Slums and our Next World

In a span of a hundred years, between 1950 and 2050, three billion people, a third of the human race, will migrate from a marginal rural existence to potentially prosperous and environmentally efficient urban life. The instrument, the “crucial protein in the human chemistry” of moving from village to city is the slum. Slums are transitional spaces where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the next explosion of violence will occur.

This is the theme of Doug Saunders’ new book Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World. Saunders is the European Bureau Chief of The Globe and Mail. It has just been announced that the book has earned him the $35,000 Donner Prize for this year.

Saunders calls slums “arrival cities,” another word for shantytowns, banlieux, bidonvilles, favelas, barrios, kamsongs, or any of hundreds of other names to describe the neighbourhoods that have sprung up like mushrooms on the edges of all of the world’s great cities and are the habitations of the new, and not-so-new arrivals. Like mushrooms, they can be poisonous. Saunders’ profound insight, after looking closely at many of them, is that a slum may include poverty, crime and squalor but it can also be a dynamic place filled with life and commerce. “The arrival city,” he writes, “is a machine that transforms humans. It is also, if it is allowed to flourish, the instrument that may create a permanently sustainable world.”

It can only flourish if it is solidly connected with the inner city, if it is not isolated and ghettoized. The arrival city may at first glance look like a cramped and sordid shantytown. But on further inspection, under the right conditions, it may become clear that there is real dynamism “in the backstreet buzz of small shops and vendors doing business”. The complex process of transformation towards working class urban prosperity may have begun.

Arrival cities need access to the inner city. Without good public transport, schools and access to jobs and business opportunities expectations may be blighted. The key public policy approach to them is facilitation and support.

Let us hope that the book finds readers in Europe. Everywhere immigration is a hot issue. Multiculturalism has been pronounced dead in Germany and in other countries. There has been little understanding of the complexities involved in the process of migration which Saunders describes. Instead there has been prejudice and old-fashioned nationalism.

Three billion people are on the move. It is time to turn a page.

Based on “The Migrant’s Quest” by Peter Showler in The Literary Review of Canada, April 2011.