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By Root 1567 0

by exertion and promise, battered by violence and death, strangled by neglect and misunderstanding. History is being written, and largely ignored, in places like Liu Gong Li, or in Clichy-sous-Bois, on the outskirts of Paris, or in Dharavi, the almost million-strong arrival city in Mumbai, or in the Latino arrival city of Compton, on the edge of Los Angeles—all places settled by people who have arrived from the village, all places that function to propel people into the core life of the city and to send support back to the next wave of arrivals. Arrival cities are known around the world by many names: as the slums, favelas, bustees, bidonvilles ashwaiyyat, shantytowns, kampongs, urban villages, gecekondular, and barrios of the developing world, but also as the immigrant neighborhoods, ethnic districts, banlieues difficiles, Plattenbau developments, Chinatowns, Little Indias, Hispanic quarters, urban slums, and migrant suburbs of wealthy countries, which are themselves each year absorbing two million people, mainly villagers, from the developing world.

I am coining the term “arrival city” to unite these places, because our conventional scholarly and bureaucratic language—“immigrant gateway,” “community of primary settlement”—misrepresents them by disguising their dynamic nature, their transitory role. When we look at arrival cities, we tend to see them as fixed entities: an accumulation of inexpensive dwellings containing poor people, usually in less than salubrious conditions. In the language of urban planners and governments, these enclaves are too often defined as static appendages, cancerous growths on an otherwise healthy city. Their residents are seen, in the words of the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “as an ecologically defined group rather than as part of the social system.”1

This leads to tragic urban-housing policies in the West, of the sort that made Paris erupt into riots in 2005, London in the 1980s, Amsterdam into murderous violence in the first decade of this century. It leads to even worse policies in the cities of Asia, Africa, and South America, to slum-clearance projects in which the futures of tens or hundreds of thousands of people are recklessly erased. Or, in an alternative version offered in popular books and movies, arrival cities are written off as contiguous extensions of a dystopian “planet of slums,” a homogenous netherworld, in which the static poor are consigned to prisonlike neighborhoods guarded by hostile police, abused by exploitative corporations, and preyed upon by parasitic evangelical religions.2 This is certainly the fate of many arrival cities after they have been deprived of their fluid structure or abandoned by the state. Yet, to see this as their normal condition is to ignore the arrival city’s great success: it is, in the most successful parts of both the developing world and the Western world, the key instrument in creating a new middle class, abolishing the horrors of rural poverty and ending inequality.‡

Rather than dismissing these neighborhoods as changeless entities or mere locations, we need to start seeing them as a set of functions. The first arrival-city function is the creation and maintenance of a network: a web of human relationships connecting village to arrival city to established city. These networks, aided by communications technology, money transfers, and more traditional family and village relationships, provide a sense of protection and security (always of primary importance in the arrival city); they generate a sense of leadership and political representation; they give the arrival-city enclave a self-identity. Second, the arrival city functions as an entry mechanism. It not only takes people in by providing cheap housing and assistance in finding entry-level jobs (through the networks), but it also makes possible the next wave of arrivals in a process known as chain migration: The arrival city sends cash and provides basic lines of credit to the village; it arranges jobs and marriages across international boundaries and sets up schemes