Trujillo, Honduras is currently a quiet backwater town, but the Honduran government has grand visions for its future growth. Photo: Wanaku (flickr)

Picture this: a nearly independent city-state -- a Hong Kong in one of the western hemisphere’s poorest countries. Sound far-fetched? Maybe so, but one country has high hopes for a changing urban future.

According to the Economist, Honduras wants to outsource development of a new city. The idea is to create a ‘charter city:’ a semi-autonomous zone with everything from governance to a separate currency managed independently and overseen by experts outside of the Honduran government. But Honduras faces the question of whether a ‘clean slate’ of separate rules and management can spur economic growth that has been largely elusive in the region.

The political wheels are rolling, but the road to a charter city is long and uncertain.

The national legislature recently legalized the creation of “special development regions,” although the ensuing steps are taking longer than anticipated. In December, Honduran president Porfirio Lobo began appointing a ‘transparency commission’ to oversee the project, despite mixed opinions of the initiative held by other government officials.

Yet charter city supporters remain enthusiastic about the steps taken so far, and optimistic about the direction of the project.

According to Paul Romer, an economics professor at New York University who proposed the concept, charter cities represent a “new type of special reform zone,” building on the idea of a special economic zone by “increasing its size and expanding the scope of its reforms.” His idea is to create internal start-ups, akin to the way that businesses often set up new divisions free to operate outside of old rules. Mr. Romer believes that the clean slate will allow government authorities to experiment with laws and governance. “What types of mechanisms will allow developing countries to copy the rules that work well in the rest of the world?” he asked The Economist.

And people in developing countries like Honduras, Mr. Romer says, will respond to the initiative by embracing opportunities in charter cities. “The worldʼs poor know that better rules prevail elsewhere,” he says, citing the Gallup report that 630 million people would like to move permanently to another country.

Charter cities, Romer claims, should also be of interest to rich countries, such as the United States, struggling with illegal immigration, as they offer an alternative to residents of poorer countries seeking to migrate.

“The new entity’s open door gives the huddled masses an alternative," Romer told The Economist. "Instead of risking their lives on perilous journeys to cross borders illegally, they can move legally to a charter city.”

But many do not agree with Romer’s plan for building cities from scratch in the world’s poorest nations, and outsourcing their design and government to rich countries. Duncan Green of Oxfam has been critical of Romer’s idea for several years, and writes that “the underlying motive seems to be to liberate development from the supposedly dead hand of dysfunctional and corrupt states, transferring it instead into the hands of benign and honest technocrats” in Honduras.

As Green points out, the Trujillo charter city proposal is incomplete at best. Even with significant outside investment and oversight, charter cities would likely suck talent and resources away from their surrounding nation-states. And even with private security forces protecting the land of new development and investment, the presence of a wealthy, employment-generating city could create huge slums outside its borders.

The allure of a Central American Hong Kong may sound appealing to some, but officials must address many questions. After all, Hong Kong was a longtime colonial outpost before becoming a semi-autonomous economic zone. Is that really what Honduras wants? Or can Trujillo skip the colonial stage?

Honduran officials have a long road ahead to bring change to the Caribbean coast. But Mr. Romer’s vision has people talking. And for Honduras, it may just have a promising direction in store.

Erik Mandell is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont. He is currently pursuing a master's degree in public administration and global leadership at Portland State. Read his other contributions to Global Envision.

A flourishing economy has enabled many Chinese citizens to climb the socio-economic ranks. Photo:xiaming (flickr)

The spirit of 1989’s Tiananmen Square is alive in China, except the swarm of charged students has been replaced by a disgruntled, expanding middle class.

Inadvertently, an economic boom has resounded with cries for change.

2011 has been an exceptionally rough year for government officials trying to maintain social complacency across China’s far-reaching borders. Perhaps inspired by the Arab Spring, Chinese civilians took to the streets in February to enact their own “Jasmine Revolution” (taken from the Tunisian movement of the same name), demanding greater accountability and transparency from their current one-party system. At least 54 activists, including lawyers and intellectuals, were arrested, and, the New York Times reports, the term “jasmine” was blocked on internet search engines. In recent months, labor strikes have swept the People’s Republic, resulting in street rallies filled with middle class voices expressing their frustrations with meager wages and unhealthy work conditions.

However, the butterfly effect of protests—originating from the Arab Spring and expanding into the Occupy Wall Street movements—reaches beyond income inequality. Much of the Chinese middle class will no longer play the passive bystander to haphazard industrialization. On July 23rd, a high speed train collision, killing 40 passengers, moved government-backed news broadcasters to risk publicly questioning the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to provide the public with safe, accessible infrastructures.

In early August, more than 12,000 people converged in the city of Dalian to stop the re-opening of a paraxylene plant (a toxic chemical used to make polyester) after a storm had exposed citizens to chemicals known to cause leukemia and birth defects. The plant’s closure provided a significant win for the protesters—the government agreed to the shutdown despite a reported $1.5 billion invested in the industry.

In a land where censorship and submissiveness are ingrained in the cultural psyche, why are so many compelled to take a stand now? It’s a complex question, but part of the explanation lies in the problem itself: the rise of China’s economy.

Globalization, specifically global export trade, has upshot China into a leading economic powerhouse. Now the fulcrum of production in the globalized world, many Chinese workers are finally transitioning from poor to middle class (defined by The Brookings Institution as households that spend $10 per person daily).

By 2015, the Brookings Institution estimates that for the first time in 300 years, "the number of Asian middle class consumers will equal the number in Europe and North America. By 2021, on present trends, there could be more than 2 billion Asians in middle class households. In China alone, there could be over 670 million middle class consumers, compared with only perhaps 150 million today.”

The Chinese Communist Party has come to rely on the middle class for support; in the past they have served as a relatively quiet buffer between a populous but powerless poor class and a power-driven rich minority. The Economist observes that China has “kept themselves to themselves as a result of the implicit social contract offered by the Communist Party: you let us rule and we will let you get rich.”

China's middle class wants to renegotiate this contract, demanding more environmental and wellness security from their political leaders. “As many previously poor people adopt middle-class lifestyles in the decades ahead,” Brookings researchers observe, “they may find themselves not only consuming more but also more forcefully advocating for less pollution and lower emissions.” In other words, more money means more demands.

If the party chooses to reinvest its money into the people’s pockets through increased incomes, subsidized health care, lowered taxes, and environmental protection, the middle class is expected to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years. However, one only needs to look back at China’s Great Leap Forward to see that blind fixation on economic prowess can result in a neglected, damaged social sector. Looks like China will need to take a middle-road approach if it hopes to flourish.

China had the most mobile subscribers in the world in 2010 with over 850 million subscriptions. Photo: Tricia Wang 王圣捷 (flickr)

As the Chinese government attempts to keep its grip on the web, China’s middle class is pushing back.

A recent train crash in China resulted in more than simply technical lessons for the government. When the bullet train on its way to Fujian province slowed due to bad weather, another, traveling the same direction, crashed into it. The collision left 40 dead, 191 injured — and several dozen micro-blogging from the scene, according to the New York Times.

China had 859 million cell phone subscribers (64 percent of the population) in 2010, while the U.S had 302.9 million subscribers (96 percent of the population), according to mobithinking.com. And the number of smartphone users is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. Smartphones are particularly popular, among China’s middle class. More importantly, they let people blog instantly from their phones — a tool that the newer Chinese generation does not hesitate to use.

This growing middle class, created by the rapid privatization of the 1990s, represents a formidable issue for government censorship. The options afforded to this newer class has resulted in a generation that is young, educated, and tech-savvy. Unlike their parents, the children of this generation are well aware of the restrictions on their freedom to roam the Web.

Even government blockades of social networks like Facebook and Twitter haven't dissuaded them. They've simply created Chinese versions of the famed social networking sites with sites like weibo.com, says the New York Times. These sites, in conjunction with smartphones, make China's middle class virtually unstoppable. For every incident or website that is blacklisted, ways around the government blockades and new websites emerge.

The train crash in Zhejiang province is a prime example of this. Immediately after the accident, passengers were pulling out their smartphones and micro-blogging from the scene. According to the Christian Science Monitor, many of their posts contradicted attempted cover-ups by the local government which blamed the accident entirely on weather conditions. Miraculously, though, China's government did not react by immediately shutting down blogging sites. In fact, local officials were forced to retract their statements, but declined to comment further on the situation. What actually transpired at the scene remains unknown, but it has provoked questions as to whether the Chinese railways are safe.

The crash, was discussed online for almost a month before the state blacked out all non-government information on the subject, according to the New York Times. This was not just a hallmark in China's censorship history. More importantly, it underlined the challenges China faces as its techie middle class continues to grow. As Chinese development, opportunity, and wealth increase, so does Internet usage. The continued growth of this group poses some intriguing challenges for Premier Hu Jintao’s successor in 2012. How will China reconcile its current censorship policies with this rapidly developing population?

Rural residents who stay in the countryside must stand center stage in the next phase of Indian development. Photo: mckaysavage (flickr)

At long last, the rural poor are stepping into the spotlight of Indian economic development.

There is increasing consensus that rural participation will be central to the continuation of the country’s prodigious growth, says Time Magazine. This dawning realization is inspiring a rush of schemes to boost incomes in the countryside — producing a new base of rural consumers.

Traditional development schemes often focus on urbanization, industrialization and increasing standards of living for wealthier city-dwellers. Government subsidies are frequently viewed as the only option for stimulating rural economies. But in India, the paradigm is shifting. What if farmers were to stay put? What if infrastructure that would allow them to turn a profit without leaving the countryside were established and accessible to them? A burgeoning community of development experts, public officials, and business owners are asking these questions.

Samriddhi, a three-year-old start-up in Bihar, India, exemplifies the kind of project produced by this innovative thinking. The company sells produce from more than 5,000 farmers in some of the state’s more lucrative urban markets. Samriddhi focuses on higher wages, trainings for better productivity, fewer middlemen, and more efficient, direct and just supply chains. One of its suppliers, Gulabchand Singh, has seen his income jump by almost 50 percent since he began working with Samriddhi.

Walmart is also tapping into the countryside’s human and natural resources. They’re recruiting more farmers, discounting agricultural products, and bringing in simple but effective techniques and technologies to increase yields and reduce operating costs. Walmart’s goal is to raise farmers’ incomes by 20 percent in five years. "If incomes rise, farmers will sell their produce to Walmart first; if incomes rise enough, they will also become its customers," says Time.

This is the gist of the emerging Indian perspective on development. Samriddhi and Walmart are just two of many companies that have caught on.

In the countryside, “the income gap between Rising India and the Other India is most pronounced.” And it’s there that “hyperlocal, market-based solutions” have the most power to break and reshape corrupt, exploitative, inefficient supply chains; to burst open monopolies; and to rearrange “old power structures and traditions,” says Time. Such changes could place India’s 840 million ruralites at the forefront of the effort to elevate the Other India into Rising India’s ranks.

“India's economic epic has reached the end of Act I," according to Time. Integrating and empowering the country’s rural poor within the larger economy will be key to opening the curtain for Indian Development: Act II.

Washington, D.C.’s bike sharing program has 1,100 bikes. London’s system has 6,000. And Paris has more than 20,000.

But on the other side of the globe, Hangzhou, China has them beat with more than 60,000, according to a recent report by National Geographic.

To see how it all works, check out this short from Streetfilms:

Bike shares -- where a user can pick up a bicycle at one service point, ride it, and then drop it off at another and walk away -- are growing in popularity. China, along with many other developing nations, has a long-held cultural tie to bicycling. Demand for automobiles skyrocketed in recent decades, but in a city of 6.7 million like Hangzhou, it would be impossible to build enough roads to support this, not to mention environmental concerns.

Bike shares are cheap (nearly free for many in Hangzhou), highly accessible, and part of a sustainable urban growth model. Hangzhou hopes to expand its system to 120,000 bikes by 2020 and other cities are taking notice of its success. Companies in Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City are making a go of it and hope to remove the training wheels soon.

This entrepreneur owns a telecentre in Tanzania and is among the small business owners in the unique position to create change for Africa's poor. Photo: IICD (flickr)

They own apartments instead of huts. They exploit technology to organize revolutions. They are Africa’s new middle class — and they are still living on less than $20 a day.

One in three Africans are earning between $2 and $20 a day and considered middle class. According to the Guardian, it is exactly this growing, educated population that is becoming the catalyst for change throughout the developing world.

According to a World Bank study cited by the Guardian, "countries with lower poverty will have a large middle class and see higher subsequent rates of both growth and poverty reduction." The reasons for this are both social and economic, but the growth of Africa's middle class seems to bode well for the continent.

Because the developing world's middle class still lives on less than $20 a day, it shares many of the grievances of those living below the poverty line, explains the Guardian. However, members of this income bracket pay more in taxes and thus are more likely to seek transparency and accountability from those in power. Since members of this narrowly defined middle class are generally business owners rather than government employees, they are unlikely to reap benefits from a corrupt system. Given these circumstances, they are often the ones most effective in lobbying for improved living conditions.

In developing countries, this mid-level income group is also particularly important in the small business sector. They have higher disposable income to invest in domestic economies and in education to produce a skilled workforce. As small business owners and entrepreneurs, they may also have the hiring power to employ new workers in difficult economic times.

Freeing Africa from poverty and corruption will take all these changes and more. But with one in three Africans qualifying as middle class, the continent may be on the right track.

In a place ravaged by years of war, there is something new taking place: Afghan youth propelled by a deck on four wheels and armed with an abundance of self confidence and a new pair of skate shoes.

Skateistan is a co-ed skateboard school and the group behind Kabul's first skatepark, says the school's founder, Sharna Nolan. The school engages growing numbers of urban and internally-displaced youth in Afghanistan through skateboarding, and provides them with new opportunities in cross-cultural interaction, education, and personal empowerment, according to their website. The main objective of Skateistan is to build the confidence of Afghan kids and to give them a voice, as Nolan explains in the video below. It's been amazing for Nolan to watch these youth become empowered through skateboarding.

There's nothing like watching an Afghan woman roll down a ramp for the first time and she has achieved something she never thought she would.

SKATEISTAN: TO LIVE AND SKATE KABUL from Diesel New Voices on Vimeo.

What do you get when you combine 120,000 data points measuring 200 years of income and life expectancy data for 200 countries with the creative genius of global health expert Hans Rosling? This. Watch.

“The Sleeping Giant is awake,” declares ABC reporter Diane Sawyer, who's reporting from Shanghai this week.

Sawyer is in China examining the rapid transformation of the largest emerging economy in the world – an economy growing at the rate of 10 percent a year. Sawyer is on a hunt for some answers about China's rapid growth -- what it means for the American economy and how the government managed to pull off such a feat in a little more than two decades.

Everyday for every baby born in the United States, almost four babies will be born in China… The Chinese say that they can build a supper highway in the time it takes to get a permit and paper work done in the U.S. Last week 200 workers in unison built a 15-story hotel in six days... By the end of next year the train from Beijing to Shanghai will take four hours. That’s about the distance from New York to Atlanta, which takes Americans 18 hours.

But, growth like this comes at a cost. According to Sawyer, “[a] quarter of the
water in the country is unsafe. [China is] the worlds worst polluters and that pollution
contributes to 70 percent of cancer deaths.” China's growth also hasn't managed to pull all its people out of poverty... Yet. “700 million people still live in poverty in China surviving on less than $2 a day,” reports Sawyer.

Check out Diane Sawyers report in this video belowand get an inside look at the growing polarities as Diane Sawyer does China by the Numbers.

It's really hard to get fresh fruits and vegetables if you live in inner-city Detroit. Fast food joins are abundant but until recently, the liquor store was your best bet if you needed a head of lettuce. In fact, there are 26 times more liquor stores than grocery stores in Detroit. Enter Peaches and Greens. They're trying to help Detroit residents eat better by bringing fruits and veggies to them — in their ice cream-style produce truck. NBC recently talked with executive director Lisa Johanon to find out how Peaches and Greens is improving the way people eat.

Paul Romer commonly uses Hong Kong as an example of what his charter cities would look like. Photo: Steve Webel (flickr)

Over the last few years, Stanford economist Paul Romer has championed a radical solution for ending world poverty — establishing brand new charter cities across the developing world. By encouraging migration to these cities, Romer hopes to compensate for problems urbanization has caused in existing cities, like unemployment, low standards of living and crime. An article by Sebastian Mallaby in the latest issue of The Atlantic called “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty" fleshes out Romer’s proposal.

Mallaby writes that the goal of the project is “to bring the governance of the developed world to workers in undeveloped places.” Romer goes into greater detail about his proposal in this TED talk he gave in July of 2009.

Charter cities sidestep the problem of what Romer calls “bad rules” — laws or regulations that stunt economic growth. Changing these kinds of laws from within takes time and can be difficult, so he thinks it would be much easier to take uninhabited land and start from scratch. People would then be free to move to places with better rules, which would accelerate change in their home countries. As Romer explains in his TED talk, the first step for a new charter city is to write "good" rules — rules that favor industry, but also provide reliable public services to residents.

Romer suspects that the people who would migrate to a charter city would be leaving slums or subsistence farms to come to the city, which would raise their standard of living and reduce global poverty. “By building urban oases of technocratic sanity,” writes Mallaby, “struggling nations could attract investment and jobs; private capital would flood in and foreign aid would not be needed.”

Romer envisions these cities as special administrative zones run by developed nations. In one possible scenario, Romer suggests that Cuba could donate land in Guantanamo Bay for a charter city and that a group of rich countries would share the costs of building the city and implementing the charter. He gives Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Norway and Spain as a possible consortium.

There’s even a model for the type of city Romer wants to build: Hong Kong. For much of the 21st century, Hong Kong was governed under British rules that allowed it to prosper independently of China. As the rest of China followed Hong Kong's example, about 100 million Chinese escaped poverty. Romer acknowledges this, saying “Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs we’ve undertaken in the last century.”

But skeptics like Columbia professor Elliott Sclar claim that "charter cities amount to a new form of colonialism." From the TED talk, Romer disagrees. “It’s not," he says, "The thing that was bad about colonialism and the thing which is residually bad in some of our aid programs is that it involved elements of coercion and condescension.” He argues that his model is based on choice, which is “the antidote to coercion and condescension.” No one would be forced to move to a charter city if they didn't want to go.

Leaders of a few nations, mostly African, have already met with Romer about starting charter cities. At this point, it's all talk. But if Romer's ideas are put into practice and are successful, poverty could be written out of existence.

What will the growth of the Mongolian mining industry mean for the country's nomadic herders? Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Mongolia could soon be home to the largest copper mine in the world.

After years of negotiations, Western mining companies Rio Tinto and Ivanhoe are close to reaching an agreement with the Mongolian parliament to develop significantly the Oyu Tolgoi mine. Mineweb reports that the untapped deposit contains 78 billion pounds of copper and 45 million ounces of gold. If all goes to plan, the massive investment would double the size of Mongolia's economy and create thousands of jobs, according to NPR.

The economic crisis has hit Mongolia harder than most countries in East Asia. One in four people are out of work, NPR reports. The country’s nomadic herders – 40 percent of the population – are struggling after the price of cashmere dramatically declined earlier this year (see Manasi Sharma’s Downturn in the Gobi). Now, some are hailing Oyu Tolgoi as an immediate economic fix.

But there are several obvious challenges. First, Mongolia is highly corrupt. It is ranked 102 out of 180 countries in the latest Transparency International index, an annual rating of perceived levels of corruption (defined as the abuse of public office for private gain). Additionally, the editorial in Mineweb suggests that Russia and China may have inordinate influence over Mongolia’s mining industry. Given these two factors, how much will the average Mongolian gain?

Lastly, there are the social implications of this investment to consider. For many nomadic herders, shifting to industrial mining jobs is far from ideal, but there isn’t much else to turn to. People are desperate now that raw cashmere and other materials do not provide a reliable way to feed and clothe families. "They are losing their land, their animals, and even their culture," reported NPR’s Louisa Lim, "for a few specks of gold."

Boxing is opening new doors for some Muslim girls from India. Photo: flickr(slack12)

An article in Friday's Wall Street Journal looks at how boxing is giving Muslim girls in India an alternative to their "practically scripted" life.

For many of these girls, the Wall Street Journal says life goes like this: "they stay home, help their mothers, and get married so they aren't a burden to their families anymore."

Sabihal Hussain, a women's studies professor at a New Delhi university explains how boxing is opening up new doors for the girls.

They find (boxing) as a way of coming out from conservativeness. They have very limited role — poor Muslim women — in the public sphere. So thes women, these boxers, they find a way to come out and this is an outlet for them to fight poverty.

The boxers train hard and those that are good enough to compete internationally, fight for cash prizes. But for many girls, boxing can be a gateway into a job with the the police or land them a college scholarship for a spot on the university sports team.

Rooftops of a Mumbai slum. Photo: Kaustav Bhattacharya (Flickr)

One in every five people living in Indian cities live in slums. And India wants to move all those people — 62 million to be exact — out of the slums in five years by promoting what they're calling "ultra-low-cost housing."

The Economist reports that ultra-low-cost housing are multi-story flat developments built outside of cities where land is cheaper. Companies like Tata Housing are building units that are teeny and no more than three stories tall so they don't require steel framing or skilled labor to build.

Initial challenges surfaced when low-income citizens failed to meet traditional loan requirements. But recently, two government-backed banks have agreed to provide more capital to finance companies. This allows those companies to provide loans to low-income people that would have previously been rejected.

However, the government banks require the purchasers to validate their income and pay 25 percent of the cost up-front. Some of the cheapest flats are $4,500, and a down payment would be close to $1,200. Slum dwellers usually earn about $1,900 per year. These obligations coupled with transportation costs to and from the developments make ultra low-cost housing much less affordable.

Although India's goal of a slum-free nation is admirable, it is ambitious and quite unrealistic. With India's population ballooning, it will take more than ultra low-cost housing to transition millions on the verge of poverty to the middle class.

Urban overcrowding, like that seen here in Kampala, has lead many Ugandans to build on top of ecologically important wetlands. Photo: kloppster (flickr)

They arrive during the night with their construction tools. Some come with hired security guards. These are the wetland encroachers of Kampala, hoping to claim land before the watchful eye of the National Environmental Management Authority notices and evicts them.

Poverty is compelling many people to build on the wetlands as population growth and urbanization increase land competition. The construction destroys the land's ecological value, Uganda's The Monitor reports.

Uganda's wetlands filter water and prevent destructive flooding downstream. They are also a source of material for profitable products like papyrus. Wetlands provide employment for 2.7 million Ugandans in a country where just five percent of the total work force has a consistent income.

Uganda was the first African country to develop a national wetlands program. The government has spent millions of dollars and partnered with the World Resources Institute (WRI) to develop an information system to track wetland use. Also, Ugandans who build on wetlands without permits are subject to fines and evictions.

The WRI and the Ugandan government are concerned that the services and products wetlands provide, and on which many poor households depend, are at risk. But, despite Uganda's pioneering status in wetlands management, the country faces many trade-offs as it balances land needs with the desire to preserve the ecosystem and alleviate poverty.