It also doesn’t mean they can form a consensus on a way forward. In fact, their intimate involvement with a set of local problems makes it, if anything, less likely that they’ll agree. Each of them is looking at a gigantic (and constantly morphing) complex system through a soda straw. For this reason a pure bottom-up approach, which privileges local insight over outside knowledge, where you “just ask a local,” isn’t the answer, either. It can be just as problematic as a top-down technocratic approach that brings in outside “experts” who ignore local perspectives. How do you decide which local to ask, for a start? And what if they disagree, suck you into local disputes, or just have no clear idea what’s going on? This is the perpetual challenge that confronts researchers in a fieldwork environment. It also bedevils aid workers, social workers, police, emergency services personnel, and military leaders who intervene in complex emergencies, and there are no easy answers. At a more basic level, as we saw in Chapter 1, the data on international interventions suggest that if outsiders understood local problems, the dozens of interventions that happen every year would probably have a greater success rate; if locals understood their own problems and could agree on how to fix them, those interventions wouldn’t be needed. Clearly, neither is the case. I think there is an approach that can work, a structured co-design technique that combines local and outsider inputs, but I’ll come to that in due course.
A further general observation is that the normative systems we’ve observed in action in Kingston and Mogadishu, in remote areas of Afghanistan, and in Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq—what I’ve called the theory of competitive control—seem to recur across rural and urban environments of all kinds, and are therefore probably hardwired into human nature, rather than habitat-dependent. This in turn means that competitive control is probably an enduring feature of human behavior, making it broadly applicable to many kinds of nonstate violence and thus potentially useful beyond narrowly defined counterinsurgency theory. Whether the group we’re examining is a militia like the Somali National Alliance or Arkan’s Tigers, a street gang like the Shower Posse or MS13, an organized crime network like the Sicilian mafia or the Honduran narcos, a soccer club like the Ultras or Red Star Belgrade, a mass movement like Hezbollah, an insurgency like the Taliban, a terrorist group like al Q aeda in Iraq, or a government, the same principles seem to hold. A group that creates predictability and consistency by establishing a normative system of rules and sanctions is thereby defining a safe behavioral space for people afflicted by terrifying uncertainty, and the safety that system creates will attract that population. In a conflict situation, people’s uncertainty arises from the presence of armed groups targeting the population; in a city that’s growing exponentially—constantly outgrowing itself—the same terrifying lack of predictability can arise simply from the pace of change. Thus a megacity under stress can offer the same opportunities for conflict entrepreneurs to control populations, provided they create a predictable rule set that makes people feel safe in the face of instability.
This occurs—and this is the critical point—because of the predictability inherent in the rules, whether people like the group or not, and regardless of the content of those rules. As we saw in Chapter 3, you don’t have to like the cops, or agree with the speed limit, for the road rules to make you feel safe. Eventually, provided the group builds consistency and order, through a wide spectrum of persuasive, administrative, and coercive measures, it may gain the subjective loyalty and support of a population. But the coercive end of the spectrum is the foundation for a normative system, since in a competitive control environment, a group that can’t fight off other groups or discipline its own members will be swept away. Support follows strength, and strength flows from the ability to enforce the rules (Mao’s “barrel of the gun”); this applies to any group seeking to control a population.
One related insight from the Arab Awakening (and the San Francisco protests) discussed in Chapter 4 is that people feel attacked when their connectivity is disrupted. In both these examples, when governments turned off cellphone networks, this alone was enough to bring people onto the streets to support previously marginalized activists. Suddenly a minority cause became a mass protest, because people felt a shared sense of grievance and indignation when the authorities pulled the plug. I think this is about more than just the convenience of electronic connectivity, though. Constant access to the digital world, letting people upload images or tweet what’s happening to them, creates a sense of security. There’s always an actual or potential witness to what’s going on: someone’s watching, ready to blow the whistle if the authorities pull something brutal or repressive. It’s as if there were always a media crew of reporters and cameramen watching out for you—but a virtual, digital, distributed crew enabled by constant connectivity. This idea of “Web as witness”—the protection that comes from virtual monitoring by independent outsiders, and the restraint this imposes on governments—is the flip side of the privacy concerns that go with our ever-connected environment. In a sense, it allows remote actors to extend their normative system into places where they can’t physically be. This idea of the permanent, universal witness is a new element in conflict, politics, and human rights advocacy alike, it’s entirely an artifact of the connected, urban world, and it’s mostly a good thing.
This leads me to a final general observation, which is that things are not all bad. I admit I’ve painted a pretty dismal picture here, and indeed, there are daunting challenges in a world that will add three billion new city dwellers over the next generation, mostly in low-income countries that were already short of resources and lacking in governance capacity. Jacques Attali, in the bleak passage from his Brief History of the Future that I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, summarizes this dystopian vision very well.34
But there are upsides, too. For one thing, population growth and urbanization tend to coincide with gains in prosperity, health, and education, so by midcentury another billion people—many in emerging markets like India and China—could be lifted out of poverty and into the global middle class, creating massive opportunities for trade and industry, unleashing immense human capital, and giving them the prospect of better lives.35 For another, there’s evidence that when population, settlement, agriculture, and energy production are concentrated in denser areas (like multistory buildings in urban zones), this reduces carbon footprint and ecological impact for a given population.36 As Robert Bryce has argued, the organizing principle for a green future is density.37
I mentioned resiliency earlier, and in a broader sense, cities throughout history have shown enormous capacity for innovation, reinvention, and self-renewal. We saw this in the case of Lagos in Chapter 1, as people adapted to the city’s lack of infrastructure and its horrendous traffic by developing their own, self-synchronized system of traffic alerts. In fact, as Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy argue in Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, increases in the size of cities tend (on average) to make them more efficient and faster, increasing innovation and prosperity, enabling more growth even as they also bring problems. “The bigger the city,” Zolli and Healy report, quoting a 2011 study, “the higher the wages were for the residents, the more patents produced there but also the greater the number of violent crimes, the more traffic, etc. ‘When you double the size of the city, you produce, on average, fifteen percent higher wages, fifteen percent more fancy restaurants, but also fifteen percent more AIDS cases, and fifteen percent more violent crime. Everything scales up by fifteen percent when you double the size.’”38
The key phrase here is “on average”—Zolli and Healy’s research reveals that growing cities, even struggling ones, have within themselves the adaptive resources they need to address their problems, provided they can unleash and apply them. But these resources aren’t evenly distributed, and it’s the unequal (or, more accurately, the perception of unjust) allocation of resources that creates conflict. Their research highlights the danger of exc
lusionary growth: if some subset of people is excluded from the general gain as a city grows, this creates relative deprivation and a sense of injustice that leads to violence, as we saw in Benghazi. Inequality per se might not be the problem—indeed, some argue that a certain amount of inequality, as long as it comes with opportunity, can spur people to better themselves, creating achievable, aspirational goals, and thus becoming an engine of economic growth and societal stability.39 But inequality without opportunity—permanent exclusion, marginalization without hope of improving one’s circumstances—can create lethal, city-killing resentments, when people who realize they can never join the party decide to burn the house down instead. Likewise, “cities that become overly reliant on just a few forms of value creation,” excluding parts of their population, economy, and territory from the wealth and capital they create, “can find themselves enjoying a golden age followed by catastrophic decline. (Think Detroit).”40 Conversely, if cities can generate enough carrying capacity quickly enough, they can build resiliencies that help them bounce back from crises. If cities have metabolisms, they also have immune systems—ways to deal with internal challenges, absorb toxins, and neutralize threats. Thinking of resiliency in this way makes more sense than focusing on stability, I think.
All this implies that it’s possible to “bend the curve”: that the linear projections I’ve outlined in this book need not automatically result in mass conflict and chaos, provided we figure out ways to unlock the adaptive resources that already exist in major cities. Cities are (or can be) engines of peace, justice, innovation, and prosperity, even as they also create violence, injustice, exclusion, and poverty. And actions that communities and governments take in their own cities can bend the curve toward resiliency.
III. Co-Design in Cities Under Stress
If the first part of this chapter is a description of the complex of problems that are affecting cities on a crowded, coastal, connected planet, then what are the appropriate governance, economic, and civil society responses to these challenges? Here, to be frank, the picture is much brighter, and this is where I believe the most exciting opportunities lie, as we seek to bend the curve away from the bleak vision suggested in a straight-line projection from current data. The problems are real enough, as are the difficulties in addressing them using traditional top-down, technocratic, outsider-led, state-based frameworks. But there are other approaches. Let’s consider three of these: Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, which ended that country’s civil war; CeaseFire Chicago, which seeks to prevent violent crime in U.S. cities; and Crisis Mappers, which brings together a community of online analysts and observers to build reliable maps of conflict-or disaster-affected areas in real time.
Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace
In 2003, Liberia’s civil war was in its fourteenth year, with two rebel groups fighting the regime of President Charles Taylor, heavy civilian casualties, and no end in sight. Taylor’s National Patriotic Front, which was backed (among others) by Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, had cemented its rule over most of Liberia’s population and territory, through the exact kinds of competitive control techniques we’ve been discussing. These ranged from terror and coercive violence against individuals and whole communities to administrative measures designed to keep communities quiet, to rigged elections in 1997. Two hundred thousand people had been killed in the conflict, with many more wounded or horribly mutilated. Rebel and government fighters had raped enormous numbers of women and forcibly recruited young boys and girls as child soldiers, porters, and sexual slaves. A tide of refugees fleeing this horror had swamped Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, and large squatter camps had formed on the city’s outskirts. These camps lacked food and water and were horribly overcrowded and disease-ridden, putting an already stressed and barely functioning city infrastructure under unbearable pressure.41
In March of that year, Leymah Gbowee, a social and trauma worker at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Monrovia’s coastal district of Sinkor, and the mother of four children, began a protest movement calling for peace in Liberia. The movement she started began organizing mass demonstrations and prayer vigils in a local fish market, and occupied a soccer field near the route used by President Taylor’s motorcade on Tubman Boulevard, Sinkor’s main road. Muslim women organized by Asatu Bah Kenneth joined forces with Gbowee’s group, creating a multifaith women’s protest movement. The movement attracted international media attention, forcing Taylor to meet with its leaders in April 2003. Taylor challenged the women (now calling their movement Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace) to find the rebel leaders, which they did—sending a delegation to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where rebel commanders were meeting, and convincing them through a series of nonviolent protest actions to agree to peace talks. The movement maintained its occupation of the soccer field and its prayer vigil throughout this period, which saw significant violence in Monrovia’s refugee camps and across Liberia.42 Peace talks began in June 2003 in Accra, Ghana, and on August 11 these talks resulted in a comprehensive peace agreement, President Taylor’s exile to Nigeria, and the entry of United Nations peacekeepers into Liberia. The women’s movement, led by Gbowee, remained closely engaged during the peacekeeping operation, helped ensure the peaceful disarmament of rebel and government fighters, and worked with transitional authorities and peacekeepers to organize free elections.43 They set up polling stations, registered voters, and scrutinized the electoral process. The poll resulted in the election of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on November 23, 2005, began the process of transition to democracy, and brought a sharp (though not total) reduction in violence. Leymah Gbowee and President Sirleaf were jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for their work.44
The Liberian women’s movement has been rightly praised as an example of nonviolent protest, women organizing for peace, and civil society influencing the political process through mass action. All this is true, but what’s also true is that this wasn’t solely a bottom-up, local movement. Local people (including women’s groups) had tried to oppose violence before, but they’d been brutally crushed—in 1990, many of them were killed in the same church in Sinkor where Gbowee began her movement in 2003. This time things were different, because Gbowee’s passion, courage, and insight into the hyperlocal context of the war were matched by technical and functional expertise from outsiders. Gbowee had trained as a trauma worker in a UNICEF program early in the war. At St. Peter’s, she was mentored as a peace activist by Sam Gbaydee Doe, leader of West Africa Network for Peace (WANEP), a regional peace-building network founded in 1998 in Ghana that was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the British Department for International Development, the British and Dutch branches of Oxfam, and the Catholic Organization for Relief and Development Aid, and which drew heavily on Internet and cellphone connectivity among activists. Thelma Ekiyor, a Nigerian lawyer specializing in alternative dispute resolution, was a particularly important mentor and sponsor of Gbowee’s efforts.45 Both Ekiyor and Doe had been formally trained in techniques of peace building, mass action, and conflict resolution when they attended Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) at Harrisonburg, Virginia. Ekiyor trained and advised Gbowee, gained WANEP funding for her initiative, and mentored her as Gbowee founded the Liberian women’s movement. The movement’s Ghanaian and Nigerian connections may also have played a role in the peace process, with Ghana hosting the peace talks and Nigeria accepting Charles Taylor as the conflict ended.46 The World Bank and several United Nations organizations also played roles in ending the conflict—not to mention the 15,000 soldiers and 1,115 police and civilian staff of the UN peacekeeping mission, supported by 4,350 U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel of Joint Task Force Liberia, who enforced an end to hostilities and maintained peace during the transition and elections process.47
Does this mean that an American university is responsible for Liberia’s transformation from conflict, or that U.S. and Bri
tish government development agencies, international NGOs, the UN, or U.S. and West African militaries can take credit for what happened? Of course not—but Gbowee could not have done it on her own, either. The external players brought what Gbowee lacked, including training for her and her colleagues, technical knowledge, and functional skill, while she brought what they lacked, including local context, insight, and the legitimacy and grass-roots organizing ability to build a local movement and forge collaboration between Christian and Muslim communities. Most important, she also brought charismatic leadership, wisdom, will and courage. Outsiders didn’t tell Gbowee to sit down and shut up, nor were they passive funders and enablers—this was a collaborative, two-way process of co-design.
CeaseFire Chicago
In a completely different setting, on the other side of the world, the same year Gbowee was starting at St. Peter’s Church, Dr. Gary Slutkin was launching CeaseFire, a violence prevention and crime control program based on his insight that because violence follows biological (epidemiological) patterns in a population, it can therefore treated like an epidemic and can be prevented by stopping the behavior at its source.48
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