Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [38]
The Santa Marta intervention is a token project, of course—one of a few dozen favelas being transformed, in this expensive and resource-intensive fashion, out of the many hundreds of such neighborhoods across Rio, many of them even more deprived. But it stands a good chance of succeeding, because it draws on the fundamental dynamics of the arrival city. If an impediment can be removed, if the state can provide the basic fruits of the city to its residents, then an arrival city will take care of itself, like a river freed from an ice dam: its residents know what to do, they have been trying to do it for years, and they and their children will become part of the city. The practice known as “slum upgrading” has been taking place across the developing world for two decades now, with great success, but unfortunately only in limited, tokenistic locations. It is expensive to install infrastructure after a neighborhood has been fully built, though not as expensive as the criminal and political explosions that will result without it. Small interventions, like installing street lights or subsidizing a private bus service into the slum, can make an enormous difference, turning these neighborhoods into desirable and productive places. So, too, can full property ownership and political citizenship, even if this means paying taxes.
Brazil’s urban poor are at the far end of an arrival process that is just beginning on other continents. South America is the first place in the world to have experienced the great postwar rural-to-urban migration, a full four decades ahead of most of Asia and Africa. By the early 1950s, 40 percent of its population was living in cities, a higher proportion than in Asia and Africa today. Over the next five decades, this number doubled, so that South America is now the first fully urbanized place in the developing world: Its migration is now practically complete. Brazil went from being 45 percent urban in the 1960s to 75 percent in the 1980s—almost as urban as Europe. This explains why living standards and average incomes of the Latin American poor are an order of magnitude better than those elsewhere in the developing world.
The Brazilian experience illustrates what can happen when arrival cities are ignored or misunderstood by governments. But given the chance, Brazil’s favelas have often functioned successfully, transforming millions of desperately poor people into employed and integrated urbanites. In recent years, they have given rise to a sizable and successful “new” middle class that includes President Lula himself, who grew up in a São Paulo slum. Lula is among the first generation of politicians, including Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to be products of the arrival city and to build their political constituency from its ex-migrant residents.
But Brazil, with its hundreds of high-population slums still controlled by narco-gangs, also offers a cautionary tale. Its governments spent decades trying to prevent, remove, isolate or ignore the arrival city, and its inevitable dynamics bit back: If left to its own devices and deprived of access to the larger political system, the arrival city will generate a defensive politics of its own. In Brazil, it took the form of the drug gang. In Mumbai, it is Hindu nationalism. In the arrival cities of Europe, Islamic extremism. The arrival city wants to be normal, wants to be included. If it is given the resources to do so, it will flourish; without them, it is likely to explode. The arrival city is not a static, fixed place. Rather, it is a dynamic location headed on a trajectory. It is within our power to decide where that trajectory leads.
* Dowry payments have officially been illegal in India since 1961. This has not prevented them from becoming the largest single lifetime expenditure for many poor families. Often involving a motorcycle or amounts of gold and cash equivalent to a year’s earnings, they are debilitating for farmers who are not otherwise reliant on cash and lead to dangerous debt crises.
† Here and in the slums of all but the