Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [154]
Finally, Slotervaart is becoming self-operational. Once it came to be governed by its rural-migrant majority, it changed. Its first priority was security. Ahmed Marcouch, the first rural-migrant council chair, established “street nuisance patrols,” plainclothes community-police groups who confronted the petty criminals and gangs of idle young men who spread fear and deterred small-business creation, and enforced truancy laws. Their second priority was schooling. Vitally, the new internal government put pressure on the larger city to end the segregation of primary and secondary schools (caused mainly by ethnic-Dutch residents sending their children out of Slotervaart but also by migrant residents retreating into insular Muslim schools). Higher-quality schools are meant to be magnets for a mixed population. “We’re trying to make a system where people can feel pride about their city, their country, their neighborhood, about themselves,” says Mohamed Mallaouch. “Everybody here wants their child to become better, to become Dutch, and now you are no longer trapped between two cultures, you can take the aspects of each one that works for you, to make a business or an education. It is a start.”
Around the world, arrival cities transform themselves from destitute poverty traps into pathways to success when they develop effective and well-connected internal governments. A major study of slums by World Bank economist Deepa Narayan and her colleagues found that things begin to improve in the most important areas—security, medicine, health, transportation—when slum communities develop effective, non-corrupt, democratic government from the inside.8 The beneficence of a national or big-city government, they found, is less important than the development of sources of “personal agency” among the slum residents, who, after all, have been trying from the beginning to find a way to govern their own affairs.
LAND, LINKAGE, SECURITY
Karail, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Maksuda Begum makes a pungent journey before dawn from her tiny tin-and-wood shack, through a labyrinth of narrow mud passageways, to the shore for ablution, then onto a narrow bamboo canoe packed with standing people and across a sewage-filled lake to the city’s mainland, followed by a long walk along endless car-packed roads to the concrete-bunker sweatshop where she sews clothing for 10 hours. And back again after nightfall, to the dense and noisy squalor known as Karail. Each night, after her return, Maksuda, an attractive and serious-looking woman of 32, lies in bed, stares at the corrugated-metal slats of her ceiling, and sobs with yearning for her daughter.
She came here, nine years before, from the poor villages of the southeast, carrying a pocketful of her family’s savings, with dreams of mobility and success and a good job in a garment factory. Karail provided it: Far denser and more chaotic (and flood-prone) than other Dhaka slums, its access to the city and thriving economy proved a base for a new life. All went well until her husband, a rickshaw driver, left her. Even though she had been the main breadwinner, without his presence and income she could not find a way to raise her young daughter here and earn enough to feed her and have her cared for during the day. So she was forced to deliver her eight-year-old, who had become her sole companion, to a “charity school”—in essence, an orphanage. They see each other once a month. “I’ll continue to live and work like this only because I must find a way to get my daughter back and send her through