Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [28]
Selina Akhter and her neighbors have not invested their entire life savings and energies in the arrival city only to see it remain a pungent slum. At the moment, though, having a roof over her head, a basic (if distant) source of water, a network of security, and some means of getting to work are the best she can manage. The next few years, and the decisions of Bangladesh’s various governments and agencies, will determine whether this corner of Kamrangirchar will follow a path that leaves it stuck, isolated, and increasingly desperate, violent, and poor or one that transforms it into an increasingly permanent and established urban community, contributing to the economic life of Bangladesh and generating a stable middle class who will ensure the future vitality and security of the city.
Because arrival cities are so widely misunderstood and distrusted—dismissed as static “slums” rather than places of dynamic change—governments have devoted much of the past 60 years to attempting to prevent their formation. It didn’t begin this way. In the two decades after the Second World War, squatter enclaves were tolerated. Industrial growth was occurring at such a pace that seemingly endless supplies of rural migrants were needed to fill labor shortages, and countries realized the value of urbanization. Then, as urban economies became increasingly informal, starting in the late 1960s, and manufacturing economies were no longer always the main destination for rural migrants, governments and international organizations developed an obsession with “over-urbanization.” This coincided with a romanticized, idealized view of the peasant life popular in Marxist economies and in many corners of academia.
The result was policies that attempted to prevent the great migration, by discouraging, redirecting, or blocking villagers from entering major cities. These policies rarely worked. Authoritarian countries had the most success: the most dramatic and far-reaching such policy was China’s hukou household-registration system, which prevented any urbanization until the 1980s (though it did not prevent countless millions of peasants from establishing footholds in the city, allowing the rapid creation of arrival cities when more liberal policies arrived). Other authoritarian states, such as South Africa’s apartheid regime and Chile’s Pinochet government, also physically blocked migration. It is worth noting that countries rarely experience economic growth while banning or restricting rural-urban migration: without urbanization, the economy stagnates, and people often starve.
Other strategies proved equally ineffective and damaging. Indonesia forced 600,000 families to move from villages on the central island of Java to more remote regions, partly to establish political control and partly to prevent urbanization. This did nothing to prevent Jakarta from rapidly urbanizing and may actually have accelerated the urban shift. Other large-scale attempts to settle populations in other regions of the country to avoid cities—in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Brazil, and the Andean countries of South America—did nothing to slow or decrease urbanization and often did great damage to the economy and to the lives of millions of people. Arrival cities continued to form, but because of these policies they couldn’t thrive or make the transition into formal and comfortable urban neighbourhoods. Studies of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Jakarta, Indonesia, found that migration-control laws made life much worse for the poor while creating deep layers of corruption, since migration meant bribing officials; this, in turn, increased