’s Pudong district, an embodiment of China’s newfound wealth and power. Photo credit: Wikimedia.Humankind will benefit enormously if the world’scities are built, designed, and governed to beeconomically productive and innovative, sociallyinclusive, environmentally sustainable and resilient,and safe and secure. Such cities enhance nationalstability and prosperity while making globalgovernance much less difficult. However, urbanizationmight not lead to such a world. When functioningat their worst, cities increase the risk of politicalinstability, make residents’ lives insecure throughcrime and violence, encourage illicit trafficking,contribute to pandemic disease formation, andconstrain national economic performance, whilestressing local, national, and global ecosystems. Suchcities make global governance far more difficult.Cities exist because they facilitate human exchange.Their key contribution to humankind, whether inthe distant past or today, lies in their density ofpeople, structures, and infrastructure. Cities createphysical proximity, which encourages the circulationof people, goods, and ideas. This simple fact enablesthe division of labor, technical and organizationalinnovation, the creation of institutions, and theAT L A N T I C C O U N C I Lformation of wealth and capital.4 As the economistEdward Glaeser, observing that per-capita incomes inthe worlds’ majority-urban societies are four timesthose of majority-rural societies, puts it, “urbandensity provides the clearest path from poverty toprosperity.”5 The implication is that mass urbanizationnot only will raise the incomes of the world’spoor, it will also make the entire world wealthier.Urbanization trends are reshaping the global politicaleconomy and in so doing are altering the globalbalance of power. Remes’s MGI has made a strong casethat the rapid and historic West-to-East shift in theglobal economy is due in large part to East Asia’s rapidurbanization. The firm forecasts that within a decade,twenty-nine of the seventy-five “most dynamic” worldcities will be in China, including four of the world’s topfive and five of the top ten.6456For a short essay on urban density, see Edward Glaeser, “Viewpoint: thecase for dense cities,” Urban Solutions 2 (February 2013), 92-5.Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How our Greatest Invention makes usRicher, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York, Penguin, 2011),1-7 (quotation, p. 1).In the MGI study, “dynamism” is loosely defined, but it is a combination ofpopulation, economic size, and rate of economic growth in the year 2025.See Richard Dobbs and Jaana Remes, “Introducing the most dynamiccities of 2025,” and Elias Groll, “The east is rising,” in Foreign Policy(Special Issue, September/October 2012), 63-7. During the April 2013workshop, Jaana Remes reiterated the claim that urbanization drives thewest-to-east economic shift.3
View from Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela. Photo credit: Wikimedia.Ecologically, if designed properly, cities can offer manyadvantages as well. People who live in denser cities(and the denser parts of metropolitan regions) treadmore lightly on the earth than those of similar meansliving in lower-density areas. In dense cities, peoplelive in smaller houses (think of the average apartmentsize in Manhattan), hence consume fewer and smallerappliances and other household goods. Because densityshortens distances, it is far easier to travel on foot,bicycle, or mass transit in places like Manhattan anddowntown London than in suburbs, exurbs, and ruralareas. Per-capita energy consumption thus tends tobe lower in higher-density areas than in similarlywealthy, less-dense ones. Urban life also createsimportant social-ecological effects. Fertility rates arelower in cities than in rural areas, for instance, andurbanization is a key driver for slowing and eventuallystopping global population growth. For all thesereasons, “sustainable city” advocates contend that goodurban design can solve the world’s greatest ecologicalchallenges.7But urbanization’s sunny side, as Billy Cobbett argues,is not guaranteed. The reality of global urbanization74See Nick Pennell, Sartaz Ahmed, and Stefan Henningsson, “Reinventing thecity to combat climate change,” strategy business 60 (Autumn 2010), 34-43;World Wide Fund for Nature and Booz & Company, Reinventing the City:Three Prerequisites for Greening Urban Infrastructure (Gland, Switzerland:World Wide Fund for Nature and Booz & Company, March 2010), http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/wwf low carbon cities final 2012.pdf.has brought with it some major headaches. If theseproblems are not dealt with adequately, the worldeasily might contain hundreds if not thousands ofcities that fail in critical respects. Much of the world’snew urban growth consists of so-called “informalsettlements,” a euphemism for the slums of thedeveloping world. One billion people already livein such places, and another billion are projected toby 2030. Having so many living in slums is a path todisaster. In these conditions, criminals and organizedterror networks easily traffic in drugs, humans, arms,and instruments of terror. Communicable diseasesform and can be spread quickly into global pandemicsvia city-to-city transmission. Slum dwellers themselvesare not the problem, as they are important assets foreconomic development. But there is much concernthat poor planning and governance of developingworld cities—including the failure to positively engageslum-dwellers—will both diminish national economicgrowth and leave behind a huge urban underclass.8At the same time, the wealth that follows urbanizationalso generates its own set of problems. Theurbanization of our species is lifting hundreds ofmillions, even billions, into the global urban middle8For an absorbing but unsettling read on this subject, see P.H. Liotta andJames F. Miskel, The Real Population Bomb: Megacities, Global Security & theMap of the Future (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2012). On the urbanfragility/state fragility question, see Stephen Commins, “Urban fragilityand security in Africa,” Africa Security Brief 12 (April 2011), 1-7.AT L A N T I C C O U N C I L
Protesters flood Cairo’s Tahrir Square, an urban epicenter of the Arab transitions. Photo credit: Ahmed Abd El-Fatah, Flickr.class. This growing wealth is a good thing, butit also has an enormous downside in the form ofincreasing energy, water, food, commodities, andgoods consumption. These things have to comefrom somewhere, and the waste involved in makingand consuming them has to go somewhere. China’sexperience is illustrative. As China has gotten richthrough urbanizing, it has also created a whollyunsustainable future for itself and the world. China’surbanization has created an insatiable appetite formore energy, water, and consumer goods. In so doing,China has fouled its air and rivers and become theworld’s largest carbon dioxide emitter.9Put simply, cities create the global middle class, whichin turn claws at the world’s resources. To counter thisfact, cities must be designed and built in ways thatpreserve and enhance the virtues of urban life whileminimizing the use of land, water, energy, and otherresources. Humanity’s grandest challenge thereforemight be thought of as a race, between how fast thegrowing global urban middle class increases resourceconsumption and how quickly we can create resourceefficient cities.9On the scale of China’s urban transformation, see Thomas J. Campanella,The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means for theWorld (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).AT L A N T I C C O U N C I LFinally, cities should be thought of as the physicalspaces where humanity’s diverse currents intersect.Cities create and recreate social and economicinequalities. They are cultural mixing bowls, wherethe traditional and the modern, the old and the young,and the established and the avant-garde all clashand recombine, resulting in new forms of culturalexpression and types of social relationships. Mostimportantly, because cities concentrate people intosmall spaces, they create a massed citizenry and anurbanized politics. An urbanized body politic cancall national governments and the state itself intoquestion, as is occurring during the Arab transitions.Daniel Serwer, a Middle East expert, observes that “thenarrative of Arab revolution reads like a tale of manycities,” arguing that cities have been the sites for nearlyall the recent mass demonstrations and revolutionaryactivity in the Middle East and North Africa.10Westphalia RevisitedThe Westphalian state system, the theoretical basisof international politics since 1648, is premised uponseveral core principles, including state sovereignty,10 Daniel Serwer, “Revolution: an urban phenomenon?,” SAISPHERE 2012-2013(2012), 32-35 (quotation, p. 33). For an illustrative essay on urbanization’seffects on social relationships, see Cecilia Tacoli and David Satterthwaite,“Gender and urban change,” Environment and Urbanization 25, 1 (April2013), 3-8, http://eau.sagepub.com/content/25/1/3.full.5
New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks to assembled media at a C40 Cities conference, Rio de Janeiro, June 2012.Photo credit: C40 Cities, Flickr.territorial integrity, and the inviolability of nationalboundaries. Above all, it privileges the nation-stateas the central actor in global affairs. This system andthese core principles are now under considerablestress. For decades, supranational actors such as theUnited Nations and European Union have nibbled at itsedges. More recently, as the Global Trends 2030 reportoutlines, sub-national actors have taken huge bites outof it as well. Empowered individuals, globally-orientedNGOs, multinational firms, and sub-national politicalactors are all engaged in building transnationalnetworks and parallel forms of global governance.Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, is amegacity politician in this vanguard. Bloomberg isthe current chair of the C40 Cities Climate LeadershipGroup, an initiative designed to bring the world’slargest cities together to find actionable solutions tothe climate change problem. C40’s very existence isevidence of the failure of the interstate (i.e., UnitedNations) climate negotiation process to produce a6workable climate stabilization regime. It also providesa concrete illustration of how mayors are willing toaddress problems that have escaped the capabilitiesof the interstate system.11 The political scientistBenjamin Barber, author of a forthcoming bookappropriately titled If Mayors Ruled the World, believesthat this willingness reflects an “inherent dispositionof cities to cooperate.”12 Implicit is the idea that therealities of daily life in cities force mayors to developworkable solutions to practical challenges. “Citiesare the real laboratories of democracy,” Bloombergargues, “because voters expect local leaders to beproblem-solvers, not debaters.”13 Mayors have a strongincentive to identify and adopt policy innovations thathave proven successful in other places, including from11 Michele Acuto and Parag Khanna, “Around the world, mayors take charge,”The Atlantic (April 26, 2013), .12 Quoted in Richard Florida, “Next great idea: what if mayors ruled theworld?,” The Atlantic Cities (June 13, 2012), what-if-mayors-ruled-world/1505/.13 SAISPHERE, “City Statesman: a conversation with Michael Bloomberg,”SAISPHERE 2012-2013 (2012), 15.AT L A N T I C C O U N C I L
abroad. C40 embodies this spirit, emphasizing learningand policy transfer rather than the tedious negotiationof complex multilateral documents.C40 highlights the formation of an increasingly selfaware and
parallel global governance structures on their own for some time now. They have become important actors in shaping global politics, helping to forge new patterns of transnational relations. The US National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) Global Trends 2030 report, released in December 2012, focused on how relatively certain megatrends and uncertain disruptive factors will shape the world of .
the world.4 In a nutshell, the assessment of the Dated Brent benchmark is based on four pillars: Physical assessment of BFOET grades. A forward curve based on the Dated swaps market. The fixed price of the forward or futures 'Brent' contract. Quality differentials on 5crudes other than Brent or Forties.
The Brent Family Front Door (incorporating Brent's Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub) may signpost, or refer families onto appropriate services. This may include a referral to Brent Children's Social Care for a Child & Family Assessment (CFA) or initiating Child Protection Enquiries (Section 47) where a child may be at significant risk of harm.
Advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies “New York Leadership Dinner and Dialogue,” New York, June 14, 2007. See also Daniel W. Drezner, “The New New World Order,” Foreign Affairs, New York, March/April 2007, pp.
The financially secure oil producers will be called upon for regional leadership, while also needing to address growing demands at home. New . Asia, and Africa, a Middle East that gets on a growth path could . I. THE MIDDLE EAST IN THE EYE OF THE STORM. 2 ATLANTIC COUNCIL Middle East 2020: Shaped by or Shaper of Global Trends? .
Nordic-Baltic Security and the US Role ISSUE BRIEF BY MARK SEIP Mark Seip was the Senior Navy Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security from 2014 to 2015. He commanded an E-2C Hawkeye squadron in Norfolk, Virginia, and deployed onboard USS Enterprise (CVN 65) prior
Guide MAX BROOKS is a senior nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point and the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. His bestselling books include Minecraft: The IslandThe , Zombie Survival GuideDevolution, , and World War Z, which was adapted into a 2013 movie starring Brad Pitt.
Brent spot oil prices stalled from late November until the middle of December at near 60 per barrel, sinking to 51 in late December, before rallying back to the near 60 in January. December was the weakest month of 2018 for Brent at 56.78 per barrel down 7.97 from the November average price. Figure 2: WTI - Brent Crude Oil Spot Price Spreads
Investigating Chemistry through Inquiry 11 - 1 S PRELIMINARY ACTIVITY FOR . Beer’s Law Investigations . Guided Inquiry Version . The primary objective of this Preliminary Activity is to determine the concentration of an unknown copper (II) sulfate solution. You will use a Colorimeter (a side view is shown in Figure 1). In this device, red light from the LED light source will pass through the .
