Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity

"Today, around 55 percent of the world’s population is thought to be living in an urban area or city, with that figure set to rise to 68 percent over the coming decades, according to the “Population Division” report from the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs." -CNBC, May 17/2018

Published on Oct 14, 2016 by John Ramos
YouTube: MUST WATCH - Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity - A Pentagon Video (4:55)
According to a startling Pentagon video obtained by The Intercept, the future of global cities will be an amalgam of the settings of "Escape from New York" and "Robocop" — with dashes of the "Warriors" and "Divergent" thrown in. It will be a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers.

At least that's the scenario outlined in "Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity," a five-minute video that has been used at the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations University. All that stands between the coming chaos and the good people of Lagos and Dhaka (or maybe even New York City) is the U.S. Army, according to the video, which The Intercept obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

References

Wikipedia: Megacity
A megacity is a very large city metropolitan area, typically with a population of more than 10 million people.

Largest cities
This is the list of the world's largest metropolitan areas by population as of 2016.

1. Tokyo = 38,140,000
2. Shanghai = 34,000,000
3. Jakarta = 31,500,000
4. Delhi = 27,200,000
5. Seoul = 25,600,000

Megacities and The United States Army: Preparing for a complex and uncertain future (PDF)
Chief of Staff of the Army, Strategic Studies Group
Cities with populations of ten million or more are given a special designation: megacity. There are currently over twenty megacities in the world, and by 2025 there will be close to forty. The trends are clear. Megacities are growing, they are be-coming more connected, and the ability of host nation governments to effectively deal with their explosive growth and maintain security is, in many cases, diminishing. Megacities are a unique environment that the U.S. Army does not fully understand.

2019-04-22

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