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By Root 1706 0

people fail to recognize the function arrival cities serve, and owing to their poverty and improvised form, they are often condemned as permanent and irredeemable slums. True, many arrival cities begin as slums, but not all slums are arrival cities. In fact, the most insalubrious and dismal slums are usually not sites of rural–urban transition. The infamous slums of East London in the nineteenth century, like Bethnal Green, were “flypaper” neighborhoods, which captured and trapped those who had fallen out the bottom of inner-city society, with few village migrants among their population.7 This is the case today in many of the inner-city slums on the Pacific Coast of the United States and Canada, such as Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and San Francisco’s Tenderloin. And, if the path to arrival becomes permanently blocked, arrival cities can become depressed and destitute after a generation or two. In sub-Saharan countries, like Chad, Ethiopia, and Niger, close to 100 percent of urban residents live in slums that have existed for decades, so the village-arrival function is sometimes swamped or forgotten (though even here it’s not hard to find recent village arrivals and distinct arrival-city enclaves within the slum). The African American ghettos of the United States in the twentieth century began as classic arrival cities, as the U.S. post-slavery exodus known as the Great Migration sent hundreds of thousands of southern rural ex-slaves in an optimistic search for the center of American society. But their arrival cities failed—because property ownership was unattainable in urban districts owned by indifferent or intolerant outsiders, because arrival-city residents were excluded from the economic and political mainstream by racism and bad urban planning, and because of the absence of government support and institutions. They turned into something else, places of failed arrival—a threat that hangs over many arrival cities today.

Nor do all rural-urban migrations create arrival cities. Emergency migrations, caused by war or famine, lack careful investment and planning among villagers and the tightly woven networks of support and linkage that characterize normal village-arrival patterns. But they tend to be temporary, with most refugees returning to the village when the crisis is over (though some usually remain or begin patterns of seasonal migration, sowing the seeds for genuine arrival cities later). Some rural populations, like Filipinos in North America, do not form distinct urban enclaves because of the nature of their employment, typically in domestic service—though a “virtual” arrival-city function exists.

Nor are all people living in arrival cities poor. As these enclaves improve and develop their own migrant-rooted middle class, they become magnets for people moving out of the crowded inner city, and they develop their own prosperous middle classes. Many of the most desirable neighborhoods in New York, London, Paris, and Toronto began as arrival cities, and there are arrival cities that have become fully middle class in Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, and other successful capitals of the developing world; if managed well, many of this generation’s villager enclaves will end this way.

There is another, even more damaging popular myth about the arrival city, which holds its cluttered streets responsible for spiraling urban growth, overcrowding, and sprawl. People look at the new shantytowns covering the hillsides, the migrant neighborhoods being ploughed into forest, and they imagine that the tide of people from the countryside is creating unmanageable megacities. In fact, rural-to-urban migration, in spite of its huge scope, is not the major cause of urban growth. For each 60 million new city-dwellers in the developing world, 36 million are born to established city-dwellers. Only 24 million come from villages, and only half of these have actually migrated; the rest become urbanites because their village, like Liu Gong Li, has been incorporated into the city.8 Arrival cities are not causing population growth; in fact, they