Future Now
The IFTF Blog
New Markets in the Developing World's Megacities
Another sneak peek from the memo in progress. My colleague George Bugliarello at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn has written an insightful piece on the meaning of third-world megacities for the developed world. One section in particular is very relevant to Technology Horizons members:
Technologies must also account for a different labor-machine equation than would be found in a highly developed economy. For instance, the sorting of material from urban waste is a significant and traditional source of employment in the poorer cities; it should be replaced by machines only when alternate and more favorable job opportunities are created. Until that occurs, mechanizing the process may be technically elegant and aesthetically pleasing, but could be socially destabilizing, even if it goes against the grain of a developed world engineering and social view. In brief, differences in social and physical environments and customs make it imperative to focus in appropriate ways on the social and environmental acceptability of a technology. Lastly, the export potential of a given technology introduced or developed in a megacity has to be considered; if there is a potential market for the technology, it could enhance the economic viability of the megacity.
Examples of needed technologies range from simpler vehicles with high local content to local energy transformers, cheap people-movers, and flexible multimodal systems for transportation, water supply, and waste removal. In each of these cases, the trunk systems -- whether streetcars, gas pipelines, water mains, or sewers -- need to be extended by flexible systems that provide services to those poorer segments of the population that are often concentrated at the margin of the megacity, as in the barrios or favelas. Those margins tend to expand more rapidly than the ability of the city to expand its trunk infrastructure -- particularly water supply and sewage systems, as well as expressways and rail systems -- to reach the periphery. In due time, some poor regions of a megacity improve economically and the trunk systems can be extended to them; but new marginal areas will arise that again will require flexible systems.
Given the importance of self-help initiatives, megacities need materials, supplies, methods, and organization to enable their citizens to help themselves. Finally, "per use" systems are needed to make it possible to charge those who are capable of paying for the use of expressways, water systems, and other services, while subsidies are provided only for those who cannot afford to pay the full rate.
Technologies and products to respond to the needs of the developing world megacities represent major market opportunities for both the megacities themselves and for the rest of the world. Those markets can be satisfied by products from inside the megacities or by products coming from anywhere else. However, for products coming from more advanced industrial economies, the market represented by developing world megacities cannot be viewed just as an extension of domestic markets, as seems often to be the case today. A megacity is a new kind of market that has new requirements, but also, given its large size, offers substantial opportunities to whomever, in either the developing or the developed world, recognizes it and has the skills and patience to pursue it. The market opportunities can be enhanced by aggregating the markets of several megacities, and by devising new appropriate technologies.