The Final Great Migration
What will be remembered about our century, more than anything except perhaps changes to the climate, is the final shift of human populations from agricultural life to cities, the effects of which are being felt around the world. Arrival City gives us an on-the-ground view of this phenomenon—from Maryland to Shenzhen, from the favelas of Rio to the shanty towns of Mumbai, from Los Angeles to Nairobi.
Doug Saunders introduces us to the migrants themselves, and with the aid of their stories elucidates their essential part in the economic fabric. He makes clear that the cities and nations that provide citizenship and opportunity to migrants stand to benefit as the migrant class evolves into a middle class, and he explains why those that ignore these people will see increased social unrest, poverty, and religious fundamentalism.
Blending intimate personal portraits with brilliant social analysis, Arrival City will change the way we think about globalization.
This final great wave of urbanization engages an unprecedented number of people, perhaps a third of the world’s population, and will affect almost everyone in tangible ways. It will be the last human movement of this size and scope, and the changes it will bring to family life, from large agrarian families to small urban ones, will put an end to the major theme of human history: continuous population growth.
More than ever before, people in villages and rural areas are packing up and moving to the metropolis; there they create “arrival cities,” clusters of ex-villagers on the city outskirts or in hidden pockets of the core, where they struggle to establish a new life and integrate themselves socially and economically. Their goal is to build communities, to save and invest and create new economies, and often to move out, creating new room for the next wave of migrants.
Arrival City argues that this migration is a story unfolding before our eyes in cities around the world, from Istanbul to Toronto, from Warsaw to Mumbai, from Nairobi to Shenzhen, and it has profound implications for the success of local, national, and international economies. Many of these arrival cities and their denizens are overlooked, willfully ignored, or even bulldozed.
As Saunders shows, this is a profound mistake. Successful arrival cities create prosperous middle classes; failed arrival cities create poverty and social problems. Saunders shows how so many conflicts, revolutions and political crises have grown directly out of unsuccessful arrival cities, from Paris in 1789 when rural migrants rose up against food shortages and poverty; to Tehran in 1978, when the revolution began with non-Islamist migrants; to the suburbs of Paris and Berlin, where disaffected migrants have led uprisings or resorted to Islamic fundamentalism.
The key, Saunders argues, is to see the opportunity of these arrival cities. By providing citizenship, a chance to own property, education, transportation links, and good security, cities like Sao Paulo in Brazil, or Parla in Spain, local and national governments have succeeded in successfully integrating their migrants. As he explores these fascinating macro trends, Saunders employs his terrific journalist’s eye for the human details. We meet families and individuals from Dhaka to Rio to Berlin to suburban Maryland, whose stories give us a vivid portrait of their world. What he sees when he looks at these arrival cities isn’t a static condition that we could ignore even if we wanted to, but rather a point of interchange, a place in between where some of the most important and surprising changes of the twenty-first century are taking place.