Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [108]
In the streets of places like Emamzadeh ‘Isa, this is breeding resentment. Village migrants are no longer the submissive, conservative, and religious people they were once thought to be. Detailed surveys by scholars Amir Nikpey and Farhad Khosrokhavar found that the citizens of Tehran’s outskirts have become deeply opposed to religious politics.18 “This young generation has a totally different point of view toward the revolution,” Nikpey told me. “They are not the young people of 30 years ago who backed the revolutionary state—this generation has no connection to the revolutionary values. They are still mainly believers in Islam, but the majority are saying that we must separate the church from the state—and that the state cannot gain its legitimacy from religion.” This is a new outskirts, as urbanized as anywhere in the center. Women here are marrying at 28 rather than at 13, as they did in 1979, and having 1.7 children per family, rather than 7, as they did in the 1980s—and women here have more education than men, just as they do downtown.
A succession of Iranian governments has repeated the mistakes of the Shah: treating the arrival cities as a threat rather than an opportunity; failing to give them the physical or financial resources to grow, instead focusing on the lower middle classes of the downtown core; and, in the process, creating a huge division of wealth. The Islamic regime, despite its oil money, has not been able to stem the accretion of blocked lives on the fringe. Out here on the edge, it feels as if history is repeating itself. These are patient, conservative people, unwilling to risk everything for a mere political statement. But if they find their path into sustainable urban life blocked by the state, then they will explode, once again, into the center of Iranian life.
Petare, Caracas
What happened to the arrival-city residents of Tehran has been repeated across the developing world. Revolutionary movements originating in the wealthy center, probably beginning with the Jacobins in 1789, have used the grievances and frustrations of the arrival city as their source of ideological and human support and then abandoned those communities as soon as they came to power.
A most extreme and fascinating variation on this theme is found in Venezuela, where the “Bolivarian revolution,” which began with the election of Col. Hugo Chávez to the presidency in 1999, promised to produce a South American government focused exclusively on the arrival city. Turning the rural-migrant slums into the symbolic instrument of their legitimacy, the Chávez regime managed to stoke these marginal lives into a revolutionary conflagration and then to provoke a fresh crisis in the arrival city.
To understand what went wrong, it’s worth speaking to the residents of Petare, an enormous shantytown community that covers a large upper slope of the Caracas valley, a dense warren of streets that overlooks the wealthier city below. The slums of Caracas are likely the most vertical in the world; rural arrivals have spent decades staking their claims on theoretically uninhabitable rock walls, the residents of Petare jerry-building steep cascades of squatter settlements, which are both physically and economically precarious.
Its people—they number between 400,000 and 900,000, depending how they’re counted—have been described from the beginning as Chávez’s most ardent supporters and most lavishly rewarded beneficiaries. The Mexican writer Alma Guillermoprieto described this slum as embodying the essence of the Chávez revolution. “Petare has … possibly more chavistas [followers of Chávez] per square foot, and more cohesively organized, than anywhere else in the country. It is in Petare that Hugo Chávez’s ambitious social welfare programs are implemented most ambitiously, because he has turned the poor into his de facto party,