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of Banglatown’s second generation are eager to escape. For them, the work of the arrival city is done, and its support networks are no longer needed. “I think you can only take so much of Tower Hamlets before it does your head in,” says Salma, the youngest and most successful of the Tafader girls. “I need a mix of people, not just Bangla.” Razeema still dreams of leaving England—though as a successful professional. Sulama intends to stay in East London, buy a house, and help improve the community. This is the gauge of an arrival city: If people are flowing through it, transformed into full-fledged contributors to the life of the city whether they leave the arrival city or stay there, then it is working. To understand how this can be made to happen, it is worth taking a detailed look at the birth, life, success, failure, and death of the world’s arrival cities.

* The title “fastest-growing city” has a number of legitimate claimants, including Dhaka and Lagos, because it has a number of meanings: it can be the place that adds the largest number of people every year (a measure that favors large cities), the place whose population increases by the largest proportion (a measure that favors small cities), or the place with the highest increase in its rate of growth. However, with a growth rate approaching 4 percent per year across its wider metropolitan district (whose population is 32 million), Chongqing qualifies by any measure.

† All figures in this book are converted to United States dollars.

‡ Inequality has declined with urbanization in those countries that allow their arrival cities to flourish. Brazil, Peru, and Malaysia have all seen inequality fall during their periods of urbanization. China, with its restricted arrival cities, has seen inequality increase. India, with chaotic urban policies, has seen no change. In all these cases, urbanization has sharply reduced poverty and improved the living standards of the poorest fifth of the population.

§ There are exceptions. The post-communist years in Central and Eastern Europe saw urban-to-rural migrations as people fled the collapse of industrial pseudo-economies to the security of subsistence agriculture. Mao’s China was essentially a huge experiment in re-ruralization. In a number of sub-Saharan African countries, the AIDS crisis and military conflicts have similarly led populations to leave the city for villages. There is every indication that these reverse transitions are temporary, lasting only as long as the root crisis.

‖ At their request, I have slightly changed the Tafader family’s names. Other names and places in this book are unaltered.

a This is the pattern of arrival cities everywhere: Nations do not migrate, but rather regions and villages do. About 80 percent of the Pakistanis in Britain are from the tiny, fully rural Bihar state. Most of the million Poles in Western Europe are from villages in Silesia and the southwest. Mexicans in the United States mostly emerge from a handful of rural regions.

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OUTSIDE IN: THE LIVES OF THE NEW CITY

THE BEGINNING: SMALL MOVES, LARGE MOVEMENTS

Kolhewadi, Ratnagiri, India

In Mumbai each June, the skinny young men pull themselves off concrete floors and sidewalk paving stones, out of tin-roofed chawls and plastic-sheet huts, all over the city’s dense northern neighborhoods. They live, in the hundreds of thousands, on the arrival city’s margins. Not yet full-fledged residents, they consider themselves citizens of their villages, and now, at the beginning of the largest rice harvest, they become villagers again. They converge upon the crowded platforms of Dadar Station, where they pull out long-saved piles of rupees for a third-class ticket, $1 each way, and board the Konkan Railway slow train, packing its benches, hanging their heads out its barred windows, as it creakily begins its eight-hour journey southward along the Arabian Sea into the bamboo forests and rice paddies of the rural south of Maharashtra state.

Sanjay Solkar, looking younger than his 20 years, hops off the train at Ratnagiri,