Interlocalism

Interlocalism is adaptation and expansion of the industrial concept of “clusters.” Compatible communities competing and collaborating in a network of mutually supportive, global-wired urban hubs that recognize and accept that economics ─ fueled by the natural resources that empires, countries, communities, tribes and villages have gone to war over ─ are, and always have been, the underlying driving engine of the locomotive of politics and senseless wars that get innocent, uneducated children killed because of their parent’s ignorance.

China has rejected the globalization economic model just as it did rural communism, and is forming Confucian humanist city clusters as the essential national cornerstone and integral part of its future interlocal cluster economic model. Most of the megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan ─ already home to millions of people ─ have room to grow. Smaller cities around the megacities ─ especially those with populations of around 1 million ─ will become an integral part of city clusters.

China, the world’s most populous nation, is now at the peak of its urban transformation. Urbanites will outnumber peasants within a decade. China will then have 83 cities with more than 750,000 residents, but only five with a population of more than five million.

City clusters have already formed on the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, with Hong Kong, Shanghai and Guangzhou as their respective cores. With plans to turn Kowloon Bay and Kwun Tong into Hong Kong’s third-largest commercial district by 2010, the market is decentralizing to compensate for the lack of large commercial property in Hong Kong’s central business district. No different than New York or Los Angeles, which just keep spreading, whether it’s from Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Statten Island, the Hamptons or Fire Island. L.A.? Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Santa Monica, Culver City, Malibu all the way to the Ventura County line. Let’s not forget the coastal cities from Manhattan Beach all the way to the Laguna Beach-Capistrano county line ─ actually all the way down to La Jolla to Acapulco with a lot of interlocal communities in between. All had two great things in common. Great interlocal people and seafood restaurants, actually, just like Hong Kong ─ all kinds of phenomenal international, local, and interlocal cuisines, because all their respective best chefs seem to want go and interlocalize ingredients and cuisines.

Global Urban Slumization

By 2008, more than half the world’s population, about 3.3 billion people, will live in towns and cities, a number expected to swell to almost 5 billion by 2030, according to a U.N. Population Fund report released in June 2007. The onrush of change will be particularly extraordinary in Africa and Asia, where between 2000 and 2030, “the accumulated urban growth during the whole span of history will be duplicated in a single generation,” the report says.

This surge in urban populations, fueled more by natural increase than the migration of people from the countryside, is unstoppable. Cities will edge out rural areas in more than sheer numbers of people. Poverty is now increasing more rapidly in urban areas as well, and governments need to plan for where the poor will live rather than leaving them to settle illegally in shanties without plumbing and other basic services.

With millions of people settling into cities in the coming decades, it is critical for interlocal urban planners to design cities that can absorb the human influx and seamlessly integrate the different communities into multicultural education systems in order to avoid the plight of today’s slums ─ while addressing their needs.

In Latin America, where urbanization came earlier than in other developing regions, many countries and cities ignored or fruitlessly tried to retard urban growth. People were left to fend for themselves in slums. There are a billion people, one-sixth of the world’s population, who already live in slums, 90 percent of them in developing countries.

In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 7 out of 10 urban dwellers live in a slum. The region’s slum population has almost doubled in just 15 years, reaching 200 million in 2005. Its urban population is already as large as North America’s.

The first great wave of urbanization unfurled over two centuries, from 1750 to 1950, in Europe and North America, with urban populations rising to 423 million from 15 million.

That was then and interlocalism is now. Globalism died in the last decade of the 20th century. It was a 19th-century model of economics based on scarcity, but the whole world was in surplus. The debates on globalization, secession or separatism have to therefore be replaced with an all-encompassing discussion on interlocalism. Interlocalism will accelerate as the economic benefits and natural growth become evident in the 21st century.