Militarized and Other New Capital Cities
The news of the ongoing construction of Nusantara, Indonesia’s new capital in Borneo to replace Jakarta, got me thinking about other moves by various countries to create new capitals from scratch, to avoid having to deal with the urbanity of the existing capital. On this issue, Nusantara joins Brasilia, Islamabad, (at the subnational level) Chandigarh, and, most ominously, Naypyidaw and Egypt’s New Administrative Capital (NAC). The last two, unlike Nusantara, are built for explicitly military purposes, with the military considering the people to be its main adversary rather than any external enemy. Such capitals always waste money that could be spent on improving literally anything else – health, education, transportation, water, electricity, business climate, anti-poverty grants. In the less militarized cases, like Brasilia, these are just waste; in the more militarized cases, these showcase that the state is run by parasites.
Non-militarized cases
The move to Nusantara is being justified on the grounds that Jakarta is sinking. In truth, it’s better to view this as a continuation of the Transmigrasi program that the state has engaged in for decades. The zeitgeist was one of concerns about overpopulation leading to either forced sterilization of the poor or a program of settlement by the core population in peripheral regions; in Indonesia, this took the form of encouraging Javans to settle elsewhere in the country, where in practice they formed an overclass and sidelined the preexisting population. Nusantara, in a mostly undeveloped part of Borneo, needs to be viewed within this program, rather than as a tragic response to climate change.
Brasilia, similarly, was built on developmentalist grounds: the Brazilian elite wanted to develop the interior of the country, viewing the rainforest and savanna as low-value land to be mined and farmed. As this process predates the military dictatorship (1964-85; Brasilia was founded 1960), this is not really a matter of militarization. Rather, it’s better viewed as developmental failure – the resources invested in the new city could have gone to more productive uses, and the value of that land for farming and mining turned out not to be much.
The environmental impacts of the program of developing the interior were wholly negative. In Brazil, half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions are land use changes and another quarter are from the agriculture sector, leading Brazil to emit 10.7 t/capita in greenhouse gases. In Germany, the figure is 8.1 t/capita, with a large industrial sector and an infamously still substantial coal sector, and on these lower emissions, Germany produces close to four times Brazil’s GDP per capita. The environmental impact of Nusantara is likely to be the same in direction as Brazil’s program, and to the extent it’s likely to be smaller in magnitude, it’s because it’s a smaller endeavor than Brazil’s entire program of developing the interior, in which Brasilia was just one component.
Militarized cases
The worst are not Brasilia, or likely Nusantara, but rather Naypyidaw and the NAC. I’ve been asked to provide some resources on social media, going over what’s involved in both projects.
Naypyidaw
The military junta that ran Myanmar between 1962 and 2011 (with significant tightening in 1988) and has run it since 2021, and exercised significant power between 2011 and 2011, built the new capital, officially since 2005, unofficially since a few years earlier, at a remote location 320 kilometers from Yangon and 240 from Mandalay. After the 1988 protests and the crackdown establishing the military government that 1990s-2000s human rights advocates knew and hated, the regime made changes to Yangon to suppress future protests, evicting 500,000 people from city center in the process. Where normally such efforts mostly target poor people in order to create the illusion of a poverty-free city center and facilitate urban renewal, in Yangon the evictions targeted the middle class, which was sympathetic to the protest movement and had communities that had sheltered protesters. But even the new Yangon was not good enough for the generals, and so they shifted to Naypyidaw.
Part of the reason was that Yangon was too multiethnic, in a part of the country that was majority-Mon until the 20th century, while Naypyidaw could be more comfortably Bamar. But the main reason was security needs. The adversary in this case is not any foreign government – a city built in 2005 by a government that might worry about American-led regime change would look at what was going on in Iraq and opt to maintain its capital in a large, dense central city to facilitate insurgency and make it easy to hide among the civilian population. Naypyidaw instead does the exact opposite – it’s easy for a superior military force to take. Rather, its threat model is a popular uprising, and thus the modernist planning with separation of uses exists to prevent the broad public from being able to stage an insurgency. There is extensive regime propaganda in the city, such as national museums telling uncritical histories, but no major religious sites, since those might shelter protesters, as happened in 1988.
The urbanism of Naypyidaw is, essentially, a giant military camp. It is designed with strict separation of uses and large roads between different complexes for movement between them; people are not expected to walk between places. The Guardian calls it a post-apocalyptic suburbia, but I don’t think that’s quite right. In an auto-oriented American city, there’s nowhere to walk, but everyone owns a car and the development forms make it convenient to drive to one’s work and regular non-work destinations. Dubai, criticized vociferously among urbanists for its tackiness and auto-oriented character, is a place where one can drive or be driven to shopping malls and towers within a close distance. Naypyidaw doesn’t have any of this and doesn’t seem to even try; it’s a collection of sites, designed for no need but that of control by the military of a population that does not want to be controlled by it. It’s a monument not to modernist urbanism, though it tries to affect that, but rather to destruction of value by an unwanted government.
New Administrative Capital
The situation in Egypt, to be clear, is a lot less brutal than in Burma. At the same time, Egypt is several times richer, which creates more value that can be extracted and given over to cronies. This can be seen in the construction of the NAC, to replace Cairo.
The immediate history of the NAC is that in 2011, Egypt famously had the Arab Spring revolution overthrowing Hosni Mubarak; in the subsequent election, the only preexisting organized political force, the Muslim Brotherhood, won the election, leading Mohamed Morsi to take office as president starting in 2012. The election was free and the state of civil liberties improved, but the Muslim Brotherhood was making moves to consolidate power, leading to fears among human rights and democracy protesters of new authoritarianism, which led to a protest movement in 2013 called Tamarod, demanding new elections; later in the same year, the military reacted to the protests by launching a coup, removing Morsi from power and restoring the military elements of the prior regime, including a pardon of Mubarak, who was on trial for corruption. Eventually, the chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, won a rigged presidential election in 2014, and has been president ever since. Much of the focus of the protest movements was street protests in Cairo, where Tahrir Square became a global metonym for democracy protests (for example, in Israel, where people basically never draw any positive inspiration from Arab political trends). This created a need among Sisi and his inner circle for a new capital in the desert, built to forestall any future Tahrir.
The capital could not even be named New Cairo, because there’s already a New Cairo, an eastern suburb of Cairo built expressly in order to decentralize the capital; Cairo is a huge, dense city. For a while, it was mocked as New New Cairo, for its location even farther east of New Cairo; by now, it has the formal name New Administrative Capital, with construction having begun in 2016.
The NAC is designed around digital surveillance of the population, and showcasing that Egypt can develop the desert, and maybe decongesting Cairo. It has pretenses of being the next Dubai, but where Dubai invites global starchitects to buy prestige, the NAC is instead giving contracts to domestic elites (as was also the case for Naypyidaw); the military directly owns 51% of the agency developing the NAC and the state ministry of housing only 49%, and the contracts are designed to enrich people who are politically connected to the government.
The violence levels involved are, again, much lower than in Burma. But precisely because Egypt’s economy is solidly middle-income, it’s frustrating to see vast sums wasted on a military prestige project. Cairo’s congestion and overcrowding have a well-known solution, in the form of building a rapid transit network to facilitate non-car commutes, and connect not just the existing built-up area to the urban core but also to-be-built areas adjacent to it. It’s a metro area of 22 million people, about the same size as New York, but only has a three-line, 100 km metro network. These 100 km should be closer to 1,000.
To be clear, there is some development of the Cairo Metro. Line 3 is being extended as we speak, with a new section having opened this month. Overall, the third phase of the line, 17 km long, cost 40.7 billion Egyptian pounds per a statement in 2012, which in contemporary dollars is $2.6 billion in exchange rate terms and $9 billion in 2021 PPP terms. On Google Earth, it looks like 9 km of the line are underground and 8 km are elevated or at-grade; this more than $500 million/km cost is not even fully-underground. This is a line where the main contractor is Orascom – this isn’t a case of outsourcing the state to Japan, China, or both, and therefore building at high costs, as is common in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. Rather, this is entirely domestic waste. Most likely, the same contractors that are profiteering off of public money through the construction of the NAC are also profiteering off of public money for what little infrastructure the military government deigns to build in the capital that people actually live in.
Pedestrian Observations 
Interesting. What about older examples, Canberra AU, Washington DC, and St. Petersburgh?
Washington, Canberra, and Ottawa are all examples of finding a site between two states for a federation; I’m not sure about Canberra, but Washington and Ottawa had preexisting cities (in fact, the site of Washington was chosen partly because it was close to George Washington’s slave plantation).
Saint-Petersburg was a labor-intensive effort – it was swampy, as river mouths often are, and workers died draining it. The area was also traditionally not ethnically Russian but Finnic (Ingrian), which I don’t think mattered in the 18th century, but did matter in the 20th century as Stalin massacred many and subjected the rest to deportations and forced assimilation while Russian settlers overwhelmed the rural areas around the city. Then again, this is Russia, so basically everything the state has done since ever has involved massacring people, not just when it founded new cities.
Also St Petersburg makes a lot of sense as transshipment point for natural resource exports along the inland waterways. And Peter was definitely thinking of his Dutch experiences. And St Petersburg resilience shows the continuing sense of doing. Its the most Peter I thing, ruthless to the point of horrific autocratic expansionism attenuated by genuine competence at state building*. The rise of Krasnodar-Novorossiysk since 1991 certainly suggests its a sustainable urban area.
*Attenuated because this is the same period as we get other ruthless warlords who don’t have legacies as useful see Nadir Shah.
It has been proposed in the past to spread the wealth of federal jobs across the country instead of DC. Put the Department of Agriculture in Iowa, put the Department of the Interior in Wyoming, put the Department of Transportation in Detroit, etc.
If the Dept. headquarters isn’t in D.C. they can’t schmooze with Congress as much.
Most Federal employees live someplace not D.C. Or not Maryland or not Virginia.
Brasilia still wastes resources today thanks to its poor urbanism. The whole city is landmarked since its inception, so there’s very little densification in the core, the suburbs are denser! Transit is difficult to retrofit because the main roads are too wide and development is set back from them, so there’s usually a 100m walk through no man’s land to get to the station. At least there’s more flexibility nowadays in the separation of uses, with more shops allowed in residential areas.
Re: failed development of the interior I guess it depends on your criteria. The environmental impact was terrible, as you note. On the economic side, Brasilia has failed to grow a native industry besides government and lobbying and brings nothing to the surrounding countryside that nearby Goiania couldn’t. However Sinop, a later new town, has grown stupendously rich growing soy beans (at the cost of encroaching on the Amazonian forest and oppressing natives)
I guess another way in which this “develop the interior” drive failed is the terrible political economy it generated. Those rural elites are horrendously reactionary, and Brazil copied the US misfeature of equal state representation in the Senate. As a contrast, São Paulo has labour unions (where Lula started his career) and real political competition, rather than the biggest landlords intimidating the peasants to vote their way.
Congressional representation actually manages to be worse than the US – Because of a military-dictatorship-era scheme to rig an election, there are a minimum of 8 and a maximum of 70 Representatives per state, which massively overrepresents the interior/agrobusiness states
Any thoughts on South Korea’s new purpose-built capital of Sejong City?
I can’t believe just how badly planned its location is. It’s just far enough from another regional gift–Osong Station–that is the closest KTX station that it’s considered inconvenient to get to except for by car. At the same time, there is a BRT network in Sejong, but the city is designed to be decentralized such that the system offers only modest coverage, and the really it’s clear from lots of other elements of the city–abundant underground parking (as is common in most newer Korean developments), the same wide roads that fissure every newly-developed area of the country–that this was a city mostly designed around cars.
The “balanced regional development” argument in its favor isn’t completely off-base. Even if just from a security angle, the fact that Seoul is so close to the north and so, so much more important to the country than every other city means that it’s a strategic liability, even if it’s also a very successful city in its own right. However, it’s still the case that a lot of the government agencies that’ve been relocated to Sejong officially like to travel up to and take meetings in Seoul. It’s really only because of the fact that Sejong’s failed to become a significant new independent center (even if it’s managed to attract a good number of people for cheaper housing, and currently has the country’s highest fertility rate) that has saved Osong Station from being a total embarrassment.
Sejong still doesn’t solve the problem that, as far as most Koreans are concerned, Seoul is the only place in the country that matters. The business clusters in Yeouido, Gangnam, and Jongno; major hospitals; tons of universities, including the SKY triumvirate; proximity to the airport in Incheon….Just plopping down a new city somewhere else was never going to detract from all that draws people to Sudogwon A smarter move would’ve been to bite the bullet on “balanced regional development” and move more administrative functions into Daejeon, which already hosts some government agencies as well as one of the few major research universities outside of Seoul (KAIST), and branch the Honam HSR from Daejeon Station.
Yes. It’s a bad idea, but note that it’s being half-assed – Wikipedia says it’s planned to have 500,000 people by 2030, which is about half as many as Naypyidaw has today, in a richer, more urbanized country. It’s also in Gyeonggi, effectively an exurb of Seoul, rather than in the true boonies like Naypyidaw. The nationalistic impulse to hate one’s own cities is not regime-dependent, but in democracies like South Korea, wastes of money like this have to compete for funding with actually useful things (universities, the rapid expansion of rail, etc.) and the room for theft of public resources is limited.
South Korea shows the weaknesses of having a super-dominant prime city in a geographically constrained area (i.e. mountains and water). Yeah, they are slowly attriting the housing shortage and building superb infrastracture, but it hasn’t helped any of the wider social problems.
South Korea’s has two original sins in regional policy. First and most important is the failure to liberate North Korea in the 1990’s during the famine. Pyongyang is well located to be capital, northern Korea has a lot more space and would change the economic geography with a land border to China and Russia. But South Koreans in the 1990’s were a bunch of cowardly racial purity worshippers who pretended the DPRK wasn’t the Korean version of Showa Japanese racial ideology. Starving 500,000 Koreans in front of your eyes is okay, because at least they died Korean*.
The second is the Gyeonsang conservative ascendency, the Daegu-Busan-Ulsan shipbuilding/heavy industrial complex is the only real economic asset ROK has outside Seoul. Its partly due to proximity to Japan, but its also because Jeolla got screwed with access to state development capital. But Geyonsang is insanely mountainous compared to Jeolla, so it couldn’t become Korea’s Kaohsiung let alone its Osaka because land prices (esp for industrial estate).
*Alon if you use Tk Korean as a source, he is pure Korean Left-nationalist ideology, Moon wasting 5 years on confederation with Fascists rather than doing anything to solve actual problems is pretty much as bad as Yoon’s half-hearted attempts to go back to the social order of the 1980’s with long working hours and lots of sexist blah blah. Its not DPP vs KMT let alone Dems vs GOP, its Sinn Fein versus Finn Gael. I.e. Creepy racial nationalists with lots of Leftist blah blah versus geopolitically sensible but reactionary centre-right.
Even during the famine, liberating North Korea would require a really big war. The Kims, who I think had nukes by this time, were not going to go easily. Seoul was also the capital of South Korea for a really long time by the 1990s, like since the 14th century I think, and wasn’t going to change to Pyongyang.
….What do you propose they actually ought to have done? The whole reason that North Korea still exists is because Seoul is where it is. Sure, the prescient thing to do might’ve been to build a new capital in the 50’s-60’s somewhere further south where there was room for it–Gwangju probably would’ve been perfect, tragicomically enough–but regionalism and an absolute refusal to nordpolitik are the only actually-differentiating factors between Korea’s left and right. Solving an actual problem like the vulnerability Seoul’s location and dominance poses to the south’s security–or chaebol dominance, education madness, energy import reliance, sexism…really, any other problem–is never really a concern to be dealt with earnestly by either side.
That reality acceded to, was Kim Young-sam supposed to just start firing missiles at the Mansudae, provoke a retaliatory strike from the north, and take the credit for killing millions of people on both sides? At this point in time, trying to get North Korea to behave more like a normal country by actually expecting it to be one–which includes not expecting it to give up the protection against forced regime change that nukes provide–is almost definitely the only way forward. Working with fascists is reprehensible, but when they’ve already won–which the Kims obviously have–there’s not much else that can be done that’s not obviously much worse.
In the 1990’s they didn’t have nukes yet. Not until probably after 2000. Yes Seoul is in artillery range but that’s relatively easy to solve with evacuation and the USAF. The real obstacle was bullying/bribing China with WTO/Promise to move US forces out of Korea. And they’re going to have cults of failed Korean revolutionary violence and sacrifice from 1890-1945 (read Liberation day speech of Korean presidents, you’d never know there was a Pacific war). Korean nationalism is very much about displaced guilt for failure to unify/that they don’t actually want it.
N/B Millions would not have died unless the PRC intervened. But considering what happened in the 3rd Taiwan strait crisis, provided they got sufficient respect/bribes it was. Probably less than 100,000 since the DPRK army was worse equipped than Iraq in 1991. 500,000 at least died from the famine alone plus the cumulative violence of the regime since. The moment the ROK had was blown because they wanted the easy way out. Its impossible now*. But it wasn’t in the mid-1990’s.
Unless the South Koreans attack the North Korean ideology at its base i.e. Korean purity nationalism. Take the struggle away from that regime and all its it got is violence and Chinese money. It is not a “normal” country, it can’t be, if it could it would have done so ages ago. Instead its Fascist-militarist state using the threat of violence to extract rents from the international system.
And yeah Gwanju-Mokpo is the best place is Korea for a megacity in terms of space.
They don’t need nukes. There’s not regular evacuation training in Sudogwon, and while I’m sure there are secret plans for evacuation, trying to get ~25 million people to get from anywhere to anywhere else–anywhere in the world–isn’t the kind of thing that’s likely to be accomplished in a timely enough way to avoid mass deaths from shelling Seoul.
The issue with Korean nationalism is two-fold. First, both Koreas focus on ethnic nationalism, but for different reasons. The north does so overtly, but only as a distraction from and deflection of blame for domestic mismanagement; they don’t really care about nationalism or reunification insofar as it risks elite privileges. The south does so in a continuing (though slowly diminishing) failure to accept minorities of any kind (on both the left and right) and a slightly more sincere motivation (on the left) to reunite with the north as a means of restoring the “minjok”. The south’s failure to evolve a sense of civic (rather than ethnic) nationalism is a failure it shares with the north, not a differentiator, even if the south knows it should and just isn’t, where the north obviously doesn’t see civic nationalism as valuable.
I’m not going to make a direct parallel between the north’s actions and American/Soviet actions during the Cold War (and since), but…there’s an element of coercion under threat of violence from basically all states in the international system. We can pretend that there’s some sort of consensus that “that’s not how we do things anymore”, but it still very much is.
If North Korea could reach a new equilibrium of domestic control that allowed it to approximate China’s economic success, I don’t think anyone would have half as much to say about its fascist tendencies. Yet, as long as we make fundamentally unreasonable demands of the north which are tantamount to telling it to prepare for absorption by the south, it’s not going to change. On the other hand, if we treat the north as if it was acting rationally, creating the illusion of a sense of legitimacy with the implicit purpose that this is to get the Kims and their enablers out of the way–providing assurance that elite privileges would be maintained in that scenario–we’d have a scenario in which Korea would probably reunify. It would mean, in essence, rewarding bad behavior and the DPRK’s history of bad faith actions, but if it’d mean liberating the north from the Kims, I’d say it’s a worthwhile trade.
(Sorry, Alon, that we’re off-topic at this point, here)
Northern nationalism isn’t just a distraction. It actually gives to the entire society, that’s why so few North Koreans fled in the 1990’s compared to East Germany or heck the Chinese contemporary diaspora. They are masterful narrative creators and calibrators of conflict. And we can judge that the elite is relatively restrained in its economic privileges’ compared to almost any other regime.
And I do make distinction on coercion, militarism as state justification is common but it as the basis of economic subsistence is actually rare, only really Pakistan comes anywhere near. And Pakistan is much more about its threat of collapse than its threat of violence. BR Myers is right North Korea can’t become a normal state because it has no reason to exist without conflict with the ROK and its backers plus the military first policy.
Indeed precisely because Park and postwar military regimes had such weak legitimacy with the presence of the DPRK pushed them towards economic development and a more open political system.
I’m actually somewhat optimistic that if the ROK can get over the current generation of Nationalist Left leaders whose brains were poisoned by the 1980’s. I think the ROK is developing civic nationalism, not just because of immigration etc but simply because unification is becoming less important over time. That gender divide in the vote we’ve been seeing is something new although conscription ties it to the DPRK issue.
It actually does have some relevance to the topic. Military regimes have very different outcomes. Its interesting how Park and co did not move the capital closer to their regional political powerbase. Again the logic of a divided and contested nation with a clear historic capital probably explains it.
I think you give too much credulity to the average North Korean. As with everyone everywhere, political ideology–such as ethnic nationalism–is only engaged with insofar as is required for daily living, and ignored otherwise. Most people there (at the very least around Pyeongyang) are aware that the south is wildly more economically successful (as with China). From that and the accompanying understanding that this is in part because of how the country is run–and that pointing out that maybe their leaders should do something about it is a no-go–I don’t think most of them really eat the whole meal they’re being served about the Kims and their government. If you listen to defectors–I grant you, a sub-population of north Koreans who are inclined not to buy into the DPRK’s ideology, ergo not necessarily representative–most of them knew before they left that they were living under an oppressive regime. You can’t listen to what people like Park Yeon-mi say about their fellow Joseon-saram; that kind of opportunist will say anything to make a buck.
On the contrary, what most defectors to the south seem to miss most are the aspects of the life that aren’t explicitly ideological: friends and family, of course; easily-sourced jobs and housing; an ease of sociality, and an absence of the cut-throat competitiveness which is utterly omnipresent in South Korea. There’s a reason a small handful of defectors try to return. As for why so few left in the ’90’s, I won’t argue that ideological indoctrination played no role, but consider that to the north is mountains, rivers, and a country with a foreign language that has typically turned back escaping North Koreans, and to the south is one of the most heavily-militarized borders in the world.
As for the elites, I think they understand that they can’t loosen the reins so as to fatten their wallets and live in more globally-equivalent luxury without risking losing control completely. You see this in the occasional reform move, such as recurrent tightening on jangmadang and the currency reform of ’09. Maintaining the status quo has been the name of the game since the institution of song 30 years ago. The fact that the outside world has made it plain they won’t be kept comfortable if their country falls is exactly what makes them understand the thin line they’re walking, which is why we should assure them that they won’t just be summarily executed or imprisoned if it does fall.
In the south, I think a large part of the problem is that as you say, the right are united in wanting the heydays of the ’80s-’90s up to the IMF crisis to come back, and the left fails to actually engage with anything but their own internal politicking and some hand-waving towards domestic rights issues. There is a possibility that this will change, but again, listening to average South Koreans, most of them aren’t really engaged with political issues outside of ways in which they’re personally affected by them. Any comprehensive moves towards civic nationalism and greater societal inclusion aren’t likely to get broad support until people understand that it’s the only way forward, for everyone. And then, letting Koreans think that there ought to be more than one “right” way to live is, ultimately, a risk to chaebol dominance. The South Korean left’s refusal to do that yeoman’s work is why I have so little faith in their ability to institute any other major changes.
They don’t need nukes….trying to get ~25 million people to get from anywhere to anywhere else–anywhere in the world–isn’t the kind of thing that’s likely to be accomplished in a timely enough way to avoid mass deaths from shelling Seoul.
Except there is also no timely way to shell thousands of km2 in such a way to cause mass death. Although Seoul is “within artillery range” of N. Korea, downtown Seoul is ~40km from the very closest point of N. Korea in the Amsil salient south of Kaesong, extremely long range for conventional artillery/rockets. That salient is unlikely to survive long as an artillery bastion in any conflict: as someone noted above the conflict will be more lopsided than the Gulf War of 1991 or Iraq War of 2003. Remove it, and most of the Seoul urban area is 60+km from the border, well outside of artillery range. Factor in that because of the DMZ and the need for survivability any artillery will need to be farther back from right on the border, and its really only Seoul’s northern suburbs that are at risk (Gimpu, Yangju, etc.) – not 25m people.
Missiles like the Scud can go this far of course, but an impoverished economy like N. Koreas will never have enough expensive missiles to blanket an area that large. If London could survive the ‘Second Blitz’ of V-1 and V-2 missiles (with much fewer casualties than the first blitz of conventional bombers) Seoul will ride out whatever N. Korea throws at it for a while – however tragic the casualties will be they quite frankly will not be a major military or political-strategic consideration.
Yeah, and meanwhile, there’s an advantage to agglomeration for civilian protection in war, which is that you can install a rocket defense system more easily. Iron Dome covers Israeli towns (but not unrecognized Bedouin villages, leading to higher Bedouin casualties in rocket attacks than there need to be); it does not cover unpopulated areas, so rockets land in those just fine. This is relevant to countering low-cost bombardment; for high-cost bombardment, other solutions are needed, like when a bunch of air forces together intercepted all but four of the ~300 Iranian missiles and drones fired last month, but that’s not something that can be done on Hamas’s budget. Russia hasn’t even hit Ukraine that hard on any single night; overall it’s fired many more missiles at Ukrainian cities, but they’re spaced over a long period of time (I think the worst night has been 90 but don’t quote me on that), and also the resources available to Russia are not available to North Korea.
Good point. Clearing the area north of Seoul will of course be the immediate main effort of S. Korean forces upon outbreak of war (soon pushing conventional artillery/rockets out of range of even Seoul’s suburbs), and meanwhile Seoul will be blanketed with a layered missile defense system (Patriot PAC-3, KM-SAM, THAAD, etc.). Given that N. Korean KN-23/24 missiles used by Russia have apparently seen a launch failure rate approaching 50% (fly wild, blow up in flight, etc.) and there isn’t much likelyhood of Seoul being bombarded into ruin as @Luke suggests.
Gwanju-Mokpo is the best place is Korea for a megacity in terms of space
To me it seems that the plains between Jeonju-Gunsan are the largest flat open area in S. Korea, plus Iksan is a major railway junction. Jeonju is also more centrally located than Gwanju and particularly closer to the Inchon/Seoul-Daejeon-Daegu-Busan/Ulsan axis that effectively defines S. Korea. For whatever its other faults or lack of commitment from S. Korea, Sejong is particularly good on this last point.
Overall though, S. Korea seems to like puting its cities in hilly areas, as opposed to every other culture that seems to locate major cities on major plains.
Seoul was located on Chinese geomancy principles interacting with communications links North-South East-West. Its a perfectly good location to interface the rice bowl coast of the east and the dry-field plains to the north. Koryo’s Kaesong is pointedly nearby. Its just a mountainous country with temperamental rivers. And if you look at many other historic East Asian capitals, Hangzhou, Luoyang/Xian, Kyoto and Nara its actually common. Cities in the 100,000’s in pre-modern era have different constraints.
But yeah Jeonju-Gunsan is good in terms of space too. Mea culpa.
I don’t think the Chaebol are the main obstacle anymore than the Keiretsu are in Japan. You have the same in Italy, Spain, Japan and Taiwan, a generation raised under astonishing growth that then can’t bear to realise it made itself obsolete. That generation’s combo of longevity and low fertility inhibits change.
Would you say that Versailles falls within this category?
I don’t recall well the politics of Louis XIV building Versailles. Not sure if it was more about fearing the populace or keeping the nobles in line (there was a major noble revolt when he was a minor). But certainly a crucial point of the French Revolution was moving Louis XVI from Versailles to the Palais des Tuileries in the city, where the population could keep a more watchful eye on him.
Fearing the population, specifically of Paris, was definitely part of it. Louis XIV was a young boy when the royal family had to flee the rampaging crowds of the Fronde to St-Germain-en-Laye one of the older, decaying royal palaces to the west of Paris. He retained a revulsion of central Paris for the rest of his life. Like you say he also wanted to keep close watch on the nobles so forced them to live in Versailles (in the palace and in the associated town) and keep them entertained. Paris continued to develop during his long reign but this was due to Jean-Baptiste Colbert (minister of finance but actually minister of everything) who thought Paris needed to be seen as Europe’s capital so continued development of the Louvre with Le Notre, Le Vau and Perrault did the Grande Axe (Champs Élysées, Tuileries etc), Place des Victoires, Place Vendome, Salpêtrière, Invalides, the banks of the Seine and much else. Louis gets credited with all this but, despite pressuring Colbert to live at Versailles, Colbert remained in Paris (his home eventually becoming the Bibliotheque Nationale*; today’s Galerie Vivienne cuts thru his residence, Hotel Colbert next to the BN). Colbert could do all this because he miraculously managed to finance Louis’ fantastically wasteful spending on Versailles and various wars, as well as act as Paris’ first town planner.
In some concrete way we can thank Louis’ extravagant spending on Colbert’s systematisation of government and finance. He began shifting the burden of tax from the peasants to the nobles, the church and business class as this was where the real wealth resided.
*I believe Jefferson was inspired by Colbert. During his years in Paris (replacing Benjamin Franklin as ambassador/plenipotentiary) he spent prodigiously on books which eventually became the foundation of the Library of Congress. Colbert continued the tradition of his patron, Mazarin (and his patron Richelieu) and built a huge library of books from all over the world that he bequeathed as the BN. Of course Jefferson was also inspired by a small chateau (Ch de Rastignac) in the Dordogne for the design of the White House!
Ah yes, I forgot that the fronde also had a popular revolt element. Makes sense that it left an impression on Louis XIV.
Jefferson inspired by Colbert? Pah. Even though he and the Democratic-Republicans triangulated a lot of the Federalist state building agenda once actually in power (esp after losing the war of 1812), the only actual French thing the early US adopts is Louisiana. Montesquieu’s interpretation of Aristotle and the early 18th century English state was more influential (separation of powers etc). But he was writing in the shadow of Colbert and Louis. But the US is such a new and different state, with state-building mostly happening at the state and local level for good (local taxation to fund education in Yankeedom) and bad (slavery, patronage over meritocracy). What inheritance it has from Europe are early modern English i.e. religious pluralism, local property taxes and common law.
Colbert’s “systemisation of government” WTF does that mean? Ancien Regime France was a warren of trade barriers, taxation exemptions, privileges, courts, consultations and other ancient holdover institutions. Colbert and Louis were masters of squeezing that system which presided over a very large society by early modern European states. It relied on scale to compensate for weaker foundations. That’s one of the reasons the revolution is so radical. And why it gets outplayed by the English parliamentary state’s superior fiscal and administrative firepower 1688-1815. The modern French state apparatus only overtakes the Anglosphere in state capacity in the mid-20th century and at enormous traumatic cost.
I think this only applies for centralised states, where most of the activity needs to be in the capital. You did not mention Bonn, which kind of was moved for military reasons. Switzerland sometimes moves the government to other cities (it happened last when they redid the building), and well, it did not matter.
The decentralization of West Germany is a different story – instead of building one capital in Frankfurt, they spread the institutions around, with the administrative capital in Bonn, the Bundesback in Frankfurt, and the courts in Karlsruhe, and with no dominant capital, professional services spread around as well, with finance in Frankfurt, industrial corporate HQs in Munich and Stuttgart, and media in Hamburg. This was less for military reasons and more for two regime change reasons: first, it was believed that a centralized state was more likely to go Nazi again, and second, the Hauptdorf was a signal that West Germany wished to reunify at some point in the future and move the capital to Berlin.
In other federations, some purpose-built capitals are put at the border between two provinces to signal that no single province can dominate: Washington is a federal district between Maryland and Virginia, Ottawa is in Ontario but at the Quebec border, Canberra is a federal district technically surrounded by New South Wales but far from Sydney and close to the border with Victoria.
Brazil’s agricultural and mining exports have turned out to be an strong part of their economy, and is quite important for providing employment in the interior. But the existence of an interior capital wasn’t relevant to achieving that.
The appeal of non-militarized planned cities is that local developing country elites find the problems of traffic on narrow roads (they own cars), air pollution, and affordable housing for government employees to be seemingly unsolvable in megacities, so they feel that moving government functions out of megacities to be optimal. It could be the best solution is to have Beijing/Seoul style Xiong’an/Sejong areas in the outskirts of the capital where there is more space for housing and government buildings, while still being connected by transit to the main city. I think a part of the problem is that there is little support for increasing skilled federal worker salaries in many countries, so it’s easier to solve the COL side. Arguably Sejong is a success because it is doing the best with Korea’s biggest problem which is low fertility rates.
Even in D.C. (itself a planned city) much of the government functions are in outer areas like Maryland and Virginia. National governments often have scientific/military needs that aren’t well suited for CBDs and inherently need a lot of land. Though maybe the D.C approach of having various government buildings in different parts of the metro area is best rather than building a formal city.
In the US, the federal government ran into attrition issues when it tried moving some federal agencies out of the DMV in the Trump era – federal workers didn’t want to move to random places, where their career advancement would be limited by lack of other employers in the field. So this trick doesn’t necessarily solve cost of living issues; it just reminds the civil service that the overclass of political appointees (in the US) or the military government (in Egypt and Burma) can boss them around and they are mere paper pushers.
I was referring more to existing Tokyo-style polycentricity (where workers still have access to the central areas) rather than moving people out of the DMV altogether. While it may have caused an inconvenience to certain government workers when the Pentagon, Patent Office, NIH (all accessible by transit) wasn’t set up in actual D.C, it probably helped recruit new workers who could get affordable housing with short commutes as well as reducing land acquisition costs for the government.
Tokyo is actually the least polycentric of Japan’s 4 main urban areas. The Yamanote core is just so huge that the centre appears polycentric, but the office CBD has expanded along the Ueno-Shinagawa axis, plus the Marunouchi-Shinjuku-Shibuya triangle. There is real diversity in these nodes but they are a clear core region. I’d argue its actually of Tokyo key advantages over Keihanshin (where Osaka has screwed up the Namba-Umeda corridor because of a lack of through-running even before you get to Kobe/Kyoto), Aichi (job sprawl due to a weak downtown caused by height restrictions and poor transit design) and Fukuoka (Kita-Kyushu).
Same thing happened a few years ago in Australia when the conservative government tried to move some of the agriculture related departments away from Canberra. Massive disruption and talent outflow.
If building Cairo metro phase 3 cost $2.6 billion, cost is 2600/17.7 = $ 147 million/km, not $9 billion or 500 million/km as you calculate using Purchasing Power Parity. The leading contractor is, for once, Egyptian. Its share of the contract being only $113 million, your profiteering accusation runs hollow. Given partial financing by the EIB, procurement followed EU directives. Egyptians understand that the local input in the construction of their metro was limited and they don’t mind. Lines are known as the French or the Japanese line for a reason and Cairo metro as “the only thing that works in Egypt”. The TBM dealing with the difficult alluvial soil are German, electric equipment and signaling are French, rails are imported, rolling stock came from well known French, Korean or Japanese makers with limited local assembly. Their costs are barely related to Egyptian PPP. Many Cairenes work informally for meagre wages. The government cannot tax them and instead must provide support through subsidized bread. PPP is telling us that to the Government and its modest tax basis, the 40.7 billion Egyptian Pound bill feels like $9 billion instead of $2.6 billion suggested by the exchange rate. This may explain why Cairo metro is underdeveloped. Another explanation is unfortunately that they are wasting billions on their New Administrative Capital.
Rolling stock and the TBM are not usually a large part of the contract; TBM costs are dominated by the operation, not the equipment.
Regarding the aforementioned capitals in Indonesia, Brazil & Egypt, are these cities attempts to impose incompatible urban forms due to vast differences in geographic attributes and socio-spatial dynamics, based on theories from the Global North, which further exacerbate socioeconomic divides? Or just continuation of pre-colonial urban legacy with geographically relevant applications?
Hmmm, good question! The answer is that I don’t know; I suspect the answers in these three cases would be different. Brasilia, I can see as a straightforward importation of European and American ideas of modernist city planning – it was ideologically based on developmentalist ideas that were in vogue globally, long before economists finally teased out what made East Asian developmentalism work and Latin American developmentalism fail. (Another example that probably falls into the same category is Islamabad.)
Naypyidaw and the NAC, I’m less sure about. That neither uses international consultants or architects suggests to me that they’re not quite importing first-world theories – regimes that import such theories usually also try to bring in some first-world contractors in order to buy prestige, as we see in the Gulf region or in Singapore or Malaysia (the Petronas Towers were designed by US-based architects). Naypyidaw doesn’t really look like the colonial style of government and Western zones with single-family houses packed at suburban American densities – its style is mid-rise buildings put in hyper-segregated zones, for military control more than anything; this is not a regime that’s buying middle-class support through materialism.
Egypt totally has a tradition of building new cities because you don’t trust the population, Alexandria, Fustat and Cairo all started as alien conqueror capitals. And since the Arab Conquest Egypt has been ruled by a military caste that was Alien until the late 19th century.
And there are elements of this in India too (always fun to compare Red Fort to Lutyens Delhi). The thing about Post-Colonial historiography is that its designed to ignore how much European colonial administrations especially that of the British fit into existing patterns of governance and resource extraction. Westerners don’t like that because it sabotages our hero/villian narratives and Post-colonial elites hate it because it reminds them of what they did before and after European imperialism.
Also the main influence on NAC is Gulf Modernism. There is a point where we have to take seriously the Middle East has created their own system that may hire Western architects but the vernacular urban governance is clearly distinct.
First, I think moving capitals has a better record than any other regional-rebalancing policy. The state controls its operations to a far greater extent than the private sector, which appropriately priortises agglomeration economies and logistical access. In almost all cases capital cities are wealthier and faster growing than their countries average. And that’s not just surplus extraction, capitals are a genuine economic niche.
Furthermore in many societies that have middle to large population sizes having an ultra-dominant primate city capital runs into genuine problems. Yes you can build a Tokyo, but its extremely demanding state-capacity wise and if your primate city is geographically constrained (Seoul, Taipei, Mumbai) its even harder. Relieving the pressure by moving the capital to a different location, is a good idea at that scale. For small population countries the calculus is different, there centralisation on a primate capital is the right call.
On cases. I think you’re a bit to negative on some of these. Probably the to most important capital choices of the 20th century was the decision by the Indian state to keep New Delhi as the capital and the CCP’s decision to have it in Beijing rather than Nanjing. I think these have actually succeeded in terms of balancing economic activity. The Delhi urban constellation is anchoring a lot of activity in India’s poorest and most populated region. And Beijing-Hebei cluster has done the same for North China. Compared to all these state’s other regional rebalancing policies its been very successful.
Brasila is modernist trash as a city in of itself, but within the Brazillian context its done fine. And you miss the successes of the wider colonisation of the Cerrado (a lot of those emissions are lime needed to reduce alkaline in the soil) in terms of Brazil’s exports and global food production. And given Sao Paulo and Rio’s problems handling urbanisation they have it was the right idea with bad original design. But they can make right if they just trash the original design. Ditto with Canberra which is just badly governed.
A bit of context here, I’m a big believer that England should move its capital to Manchester. There is no way to revive the Northern private sector at scale and I am also suspicious that we can ever completely defeat Southern Nimbys. And England will always be a centralised polity so we should just do it. Manchester and the Transpennine belt have the bones of a megacity cluster. They just need a big industry that isn’t subsidy or run-off from Southern England. And putting there also means the Midlands can play the Nagoya it between role. Plus central Manchester space is worth 2000 pounds per square metre, Westminster its 20,000. My model is Berlin/Rome i.e. use historic major city.
Re Manchester: interesting idea. But Manchester etc will always be much more car dependent than the Southeast – the land use is rather baked in, and the UK is incapable of building new transit at an affordable price nowadays. And if they face the prospect of growth, I’d guess the same level of NIMBYism will rear its head.
But in theory, London would retain its role as the “New York” (economic capital) of the UK while Manchester would be the “Washington” – both with a major economic driver. Berlin/Rome are actually the parallels to Manchester here – a poor city that is strengthened by the public sector, while Frankfurt (etc)/Milan remain the focus of the private sector.
Berlin’s become the centre of Germany’s IT and Tourism industries. Its building a industrial sector (Tesla). And it actually has very good logistic connections as it sites at a logistical nodal point between west and east Europe. Add its demographic expansion, it actually on course to become much wealthier within Germany.
I mean Rome’s weird because its Rome, but its actually got quite a few company headquarters. Not as much as Milan, but it has a real private sector even before we get to it being the centre of the world’s largest non-profit. And if it hadn’t been for poor transit/development policies they’d be much better off.
Manchester’s land use is not nearly so baked in. Its changed more radically in the last century than any German or French city, they liquidated/depopulated its historic inner suburbs 1945-1979 built a massive road network (by w.Euro standards) and did a huge amount of suburbanisation (warrington/stockport). And its on course to have more high-rises than any of Europe’s non-megacities at least in Manchester proper and Salford. PS: if they got the capital they’d have to agree to massive upzoning.
To me it seems that having a separate economic and political capital was the optimal path as it reduces regional inequality, housing costs, and commute times. Large megacities everywhere seem to have high housing prices relative to local incomes and long commute times, and having a ~5 million metro areas that aren’t very geographically constrained like Milan/Rome/Frankfurt/Berlin seems to keep these factors reasonable and not like London/Paris/Tokyo/Seoul. Commute times seem very correlated to happiness and life satisfaction in various studies.
On the other hand, the highest-inequality developed democracy has separate capitals (the US) and so does the highest-inequality Western European country (Italy) – and Italy also has very high interregional inequality to boot.
Manchester-as-capital would be closer to 10 million than to 5 million given the scale of the urbanisation of the transpennine belt.
There’s was a debate on Urbanist Twitter a few weeks back about whether density causes low birth rates. Its deeply problematic given clear signals of sorting effect, and confusing cause (high land prices) and effect (density). Put more solidly does Tokyo’s success at urban planning enable or attenuate the bad features of Japan’s salaryman model (that’s actually the big predictor of birthrates)? ditto Seoul which has a very similar gender/work culture (which the most ardent anti-Japanese nationalist will defend, the work culture is something even feminists defend).
Yeah, regional equality=/= class-social equality. Italy is actually quite similar to the UK. The south has horrendous relative logistics, you can drive to Munich and Lyon from Milan, you can take a quicker ferry to Albania/Tunisia* from Naples/Taranto. As I said, Rome being the capital was and is a good idea. Plus as we’ve discussed before if you have a dsyfunctional housing market, labour markets get segmented. Italy’s housing problems aren’t as bad as the UKs, but they are there in the North plus Rome esp when you see relative prices (nowhere in England has rural housing as cheap as S.Italy).
*The bit of East German convergence success that nobody talks about is the integration of 2004 ascension countries. So the Southern Italy really should want South Med convergence growth/Single Market intergration.
In an alternate future where the NYC and Milan were also the government capital, regional inequality would have likely been even worse. You would have a poorer south in both countries. The location of DC likely helped develop areas like Virginia and North Carolina much more.
Rome is not in the South, and DC development hasn’t really spread beyond Northern Virginia (Hampton Roads gets extensive government spending but that’s the Navy, not capital-oriented anything). There are various attempts at place-based subsidization of poorer areas but they never end up subsidizing poor people – for example, Georgia, home of the CDC due to a place-based program to keep it there due to the high historic burden of infectious disease in the South, is in many (most?) years a net tax donor, which is not at all the case for Maryland or Virginia. The main program reducing interregional inequality in the US is the combination of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which reduce general inequality and therefore also reduce interregional inequality.
The location of DC likely helped develop areas like Virginia and North Carolina much more.
Except for at least the first century and a half after DC was founded Virginia and N. Carolina didn’t develop at all; at the time of the Civil War there was a huge divide between the poor agricultural south and the rich industrialized north, and this only got larger with major industrialization in the latter 19th Century. In the post war area DC’s growth has spread equally to suburbs in Maryland and Northern Virginia, but only to the extent that any wealthy growing city develops its suburbs – NYC led to major growth on Long Island and Westchester County, not random parts of upstate. N. Carolina’s recent growth has meanwhile been fueled by poor legal policies in other states (Charlotte is becoming a de facto banking capital of the US as major firms flee regulation and housing policies in NY and SF) not because of proximity to government agencies in DC.
Brasilia doesn’t solve the urban problems of Rio or São Paulo because it suffers from the exact same problems. A large part of the population lives in suburban slums. This is even harder to fix in Brasilia since the entire core has been landmarked from the time it was built. I really don’t get how you look at Brasília, Rio and SP and conclude *Brasília* is the easiest one to fix?
Moving the capital away from Rio sinked the local economy, until it recovered recently with the oil industry becoming more prominent. You could have spent the Brasilia money improving the rail network in Rio, that would’ve been better for everyone involved.
Development of the cerrado did work in an economic sense, I mentioned in another comment Sinop as a planned new city that’s booming. But it came with a terrible political economy cost (I thought that was your jam?) making reactionary rural interests more prominent in national politics. Even beyond the population involved, thanks to Congress malapropriation. And the malapropriation comes baked in with the developmentalism of these rural areas, part of the process was creating new states with zero population but the minimum number of federal representatives.
Brazil isn’t going to escape being a natural resource economy anytime soon. That’s going to grandfather in a lot of conservativism. The lesson is don’t copy the US constitution. Its pretty normal for Settler societies. Certain Aussies love blaming inherited cultural memes for Australian conservatism rather than accepting natural resource curses is the price of doing business.
And there’s going to be at least a generation of Evangelical Christian conservatism too, until as we’re seeing in the US, the next generation gets bored.
Also you’re point about the problems of Brazilian urbanism in general is well taken, but do you think an extra 2 million from capital status would have made Rio better for its citizens given how difficult the terrain is? And yes I do think in the grand scheme of things redeveloping Brasilia is easier than central Sao Paulo/Rio simply because the state owns most of that wasted green space/roads. Plus fewer people per square footage means you have fewer voters and fewer landowners/tenants to buy out etc. Plus the nature of the Federal district itself makes it amenable to top-down changes in way that the Federal system usually prevents.
I’m not as familiar with São Paulo, but there are some pretty abandoned parts of central Rio that can be redeveloped. The harbour area, and the area just west of Central do Brasil. Various mayors have long tried to revitalise these areas, but there’s just not enough commercial demand for it, the CBD concentrates around Carioca and Cinelândia, closer to the favoured quarter, but less convenient for those taking suburban rail to Central do Brasil.
Add the Philippines’ New Clark City to the list of new administrative capitals being built. I’ve seen videos of the finished sections and it looks exactly like Southern California, car-centric design and all. I think I even saw a Jack in the Box restaurant. Seriously disappointing especially since Manila is painfully clawing its way into slightly better land use (building a subway, expanding the LRT, putting in BRT and a handful of bike lanes).