Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [29]
Brazil’s military government probably went the furthest in trying to prevent arrival cities from forming. They tried everything: initiating programs to mass-move northeastern peasants into the Amazon basin; constructing intermediate destination cities, including the new capital of Brasilia; giving grants to bolster existing medium-sized centers; outlawing all internal migration; establishing roadblocks and checkpoints to stop movement; and redirecting the entire state budget to facilitate “the rationalization and spatial distribution of population,” whatever that meant. None of this stopped slums from forming in the major cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and at the most rapid rate in the world. The violence and squalor of these favelas masked the fact that nobody was moving back because their material conditions were better and their prospects more hopeful.
The first person who managed to see through the myths of the arrival city was the anthropologist Janice Perlman, who spent the 1960s within the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, engaged in the then-fashionable study of “marginality,” in this case among peasant migrants. She had expected to find migrants “arriving lonely and rootless from the countryside, unprepared and unable to adapt fully to urban life, and perpetually anxious to return to their villages. In defense, they isolate themselves in parochial ruralistic enclaves.” Instead, she discovered, in her landmark 1976 study, The Myth of Marginality, “Careful examination reveals a more complex reality … Beneath the apparent squalor is a community characterized by careful planning in the use of limited housing space and innovative construction techniques on hillsides considered too steep for building by urban developers. Dotting the area are permanent brick structures that represent the accumulated savings of families who have been building little by little, brick by brick.” These supposedly marginal places, Perlman concluded, are “communities striving for elevation,” built by “dynamic, honest, capable people who could develop their neighborhoods on their own initiative if given the chance … Over time the favela will evolve naturally into a productive neighborhood, fully integrated into the city.” She warned, however, that these dynamic neighborhoods were becoming trapped: “In short, they have the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, the perseverance of pioneers, and the values of patriots,” she concluded. “What they do not have is an opportunity to fulfill their aspirations.”13
Her ideas, and those of like-minded South American scholars, slowly caught the attention of the Brazilian leadership, notably the economist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was to become president in 1995. In the late 1980s, Brazil embarked on its first proper study of the phenomenon and realized that not only was urban migration creating improved urban lives for the former peasants but that favela residents, after 10 years in the city, ended up having better economic and social standing, on average, than native-born residents of the city.14 In other words, the unimpeded arrival city was a more effective form of development than any known economic, social, or population-control policy.
By the end of the twentieth century, many economists and some governments realized that rural-urban migration, far from being a problem for poor countries, was the key to their economic futures. In fact, the largest study of the issue to date, by the World Bank in 2009, concluded that the most effective route to poverty reduction and economic growth is to encourage the highest possible urban population density and the growth of the largest cities through migration—as long as the urban areas where rural migrants arrive are given intensive investment and infrastructure development by governments.15 This was the first full-scale acknowledgment that arrival cities are at the center of the world’s future. But in many places, official attitudes continue to lag far behind this larger understanding. As recently as 2005, almost three-quarters