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

by Joel Kotkin

  This vast outward movement occurred largely because of escalating land costs in the Tokyo core area. By the 1970s, the dream for middle-class Tokyo residents of owning a home, even the smallest one-bedroom apartment, escalated out of reach. Forced to the periphery for affordable homes, almost 10 million settled in the suburban regions around the main cities of the Kanto plain between 1970 and 1995.47

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE POSTCOLONIAL DILEMMA

  Gladys García, a character in Carlos Fuentes’s ironically titled first novel, Where the Air Is Clear, lives amid the sprawling concrete of “the great flatsnouted suffocating city, the city forever spreading like a creeping blot.” A cocktail waitress, she inhales not the fragrances of the flowers that bloomed once everywhere in Mexico City, but the old garbage, cigarette smoke, and rotting animals of the backstreets.

  Extending beyond limits imagined by either Aztec founders or Spanish conquerors, Mexico City has spread out over 620 square miles. In the world’s second most populous city, people are swallowed in chaotic traffic, choked by smog, overcome by stenches, threatened by crime.1

  García has little notion of the spectacular nature that rings the ancient city. “She knew neither the sea nor the mountains, mustard bloom, the meeting of sun and horizon, ripeness of medlar trees, nor any simple loveliness.”2

  THE COLONIAL LEGACY

  Contemporary Mexico, like many cities in the developing world, struggles with both headlong growth and the consequences of a colonial past. At the time of the Spanish conquest in the early sixteenth century, the city known as Tenochtitlán, with between eighty thousand and three hundred thousand people, surpassed any city in Spain3 and almost any in Europe.4 The capital of the Aztecs also exceeded these ill-planned, often pestilential European cities in cleanliness, public hygiene, and general orderliness.5 According to soldiers who traveled with Cortés, the marketplace at Tlatelolco, Tenochtitlán’s sister city, excelled in both size and variety over those of Constantinople, Rome, or any city in Spain.6

  The conquest of Mexico, like those of cities in other parts of the developing world, demolished this old urban culture, its religion, and its political and economic way of life. As an Aztec poet was to write a few years after the conquest:

  Broken spears lie in the roads . . .

  The houses are roofless; The walls are red with blood. Our city, our inheritance Is lost and dead; The shields of our warriors Could not save it.7

  However brutal the eradication of the old cultures, most European invaders did not eradicate the places of conquest, but recast them in their own image. The great conquistador Cortés understood the political significance of the city he destroyed. He invited the former residents of the city to return and purposely located his main administrative buildings on the site of the central palace, what is now known as the Zocolo. 8 In the same way, the church erected its great cathedral on the site that had been Tenochtitlán’s center of religious worship—much as it earlier had built cathedrals on the sites of mosques constructed by the hated Moors.9

  Replacing ancient sources of sacred power proved far easier than reviving a great metropolis. Cortés had pledged to his emperor, Charles I, that he would create there a great city, but Mexico’s resurgence proved slow in coming. More than two centuries after the conquest, the Spanish city of Mexico remained essentially an economic backwater, housing less than half the population of the former Tenochtitlán.10

  Mexico finally surpassed its preconquest population at the turn of the twentieth century. As it began to connect with the broader world economy, through trains, over roads, and finally by air, the city reached 1 million residents in 1930. Massive new waterworks such as the Lerma aqueduct, completed in 1951, allowed the city, which had exhausted its surrounding lakes, to begin its evolution into one of the globe’s largest urban centers.11

  Yet if the modern city had achieved great size, it often did so in a disorderly and troubling manner. As millions poured in from tiny ejidos and small towns, the center of the city became more crowded and less elegant. By the 1920s, the affluent had already begun to flee to the periphery, following the highly mobile, car-oriented lifestyle associated with North American cities.

  Many of the poor and working class crowded into illegal settlements. One, Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl, sprouted on a former lake bed so saline that even the hardiest shrubs and trees had trouble growing. This desolate expanse was home to sixty-five thousand people in 1960 and ten times that number a decade later. By 2000, some 2 million people eked out their lives in Nezahualcoyotl; many millions more inhabited other such areas.

  Residents of these areas were not too dissimilar, noted one sociologist, from “primitive hunters and gatherers of preagriculture societies,” ever on the lookout for odd jobs and whatever else was “left over” from the more affluent members of society.12 By 2000, the capital suffered a crime rate 2.5 times higher than Mexico’s second city, Guadalajara, and 8 times that of Monterrey, the capital of the rapidly growing north. 13 The newcomers, Carlos Fuentes observed, often had to let go of “their migrant nostalgia” and traditional moral restraints. “Sharpen your knives,” he warned, “deny everything, feeling no pity, without parleying, without even looking.”14

  “THE URBANIZATION OF THE COUNTRYSIDE”

  Such places now define urban reality in much of the world. Between 1960 and 2000, the urban share of population in developing countries doubled from 20 to 40 percent. With the slowing of population growth in European and American cities, the clear majority of the world’s urbanites— and over 90 percent of all new city dwellers—resided in the cities of Latin America, Asia, and Africa.15 By 2007, their growth will establish urban dwellers, for the first time, as an absolute majority of the global population.

  These developments were evident in the changing roster of the world’s largest megacities. In 1950, only two cities, London and New York, possessed populations greater than 10 million; half a century later, there were nineteen, all but three in the developing world. In 2015, according to the United Nations, there will be twenty-three such urban behemoths, nineteen of them located in developing countries. By that same date, there will be three urbanites in developing nations to every advanced-country city dweller.16

  This process reflects a broader, longer-term historical trend that Karl Marx referred to as “the urbanization of the countryside.” In his day, Marx noted, the movement of European capitalism had created a “social revolution” undermining the older, largely village-based societies in Asia, South America, and Africa. The current megacities of the developing world represent the ultimate consequence of that revolution.17

  With the arrival of the Europeans, the urban order in the East, long on a par with or more evolved than that of the West, was transformed and subordinated to a second-class status. The fates of cities in Asia, Latin America, and Africa were determined no longer by emperors, sultans, or local potentates, but by European bankers and government officials. Many of the older capitals that remained, such as Beijing, Istanbul, and Delhi, surrendered much of their historic influence.18

  “EUROPEAN MICROCOSMS”

  A host of relatively new cities serving as “European microcosms” now arose throughout Asia and Africa—Jakarta, Singapore, Bombay, Calcutta, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Lagos. Much as Trier, Antioch, Alexandria, and Marseilles had played subordinate roles in Rome’s far-flung urban network a millennium and a half earlier, these colonial centers drew their sustenance and direction from European capitals. Local trade diasporas, whether Arab, Lebanese, Chinese, or Indian, shared in the growth of these cities, but not to the extent enjoyed by those most closely aligned with the metropolitan cores.19

  The evolution of some of these cities was often remarkably rapid. Calcutta, founded in 1690 by Job Charnock, an agent for the British East India Company, arose from a small village to become the largest city on the subcontinent and for 140 years the capital of British India. Along with Bombay, which passed into British hand
s in 1665, and Madras, the leading port in the south,20 the city dominated the economy of the subcontinent.

  Calcutta served as the ultimate colonial metropolis, taking in the manufacturers of Britain and sending back silk, jute, cotton, rice, sugar, and scores of other products. Alongside the local merchant class, a small European elite presided confidently over the vast city. The splendid Esplanade, where the fashionable took their weekend drives, and magnificent new buildings—the High Court, the Standard Chartered Bank, the Great Eastern Hotel—spoke of a permanent sense of domination.21

  Similarly favored cities, such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Lagos, also rose rapidly to dominate regional economies. Administered by a British elite and populated largely by indigenous peoples or migrants from other possessions, these cities grew swiftly while more traditional centers— Kano and Timbuktu in Africa, Beijing, and Delhi—suffered relative declines in importance and economic power.

  European influence could also be felt in cities that, at least nominally, remained outside direct colonial control. In Egypt, French and British influence encouraged the growth of both European populations and ethnic minorities from throughout the region. By the 1930s, a full quarter of Alexandria’s residents came from groups outside the mainstream Muslim Arab population. Cairo, too, was changed. By the 1930s, more than 16 percent of Cairo’s population were foreigners and minorities, compared with barely 10 percent in 1800.

  On the surface, cities such as Cairo appeared increasingly modern and European. Wide avenues and broad streets able to accommodate motorcars were cut through the often labyrinthine streets. New concepts of urban design, emphasizing such European ideas as the development of suburban “garden cities” and broad shopping streets, impinged ever more on the traditional Islamic pattern.22

  Yet in the end, there remained two Cairos. One, under substantial European influence, grew into a modern, commercial, and heavily secularized metropolis. The other remained largely unchanged, bound tightly by old Islamic social and religious traditions. “Cairo,” commented one late-nineteenth-century observer, “is like a cracked vase whose two parts can never be put together.”23

  Many cities in developing countries suffered a similar bifurcation between a Westernized modern metropolis and a poorer, more traditional one. Often unspeakable poverty, filth, and disease existed side by side with great wealth and privilege. In addition, many restraints imposed by Islamic and other traditional moral systems no longer applied. Even arch-colonialists were frequently appalled by the social and physical reality they had created. The eighteenth-century imperialist Robert Clive, for example, described Calcutta—with its slums, criminality, semislavery, and pervasive corruption—as “the most wicked place in the universe.” 24

  Perhaps no city suffered more in reputation than Shanghai, the emerging Chinese industrial capital. In 1900, the city’s population was a mere thirty-seven thousand compared with the more than 1 million residents of Beijing. By 1937, Shanghai was home to over 3.5 million, better than twice the population of the old imperial capital.25 Besides serving as a bustling European business center, Shanghai stood out as a hotbed of gangsterism, drug running, and prostitution. “If God lets Shanghai endure,” suggested one missionary, “he owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah.” 26

  “THE HALCYON DAYS”

  The end of colonial domination in the 1950s and 1960s created a dilemma for the newly empowered rulers of colonial cities. They had inherited “microcosms” of European influence, with both some modern infrastructure and enormous entrenched inequality. A small, European-educated elite coexisted with a large population that continued to adhere to traditional values and ways of life.

  Initially, it was widely hoped that these cities would emerge as vital centers of modernization while serving as proud symbols of political, economic, and cultural renaissance. The 1960s, in the words of Janet Abu-Lugoud, were “the halcyon days” for cities in the Arab and Muslim worlds. 27 Much the same could be said for the rulers of cities in other developing countries.

  In many cases, the local European-trained elites moved into the elegant quarters once occupied by Europeans. Hoping to make their cities competitive with those in Europe and North America, they often seized control of major enterprises and simultaneously expanded their own government bureaucracies.

  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.28

  A FATEFUL BREAK IN URBAN HISTORY

  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.29

  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.

  THE RISE OF SQUATTER CITIES

  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.30

  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.31 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.”32

  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.33 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.34 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.”

  AFRICA’S URB
AN TRAGEDY

  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.35

  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.36

  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. 37

  “SOCIAL TIME BOMBS”

  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.38