I recently purchased a copy of Arrival City by Doug Saunders. I’d heard a bit about the book, and was hoping that it would provide some great additional information for me on cities and the importance of them as engines of growth and prosperity.
The book largely delivers, with a collection of interesting stories about the transition from rural to urban life. The arrival city is a bit of a slippery concept, but I think still provides a useful analytical way of thinking about the specific places mentioned in the book. Arrival cities, according to the book, represent those often marginal areas of large cities, where rural migrants are able to get to the first rung on the urban ladder.
The book argues that it is this first crucial step that is often overlooked when we think of what is really transforming the world into a truly urban place. The transition between village and rural life is the focus of the book, and it really highlighted for me the challenge of becoming an urbanite. In fact many of the stories he covers are about the failures of this transition both in the West and the developing world.
The book covers a good deal of territory both geographically, and metaphorically. It includes stops in Turkey, Brazil, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Iran among others.
As a journalist, Saunders is able to weave the personal stories into a compelling narrative, and these individual personal stories are the best part of the book..
Saunders is able to link these personal stories together and highlight the importance of local and urban issues for the national context. Indeed this is the most interesting part of the book, where he is able to link the improving improvements and changes to a given favela to the largest context of President Lula and Brazil’s recent success. He does the same in linking the success of the Gecekndu in Turkey to the rise of its President Recep Ergodan These good examples, are unfortunately is lacking in some of the other sections.
One thing I found fascinating, was the importance of providing a path to citizenship, as a way of bringing immigrants into the formal economy. This is one thing Canada does better than any else, as a large majority of immigrants to Canada are able obtain citizenship in three years. This much faster than other countries. It also was interesting to note that this "path to citizenship" has also been provided in the U.S. through amnesties, which seems to come up often in their debate about immigration. Hopefully for their own sake they will get around to sometime soon.
The book does a good job of combining Saunders obvious skill as a journalist with obvious scholarship and research into the topic. The book is a good read, and even attempts at times to deal with the larger national political issues. It's a refreshing take to see national politics as fundamentally urban, which one imagines it is in some of these countries. I wish there was a bit more here on structural issues, on the macro context, but generally speaking it's covered off.
