From one of Canada's leading journalists comes a major book about how the movement of populations from rural to urban areas on the margins is reshaping our world. These transitional spaces are where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the great explosion of violence will occur. The difference depends on our ability to notice.

The twenty-first century is going to be remembered for the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural life into cities. The movement engages an unprecedented number of people, perhaps a third of the world's population, and will affect almost everyone in tangible ways. 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.

Arrival City offers a detailed tour of the key places of the "final migration" and explores the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in the developing new world order. From villages in China, India, Bangladesh and Poland to the international cities of the world, Doug Saunders portrays a diverse group of people as they struggle to make the transition, and in telling the story of their journeys — and the history of their often multi-generational families enmeshed in the struggle of transition — gives an often surprising sense of what factors aid in the creation of a stable, productive community.

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The modern arrival city is the product of the final great human migration. A third of the world’s population is on the move this century, from village to city, a move that began in earnest shortly after the Second World War, when South American and Middle Eastern villagers left their homes to build new enclaves on the urban outskirts, and is entering its most intense phase now, with 150 to 200 million Chinese peasants “floating” between village and city, vast shifts under way in India and Bangladesh, and huge numbers of Africans and Southeast Asians joining the exodus. In 1950, 309 million people in the developing world lived in cities; by 2030, 3.9 billion will. As of 2008, exactly half the world’s 6.7 billion people lived in villages, most of them in Africa and Asia, including almost all of the billion poorest people in the world, those whose families subsist on less than $1 a day. The wealthy nations of North America, Europe, Australasia and Japan, which were largely peasant-populated as recently as the late nineteenth century, today are between 72 and 95 per cent urban, figures that have not changed in decades. In most of these countries, less than 5 per cent of the population is employed in agriculture; this is still enough to produce more export food than all the peasant-heavy countries of the developing world combined. At the moment, only 41 per cent of Asians and 38 per cent of Africans live in cities—leaving a population of villagers that is unproductive and unsustainable. They are on the land not because it is a better life, but because they are trapped.
 
This is changing fast. Between 2007 and 2050, the world’s cities will absorb an additional 3.1 billion people. The population of the world’s countryside will stop growing around 2019, and by 2050 will have fallen by 600 million, despite much higher family sizes in rural areas, largely because of migration to the city. India’s rural population, one of the last to stop growing, will peak in 2025 at 909 million, and shrink to 743 million by 2050. Each month, there are five million new city-dwellers created through migration or birth in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Between 2000 and 2030, the urban population of Asia and Africa will double, adding as many city-dwellers in one generation as these continents have accumulated during their entire histories. By the end of 2025, 60 per cent of the world will live in cities; by 2050, more than 70 per cent; and by century’s end, the entire world, even the poor nations of sub-Saharan Africa, will be at least three-quarters urban. This point, when the entire world is as urban as the West is today, will mark an end point. Once humans urbanize, or migrate to more urban countries, they almost never return. After this final half of humanity has moved to the cities, there will be migrations again, but never again a mass movement on this scale. Humanity will have reached a new and permanent equilibrium.
 
This migration is, in any measurable sense, an improvement. There is no romance in village life. Rural living is the largest single killer of humans today, the greatest source of malnutrition, infant mortality and reduced lifespans. According to the World Food Programme, three-quarters of the world’s billion people living in hunger are peasant farmers. The rural village is also the predominant source of excessive population growth, with its need for large families to provide labour and stave off ruination. Urban incomes everywhere are higher, often by large multiples; access to education, health, water and sanitation as well as communications and culture are always better in the city. The move to cities also reduces ecological damage and carbon emissions, by decreasing distances and increasing shared technologies: cities, in the words of one major  study, “provide an opportunity to mitigate or even reverse the impact of global climate change as they provide the economies of scale that reduce per capita costs and demand for resources.”5 Mortal poverty is a rural phenomenon: three-quarters of the world’s poor, those with less than a dollar a day, live in rural areas. The dramatic declines in the number of very poor people in the world around the turn of this century, with 98 million people leaving poverty between 1998 and 2002 and the world poverty rate falling from 34 per cent in 1999 to 25 per cent in 2009, were caused entirely by urbanization: people made better livings when they moved to the city, and sent funds back to the village. Urbanization doesn’t just improve the lives of those who move to the city; it improves conditions in the countryside, too, by giving villages the finance they need to turn agriculture into a business with salaried jobs and stable incomes.

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"Doug Saunders is neither a glum pessimist nor a glib optimist and Arrival City will not please closed minds. But this provocative, disturbing, and exhilarating book is a delight for thoughtful readers. Indeed, it is essential. Migration is reshaping the world and, as Saunders demonstrates, the choices we make today will determine whether it brings prosperity or catastrophe tomorrow."
—Dan Gardner, author of Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear

"Arrival City is scarier than a dark urban fantasy and more gritty than the bottom of a demographer's coffee cup. It's also highly topical, as population growth and immigration are subjects of heated debate worldwide."
—Daily Mercury

"Saunders's approach is through anecdotes and vignettes, but… they cumulate into a persuasive whole… Saunders's practical suggestions for helping immigrants… are sure to attract attention… [A] highly readable book."
—Paul Collier, Financial Times

"An important new book… Saunders's greatest strength lies in the global breadth of his reportage… His evocative descriptions… transform a complex, serious subject into a page-turning read."
—Literary Review

"Few books can make rationalists feel optimistic and empowered for the future. This one does."
—The Guardian

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MAP: ARRIVAL CITIES AND THEIR VILLAGES
PREFACE: THE PLACE WHERE EVERYTHING CHANGES
 
1. ON THE EDGE OF THE CITY
Liu Gong Li, China
Tower Hamlets, London, U.K.
 
2. OUTSIDE IN: THE LIVES OF THE NEW CITY
Kolhewadi, Ratnagiri, India
Kamrangirchar, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Shenzhen, China
Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya
Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
 
3. ARRIVING AT THE TOP OF THE PYRAMID
Los Angeles, California
Herndon, Virginia, and Wheaton, Maryland
 
4. THE URBANIZATION OF THE VILLAGE
Tatary, Poland
Shuilin, Sichuan, China
Dorli, Maharashtra, India
Biswanath, Sylhet, Bangladesh
 
5. THE FIRST GREAT MIGRATION: HOW THE WEST ARRIVED
Paris
London
Toronto and Chicago
 
6. THE DEATH AND LIFE OF A GREAT ARRIVAL CITY
Istanbul
 
7. WHEN THE MARGINS EXPLODE
Emamzadeh ‘Iza, Tehran
Petare, Caracas
Mulund, Mumbai
 
8. THE NEW CITY CONFRONTS THE OLD WORLD
Les Pyramides, Evry, France
Kreuzberg, Berlin
Parla, Spain
 
9. ARRIVAL’S END: MUD FLOOR TO MIDDLE CLASS
Jardim Angela, São Paulo, Brazil
Mumbai
 
10. ARRIVING IN STYLE
Slotervaart, Amsterdam
Karail, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Thorncliffe Park, Toronto
 
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX

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DOUG SAUNDERS is the European Bureau Chief of the Globe and Mail and the author of a popular and award-winning column devoted to intellectual ideas and social developments behind the news. He has won four National Newspaper Awards. He is based in London, England.

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