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By Root 1711 0

to circumvent immigration restrictions. Third, the arrival city functions as an urban establishment platform: it provides informal resources that allow the village migrant, after saving and becoming part of the network, to purchase a house (through credit and informal or legal deeds), to start a small business (through loans, buildings, relationships), to reach out to the larger city for higher education, or to assume a position of political leadership. Fourth, the properly functioning arrival city provides a social-mobility path into either the middle class or the sustainable, permanently employed and propertied ranks of the upper-working class. These paths into the “core city” are provided through housing values and legalization, business success, higher-education opportunities for migrants or their children, employment opportunities in elite or “official” urban enterprises, or even through simple physical connections to the city and the upgrading of streets, plumbing, housing, and transit, allowing the arrival city’s own rising real-estate values, and the opportunities provided by sale or rental income, to create an exit path. It has become popular in scholarly and government circles to describe such functions, vaguely, as “social capital.” And that is, in short, what arrival cities are: repositories of social capital, machines for its creation and distribution. The aim here is to show exactly how this capital works in the larger economy of urban success.

An arrival city can be a single set of buildings entirely occupied by village migrants (like Liu Gong Li), or it can be a tight-knit network of people who constitute a minority, even as little as 10 percent of the population, in a deprived urban neighborhood (this is the case in most British arrival cities: Even ethnic enclaves such as Bradford and Bethnal Green have fewer than 50 percent migrants).

The modern arrival city is the product of the final great human migration. A third of the world’s population is on the move this century, from village to city, a move that began in earnest shortly after the Second World War, when South American and Middle Eastern villagers left their homes to build new enclaves on the urban outskirts, and is entering its most intense phase now, with 150 to 200 million Chinese peasants “floating” between village and city, vast shifts under way in India and Bangladesh, and huge numbers of Africans and Southeast Asians joining the exodus. In 1950, 309 million people in the developing world lived in cities; by 2030, 3.9 billion will. As of 2008, exactly half the world’s 6.7 billion people lived in villages, most of them in Africa and Asia, including almost all of the billion poorest people in the world, those whose families subsist on less than $1 a day. The wealthy nations of North America, Europe, Australasia, and Japan, which were largely peasant-populated as recently as the late nineteenth century, today are between 72 and 95 percent urban, figures that have not changed in decades. In most of these countries, less than 5 percent of the population is employed in agriculture; this is still enough to produce more export food than all the peasant-heavy countries of the developing world combined. At the moment, only 41 percent of Asians and 38 percent of Africans live in cities—leaving a population of villagers that is unproductive and unsustainable. They are on the land not because it is a better life but because they are trapped.

This is changing fast. Between 2007 and 2050, the world’s cities will absorb an additional 3.1 billion people. The population of the world’s countryside will stop growing around 2019 and by 2050 will have fallen by 600 million, despite much higher family sizes in rural areas, largely because of migration to the city. India’s rural population, one of the last to stop growing, will peak in 2025 at 909 million and shrink to 743 million by 2050.3 Each month, there are five million new city-dwellers created through migration or birth in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Between 2000 and 2030, the urban population of