Word: urbane
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...esoteric as tapioca-derived alternative fuel and campaign-finance reform, Abhisit resembles a certain heavyweight from the U.S. Democratic Party. But there's one big difference: unlike Bill Clinton, Abhisit didn't grow up in trailer-park country. Although the patrician Thai Democrat can count on support from the urban middle class, as well as residents of Thailand's largely Muslim south, Abhisit will have a tougher time convincing the rural masses that he feels their pain. Thailand's agrarian northeast, in particular, was the voting bloc that delivered a huge mandate to Prime Minister Thaksin in 2001, after...
Aerial views of urban areas magnify the damage seen on the ground. Whole sections of Pisco and Chincha have been leveled. The few buildings that remain standing are oddly off center, resembling a lopsided wood-block tower about to crumble. Schools and hospitals are gone and the Tambo de Mora prison, from which 600 inmates escaped after the earthquake, looks like a pile of rocks around which someone has incongruously built guard towers. Of the 91 government-run daycare centers in Pisco, only one remains...
Singh doesn't see it that way. "Urban development in India ... will be the biggest sunrise industry that any country has seen in any part of the world," he says. The trend is being driven by macro forces. As the country becomes richer and more urban (the number of people living in cities will rise to 461 million by 2025, from 286 million today, according to the Asian Development Bank), demand for housing should go right on booming...
...hope for India," says Singh. "We found that we were on the same wavelength very quickly." He was later repaid for his water when Gandhi pushed the Haryana government to ease the commercial-development restrictions. Their two-hour conversation that day, says Singh, was "the birth of the entire urban-development policy of India today...
...economy grows, India will need millions more square feet of offices as well. Industry analysts estimate that India has less modern urban office space than a single large American city. "It's not a bubble," says Arjun Divecha, the California-based manager of investment firm GMO's $15 billion emerging-markets fund. "The reason prices have risen so rapidly is that there has been so little increase in supply. If you look at the experience of other emerging markets, the real wealth escalator has been real estate, and I expect the same in India...