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sewage, and water supplies, and municipal services, such as schools, clinics, and parks, to deserving (Hindu) slums, in ways that sometimes follow the best practices of urban land reform and turn the self-built settlements into truly thriving neighbourhoods. It has also meant that the worst sort of practices—bulldozer slum clearance, high-rise replacement of upwardly mobile arrival cities, complete neglect of the most basic sanitary and health needs, and criminal-gang control of services—have continued, and have even been amplified, in slums that are not part of that privileged group. It is a dangerous, divisive form of politics, one that retains the power to take over the Indian state and one that could have been avoided if governments had kept the needs of the arrival city in mind from the beginning. Its evolution ought to be studied by governments in Africa, South America, and East Asia, for it is precisely the form of politics that fills the vacuum when the rural migrants are taken for granted.

* I have omitted Soheila’s surname to protect her security.

† The names of these settlements were later changed by the government to Nasim Shahr and Golestan, though they are still widely known by their original names.

‡ The Gini Coefficient, the standard measure of inequality, in which zero indicates perfect equality and a one indicates complete inequality, increased from 0.44 to 0.48, a significant jump, between 2000 and 2005, according to the Venezuelan Central Bank.

§ Shivaji Bhosale was the seventeenth-century Maharashtrian Hindu who led an uprising against the Moghul rulers of the region and established a Marathi empire; he is a folk hero among Maharashtrians and low-caste Hindus across India.

8

THE NEW CITY CONFRONTS THE OLD WORLD

THE PROBLEM OF SPACE

Les Pyramides, Evry, France

Like the ruins of some lost Martian empire on the cover of a previous generation’s science-fiction novel, the dun-and-gray pyramids materialize amid fields and forests along the motorway an hour south of Paris. Les Pyramides, the product of the largest European architectural competition of the 1960s, is the most utopian of the many state-planned utopias that ring the perimeter of Paris, built to house an expanding French urban middle class who were supposedly seeking an escape from the postwar congestion of downtown Paris—and occupied, almost from the beginning, by the precise opposite group, a rural, non-French working class who are fighting their way inward. As you get closer, the pyramids look less utopian, their stuccoed walls streaked with rain damage, their shadow-strewn concrete pathways offering little security for the 12,000 pyramid-dwellers, their central squares occupied by small clusters of young men with nothing much to do.

One warm November evening in 2005, on the edge of one of those squares, Aziz Foon shuttered the doors on his tiny shop, which sits at the foot of a poured-concrete tower, squeezed between a cell-phone vendor and a Turkish café, beneath an exuberant sign reading “NUMBER ONE: Produits Exotiques—Alimentaires—Cosmetiques.” Aziz, a very large and indelibly good-humored Gambian man of 46 with a bald pate and deep black skin, spends his days at the back of his narrow shop. Its walls are filled with an amazing range of products: cassava leaf, plantain root, African hair tonics, Islamic wall hangings, cooking pots, Dora the Explorer toys, canned coconut milk, Haribo candies, butane-gas cylinders, hair extensions, baby formula, kilograms of ghee, Argentinean corned beef, tiny tins of petits pois and haricots verts, prayer beads. “It’s all the things that black people need,” boasts Aziz’s even more ebullient 33-year-old stepson, Yousef, dressed in silver chains and an oversized T-shirt and greeting his customers in Swahili, Mandinka, Hausa, Vai, Lingala, and Bambara, not to mention German, English, and French.

It is the only shop in Les Pyramides that sells these things—in fact, it is one of the very few shops owned by anyone who lives in these buildings. The vital arrival-city practice of starting