Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [148]
What comes from this work, and from the experiences of families like the Magalhãeses in Brazil and the Parabs in India, is a conclusion that is unlikely to please ideologues on the socialist left or the free-market right: To achieve social mobility and a way into the middle class for the rural-migrant poor, you need to have both a free market in widely held private property and a strong and assertive government willing to spend heavily on this transition. When both are present, change will happen.
* By comparison, the most murder-prone city in the United States, Detroit, has a homicide rate of 46 per 100,000.
† Some Jardim Angela residents have had titles since the 1980s, but in 2003 it became possible to own property on protected water-supply land.
‡ Significantly, only 0.5 percent of people in Jardim Angela are in the poorest E band. Today, only rural residents in most countries are poor enough to fall into the bottom 20 percent of the population.
§ The word sustainable is important here: As the 2008 credit crisis demonstrated in many countries, a middle-class illusion can be built on unsupportable levels of private debt.
10
ARRIVING IN STYLE
INTENSITY, SPONTANEITY, AUTONOMY
Slotervaart, Amsterdam
Mohamed Mallaouch stepped off the flight from Marrakesh at Schiphol Airport, took the train into the western outskirts of Amsterdam, and marveled at the green, geometric patterns before him. After the low clay villages of his mountainous home in northern Morocco, after the helter-skelter enclaves of Marrakesh, this was an altogether different way of living.
To his eyes, it looked like a child’s model city, full of artificial-looking leafy spaces, built from Lego and green felt. In deliberate contrast to the densely packed hodgepodge of the canal city’s famous inner districts next door, the planned enclave of Slotervaart was an orderly grid of broad, low apartment buildings with wide expanses of parkland between them, each building separated from a meandering, quiet street by a thick verge of lawn and trees, all isolated from the bustle of the central city by a large, forested park pierced with elevated roads. When it was created in the 1960s to replace a bombed-out industrial district, Slotervaart and its larger district of Overtoomse Veld was a bedroom community for Dutch workers. Its small apartments were served with only a few shops on the main boulevard, to keep domestic life quiet and free from the ravages of commerce and capitalism. Between the buildings were numerous public squares, built for pedestrians. Like many urban-outskirts neighborhoods across Europe, it was inspired by the ideas of Le Corbusier and the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, which held that the key to good life was a strict functional separation of working, living, and recreational areas. Strict zoning was applied. On the architectural renderings, the public squares were decorated with small clusters of pale-skinned people, conversing and appearing to enjoy standing around outdoors.
“It seemed like a perfect place at first,” Mohamed says, “and in many ways it is a good place to live, but after only a few weeks in Slotervaart I knew there was something seriously wrong. It had become a dumping ground for migrants, cut off from everything.” Mohamed had come from Morocco to work as a schoolteacher. In 1992, when he arrived, about half the 45,000 residents of Slotervaart were Moroccan migrants (as well as a significant minority of Turks), most of them from the remote, thoroughly rural Rif Mountain region he called home. They’d been arriving since the 1960s, filling