Oct 31,2012

UP Links 31 October 2012

+ Brandon Fuller

Jaques Morisset on the Rural-to-Urban Transition in Tanzania

Let’s pretend that we are in 2050. According to UN projections, Tanzania’s population will be over 150 million, with Dar es Salaam one of the megacities of the African continent. Most likely, large secondary cities will have also emerged around growth poles such as natural gas in the South or tourism as well as agribusiness in the Arusha region. But what will have happened to the rural poor? Will they have moved to cities to be employed in manufacturing and service sectors like in China today? Will rural Tanzania be more like Thailand with its vibrant smallholder farms?  The response will greatly depend on the Government‘s capacity to stimulate and, above all, manage these three transformational forces of agricultural productivity, rural diversification, and urbanization.

Timothy Taylor on KPMG’s Driverless Cars Report

Automobile travel transformed how people relate to distance: it decentralized how people live and work, and gave them a new array of choices for everything from the Friday night date to the long-distance road trip…Driverless cars may turn out to be one of those rare inventions that transform transportation even further. KPMG and the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research published a report on “Self-driving cars: The next revolution.” last August. It’s available from the KPMG website here…

Edward Glaeser on San Francisco and Detroit

I hope that the next generation of U.S. entrepreneurs will figure out opportunities for the millions of less-skilled Americans. Every unemployed person is ultimately a failure of entrepreneurial imagination. Until that happens, we must invest more in educating the less fortunate, and hope that a bit of Detroit’s ability to employ the less skilled rubs off on San Francisco, and a bit of San Francisco’s economic energy rubs off on Detroit.

Stephen Smith on Cities and Climate Change Adaptation

At a seminar at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute to study flood barriers in New York City, Brian Colle of Stony Brook University predicted in 2009 that episodes such as this week’s record-setting floods at the Battery in Lower Manhattan would become more common… [For] a few billion dollars, it could build defenses blocking the entrances to New York’s Upper or Lower Bays, according to presenters at the conference.

New York’s large taxpaying population packed onto a small amount of land makes such a plan feasible. Protecting entire coastlines such as the New Jersey shore, however, is probably not…

Seawalls aren’t the only protection against natural disasters that cities can afford but outlying areas can’t. Burying power lines is usually prohibitively expensive outside of dense neighborhoods, and city dwellers usually don’t have to wait as long as their suburban counterparts for streets to be plowed after snowstorms… If climate scientists are correct and sea levels continue to rise and extreme weather becomes more common, cities will probably continue to find ways to protect themselves from natural disasters.