Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [13]
This is a crucial point. Sometime around 2050, according to the most recent United Nations projections, the population of the world will stop growing. After peaking at nine billion, for the first time in history humans will stop being more numerous each year, and the prospect of a Malthusian population crisis will end.9 This will be a direct product of urbanization: Because of migration, smaller urban families will outnumber large rural ones, and, in turn, the flow of money, knowledge, and educated return migrants from the arrival city back to the village will push down birth rates in rural areas. We have already seen this in quickly urbanized countries like Iran, where the “urbanization of the village” has sent both rural and urban birth rates down to negative territory. After urbanization is accomplished, average family sizes around the world will fall below 2.1 children, and the problems of crowding and competition for resources will be replaced with the much more sustainable (though still challenging) problems of non-growing population. The date of this transition is projected, in the most likely scenario, for 2050; the UN’s less optimistic scenarios place the peak a decade later, and the peak population a billion higher. What makes the difference is the arrival city, which has accomplished the things that bring fertility rates down: educating girls and women, improving health, and creating physical and financial security. The arrival city is a machine that transforms humans. It is also, if allowed to flourish, the instrument that will create a permanently sustainable world.
Tower Hamlets, London, U.K.
On a warm evening in 1995, the Tafader sisters escape the cramped and noisy confines of their tiny two-bedroom row house in Coverley Close, an enclosed brick square amid a forest of public-housing towers. Under the glow of the nearby office towers, they sit against the low wall alongside the 15 to 20 older children and teenagers who populate its 14 houses, their doors all open, talking late into the night in East London English laced with phrases from the piquant dialect of their parents’ Bangladeshi village. The smaller children race about on the pavement, oblivious to the frequent din of police sirens and occasional explosions of violence on the busy road outside. Early in the evening, they’d organized a badminton game on the concrete court; now they sit and talk late into the evening, their parents largely absent in all-night jobs. Fine-featured, sharp-eyed Razeema, the oldest of the three girls and an outspoken leader of her siblings, baffles them all by talking at length of her family’s village, which she has visited a few times on school holidays. “I want to move there someday, when I am finished school, and grow all my own food in the quiet countryside,” she says, interrupting the talk of Madonna and Mariah Carey with her agrarian idylls. The other children laugh at this, as they do at her newfound habit of wearing a headscarf. “You’re welcome to it,” her sister Sulama, two years younger, tells her, laughing. “By the time you get there, everyone else in the village will have left to come here.” Salma, the youngest, does admit that she dreams of living in the countryside, albeit in England, in a big house with no neighbors. For now, the little concrete square and the shops around it, owned by people they know, feel like a welcome cocoon to protect them from the two forces that press on their young consciences at every moment: the push of the traditional life of their family village, and the pull of the impenetrable and often unwelcoming city just outside their courtyard.‖
The Tafader family’s journey from a dirt floor to the center of British life, a passage whose main instrument of transformation was an infamous arrival city