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peninsula in the nineteenth century, had industrialized on a large scale; the wages paid in its factories were double those in Madrid, and the displaced peasants of Spain and southern France, their land overwhelmed by population growth and frequent famine, headed there in great numbers. Between the mid-eighteenth century and 1854, Barcelona’s population grew from 35,000 to 175,000, inside a very limited area defined by the old city walls. A majority of its residents wound up living in the most dire sort of unplanned slums, prone to disease outbreaks and cholera epidemics in what was considered the most unsanitary city in Europe. Even more so than Paris, the arrival city of Barcelona, neglected by all levels of government, became the site of violent unrest, with a century-long sequence of uprisings, revolutions, and riots that were perhaps the worst in Europe. Because of this crisis, and because of the particular genius of the urban planner Ildefons Cerdà, Barcelona became one of the first cities to embrace the arrival city in its urban plans. Cerdà’s famous extension of the city, the Eixample, provided not only sanitation but the possibility of a toehold of ownership in the city for a generation of rural arrivals. It was certainly not sufficient to accommodate the masses who kept arriving through the early twentieth century, which was rife with arrival-city explosions, but it did set an example for cities in the future.

HOW THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS BUILT

London

Five years before Jeanne Bouvier made her trip from the Rhone valley to Paris, a similar journey, under equally urgent and traumatic circumstances, was made by two peasant tenant farmers from a thatched-roof village in southeastern England. In 1874, amid the final sweep of enclosure acts, a young married couple felicitously named Will and Lucy Luck, found themselves evicted from their cottage. They packed their few possessions onto their backs and walked the 50 kilometers from Luton to the fast-expanding outskirts of London.

They ended up in the arrival city that had spread outward from the edge of the Regent’s Canal near Paddington Station during the previous decade; its long rows of houses had mainly been built by speculative developers hoping for buyers among the lower middle classes moving outward from the City of London along the new tramlines. Such people simply didn’t exist in great enough numbers to fill the suburbs, especially in the long economic depression that had begun a year before the Lucks came to London. As developers would learn throughout the century, the larger human flood is not outward from the city but inward from the fields. Their neighborhood, like much of London’s ballooning periphery, became an arrival-city slum.

The Lucks found themselves surrounded by former tradesmen, farmers, and rural workers from villages near theirs in Bedfordshire, drawing them into the tight social networks that led to employment. Lucy soon found work as a straw plaiter in one of the many hat shops in their district; Will’s equine skills led to solid work as a horse-keeper for the railway companies. They both made many times more money than they would have been able to earn in the village and eventually established a comfortable life in the secure reaches of the middle classes.17

Millions of people from across Britain were following the Lucks’s path to London, in what, until the late twentieth century, was history’s largest rural-to-urban migration. London was by far the largest city in the world, and at almost any time in the nineteenth century at least 40 percent of its citizens were born outside the city. By 1901, the metropolis contained a startling 1.3 million rural arrivals, up from 750,000 only 50 years earlier, with another 50,000 or so arriving from the country each year throughout the last half of the nineteenth century. The largest group were women: In 1881, London had 1,312 women for every thousand men, mainly because so many more women came from the country to enter domestic service.

Nineteenth-century London was infamous for its eastern