I want you to reimagine how life is organized on earth.
Think of the planet like a human body that we inhabit.
The skeleton is the transportation system of roads and railways,
bridges and tunnels, air and seaports
that enable our mobility across the contient.
The vascular system that powers the body
with oil and gas pipelines that distribute energy.
And the nervous system of communications
is the internet cables, satellites, cellular networks
and data centers that allow us to share information.
This ever-expanding infrastructural matrix of 64 million kilometers of roads,
4 million kilometers of railways,
2 million kilometers of pipelines,
and 1 million kilometers of internet cables.
What about international borders?
We have less than 500,000 kilometers of borders.
Let's build a better map of the world.
And we can start by overcoming some ancient mythology.
There's a saying with which all students of history are familiar:
"Geography is destiny."
Sounds so grave, doesn't it?
It's such a fatalistic adage.
It tells us that landlocked countries are condemned to be poor,
that small countries cannot escape their larger neighbors,
that vast distances are insurmountable.
But every journey I take around the world,
I see an even greater force sweeping the planet:
connectivity.
The global connectivity revolution, in all of its forms --
transportation, energy and communications--
has enabled such a quantum leap in the mobility of people,
of goods, of resources, of knowledge,
such that we can no longer think of geography as distinct from it.
In fact, I view the two forces as fusing together
into what I call connectography.
Connectography represents a quantum leap
in the mobility of people, resources and ideas,
but it is an evolution,
an evolution of the world from political geography,
which is how we legally divide the world,
to functional geography,
which is how we actually use the world,
from nations and borders, to infrastructure and supply chains.
Our global system is evolving
from the vertically integrated empires of the 19th century,
through the horizontally, interdependent nations
of the 20th century,
into a global network civilization in the 21st century.
Connectivity, not sovereignty, has become
the organizing principle of the human species.
(Applause)
We are becoming this global network civilization
because we are literally building it.
All of the world's defense budgets and military spending
taken together total just under 2 trillion dollars per year.
Meanwhile, our global infrastructure spending is projected to rise
to 9 trillion dollars per year within the coming decade.
And, well, it should.
We have been living off an infrastructure stock
meant for a world population of 3 billion,
as our population has crossed 7 billion to 8 billion
and eventually 9 billion and more.
As a rule of thumb, we should spend about 1 trillion dollars
on the basic infrastructure needs of every billion people in the world.
Not surprisingly, Asia is in the lead.
In 2015, China announced the creation
of the Asia Infrastructure and Investment Bank,
which together with a network of other organizations,
aims to construct a network of iron and silk roads,
stretching from Shanghai to Lisbon.
And as all of this topographical engineering unfolds,
we will likely spend more on infrastrucutre
in the nest 40 years,
we will build more infrastructure in the next 40 years,
than we have in the last 4,000 years.
Now let's stop and think about it for a little minute.
Spending so much more
on building the foundations of global society
rather than on the tools to destroy it
can have profound consequences.
Connectivity is how we optimize the distribution
of people and resources around the world.
It is how mankind comes to be more than just the sum of its parts.
I believe that is what is happening.
Connectivity has a twin megatrend in the the 21st century:
planetary urbanization.
Cities are the infrastructures that most define us.
By 2030, more than two thirds of the world's population
will live in cities.
And these are not mere dots on the map,
but they are vast archepelagos stretching hundreds of kilomters.
Here we are in Vancouver,
at the head of the Cascadia Corridor
that stretches south across the US border to Seattle.
The technology powerhouse of SIlicon Valley
begins north of San Francisco down to San Jose
and across the bay to Oakland.
The sprawl of Los Angeles now passes San Diego
across the Mexican border to Tijuana.
San Diego and Tijuana now share an airport terminal
where you can exit into either country.
Eventually, a high-speed rail network may connect the entire Pacific spine.
America's northeastern megalopolis begins in Boston through New York
and Philadelphia to Washingotn.
It contains more than 50 million people
and also has plans for a high-speed rail network.
But Asia is where we really see the magacities coming together.
This continous strip of light from Tokyo through Negoya
to Osaka contains more than 80 million people,
and most of Japan's economy.
It is the world's largest megacity.
For now.
But in China, megacity clusters are coming together
with populations reaching 100 million people.
The Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai
and the Pearl River Delta,
stretching from Hong Kong to ?
And in the middle,
the ? mgacity,
whose geographic footprint is almost the same size
as the country of Austria.
And any number of these megacity clusters
has a GDP approaching 2 trillion dollars,
that's almost the same of all of India today.
So imagine if our global diplomatic institutions like the G20
were to base their membership of economic size
rather than national representation.
Some Chinese megacities may be in and have a seat at the table,
while entire countries, like Argentina and Indonesia may be out.
Moving to India, whose population will soon exceed that of China,
it too has a number of megacity clusters,
such as the Delhi capital region and Mumbai.
In the Middle East, greater Tehran is absorbing
one third of Iran's population.
Most of Egypt's 30 million people
live in the corridor between Cairo and Alexandria.
And in the gulf, a necklace of citystates if forming,
from Bahrain to Qatar,
through the United Arab Emirates through Muscat in Oman.
And then there's Lagos,
Africa's largest city and Nigeria's commerical hub.
It has plans for a rail network that will make it the anchor
of a vast Atlantic coastal corridor,
stretching across Benin, Togo and Ghana,
to Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast.
But these countries are suburbs of Lagos.
In the megacity world,
countries can be suburbs of cities.
By 2030, we will have as many as 50 such megacity clusters
in the world.
So which map tells you more?
Our traditional map of 200 discret nations that hang on most of our wallls,
or this map of the 50 megacity clusters?
And yet, even this is incomplete
because you cannot understand any individual megacity
without understanding its connections to the others.
People move to cities to be connected,
and connectivity is why these cities thrive.
Any number of them such as Sao Paolo or Istanbul or Moscow
has a GDP approaching or exceeding one third of one half
of their entire national GDP.
But equally importantly,
you cannot calculate any of their individual value
without understanding the role of the flows of people,
of finance, of technology
that enable them to thrive.
Take the Gauteng province of South Africa,
which contains Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria.
It too represents just over a third of South Africa's GDP.
Equally importantly, it is home to the offices
of almost every single multinational corporation
that invests directly into South Africa
and indeed, into the entire African continent.