By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The search for Nextpolis

Yesterday the highly anticipated COP26 climate change summit began in the Scottish city of Glasgow. Delegates from about 200 countries will announce how they will cut emissions by 2030 and help the planet.

With world warming because of fossil fuel emissions caused by humans, scientists warn that urgent action is needed to avoid a climate catastrophe.

A previously unnamed glacier in West Antarctica is to be called Glasgow Glacier to mark the Scottish city's hosting of the COP26 climate meeting:

Speaking to reporters on the way to Rome on Friday, the British PM Boris Johnson used the example of the Roman empire’s collapse to highlight what he said was the possibility of runaway climate change bringing a decline in civilization.

Questioned about the stakes for Cop26 in Rome, where he was interviewed next to the Coliseum, Johnson reiterated his warnings about the consequences for the globe.

“If you increase the temperatures of the planet by four degrees or more, as they are predicted to do remorselessly, you’ll have seen the graphs, then you produce these very difficult geopolitical events,” he told Channel 4 News.

“You produce shortages, you produce desertification, habitat loss, movements, contests for water, for food, huge movements of peoples. Those are things that are going to be politically very, very difficult to control.

“When the Roman Empire fell, it was large as a result of uncontrolled immigration. The empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east, all over the place, and we went into a dark age, Europe went into a dark age that lasted a very long time. The point of that is to say it can happen again. People should not be so conceited as to imagine that history is a one-way ratchet.

“Unless you can make sure next week at Cop in Glasgow that we keep alive this prospect of restricting the growth in the temperature of the planet then we really face a real problem for humanity.”

Johnson has faced criticism this week for his own inaction over tackling emissions, with Wednesday’s autumn budget again froze fuel duty, and cut levies on shorter, domestic flights, but he arrived in Rome bearing a blunt message for fellow G20 leaders.

In Rome, Johnson will hold bilateral talks with Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, whose own record on reducing emissions has been heavily criticised, as well as Canada’s Justin Trudeau and Italy’s Mario Draghi.

Also attending this meeting will be the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who is expected to bring along her likely successor, Olaf Scholz, currently the finance minister.

 

                                                                  The search for Nextpolis

 

Thus many, especially this past year, wondered where to move.

During the pandemic spring of 2020, our Mesopotamian instincts refreshed as naturally as riding a bicycle. Australia and New Zealand, Switzerland and Austria, Finland and Estonia, pairs of like-minded neighbors with small populations reopened borders exclusively to each other. “Green lanes” and “immunity bubbles” kicked in, signifying how trust in each other’s health systems mattered more than centuries of inter-state diplomatic conventions. The US passport was suddenly welcome in just 30 countries instead of the usual 150. 

 

The planned site for Necropolis:

Nobody wants a trade-off between health and wealth. Our vague loyalty to the nation pales in comparison to our visceral desire to be ensconced inside a green zone. Well-governed territories would instead connect than be chained to weak links next door. Indeed, most striking was the behavior of states and provinces within countries that had no legal right to close internal borders. Hawaii sought to reopen tourism for Australians and Japanese, but not fellow Americans. Police in Rhode Island searched neighborhoods for New York license plates; even fellow New Yorkers in the Hamptons suspected wealthy refugees from New York City of unfairly plundering their grocery stores. As Scotland brought Covid under control, it had no interest in letting in undisciplined compatriots from England. 

Anyone who can afford to is moving away from red zones and into green zones, places with robust virus testing and vaccination programs. Within the US, that means ditching states where armed militias occupy capitol buildings to prevent lockdowns while anti-vaxxers and other “Covidiots” run amok. More broadly, green zones tend to be countries where politics doesn’t interfere with science and where technology is aggressively being applied to public health, such as South Korea. Canada’s BlueDot system integrates medical records, geolocated web search metadata, and mobile phone patterns to warn of virus outbreaks. Swedes have begun having RFID-tagged chips inserted under their skin that can affirm their health status. AI now scans health records in China, Singapore, and elsewhere, and free screenings anticipate the potential onset of cancer and other conditions. Next, we might see governments proactively offer treatments using genomics and synthetic biology. 

No doubt, public health will become a significant priority in countries that failed the Covid test, much as after the Black Death, European societies introduced sewers and paved roads. But why gamble with your life when life is no longer short? Indeed, today’s mobile class is looking for “blue zones” that combine preventive measures and pro-longevity interventions. Places such as Sardinia in Italy and Okinawa in Japan have earned the blue zone moniker for their combination of the new environment, organic diet, regular exercise, and strong community bonds that have propelled locals to the most extended lifespans of any place on Earth. Humanity would be better off with the blue zone diet of vegetables, grains, seeds, fruits, nuts, beans, and fish. Longer biological lifespans could elevate people’s desire to live in places free of arbitrary violence. Since America is the only rich country with frequent mass shootings, talented people with a healthy sense of self-preservation will either continue to raise their security walls or move to more trustworthy communities. In 2019, San Francisco labeled the NRA a “domestic terrorist organization,” but now that guns can be 3D-printed, sensible locales will have to monitor those technologies as well. At the intersection of green zones and blue zones, one finds societies that have affordable housing and wage protections and female leaders and community policing.1

This is a reminder that people don’t plan their next moves searching for high GDP growth. GDP as a measure of welfare is the statistical equivalent of gold: It’s only valuable if people believe in it. Instead, today’s youth are more inclined to put their faith in sustainable economies, diverse and inclusive societies, and a culture of rights and wellness. There is an arms race underway to rank countries according to their socioeconomic inclusion and environmental sustainability balance. Comparing countries by their GDP versus their rank in the recently launched Social Progress Index (SPI) is startling. The US, for example, is wealthier per capita than all but a few small European tax-havens. But given its poor healthcare, violence, and inequality, it ranks only twenty-sixth in the SPI. The top tier of SPI countries is made up of the usual suspects in northern Europe and Switzerland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, and large countries such as Germany, Japan, Canada, and France. Even amid Europe’s low-growth trajectory, wealth tempered by fairness suggests more excellent social stability.

Heliogen technology

Canadian, European, and Australian cities have made the most significant strides toward alternative and renewable energy such as solar, wind, and nuclear power. No country is decarbonizing faster than France, which has invited a multinational consortium to construct the world’s most powerful fusion reactor. Cold fusion technology has the support of Google and Japan’s Mitsubishi and Bill Gates, who also backs Heliogen. This concentrated solar technology could provide enough power even for industrial cement making. (Companies such as Carbon Cure also inject carbon captured from cement making back into the cement.) Hydrogen power can already replace coal and gas for steel making and energy extraction (two other emissions-intensive sectors). Japan is building two dozen new coal-fired power plants to compensate for its closing of nuclear plants after the Fukushima disaster. Still, it’s also importing compressed liquid hydrogen from Australia in a bid to become the world’s clean energy leader. South Korea is well on its way to having multiple cities fueled by hydrogen for heating, cooling, and electricity. Fusion, hydrogen, solar, and wind power can also be used to cool our data centers, the fastest-growing source of emissions. A city of any size should be able to power itself. 

This means that our mobility within and between cities should have a far smaller environmental footprint. Thanks to Tesla, BYD in China, and the many European and Japanese carmakers ramping up electric vehicle production, the EV share of total car sales is rising steadily worldwide. But even though Germany and Sweden have roads that charge them, the global supply chain for lithium-ion batteries is dirty and vulnerable. That’s why China’s CATL is developing (for Tesla) cobalt-free batteries that don’t require mining in Africa and South America. Hydrogen-powered public transport and cars are taking off in Japan, South Korea, and China. Organic waste can be turned into synthetic gas to power garbage trucks. And Toyota’s solar panel–covered car provides a day’s worth of urban driving with no charging required.

It’s common today to hear pronouncements about the “death of globalization.” Generations past have presumed the same about their times. Yet much like Europe after World War I, each period of retrenchment is followed by an even broader and deeper globalization wave. So it shall be again. Oil trade may decrease, but the digital exchange is exploding. Trade-in manufactured goods have ebbed, but capital flows and cryptocurrencies are thriving. Populism and the pandemic have tightened some borders, but climate change will drive ever more people across them. Remember the most fundamental truth about humanity through the ages: We keep building connectivity across the planet, and we keep using it.

Mobility is destiny. A map of the world population distribution in 2020 shows large concentrations along the coasts of North America and the Pacific Rim and the dense urban clusters of Europe, Africa, and South Asia. But as we animate that map toward 2050, the coastlines of North America and Asia will submerge, and their people will retreat inland. South Americans and Africans will surge northward as their farmland desertifies and their economies crumble. South Asia, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, will be the origin of an even more significant exodus as sea levels rise and rivers dry up. At the same time, automation makes human labor redundant, and governments fail to provide stability and welfare. As the decades unfold, dozens of new cities will pop up in previously uninhabited regions, from the Canadian Arctic and Greenland to Russian Siberia and the Central Asian steppe. Some towns will move with their inhabitants.

The Covid lockdown crushed the economy but (temporarily) cleared the skies. Millions of Indians living in the foothills of the Himalayas had never seen its peaks until March 2020, when decades of oppressive smog were temporarily removed. Can we maintain economic vibrancy while also eliminating noxious greenhouse gas emissions? The Paris climate agreement has been held up as a road map for the world, but no collective action has backed it up. American presidents can make promises that their successors reject and Congress fails to legislate, and that would take decades to implement. Canada is a signatory to the Paris Agreement but has just approved the development of a massive new tar sands oil field. Europe is reducing its emissions, but its efforts are more than outweighed by their growth everywhere else. China is cleaning up at home but exporting dirty coal abroad. India and Brazil decry climate colonialism while India remains reliant on coal power, and Brazil logs the Amazon. Carbon taxes are gaining ground, but these are, at best half measures. Markets, many critics argue, are what got us into this mess in the first place. 

Our many colonial-era borders hinder cooperation on today’s existential challenges. For example, India and Pakistan dispute the Sir Creek estuary that forms the Feni River’s delta into the Arabian Sea. Here and elsewhere, countries can’t agree on a river border. Instead, they should have been turned into wetland conservation areas long ago. Some sub-Saharan African nations, such as Botswana and Zambia, have managed to establish cross-border ecological preserves. The same should be done in the precarious but ecologically precious Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. Such thinking is needed across the world. Though the notorious 1885 Congress of Berlin is where Africa got many of its straight-line borders, Europeans also utilized the legal concept of do ut des, meaning “giving to receive.” Today, they can also share sovereignty. 

Sovereignty today serves to demarcate zones of political control, but it also shields governments from complying with transnational responsibilities. Yet climate change raises new questions about countries’ obligations to conserve habitats, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and accept migrants. At the heart of these queries lies a stark choice. What matters more: nationality or sustainability? Should states be permitted to have leaders who ruin the Earth for all of us? Is the territory of Canada or Russia too crucial to the world to be left to Canadians and Russians alone to govern? Can we evolve from sovereignty to stewardship? 

Repurposing vast swaths of the planet for large-scale resettlement requires re-coding territory away from strict sovereignty into administrative protectorates designated for agriculture, forestry, marine life, or habitation. Countries could lease critical habitats to international cooperatives for their sustainable cultivation. When spaces are so crucial that no one government should control them exclusively, we can design mechanisms that balance sustainability with fair access. IUCN helps countries designate nature reserves, wilderness areas, national parks, and sustainable resource development areas and finds partners to assist them. To date, such technical support by IUCN and the World Wildlife Fund has led to 15 percent of the Earth’s land area being designated as protected areas. E. O. Wilson argued our target should be 50 percent. Linking biospheres would allow many currently endangered species and natural habitats to regenerate.

Twenty years ago, we feared rampant overpopulation. Today’s most urgent task is to nurture those alive and yet to be born to ensure the survival of humanity through this century. Will people have to move, but will we let them? Is there any justification for a system in which large and resource-rich countries close their borders while those least responsible for climate change are sinking or running out of water? To lock the world population into its present position amounts to ecocide, yet it won’t make those who survive better off. Our economies will still face acute labor shortages, and the wealth created from the global exchange will halt. We should cultivate the planet’s habitable oases and move people there. 

Moral philosophers have nonetheless put the nation ahead of humanity in their inquiries. For example, seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke argued for naturalizing immigrants to enlarge the labor pool and expand production. He was clear that migration should not deprive locals of their property rights. The eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant advocated a right to hospitality for all people, but this was understood more as a temporary sojourn rather than permanent residence. As with Locke, it was conditioned on the visitor not causing harm to his hosts.2

Kant’s ideas continued to animate twentieth-century debates about migrant rights. Living through the postwar decades of significant migrations between Britain and its former colonies, the late Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett echoed Kant in his view that a moral state should provide fundamental rights to both citizens and noncitizens alike. The right to migrate is such a right, as is the right of stateless people to become citizens of some state. Jacques Derrida similarly argued for strict national sovereignty to soften in favor of more ethical hospitality toward foreigners. But even for famed philosophers such as John Rawls, migration played a minor role in his thought experiments about self-contained states. He supported people’s right to move, but not any imposition on national sovereignty. Instead, a just global system would eliminate the root causes of poverty, corruption, or other motivations for migration.

Some European conservatives argue that citizenship should only be conferred on those with a “genuine” link to the country. This usage of “genuine” is specious, effectively reducing citizenship back to the arbitrary happenstance of birth, hardly a measure of genuine volition. The actual intent of criticizing citizenship-for-sale programs, of course, is to avoid losing tax revenue. The “Paradise Papers” (a trove of 13 million documents disclosing offshore financial holdings of elites from around the world) revealed the extent to which wealthy individuals, like stateless global companies, will go to hide their assets in offshore jurisdictions.

The EU is pushing back, demanding that companies registered in low-tax countries prove their “economic substance” involves actual people living there. There must be employees, not just shell companies. Governments count the number of days people spend within their borders to tax them; soon, they will check your passport dates and stamps and for whom you did the work. The likely result is that people will vote with their wallets, moving themselves or their staff to more tax-efficient places. Companies certainly are, whether Dyson is shifting its headquarters from London to Singapore or SoftBank’s Vision Fund relocating from London to Abu Dhabi. 

Ireland is already a tax haven for global tech companies and takes in tens of thousands of new skilled residents each year, many living in “Googleville” in central Dublin. After just one year and paying 1 million euros, residents are eligible to apply for citizenship, enabling them to move at will to other EU countries competing to attract migrant investors. (In mid-2020, Hong Kong tycoon Ivan Ho proposed building a new city in Ireland called Nextpolis to relocate fifty thousand Hong Kong citizens.) 

If countries don’t do a better job moving their passports up the rankings of global access, their citizens will just move and change citizenship. While Asian passports from Japan, South Korea, and Singapore now sit atop the ranking of most powerful passports, China ranks seventy-fourth, and India is far lower still. Each year, about one hundred thousand, mostly Chinese and Indians, have come into New Zealand either to stay or use it as a back door to enter Australia. After alarm bells sounded, New Zealand backtracked on allowing any foreigners (save for those from a handful of friendly countries or selected billionaires) to buy property at all. Now those would-be Kiwis will likely become Canucks instead. A Chinese proverb advises that a wise rabbit always has three holes to burrow in. Chinese should know: They’re buying up properties and passports from Canada to Portugal to Singapore. 

So too are Americans. Historically, Americans only expatriate after many years of frustration at US tax filings. The ultra-rich 1 percent of American ex-pats can easily afford either to renounce or to keep US citizenship. Still, it’s the 2 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent, and everyone else that struggles to save money while paying taxes in two countries simultaneously.2 Punitive tax policy, political populism, and Covid mismanagement drove a growing number of Americans to the exits throughout the 2010s. In the first half of 2020 alone, American expatriation reached nearly six thousand worldwide, a 1,200 percent jump over the entire total of 2019, and would have been even higher if not for the backlog of applicants at various embassies. Departing elites have their pick of justifications: authoritarian populist Republicans or woke socialist Democrats. Ironically, Italy and Ireland, which provided so many grateful migrants to America in the nineteenth century, are top destinations for Americans using their lineage to obtain European passports for themselves, and their children too. Who knows where America’s growing diaspora will go next? 

Even those with an American passport or green card have no longer considered America a haven. An estimated 6 million Americans also hold other passports, they’re “American” on paper, but America is more a backup plan than a pledge of allegiance. Now both Americans and these secondary US passport holders are having second thoughts. Even more, foreigners give up their green cards each year than Americans give up passports. America’s lost its dominant grip on the best and brightest students, is losing appeal as a nationality, and is competing in a war for global wealth and talent, including Americans. 

The term “user experience” applies as much to cities as it does to companies for youth. They demand that local governance leapfrog from decrepit infrastructure and shoddy services to sensors managing traffic and digital referenda gathering their views in real-time. Small and wealthy countries tend to offer the best combination of security and lifestyle that youth seek, but cities will compete to be “smarter” than their peers within large countries such as the US.3

“Smart city” now denotes everything from telemedicine to pervasive surveillance. The technological dimension of smart city life is a mix of alluring and discomforting. Apartments are becoming configurable spaces where the furniture folds itself up to fit the area depending on whether you need a couch, bed, kitchen, or office.

It’s common today to hear pronouncements about the “death of globalization.” Generations past have presumed the same about their times. Yet much like Europe after World War I, each period of retrenchment is followed by an even broader and deeper globalization wave. So it shall be again. Oil trade may decrease, but the digital exchange is exploding. Trade-in manufactured goods have ebbed, but capital flows and cryptocurrencies are thriving. Populism and the pandemic have tightened some borders, but climate change will drive ever more people across them. Remember the most fundamental truth about humanity through the ages: We keep building connectivity across the planet, and we keep using it.

Mobility is destiny. A map of the world population distribution in 2020 shows large concentrations along the coasts of North America and the Pacific Rim and the dense urban clusters of Europe, Africa, and South Asia. But as we animate that map toward 2050, the coastlines of North America and Asia will submerge, and their people will retreat inland. South Americans and Africans will surge northward as their farmland desertifies and their economies crumble. South Asia, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, will be the origin of an even more significant exodus as sea levels rise and rivers dry up. At the same time, automation makes human labor redundant, and governments fail to provide stability and welfare. As the decades unfold, dozens of new cities will pop up in previously uninhabited regions, from the Canadian Arctic and Greenland to Russian Siberia and the Central Asian steppe. Some towns will move with their inhabitants.

Our many arbitrary colonial-era borders hinder cooperation on today’s existential demographic and environmental challenges. For example, India and Pakistan dispute the Sir Creek estuary that forms the Feni River’s delta into the Arabian Sea. Here and elsewhere, countries can’t agree whether a river border should be defined at the midpoint or the banks. Yet as University of Maryland professor Saleem Ali argues, such fragile ecosystems should have been turned into wetland conservation areas long ago rather than militarized. Some sub-Saharan African nations, such as Botswana and Zambia and Mozambique, and South Africa, have established cross-border ecological preserves. The same should be done in the precarious but ecologically precious Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. Such thinking is needed across the world. Though the notorious 1885 Congress of Berlin is where Africa got many of its straight-line borders, Europeans also utilized the legal concept of do ut des, meaning “giving to receive,” or simply tit-for-tat. Today countries can do better than that: They can also share sovereignty. 

Sovereignty today serves to demarcate zones of political control, but it also shields governments from complying with transnational responsibilities. Yet climate change raises new questions about countries’ obligations to conserve habitats, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and accept migrants. At the heart of these queries lies a stark choice. What matters more: nationality or sustainability? Should states be permitted to have leaders who ruin the Earth for all of us? Is the territory of Canada or Russia too crucial to the world to be left to Canadians and Russians alone to govern? Can we evolve from sovereignty to stewardship? 

Repurposing entire swaths of the planet for large-scale resettlement requires re-coding territory away from strict sovereignty into administrative protectorates designated for agriculture, forestry, marine life, or habitation. In this spirit, countries could lease critical habitats to international cooperatives for their sustainable cultivation. When spaces are so crucial that no one government should control them exclusively, we can design mechanisms that balance sustainability with fair access. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) helps countries designate nature reserves, wilderness areas, national parks, and sustainable resource development areas and finds the right partners to assist them to protect, regenerate, or attract tourists to these ecozones. To date, such technical support by IUCN and the World Wildlife Fund has led to 15 percent of the Earth’s land area being designated as protected areas. E. O. Wilson argued our target should be 50 percent, half the Earth. Linking biospheres would allow many currently endangered species and natural habitats to regenerate, from North American forests to the Amazon river basin to African grasslands.

 

If temperatures rise by four degrees Celsius, Canada, northern Europe, and Russia would be the only regions of the planet suitable for year-round human habitation. Due to droughts and other environmental hazards, today’s most populous countries, such as China, India, and the US, would be unsuitable. However, the US and other parts of the world could still be producers of solar, wind, and other renewable power sources. 

And yet, we will try. America’s only partially Arctic state, Alaska, has been flagged in the EPA’s Climate Resilience Screening Index (CSRI) as having the highest number of counties prepared for climate hazards. With its low population density, it also had the lowest Covid infection rate of any American state. But currently, Alaska is losing people annually to better jobs in the lower forty-eight states. It will undoubtedly attract rugged Americans seeking a low tax escape to start a new life and enjoy less scorching weather. But even in Alaska, dozens of coastal towns are engulfed by rising Pacific tides, while heat waves have been killing salmon in rivers before they can spawn. Farther inland, oil drilling and timber logging threaten the state’s nature preserves. A fresh start may well mean building new towns altogether. There and across Canada, one will find an archipelago of new Arctic melting pots.

In Europe, the gold rush for Arctic real estate has already begun, driven not least by massive gusts of hot Saharan desert blasting north from Africa. Before the long heat spell of 2019 arrived, a Spanish meteorologist announced, “Hell is coming.” A longer dry season in Germany’s Brandenburg region has caused wildfires and ashen haze in Berlin, with similarly black-red skies during heat waves in Moscow as well. Scandinavian property developers keenly offer summer dachas to Europeans from farther south. The first company that announces it’s building an Arctic outpost to relocate its staff during the summer will need AI to scan through all the CVs flooding its inbox. After all, with twenty-plus hours of daylight in the summer, there will be plenty of time for both works and play. 

Arctic territories will take on a new purpose: to build something for humanity where there was only nature before. Like the Amish or Mennonite communities who pioneered westward in nineteenth-century America, small communes will strive to live off-grid, harnessing local water supplies and agriculture to reduce dependence on the wild world beyond their horizon. The Arctic will also be tempting for scientists, engineers, environmentalists, and financiers to establish research settlements. They’re already coding their digital community by simulating architecture in VR and transacting in cashless blockchain contracts. Next, they’ll raise funds from investors and negotiate with governments to grant them land to colonize in exchange for investment and access to the benefits from these new businesses. It will be, in the words of Balaji Srinivasan, “Cloud-first, land last.” 

A more populous Arctic region may come to resemble the resource-rich continent of South America, where indigenous people, Iberian colonists, African slaves, Europeans and Asians escaping hunger, and Arabs fleeing civil war have all layered over the centuries into a unique milieu. Over time, one should expect to see in the Arctic not only Europeans, Russians, and North Americans, but Syrian and Indian farmers, Chinese and Turkish industrial engineers, and dozens of other nationalities planting trees, building settlements, and harvesting resources. What better geography to promote a new orientation for human identity than the barren far north, which for centuries was stateless terrain? 

 

When the ice melts

At the same time, the land grab for resource extraction, agro-industry, and real estate development will accelerate. The Inuit and Sami people already subsist precariously off the land and sea as the ice melts. A new commercial influx may further force them onto reservations, as with Native Americans in the US and aboriginals in Australia. This would be a reversal for Canada, given the First Nations' significant autonomy in recent decades. Mining companies, billionaire environmentalists, and indigenous peoples may battle in courts and on the ground over sovereignty. 

Arctic geopolitics may also further heat the already warming northern cone. New shipping routes allow North Americans, Europeans, and Asians to evade traditional bottlenecks such as the Suez Canal or Strait of Malacca. At the same time, Russia is deploying armored icebreakers and nuclear submarines to assert its territorial claims as mineral deposits are discovered. Once Arctic states disputed claims on the ice sheet, they’ll now do so on the ocean floor. Given the lucrative resources and trade routes, the Arctic represents, perhaps piracy will migrate north too. 

China has taken a growing interest in the Arctic, declaring it a “polar Silk Road.” Chinese investors have sought to buy strategic tracts of land in Iceland and Norway, but Nordic democracies have rebuffed offers that don’t involve full local control and democratic scrutiny. 

 

Shanghai:

A scenario amalgamating these trends points to the rise of a network of northern hemispheric trading hubs across which hundreds of millions of people may eventually circulate. This revival of the early medieval Hanseatic League, with members spanning beyond Hamburg and Tallinn to include St. Petersburg, Reykjavik, Kirkenes, Aberdeen, Nuuk, Churchill, and other like-minded entrepôts, signals a future in which once again city-states and their chambers of commerce drive vital global relations among pragmatic trading powers. 

Can we pre-design our movements into the Arctic latitudes in such a way that we tread lightly, gradually preparing the terrain to absorb populations without destroying the resources on which we depend? Or will we bring rapacious extraction, pestilence, and geopolitical troubles as we have elsewhere in the past? If we don’t get the Arctic right, there won’t be any other options left.

 

1. According to the Healthcare Access and Quality (HAQ) Index, the three best healthcare systems are in Iceland, Norway, and the Netherlands. Universal healthcare is offered in eighteen countries: Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. In addition, Austria, Belgium, Japan, and Spain have near-universal health coverage.

2. Kant was, not incidentally, one of the first philosophers to treat geography as a discipline, outlining its subcategories, such as physical, economic, and moral. He wrote of a “philosophical topography” to explain how spaces and places shape human experience and knowledge. Malpas and Thiel, “Kant’s Geography of Reason,” Reading Kant’s Geography (2011), in Robert B. Louden, “The Last Frontier: The Importance of Kant’s Geography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no.3 (January 2014): 450–465.

3. A joint report by IMD of Switzerland and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) ranks cities based on their technology deployment to improve citizen experience.

 

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