 So it's a nice white room, we're going to begin with a nice dark map. What we're going to do over the course of this session is to fill it. We're going to fill it with the lines that matter most. We're going to start with all of the world's transportation systems, which is to say all the world's highways and railways are now on your map. But that's not all. We're going to fill it with the world's energy distribution systems, all of the world's oil and gas pipelines and electricity grids. And then we're going to add in, when you hear the word connectivity, of course what you think of is that it's invisible, right? You think that your mobile phone is just wirelessly connected to everything else, but as you also know, there is this system of internet cables that wraps around the world. This is the world's infrastructural matrix. I think of it like an exoskeleton that we are physically wrapping and enveloping around the planet. And this is what we call functional geography. All of you in your offices and schools have maps of political geography, all the borders. And yet, over the last 100 years in particular, we have built this infrastructural matrix, these physical lines on the map that are about 150 times more voluminous and lengthy than every political border in the world put together. But in none of your offices do you have this map. So I am out to correct that through mapping functional infrastructure. So let's talk about how the infrastructural revolution is playing out. I believe it requires a whole new vocabulary, not just geography and connectivity, but their fusion into connectography. And this is the title of my new book. What connectivity focuses on is, as I said, this 100 year story that's really just taking off, but goes back to a century ago when the world's infrastructure spending was much lower, but over the last generation in particular, following what the United States and Europe did for the first half and two-thirds of the 20th century, Asia has been leading the world in infrastructure spending. And if you combine all the worlds spending on infrastructure together, we're at a point where it's already about double what global military spending is, and it's projected to rise further and further. And this is what is fueling this huge amount of physical connectivity around the planet. How is this manifest? First and foremost, it is urbanization. We all know the theme of cities. But there does in fact come a point where we don't talk about cities as such anymore as some separate category of investigation away from talking about countries. So much has become the city. So much of economic and social life is in cities and in a time when most of the world's population is urbanized and even more so into the future. So what are the main urban clusters in the world where you not only see the most people, but also the most sort of economic activity coming together? So I've found a bunch of them on each continent. This is what's called the Cascadia corridor stretching from Vancouver all the way to Seattle. And again, what's interesting is that it crosses an international boundary and yet you have growing amounts of connectivity across that boundary. You have Silicon Valley of course, which is really not just one city or several cities in one radius, but in fact it's growing broader and broader as the technology community spreads. Greater Los Angeles that stretches down through San Diego across again the Mexican border to Tijuana in Mexico. What is America's largest megalopolis? It's of course from Boston through New York, Philadelphia to Washington DC. This is the part of the country where of course we Americans are desperate to have a high-speed railway, but unfortunately we don't. It's an interesting point to reflect on because I think we all remember when President Obama was elected he said that he would push for eight separate high-speed rail networks across the United States. He's about to leave office and we still have zero kilometers of high-speed rail. As you probably well know in that much time China has accelerated past Europe in terms of the actual total length of high-speed rails in the country. As I've emphasized before I not only don't put international borders on these maps very consciously, bear in mind I am a political geographer by training so I do know where all the borders in the world are. I've consciously chosen not to put them here. So don't worry that I'm naive. I've also removed from this map all of the internal provincial state boundaries in the United States. America has 50 states. The lower 48 states would normally appear on this map. However those borders are very very useful if your name is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump and you want to go out and collect votes to win an election. They are not very good when you want to understand how to optimize an economy when you want to bring benefits to all members of society. Instead what you would do is think of the United States according to its natural economic regions which is to say areas that have strengths in agriculture, in energy, in manufacturing, in services and then you would think about what are the major urban clusters. These white patches are these urban zones if you will, the most urbanized parts of the United States. And then of course in order to enhance the mobility of people and the movement of goods and services and commodities you would want to have these transportation networks connecting them. So this is not the map of the United States today. Again this is not the map that you would conventionally have. This is what I believe the United States should be working towards. I call it the United City States of America. And if there's one thing that Trump and Clinton actually agree on it's that whoever is elected the United States does need to invest a lot more in infrastructure. So we have a solid foundation going forward. As you know Asia is where the mega cities really are. So of course Greater Tokyo or the corridor really from Tokyo to Osaka is still the world's largest mega city in the world today. China of course is accelerated towards consolidating into or having the largest number of mega city regions which makes sense given the size of the population. Bonus points if you can see where Tianzhen is right sort of south of Beijing Greater Shanghai Pearl River Delta and Chongqing Chengdu are among the other clusters. But in fact China as many of you may know is consciously moving towards setting up or establishing around two dozen mega city clusters. And these are the ones where you see the main urban anchor. There are satellite cities around it. There is very good internal integration with transportation networks and then of course the high speed rail that I mentioned earlier that is connecting China's mega cities together. This is a pattern that we're seeing in other countries as well. In India you see the Delhi capital region and Greater Mumbai with very large populations. In the Middle East as well you have mega city clusters forming. At the top there is Greater Tehran. People may not know that about a quarter of Iran's population. There's a South to North move in Iran and the population is clustering to large to be there. This is of course Cairo. Most of Egypt's 80 million people live in the Lower Nile Delta region. And then here this is the Persian Gulf city states stretching from Bahrain and Qatar through Abu Dhabi and Dubai all the way to Muscat and Oman. Again four or five countries but with plans for rail networks and other connectivity that really make it one larger urban archipelago if you will. And as you can see again on most conventional maps cities are just the same little boring black dots. That's very 20th century. That's not actually not what urbanization physically looks like in the 21st century. They're much more like archipelagos. Here's the final example I'll show you of that. And that is the stretch from Lagos across the Atlantic coast of West Africa really covering Danine, Togo and Ghana perhaps all the way reaching Abidjan on the Ivory Coast. And here there are also plans for an infrastructural network that will connect these cities together. The sort of punchline that I have in the book is that this is an example of how countries are suburbs of cities. Because Lagos is a city with the same economic size as the country of Kenya and the smaller West African countries their economic positioning really depends on their connectivity to Lagos, Nigeria. The net picture is a world that's emerging of around 50 megacity clusters. I took the projections from the World Bank from McKinsey and so forth and they project that by 2030 we'll have about 50 megacity regions if you will. So we've already put them sort of preemptively here. Why? Well if you're going to be a megacity in the year 2030 chances are you already are one today or well on your way to being one. So we can say with some confidence that if we return to Tianjin or Dalian in 14 years I probably won't change this image all that much. And what's very important in this sort of connectography thesis is that one cannot speak in strictly physical or geographical terms about the value of a city or the value of a national economy. So much depends on connectivity. Cities always want to be open to flows. This is where I get to bring in Brexit because of course the London voters did not want to secede from the European Union. They understand the value of connectivity. Well all cities, all major cities understand the value of connectivity. They know that some substantial component of their GDP rests in fact on connectivity. So this is again what it looks like in terms of population density where you can see the imperative of urbanization, the picture I showed you earlier is not really complete in the sense that it's maybe a world of 50 megacities but it's also a world of 9 billion people. And this is the general distribution of the world's population with yellow indicating the most dense areas. But what I want to direct your attention to is the circles. What the circles show you is the share of the national GDP represented by specific cities. And what's deeply, deeply worrying is that in emerging markets whether it's South Africa or Indonesia or the Philippines so much of the national GDP just depends on one city. But if you have a population of 100 million, 200 million people what it means is that you are not sufficiently distributed in terms of your investment patterns. And that's why these countries in particular need to focus on building more second tier cities and third tier cities to harness their populations. At the Lee Kuan Yew School we search for productivity data for cities and provinces and municipalities all over Asia and we find that you can't even get data outside of the big city. That's a problem. On the one hand as a business you can say well I know my market is Jakarta, I know my market is Manila but what if it doesn't tell you a positive story about the future of the country as a whole unless they invest more in urbanization and smart urbanization to cope with their populations. As they do so a lot of people worry that this means that we are destroying the planet in terms of greater resource consumption and emissions. But over time we also see that per capita carbon emissions go down in large cities with greater efficiencies. This is a result of public transportation, less people driving in cars, lower emissions in buildings and all of these other kinds of measures that we see kicking in around the world as cities modernize. So cities for many people are the problem but bear in mind that urbanization is a organic pattern. For 60,000 years mankind has been wandering on the planet and urbanizing. You do not reverse urbanization unless you're doing it involuntarily but in fact it's happening voluntarily and even by design around the world so we have to make cities part of the solution, not just talk about them as the problem. And as I said just now we have to invest more, a lot more in building the kind of capacity in cities that can harness populations. Right now the world's global financial or global capital stock is about $300 trillion. That's about four times the world's actual real GDP. This is an enormous amount of debt, public debt, private debt that we are sitting on and we are not finding ways to take this enormous amount of assets in pension funds and corporate debt to actually deploy it into the kinds of investments that are going to raise productivity and empower people in the future. I think this is really the big gap. So I think of connectivity in all of its forms, all of the infrastructure categories I've been speaking about, transportation, energy and communications as the most important asset class of the 21st century. I think this is going to have a significant impact on how we view international relations. Again I get to talk about Brexit, one of my favorite topics. You know on a political map you can see lots of them today, lots of infographics circulating on the internet about how Britain is literally disappearing, you know, not connected and of course Britain is very functionally connected. Again I do functional maps. Britain is very functionally connected through energy, through transportation, through communications, through financial markets. I'm not going to go so far as to say that despite everything that has just happened not much will change but the day-to-day dependencies that Britain has on Europe and vice versa can be physically and most certainly digitally and financially calculated and they are extreme. So we should think about politics as one vertical if you will in terms of the total relationships that Britain has with Europe and remember that the smaller a country becomes the more it depends on connectivity, right? Because small countries don't produce all their own food, all their own fuel, they actually wind up needing to import labor and so on and so forth. So the long-term outcome may be different than we realize. North America too, when we talk about North American politics we focus on how Donald Trump wants to build a wall between the US and Mexico. What the world's most heavily trafficked border is? Legal crossings of a border every single day, 365 days a year. It's of course the US and Mexico. What's the number two most heavily trafficked border on the planet Earth? United States and Canada, okay? So politics tells you one thing, functional geography tells you another thing and right now as Mexico liberalizes its energy sector for example there's so much more investment going in, so much more connectivity being built between the United States and Mexico. I don't want to go on too much longer. What we've done with these maps is to show the growing connectivity between different regions. I think it's particularly significant south of where we are now in Southeast Asia, a region with less than half the population of China now has a larger GDP than India and is attracting more foreign investment every year than China is. No individual country is able to accomplish that alone. Vietnam alone does not compete with China. Cambodia does not compete with China. Indonesia does not compete with China. They do more connectivity by integrating their supply chains which is something that we know through economic data they've been doing in the last 15, 20 years. They are collectively a very important force. They are what many call the new world's factory floor. We see this connectivity playing a role growing in East Africa as well where the six countries of the East African community are starting to harmonize their energy grids, their railways and do investment promotion together. Even in the Middle East as states are collapsing at the underlying infrastructures that actually connect people and it's interesting because the Arab world is almost entirely urbanized so the real socio-political geography of the Arab world is not, of course, these artificial nations that have not really made it up until the year 100. Many of them didn't even make it to their 50th birthday, they've collapsed but the underlying infrastructures are there and in my book I document these oil pipelines that have been around for 100 years. They have seen the Ottoman Empire come and go. They have seen nations rise and fall. The infrastructure is still there. The functional geography winds up being more important in the long run than the political geography. Bringing it back to Asia, we have, again, all of these political divisions between Asian countries. There's so much concern about hostility and tensions across borders between Asian giants. We've had the Taiwan situation, the tensions between China and Japan as well but remember that there is this force of connectivity, this force of interdependence that is actually having a significant impact on the political calculations of leaders in Tokyo, in Taipei, and in Beijing. When there is a significant escalation, they step back and they make their calculations, their cost-benefit calculations and they realize that, in fact, this situation needs to be contained and I view that as very positive development, the fact that we have so much more connectivity than we had before. China and India, same thing. There are outstanding border disputes but they're also building physical trade corridors for each other. Bilateral trade is up to $80 billion a year. China is making very significant investments in Indian infrastructure, in fact. India and Pakistan are moving towards a free trade agreement. There is an oil gas pipeline that's meant to connect Iran through Pakistan to India and so forth. So, the final map is what will happen when the AIIB completes its mission. When all of the infrastructure projects that are meant to link together the Eurasian landmass are complete. Right now, we've just heard about one. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor down here but in a nutshell, if you look at all of the plans for highways, railways, for oil and gas pipelines and other kinds of infrastructures, even hydrological canals that can bring Eurasia together, this is actually what it will look like. It will not just be large nations and the borders between them and I view that as very promising because you're talking about most of the world's population living in this region, 5 billion people. How do you unlock their energy? It's going to be through more connectivity. Final point is around geopolitics. We worry a lot in geopolitics about maritime choke points, stopping the flow of commodities and goods and the potential tension that can create, particularly the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz and the Straits of Malacca. But in a world where we've built these one belt, one road kinds of trans-Eurasian corridors and in a world in which we have Arctic shipping as well, there's a huge amount of strategic resilience that we are creating through making these infrastructure investments. I know that we'll talk about the economic ROI on these investments but the strategic ROI is priceless and I'll give you just one anecdote. Ten years ago, in all of our grand strategy conversations in Washington or elsewhere, there was a fear that the U.S. and China might go to war over Middle Eastern oil and gas resources. We know that that's actually not the case anymore. The first American oil set sail from Texas through the Panama Canal and went to China. The United States now sells oil to China and China's energy security strategy is not to fight with America in the Middle East over oil, it's just to buy more oil from America. And I view that these infrastructure networks is making a big contribution towards that. So I've gone on a bit too long but this is our final little pretty animation to wrap things up and what it really shows you is that infrastructure is not just a physical thing, it is the pathway, it is the conduit for ourselves as people to be mobile and move around the world more than 1 billion people crossing borders every single year, projected to rise to 2 billion and even further with international travel of tourists and business people. It's also our data connectivity. We know the bandwidth volumes, new internet cables are being laid down practically every single month. So I want to emphasize that it's not just a static thing, it is a platform, it is a layer of connectivity that we all use. We built this map. We don't just build the maps of the lines that connect us into political nations. We are also the ones that built these lines of infrastructure that connect us and in the end it makes us all better off. Thank you very much.