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By Root 1704 0

In the vast slums of Mumbai, the cable-wallah is a mafioso figure, wielding, on behalf of shadowy gangs, the power to loan and to influence government, to save huts from demolition or condemn them to the bulldozer. In the favelas of Brazil, where the average slum family has 1.5 TVs, 14 percent have computers, and 7 percent have internet access, cable and satellite TV hookups are part of the social-control arsenal of the drug gang.9 Jainal’s powers are more diffuse; he purchased his territory when he was 18, with the help of his cable-installer father, hooked it up to the cable-TV trunk by hand and lays the cables in the ever-expanding shantytown himself. He works as a mild intermediary between business, property owners, tenants, and other less visible figures. He charges 200 taka, or $3, per month for a 30-channel package—a spectrum of Hindi musicals, Bengali melodramas, Persian Gulf newscasts, and English cricket matches, which glows from at least one TV in each bustee. To walk through the slum at night is to traverse pools of blue light and competing blasts of tinny music.

The roaring success of the cable-TV business in an overcrowded Asian slum packed with former farmers earning less than $1 a day might seem a bizarre and inexplicable anomaly. If so, it’s because we so completely misunderstand the nature of the arrival city and its inhabitants. To the outside eye, this looks like a failed community relegated to the most horrid and repellent sort of houses: thick encrustations of unstable buildings elevated on stilts over open cesspits, separated by shadowy passageways less than a meter wide, crawling with livestock and untended children and reeking of waste. It is widely imagined, both by visiting Westerners and by established residents of cities like Dhaka, that such places must be the last refuge of failures, the human fallout of industrial society. But this is to disregard what the residents believe is the temporary nature of the filth and disorder, the investments they are making and the dynamics of a community that envisions itself becoming crisp, paved, lighted, legal, sanitary, and fully linked to the city as soon as possible. The 20,000 people in this corner of Dhaka, and most of the five million slum dwellers who make up 40 percent of the city’s population, have fought and saved for years to get here, have made their urbanization a matter of constant planning, calculation, and strategizing.‡ This can be seen in the booming cable businesses (which now sometimes include Internet access as well), the thriving market in every sort of mobile-phone service, the complex network of credit sources, appliance and furniture stores that have stoked a rudimentary wave of consumerism—and, above all, in the well-organized property market that allowed the slum-dwellers to buy their tiny patches of land. The arrival-city slum is a place of upward mobility—or at least a calculated grasp for the best hope of mobility. These are, in the words of a United Nations agency, not “slums of despair” but rather “slums of hope.”10

Jainal Abedin knows this. He watches the back streets of Kamrangirchar transform themselves from tentative improvisations into a permanent urban community. He first encounters the lone men and women who have been working and sleeping in the city for years, staking their claims on property, then the packages of cash going back to the village every month, then the rest of the family arriving. Many people move out after a few months. There are the frustrated ones who give up and return, the ones who move on to other, more central slums or to better neighborhoods. Poor people move house frequently, and arrival cities, in their early years, are places of constant movement and change. Jainal keeps track of it all. “These are very poor people living on this street, they’ve come from Barisal district,” he says of one fast-rising row of shacks, whose residents come from a swampy farming region 120 kilometers downriver to the south. “The men here are drivers, but they’ve saved a lot of money.” This island is known for