UP Links 04 March 2013

Damian McKinney, a former Royal Marine, argues that today’s armed services have more to teach the private sector than ever. For example, how to build a ladder of training rather than just prepare people for the next job: armies routinely think in terms of “two rungs up”. And how to learn from experience: armies routinely conduct post-mortems on their missions.

Third, the best case scenario with the lowest probability, but it has the virtue of depending solely on Africans: African nations realise the biggest opportunity in their history awaits them. Africans need to upgrade their investment platforms so China will outsource manufacturing to them. They need to create truly independent central banks; build specialised infrastructure, especially in agriculture and across national borders; demolish intra-African trade barriers; and invest in the only possibility of infinite returns – the skills, abilities and self-determination of entrepreneurs and the work force.

Emerging markets are driving global growth, and 3.5 billion people are moving to cities. That’s $20 trillion of infrastructure to lay down. It’s either a big problem or an opportunity.

The Riley Packaging plant in Uganda is quite a sight. From wall to wall and floor to ceiling, it is crammed with vast rolls of paper. A visitor feels like an ant gazing at stacks of toilet rolls. A management consultant might ask: why does Riley need to keep so much inventory—three months’ worth—heaped idly on the floor? Surely there are better uses for the firm’s capital?

Actually, no. The paper has to be imported. Uganda is landlocked. The nearest port, at Mombasa in Kenya, is more than 1,000km (620 miles) away on iffy roads. Containers passing through customs there face long and unpredictable delays. The factory keeps masses of inventory because it cannot rely on supplies to arrive just-in-time. And “we can’t ever let customers down,” says Ashish Thakkar, a part-owner of the firm.

The “equipment library” at Union Kitchen in Northeast Washington, D.C., contains some of the more mundane artifacts of the modern “sharing economy”: an oversized whisk, a set of spatulas, ladles, chopping knives, sheet pans and tongs. “Collaborative consumption,” as it’s also known, is more often associated with the big-ticket items that have given the concept such bemusing cachet. Suddenly, it seems, people are casually lending and borrowing cars, bikes, even brownstones. But this basic kitchenware, hanging in a 7,300 square-foot warehouse, reveals the reaches to which all this sharing could ultimately expand, as well as the reasons why it will have to.

…As Singer’s kitchen illustrates, collective ownership in all its evolving forms constitutes less a fleeting fad and more an essential piece of how we’ll live in an increasingly dense, urbanized world. This is both a physical and economic reality. “Fundamentally,” Singer says, “if more people are living on the same square foot of land, and that square foot of land is worth more money, what are the consequences and how do we set up our society to deal with that? That’s what we’re trying to wrap our heads around.”

So an alternative method of calculating population density is to divide the urban population by the area taken up by cities. On this measure Bangladesh’s urban areas hold about 75,000 people per square kilometre (194,250 per square mile). This is likely the world’s highest and is over 70 times the figure derived from cruder calculations. Since more than half the world’s population now lives in cities, a share the UN expects to rise to over two-thirds by 2050, adjusting population density to account for the smaller areas where people actually choose to live is probably a better way of gauging how crowded somewhere is.

Alain Bertaud has famously compared Atlanta to Barcelona. They are similar in population size but vastly different in the way of spatial settlement patterns. He finds that Atlanta can never achieve the kind of transit service that Barcelona has.

“Barcelona’s metro network is 99 kilometers long and 60% of the population lives at less than 600 meters from a metro station. Atlanta’s metro network is 74 km long – not so different from Barcelona – but only 4% of the population live within 800 meters from a metro station! Predictably, in Atlanta only 4.5% of trips are made by transit vs. 30% in metropolitan Barcelona.”

“Suppose that the city of Atlanta would want to provide its population with the same metro accessibility as Barcelona does (60% of the population within 600 meter from a metro station), it would then have to build an additional 3,400 kilometers of metro tracks and about 2,800 new metro stations. This enormous new investment will allow Atlanta metro to potentially transport the same number of people that Barcelona does with only 99 kilometers of tracks and 136 stations!”