This essay was born out of two Twitter exchanges: the first with German geographer Simon Kuestenmacher and the second with Silicon Valley investor Balaji Srinivasan. Kuestenmacher tweeted out a map that showed the startlingly small geographical area responsible for bringing in half of the global GDP. Srinivasan wrote in his tweet, “The SF (San Francisco) Bay Area is one of the richest places in the world. We really don’t need to commit to making rich places richer.
We need to decentralise technology to the entire world. I’m more excited to invest in the Middle East and the Midwest, Nigeria and India, than in SFBA.” For most of humanity, the vast amount of the world’s productive activity and riches have coagulated in major cities, from Rome to Baghdad, London to Tokyo, New York to Mumbai. This aggregation gave cities both their ephemeral sense of immortality and their mythology.
It also made them very crowded and, in more recent times, struggle to deal with issues such as little open spaces, limited parking and air pollution. The question to ask is not how to decongest cities, but what made them crowded in the first place? Simply, aggregation has economic benefits. Proximity helps build efficiencies in the flow of information, helps build resilient networks and cheapens cost of transportation. There is, therefore, natural economic logic to the cheek-by-jowl-ness of a large city.
But no matter where one looks, from Silicon Valley heavyweight companies moving base to Texas to Indian tech entrepreneurs trying out models of working from villages, there are signs of the aggregated urban model disaggregating. There are many reasons for this: low taxes, cleaner environments, better quality of life and low expenses.
Such impulses to move location—never easy for big business—has also been propelled by the supply chain resilience impetus created by trade wars and the Covid-19 pandemic. It is supported by mass digitisation, rising internet speeds and cloud computing technology, which is creating what I call an ‘anything, anywhere’ world. This AA world, if you will, promises one of the greatest disruptions for business and urbanisation in history.
It holds within it the promise for workers to work from anywhere, on anything, without the need to relocate. It must be stressed here that we are talking about relatively privileged workers here whose work is based on the use of tech platforms. If you think about it, what does this amount to, really? It holds within it the promise of bridging the gap that our latest wave of globalisation has created—between the active participants and beneficiaries, and those left behind.
It is a spread of companies, jobs and work, and in turn, of income towards places that might have suffered from the tyranny of distance in the aggregation model. The benefits of the earlier age of globalisation, in many ways, came to those who could relocate to the major hubs of capital, commerce and jobs. From now on, perhaps the entry barrier would only be as high as those who can access high speed internet.
That, after all, is what’s left behind if there is nowhere specific that you have to go to access the fruits of the best markets. Instead, the markets are at your doorstep, or perhaps more accurately, at your desktop. Such a spread—whether you think of this in terms of Mahatma Gandhi’s self-sufficient villages or Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan of rolling out numerous ‘smart’ cities—would assist in decongesting the accumulation of population and wealth in very concentrated dots of geography. This kind of tech-driven spread would not be the suburbanisation of yore.
There would be no need to make the harried trip to the downtown office every day. The AA model opens the gateway for people—at least those whose work is connected to technology—to locate themselves in the geography of their convenience. Remember the map that we started this essay with? The concentration of the world’s wealth is, as we hear every day, one of the biggest challenges facing society. It is tearing our world apart. But not enough is discussed about how this concentration is not only among people (the infamous 1%) but also in geographical locations.
The anything, anywhere model breaks this hegemony for it is fundamentally inclusive in terms of that vital element—geography. This works to India’s advantage. India is simultaneously working to develop its hinterlands, expand its city network, empower villages, and present itself as a suitable alternative in the global value chains.
It also has one of the most efficient and low-cost internet networks in the world, which is fast expanding. The anytime, anywhere world helps both myriad Indian products tucked away far from major cities to find markets with ease and for the country to insert itself more effectively in global supply chains. An AA situation, if there was one.
Hindol Sengupta (hindol.opinion@gmail.com)
Vice President & Head of Research at Invest India, GoI’s national investment promotion agency