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And chain migration, too, requires its own special sort of urban space, one that will host constant movement in both directions. Chain migrations, Tilly noted, “tend to produce a considerable proportion of experimental moves and a large backflow to the place of origin. At the destination, they also tend to produce durable clusters of people linked by common origin. At the extreme, the migrants form urban villages.”7 These “durable clusters” and “urban villages” are arrival cities, in their purest form. Once arrival cities are understood in this light, it becomes possible to see their importance for both urban and rural development. They are not mere slums housing the outcasts and failures of the urban society; nor are they temporary encampments for transient labor. They are the key mechanisms of the city’s regeneration.

And what they produce, through this cycle of selection, are among the most inventive and resilient population groups in the world. Contrary to their popular image as the losers in a capitalist society, the individuals and families who make it into the slums and shantytowns are the winners of the rural-urban lottery, the best of the best from the villages, the most successful of a highly ambitious group. “The migrants from the villages come with very high expectations, often higher than those of the native-born city dwellers,” says Patricia Mota Guedes, a Brazilian scholar who studies schools and social conditions in favelas. “They always have the choice to move out and go back to the village, and more than half of them do. Those who stay are the toughest and smartest ones, and they can take a lot of change.” Or, as one Kenyan urban-planning administrator concluded, “slum dwellers are generally more robust than the rest of the urban population.”8

THE BIRTH PANGS: AN ARRIVAL CITY TAKES SHAPE

Kamrangirchar, Dhaka, Bangladesh

First come the men with saws and machetes, clearing the swampy, low-lying land on the edge of town. Then come the families, carting piles of bricks and wood down mud pathways, staking out rudimentary foundations on the small plots they have purchased. Then come months of scavenging and hard work, as mud, sticks, stray boards, scraps of tin, and sheets of plastic are cobbled together by the family into the beginnings of a one-room house. Here, on the fast-expanding southwest corner of Dhaka, on the edge of an island that was swampy farmland a few years earlier, the houses are built up on bamboo stilts, East Asian style, so the inevitable floods won’t wash them away. Just up the road, where the floods are only occasional, they are built from random collections of bricks and boards. The Bangladeshi capital is vying with Chongqing and Lagos as the fastest-growing and most migrant-filled city in the world, and its slum houses are packed together to an extraordinary density. All are spaced tight up against one another, in clusters around small courtyards known in Bangladesh as bustees, built by their owners. It is here where seasonal, temporary migration turns into permanent, tenacious settlement, and a new arrival city is born.

Next comes Jainal Abedin, a young man in a neatly pressed shirt, with a patient demeanour and a small toolbox, strolling along the pathway, entering every door. He is the new neighborhood’s first link to the larger city. He greets the new families, collects their names, writes them in a vinyl-bound ledger book, passes along advice and gossip and news of threats to the neighborhood and opportunities for work. He listens to their financial troubles and collects small piles of money. He scrawls symbols on the outer walls of houses and makes promises.

Jainal is the cable-TV man. This makes him a powerful and influential figure in the new slum, in good part because his is the first and most reliable utility to be delivered, years or decades ahead of running water, postal services, and sewage.† All across the developing world, in South America and Asia and the Middle East, the cable guy has become a source of influence in the slum.