The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (22 page)

The prospect of great new possibilities made these cities irresistible, not only to the entrepreneurial and professional elites, but also to a swelling migrant population made up of dispossessed farmers and small-town artisans. Cities such as Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Lahore, Lagos, Cairo, and Manila swelled to many times their size under colonial rule. Bombay’s population, for example, increased from less than 1.5 million in 1941 to more than 15 million by century’s end.
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In many cases, this huge expansion of cities occurred without a corresponding increase in either wealth or power. Such a development represents a tragic and fateful break in urban history. Whether in the Greco-Roman world, the Chinese or Islamic empires, the Italian cities of the Renaissance, or Northern Europe in the industrial age, large cities usually have developed as a consequence of accelerating economic and political fortunes.

As people migrated to the expanding cities, they either found work in expanding industries or tapped the largesse drawn from imperial conquests. In contrast, many of the largest cities in the contemporary world have grown ever more enormous amid persistent economic stagnation as well as social and political dysfunction. In most cases, these urban areas have failed, as one analyst noted, to perform “their assumed function as the generators of modernization and development.”

Superficially, many of these cities retained a Western face, often a legacy from colonial times. There are impressive offices of the global companies, first-class hotels, and elegant residential districts. But in reality, most of these cities have remained mired in underdevelopment, their fates largely subordinate to decisions made by corporations in the United States, Europe, or increasingly East Asia.
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Without reliable economic engines to power their growth, such urban regions often lack the wherewithal to maintain, much less expand, their most basic infrastructure. Throughout the developing world, as much as 30 to 50 percent of their garbage goes uncollected, and clean water is often in short supply. Air pollution has become more lethal than in the most congested cities of Europe or North America.

In the early twenty-first century, at least 600 million urbanites in developing countries survive in squatter settlements—called variously
barriadas,bidonvilles, katchi adabis, favelas,
and shantytowns. These settlements, according to one United Nations study, account for the bulk of all new growth in the developing world. Spending upwards of three-fourths of their meager incomes on food, many of these slum dwellers subsist on the fringes of the formal economy.
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Despite such miserable conditions, migrants continue to pour into these cities, in large part because prospects in their native rural communities have grown far worse.
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In many countries, drought and deforestation along with declining commodity prices have left little choice between migration and starvation. “In Sertão,” suggests a local saying from that drought-plagued district of Brazil, “one stays and dies or leaves and suffers.”
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For these rural people, the urban centers, particularly politically influential capital cities, at least offer some basic public services, access to international food aid, and the prospect of informal employment.
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As in Mexico City, these rural refugees account for a large proportion of both newcomers and residents of informal slum communities.

The industrial city of São Paulo, which by 2000 was ranked the third or fourth largest metropolis in the world, has seen some of the fastest growth experienced by such neighborhoods.
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Although the city boasts a considerable middle class, São Paulo has evolved into a highly bifurcated city, what the Brazilian sociologist Teresa Caldeira labels “a city of walls.”

Similar or even worse conditions persist elsewhere in cities throughout the developing world. In Africa, long one of the least urbanized regions of the world, the percentage of natives living in cities more than doubled to some 40 percent between 1960 and 1980. Declining agricultural exports, lack of large-scale industry, the ravages of epidemic disease, and persistent political instability have left African cities among the most ill prepared to accommodate massive demographic growth.
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These pathologies evolved on a grand scale in Lagos, whose population expanded almost ninefold in the forty years following the departure of the British in 1960. A small minority live in well-appointed neighborhoods, but most residents eke out their existence in crowded quarters, averaging 3.5 people per room, often on the outskirts of the city. Nearly 1 in 5 residents squat in illegal settlements.
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In many African cities, the affluent escape the congestion by heading for more comfortable homes on the periphery. Large-scale Western-style suburbs, attracting both whites and upwardly mobile blacks, have evolved in the countryside outside Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg in South Africa. As occurred earlier in North America, businesses often have followed this outward migration.
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Long a center of urban civilization, since the 1950s the Middle East has experienced some of the most explosive urban growth in the world, and little of it has been successful. Cairo, the largest city in the region, has expanded its land area to fifteen times its 1900 levels, while its population has grown to over 10 million. Baghdad, a city of five hundred thousand in the 1940s, after tripling in size by the 1960s, swelled to well over 2 million by the end of the millennium. Once obscure cities—such as Amman, Kuwait City, and Riyadh—enjoyed even more rapid rates of growth.
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Owing to the region’s prodigious energy resources, the Middle Eastern cities might have been expected to possess the wherewithal to deal with their rising populations. Islam’s early success as a city-based religion could have provided some glue for constructing a workable urban moral order.
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Tragically, even at the height of the oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s, few of these cities created either large-scale manufacturing or world-class service industries capable of employing the growing ranks of city dwellers. And to date, Islam has not been notably any more successful than other belief systems in coping with the ill effects of mass urbanization.

The economic prospects of Middle Eastern megacities, like those in much of the developing world, have been further eroded by the rise of what the historian Manuel Castells labels “informationalism.” The increased importance of technology, and the evolution of global economic networks, hurt cities whose populations were largely unable or unwilling to participate successfully in the evolving international economy.
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With the notable exceptions of secular-oriented Turkey and pariah Israel, few Near Eastern cities possessed high levels of computer and technical literacy. Barely 1 percent of the population in other Near Eastern countries, for example, used the Internet in 2000. The Middle East, noted the Syrian academic Sami Khiyami, now stood in danger of being “left behind again” in the information age, just as had occurred in the industrial era.
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Equally critical, these cities have lost large numbers of entrepreneurial and educated people, who now seek out opportunities in North America and Europe. This exodus has been particularly noticeable among highly urbanized ethnic and religious minorities.
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Since the 1960s, many groups, such as Arab Christians and Jews, have departed cities like Cairo, Baghdad, and Tehran even after having been resident there for centuries.
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These migrations have left behind a population that is generally too poor and unskilled to lay the basis for the kind of modern economy capable of financing an urban infrastructure. As urban populations passed over 50 percent in most Arab countries, sewer and water systems failed to keep pace. Housing also remained in short supply. In Cairo, Casablanca, and Alexandria, as many as three or four people crowd one room. Illegal settlements surround most of the major cities, constituting more than half of all new housing in urban parts of Egypt. A United Nations study estimated that by the 1990s, 84 percent of Cairenes could be characterized as slum dwellers.
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The Iranian capital of Tehran stands as another tragic failure. A relatively young city—becoming the country’s capital only in 1788—Tehran, as home to the ruling shahs, had enjoyed spectacular growth throughout the twentieth century. The country’s oil wealth, expanding middle class, and educated population all pointed to the potential for the building of a great modern city.

Unfortunately, the frequently corrupt and authoritarian regime had failed to distribute the benefits of the nation’s prosperity to its growing urban population. As the economy grew, rates of poverty in Tehran more than doubled between the 1940s and the 1970s.
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Social problems, including crime and prostitution, festered as newcomers crowded once tightly knit neighborhoods, turning Tehran, in the words of one Iranian planner, into “a city of strangers.”

Such alienated, impoverished urbanites, like the European working class of the nineteenth century, increasingly embraced radical ideologies, including Islamic fundamentalism. In 1979, these “marginalized Tehranis” and hard-pressed
bazaris
poured into the streets to overturn the shah’s rule and bring to power a fundamentalist government.

Cities in other countries not yet under Islamist control have suffered similar economic and social problems. From North Africa to Pakistan, these agglomerations incubated often violent movements with strongly antimodernist tendencies. Urban areas in the region, noted one top UN official, now represent “nothing less than social time bombs” that threaten to undermine the entire global order.
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“QUEENS OF THE FURTHER EAST”

Asia experienced the world’s largest urban migration—in terms of absolute numbers—during the second half of the twentieth century.
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In contrast with the growth of the Middle East, much of Latin America, and Africa, Asia’s metropolitan development generally occurred more along classic historical lines. Cities not only burgeoned in numbers, but also experienced considerable economic expansion, as well as often greater degrees of both political and social order.

Rather than suffer from the dilemma of postcolonial rule, many of Asia’s cities have lived up to the promise of what one nineteenth-century colonialist called “queens of the further east.”
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This optimistic picture was not universal, of course. At the dawn of the new millennium, nearly 40 percent of Karachi’s 10 million people lived in squatter settlements. Political instability, particularly the growth of anti-Western and antimodernist Islamic movements, has since slowed the successful integration of Pakistani cities into the global economy.
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Other major cities in Asia—Jakarta, Bangkok, and Manila—have also suffered from political upheavals. Most experienced economic growth, but often barely enough to offset their own demographic expansion. The majority of residents remained very poor, although generally not in the proportions found in the cities of Africa and the Near East.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, India reemerged as a major center of global urban life. In contradiction to Mahatma Gandhi’s ideal vision of a village-centered nation, the nation’s economy shifted from a predominantly rural and agricultural system to one that was increasingly industrialized (even postindustrial) and urban. Spurred by state-led investment in manufacturing and modern infrastructure, cities in India more than doubled their share of the national gross domestic product between 1950 and 1995.
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The reform of India’s once quasi-Socialist system, which had long suppressed entrepreneurial ventures, further accelerated urban growth.

Much of the new urban growth was concentrated less in the old colonial hub, Calcutta, than in the capital city of New Delhi and the other great outpost of imperialism, Bombay. In contrast with those of cities in much of the developing world, the prospects for Bombay, whose name was changed to Mumbai in 1995, are not entirely bleak. Projected to be the world’s second largest city, after Tokyo, by 2015, Mumbai already assumed a commanding position in a whole series of industries from financial services to manufacturing and entertainment. In the late 1990s, steps toward constructing new poles of development such as the “new city” of Navi Mumbai helped create new environments attractive to the city’s growing middle class.
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More than anything, the presence of a large group of educated, technically proficient workers—by 2000, India accounted for roughly 30 percent of the world’s software engineers—constituted the critical advantage for the nation’s metropolitan areas. This proved particularly true for several smaller Indian cities such as Bangalore.
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By the 1980s, Bangalore had emerged as India’s fastest-growing city, its population soaring from barely 1 million in 1960 to over 4.5 million by century’s end. With over nine hundred software firms, the city had become widely regarded as India’s “Silicon Valley,” and its development largely followed that of the original American version—sprawling, car oriented, and full of largely self-contained, research-oriented industrial parks.
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