• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1709 0

true, in both the Middle East and the West, that rural-arrival enclaves are not the main places where radical Islam arises. The Dutch sociologist Asef Bayat, in a detailed study of such neighborhoods in Iran and Egypt, found that arrival cities are very rarely “the breeding ground for violence, crime, anomie, extremism and, consequently, radical Islam.” Rather, he found, they are “a significant locus of struggle for (urban) citizenship and transformation in urban configuration.” The centers of Islamism, he found, were predominantly the lower-middle-class neighborhoods that had benefited from the state-run economies of the decades before the 1980s, then lost out to informal-economy competition from these new arrivals. Religious fanaticism has little to do with rural–urban migration.21

The crucial paradox of the arrival city is that its occupants all want to stop living in an arrival city—either by making money and moving their families and village networks out or by turning the neighborhood itself into something better. Some arrival cities, like Thorncliffe Park, are self-renewing, constantly attracting new waves of arrivals, often from different cultures. But most, if they succeed, tend to produce their own obsolescence. The arrival city is now the favored new residential neighborhood in many North American and European cities, with districts like Rampart in Los Angeles, the Lower East Side in Manhattan, Spitalfields in London, Belleville in Paris, and Ossington in Toronto becoming desirable for young graduates (some of them the children of the original arrival-city tenants) seeking homes precisely because of the presence of dynamic, city-transforming arrival-city communities. The first wave of arrival, up to the First World War, created the core neighborhoods of most Western cities; the second, postwar wave is now creating the next set of places to live—and the next set of cultures. This reverse attraction (critics call it “gentrification”) is taking place, in exactly the same way, in the arrival cities of Chongqing, Mumbai, Istanbul, Cairo, and São Paulo, just as the arrival cities of the West are equally prone to the arrival-city failures seen in those cities. It is the same process, involving much the same people; the only difference is in wealth and resources. The great migration of the twenty-first century has the advantage over its nineteenth-century precursor, in that it is taking place in a world that understands what a good arrival city looks like. The last time around, these desirable quarters took shape by accident, with too many humanitarian disasters along the way. This time, we will need to plan, anticipate the inevitable arrival of villagers, and invest in their urban futures.

For the ultimate lesson of the arrival city is that it does not simply add itself on to the edges of the city; it becomes the city. Whether it does so creatively or destructively is a matter of engagement. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has described this process of collision and grappling-on of villagers to the city as the heart of a vital cosmopolitanism, an embrace of what he calls a life-giving contamination: “We do not need, have never needed, settled community, a homogenous system of values, in order to have a home. Cultural purity is an oxymoron.” He completes his argument by citing the self-defence made by the author Salman Rushdie at the hands of the same Iranian cultural purists who gained power by manipulating the polyglot arrival cities of Tehran. Rushdie, facing the fatwa, defended his novel The Satanic Verses by describing it as an arrival city, like the arrival cities that fill its pages, like the arrival cities throughout the world: a place that “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration