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By Root 1716 0

Asia and Africa will double, adding as many city-dwellers in one generation as these continents have accumulated during their entire histories. By the end of 2025, 60 percent of the world will live in cities; by 2050, more than 70 percent; and, by century’s end, the entire world, even the poor nations of sub-Saharan Africa, will be at least three-quarters urban.4 This point, when the entire world is as urban as the West is today, will mark an end point. Once humans urbanize, or migrate to more urban countries, they almost never return.§ After this final half of humanity has moved to the cities, there will be migrations again, but never again a mass movement on this scale. Humanity will have reached a new and permanent equilibrium.

This migration is, in any measurable sense, an improvement. There is no romance in village life. Rural living is the largest single killer of humans today, the greatest source of malnutrition, infant mortality, and reduced lifespans. According to the World Food Programme, three-quarters of the world’s billion people living in hunger are peasant farmers. The rural village is also the predominant source of excessive population growth, with its need for large families to provide labor and stave off ruination. Urban incomes everywhere are higher, often by large multiples; access to education, health, water, and sanitation, as well as communications and culture, are always better in the city. The move to cities also reduces ecological damage and carbon emissions by decreasing distances and increasing shared technologies: Cities, in the words of one major study, “provide an opportunity to mitigate or even reverse the impact of global climate change as they provide the economies of scale that reduce per capita costs and demand for resources.”5 Mortal poverty is a rural phenomenon: Three-quarters of the world’s poor, those with less than a dollar a day, live in rural areas. The dramatic declines in the number of very poor people in the world around the turn of this century, with 98 million people leaving poverty between 1998 and 2002 and the world poverty rate falling from 34 percent in 1999 to 25 percent in 2009, were caused entirely by urbanization: People made better livings when they moved to the city and sent funds back to the village. Urbanization doesn’t just improve the lives of those who move to the city; it improves conditions in the countryside, too, by giving villages the finance they need to turn agriculture into a business with salaried jobs and stable incomes.

The arrival city is often barely urban in form or culture, but it should not be mistaken for a rural place. Urbanites tend to see the arrival city as a simple reproduction, within the city, of the structures and folkways of the village. “Look, on one side villages, on the other side buildings,” the Indian-American writer Suketu Mehta hears his young son observe on first seeing the arrival-city enclaves nestled against apartment towers in Bandra, in northern Mumbai. The father reacts approvingly: “He has identified the slums for what they are: villages in the city.”6 People responded similarly to the realization that Los Angeles barrios are each directly linked to a Mexican or Central American village, and Chinese tend to view their “urban villages” as being, too literally, villages. But this view misinterprets the urban ambitions of the arrival city, its fast-changing nature and its role in redefining the nature of urban life. The culture of the arrival city is neither rural nor urban, though it incorporates elements of both—often in grotesquely distorted form—in its anxious effort to find a common source of security among its ambitious and highly insecure residents. It is a fallacy that people move in a straight line from backward, conservative rural customs to sophisticated, secular urban customs. The period in between, with its insecurities, its need for tight bonds and supportive institutions, its threats to the coherence of the family and the person, is often the time when new, hybrid, protective cultures are developed.

Because