How The Growth Of New Cities Is Becoming A Global Economic Driver

LODHA

31 May, 2018

If only half of the new cities that are currently being built today are actually completed we’re looking at a trillion dollars of investment—minimum. The likely reality is that over the next thirty years the new city building boom will kick into high gear and become one of the biggest economic drivers in the world, as hundreds of new dots are scattered across the maps of Asia and Africa.

When emerging markets step onto the global stage they are often clad in new cities. From China to India to the Middle East to North and Subsaharan Africa, markets are rebranding themselves as modern, international and investment-worthy by building shiny new metropolises in droves. Indonesia has 28 new cities in the works, Morocco is building nine, while even little Kuwait is at work constructing 12 new cities of their own. As I write this, Oman is building Duqm—a new urban colossus two and half times the size of Singapore—out in the middle of the desert, Palestine is throwing up the towers of Rawabi, and developers in South Korea’s Songdo are proverbially looking down from the windows of their skyscrapers upon the new city of 120,000 people they built successfully from scratch on reclaimed land.