Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [157]
In an era when the value and effectiveness of foreign aid has fallen into question,9 one of the few truly effective, sustainable, and life-transforming channels for international assistance is the arrival city. Turning these neighborhoods around (or providing their own networks and self-government bodies the tools to do so) can be an unusually productive and secure aid investment, since a well-functioning arrival city will serve several generations of arrivals and produce multiplying benefits among both urban and rural poor communities. This reduces both village and city poverty, improves fertility rates, and provides the ecological benefits that arise from more urban, dense populations. In many ways, the arrival city is the one channel that can make foreign aid work.
But around the world there is confusion about what should best be done about these neighborhoods. Much of it is rooted in a lack of understanding of their function. Yet, once they are seen as arrival cities at the center of a set of dialectically related rural and urban functions, it becomes easier to devise policies to make them work.
There is an essential paradox in any effort to improve arrival-city housing. In doing so, by injecting money and official recognition into poor, informal communities, you are making them more valuable. And in being more valuable and better serviced with utilities, you are making them appealing to people who are not rural arrivals—notably, to lower-middle-class people from the established “core” city. To some extent, this can be beneficial: The resulting social mixing can attract entrepreneurial capital and lucrative consumer markets, making the arrival-city process easier. But there is a risk that the neighborhood will become inaccessible to any future arrivals. Upgrading rehousing projects to legal minimum standards, as we saw in Kibera, Nairobi, in chapter 2, can price them beyond the rural-arrival market. But, today, a number of approaches to slum improvement do not distort the market unduly (or, more to the point, they permit the poor residents to benefit from the rise in property values). Most of these involve the direct participation of the arrivals themselves.
One approach begins with land. Most slum-upgrading plans are expensive because they involve installing infrastructure and solid foundations beneath existing neighborhoods, never an easy task. Turning illegal, informal, self-built housing into title-holding, legal, sustainable, and sanitary housing is an enormous job, as we saw with Rio de Janeiro’s Santa Marta project in chapter 2. Many of the lauded slum-upgrading schemes in Asia and South America are covering little more than token patches of land, so large are the public investments needed. Key to any arrival-city project is to find mechanisms that use the increase in land values to pay for the project itself and to support the rural arrivals. Even better, most of the problems can be solved in advance, at much lower cost, with considerably better lives for the arrivals, if the interventions can be made before the rural–urban migration occurs and the houses are built. This requires honesty and foresight on the part of governments and an admission that the arrival of large numbers of new residents from villages is both inevitable and, in many ways, desirable.
To see this in its most dramatic and effective implementation, it’s worth visiting the southeastern edge of Bogotá, Colombia, where low, rolling