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By the time the smoke cleared, the world had changed. War, even more conclusively than peace, had served to urbanize the West, and those temporary innovations of the First World War, the passport and immigration control, became permanent features of the nation-state. Those would become the principal elements of migration when, in the decades after the Second World War, the world’s newly awakened south and east would begin sending their villagers out to their own arrival cities and those of the West. Though the numbers and distances would give this final migration a scale never seen before, they would follow patterns that ought to seem terribly familiar.

* Another effect of the Parisian arrival city was to turn French into a universal language of France. In Jeanne Bouvier’s time, only perhaps 40 percent of the population spoke French, and far fewer, mainly those who had worked extensively in Paris, felt confident speaking it; most spoke only regional tongues and dialects, such as Occitan, Burgundian, Breton, and Walloon. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that a majority of French citizens were able to speak the country’s official language.

† Jeanne Bouvier would become, in the twentieth century, a labor organizer, feminist, amateur historian, and the author of one of the very few memoirs written by European rural-to-urban migrants.

‡ The expression faire la grève emerged from this square; at first, it meant “to be unemployed,” while today it means “to be on strike.”

§ Those 5 percent of escapees from the working class were able to make up 33 to 50 percent of the middle class because the middle class was so much smaller in number.

6

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF A GREAT ARRIVAL CITY

Istanbul

After you have awoken at sunrise in your motionless hillside village, walked down the rock-strewn lane into the valley, waited at the side of the lone paved road, and then bumped for long hours along an asphalt path that follows the Silk Road’s route to the very westernmost tip of the Asian continent, you find yourself in a place called Harem. It does not offer, as its name might suggest, any kind of alluring sanctuary or fragrant Oriental specter; in fact, Harem is a place of anonymous, unadorned reinforced-concrete modernism and constant noise and bustle, of hasty lunches sold over smoldering wood fires and hucksters shouting their offerings; it is the place, more than any other, where the great transformation of Istanbul, and then of the Turkish nation, has had its origin.

Harem is a bus station. It is here, decades ahead of the rest of the Eastern world, that the great migration has taken place in its most dramatic fashion. And it was here, while most of the world wasn’t watching, that the migration built, for the first time, an arrival city that was large and powerful enough to take over a nation. What began at Harem, and exploded over an amazingly short period across Istanbul, offers a foretaste of the transformations, both exciting and threatening, that are about to sweep across half of the world. If you begin at Harem, you will find the future of the world’s cities.

The Harem bus station was erected in the 1950s, when the modern Turkish road system first made it possible for people to move efficiently across the country’s expanse. Since then, it has been the main landing point for a constant flood of people arriving, usually with their few possessions in plastic bags, from villages in central and eastern Anatolia. In four decades, these arrivals have increased the city’s metropolitan population from under a million in the late 1950s to about 14 million today. Until 1973, when the first bridge was built across the Bosporus, Harem was the last stop on a path that had been the central trunk of the Silk Road; it remains the final destination for many. During the 1980s and early 1990s, half a million villagers a year were settling here, and, even though Istanbul is routinely said to be “full,”