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that rural-migrant neighborhoods are crucial to a city’s future, not a problem to be eliminated. The past decade has seen a dramatic change in official opinions. Still, the demolition of arrival-city slums is all too common a practice in such cities as Mumbai and Manila. These bulldozings destroy the economic and social functioning of the arrival city. Even in cases where evicted slum-dwellers are given rudimentary apartments in tower blocks—a common practice in Asia and South America—it is no longer possible for them to create shops, restaurants, and factories to suit the community’s needs or to form organic networks to link village to city. The people become dependent, and their communities get stuck.

As recently as 2005, Mumbai launched an aggressive drive to demolish shantytowns, which occupy 14 percent of the city’s land area and house 60 percent of its 12 million people. More than 67,000 homes were bulldozed, their families thrown into streets and fields. While some of the slums had been built on dangerous land, on the verges of railway tracks and airports or in national parks, this was explicitly a demolition aimed at the core purpose of the arrival city. Mumbai official Vijay Kalam Patil explained to reporters: “We want to put the fear of the consequences of unfettered migration into these people. We have to restrain them from coming to Mumbai.”19 Of course, it did not work. Within a year, almost all of the slums had been rebuilt. The same thing happened when Beijing, as part of its 1999 beautification campaign, demolished 2.6 million square meters of “urban village” housing, restaurants, markets, and stores built by migrants: they quickly returned. For the most part, governments have realized the folly of such acts. Slum-demolition campaigns get a lot of media attention—deservedly, given the misery they create—but they are relatively rare today: A few hundred thousand people are affected each year in Asia and Africa, out of the billion who live in slums. While overbearing urban planners will always exist, the larger logic of the city is inescapable: New people create new economies, and those economies develop best when those people, no matter how poor, are able to stage their arrival in an organic, self-generated, bottom-up fashion. The city wants to have migrants. It does not want to meet the fate of Shenzhen, a wound that will not heal, a place nobody can call home.

ARRIVAL POSTPONED: THE STUCK CITY

Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya

Eunice Orembo, her four sons, and her daughter spend their mornings and nights in a single room, ten by seven meters, its walls made from a slurry of red mud, stones, and garbage, packed flat and dried onto a lattice of tree branches lashed to wooden poles; these mud walls hold up a roof made of sheets of corrugated metal. Their home is a tight but welcoming space, with three small windows, colorful fabric and plastic sheets to cover the mud walls, a gas cooker, a CD player, a TV, some chairs, some bare fluorescent-tube lights, a shelf of textbooks, and some attractive decorations with a traditional lion motif. Eunice has hung sheets to divide the interior into two rooms. Her sons, aged 14 to 21, sleep on one side; she and her 5-year-old daughter sleep and cook on the other. These are very close quarters, penned in by great waves of noise, stench, frightening darkness, and criminal violence from outside.

This wattle-and-daub shack is perched amid a lake of similar houses jammed close together across a two-kilometer expanse, separated by narrow alleyways of mud, garbage, and slurries of human waste, a labyrinthine, pungent cluster of almost unimaginably high population density built on hillocks of refuse near the heart of Nairobi. This is the Kianda neighborhood in the Kibera slum, whose inhabitants, numbering close to a million, are perhaps the largest and most infamous slum community in sub-Saharan Africa, subject to disease infestations and bursts of political and gang violence on a terrifying scale. At the end of 2007, Kibera exploded into months of murderous political violence,