• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

This is the way of the world. The functioning arrival city slowly colonizes the established city (just as the failed arrival city is likely, after festering and simmering, to invade it violently). The city discovers, confronts, and, in fortunate circumstances, embraces the arrival city. Yesterday’s alien villagers and immigrants become today’s urban merchants and tomorrow’s professionals and political leaders. Without this metamorphosis, cities stagnate and die. Beneath the sterile debates about multiculturalism and globalization are the specific experiences of waves of rural migration striking the soft points of the world’s cities. It is, as each family’s experience shows, an accumulation of people who want more than anything to become an accepted part of the whole. These families are taking calculated risks, betting on property and education and the largesse of friends and strangers. It costs governments money to make those gambles pay off: The arrival city is an expensive place in the short run, absorbing more public revenue than it produces at first. Yet three centuries of urban history have surely shown us that the investment is well worth it, both for the huge gains it produces and for the terrible tolls it averts. If these families are driven out or trapped on the margins or denied citizenship or an ownership stake in the larger city, they will turn into a far more expensive threat. In the coming decades, during our lifetimes, more villagers will take these risks than at any previous time in human history. This will be the world’s final century of urbanization, no matter how it plays out. This is our opportunity, now, to turn this final migration into a force of lasting progress, an end to poverty, a more sustainable economy, a less brutal existence in the village. It will work only if we stop ignoring those awkward neighborhoods on the edge of town.

* Job Cohen and Ahmed Marcouch both entered national politics in 2010.

† The change in approach was precipitated in part by a 1992 disaster, in which an El Al Boeing 747 crashed into an apartment tower in Bijlmermeer, killing 43 passengers and 39 people in the building and drawing attention to the neighborhood’s plight.

‡ Rising ocean levels caused by the ice-cap melting of global warming are already having effects on Bangladesh, which has one of the largest rural populations at or below sea level. This has led governments and agencies to describe hundreds of thousands of people as “climate migrants.” But experienced observers agree that climate and flooding is usually just an incentive effect on a migration pattern already in play, and the rural poverty that makes families vulnerable to climate change is usually a far greater motive to migrate than the climate change itself. The migration scholars Ronald Skeldon and Cecilia Tacoli have both concluded that even intense climate-driven migration in this century will be swamped by the far larger numbers of people making rural–urban migrations for economic reasons.

NOTES

1 ON THE EDGE OF THE CITY

1 From Cardoso’s introduction to the first edition of Janice E. Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio De Janeiro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), xii.

2 This was the message most commentators took from one recent popular book on such districts, Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). Davis provides a more nuanced view of the transformative potential of the arrival city in an earlier work, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City (New York: Verso, 2000).

3 UNFPA, “An Overview of Urbanization, Internal Migration, Population Distribution and Development in the World,” in UN Expert Group Meeting on Population Distribution, Urbanization, Internal Migration and Development (New York: United Nations Population Division, 2008).

4 UNFPA, “State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth” (New York: United Nations Population Fund, 2007); UN Population Division, “World Population