Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World

by Doug Saunders

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Politics, Economics, Urbanism, History, Cities

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Doug Saunders (b. 1967) is a Canadian-British author and journalist.

He is the author of the books Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World (2011) and The Myth of the Muslim Tide (2012) and is the international-affairs columnist for The Globe and Mail.

He served as the paper’s London-based European bureau chief for a decade, after having run the paper’s Los Angeles bureau, and has written extensively from East Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, the Middle East and North Africa. He writes a weekly column devoted to the larger themes and intellectual concepts behind international news, and has won the National Newspaper Award, Canada’s counterpart to the Pulitzer Prize, on five occasions.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Later add: 9.9.2015. I have come back to up the rating of this book to 5 stars. This is because I find it keeps cropping up in conversations with my friends, and I keep going back and looking at the notes I took. It is turning out to have been a really invaluable read. Review below....

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This is an interesting book, with a whole new take on immigration. The author is Doug Saunders, a foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper. He is five times winner of The National Newspaper Award, a Canadian equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize.

Herewith some bullet points of what I picked up from the book....

* Due to falling populations in the West, Saunders believes we will not only welcome immigrants in the near future, but will be bending over backwards to encourage them to enter our countries. As time goes on we are likely to experience severe labour shortages, both in skilled and unskilled areas of work, and we will need immigrants to fill the gap.

* All over the world there is currently a huge exodus from rural societies into cities. We are all becoming urbanized. Saunders believes this is a positive step forward, as it is usually accompanied by greater prosperity for everyone. Nearly all poverty in the world is rural poverty. There are many farms all over the world that are too small for optimum yields, plus their owners cannot afford the machinery and techniques needed to make the most of their land. The result is frequently subsistence farmers in dire poverty.

* There are gateways for rural people to enter the cities. Saunders calls these gateways "arrival cities". They may be slums, or poor areas in the centre of cities, or they may be suburbs or satellite towns on the periphery of cities. The defining factor about them is that they attract immigrants.

*There are lines of cooperation, communication and financial remittance between these arrival cities....and the rural communities the immigrants come from. These networks ensure that more immigrants will follow in the footsteps of earlier immigrants. There is a continual flow from specific rural communities to specific arrival cities. For example the borough Tower Hamlets in London has a large community of Bangladeshi immigrants. They all come from a small agricultural area in north-east Bangladesh called Sylhet. You don't just get a whoosh of immigrants from everywhere. Instead there are well travelled paths between each rural community and city.

*Arrival cities often appear to be perpetually poor, often terribly poor, but when they work well, they are in fact great processing institutions. Within a generation or so they create educated and financially stable citizens, who then leave the arrival city to settle elsewhere in the country. Meanwhile the next crop of new poor immigrants has arrived. So, on the outside, these arrival cities always look poor, but the reality is they are often powerhouses for turning people's lives around.

* Arrival cities don't always work though. This book is full of good and bad examples of arrival cities. Basically the book is a huge plea to governments around the world to apply themselves to the well-being of their arrival cities. Issues that need to be thought of include:
- Basic access to water, sewage disposal , street lighting and other facilities.
- And in wealthier places, architecture which allows for the establishment of an organic community, and space for shops and businesses.
- Laws which enable people to apply for citizenship and feel part of the country they are so keen to join.
- Laws which enable people to practice business easily, rather than excluding them from commerce.
-Transport which allows people to travel from their arrival city to areas in the wider city where they will find work.
-Opportunities for the children of immigrants to receive education.
- Opportunities for immigrants to learn the language of their new country.
- A community centre where there is help and advice.

*A worst case scenario might be a bunch of tower blocks in a suburban outpost, cut off from the rest of the city, and with little opportunity for immigrants to mingle easily with one another, or create businesses for themselves. Another issue would be little opportunity for citizenship or education. This type of arrival city is just a carbuncle on the face of the city proper, and in the end will generate despondency and alienation amongst its inhabitants. Eventually it can result in all sorts of hostility and rioting against the host city. It is the opposite of a welcoming effort to integrate new immigrants.

The above is a very brief and generalized description of a book that is actually both specific and detailed, not only in the twenty arrival cities from around the world that it describes, but also in detailing the lives and experiences of specific immigrant families. It opened my eyes to all sorts situations and issues that I had little idea of before. Issues that are of huge importance to all of us. I thought it was excellent.

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A link to a 25 minute talk given by Doug Saunders on "Global migration and arrival cities"

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/03/23/gl...

[Murtaza · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a compellingly argued, highly entertaining book - part travelogue, part sociological study - which offers an optimistic new perspective on the 'slums' surrounding many urban centers around the world today.

Such slums are the products of the great rural-to-urban migration which has occurred across much of the world over the past few decades. The massive shantytowns surrounding places like Karachi, Mumbai and Lagos - and urban slums in Europe - have often been viewed by outsiders as place of hopeless failure and destitution; warehouses of victims. However the reality is often quite different. These are places of strivers, who have made the decision to leave (an often falsely-romanticized) rural poverty for a chance to eventually achieve a middle-class foothold in the city, even if it takes a generation. Hence the formation of cities outside the city; enclaves for newly arrived former denizens of the countryside.

Statistics show that these 'arrival cities', when managed correctly, are actually the greatest engines of personal empowerment and economic advancement available to billions of people around the world. These slums are not warehouses of victims but of ambitious people, working to improve their prospects and those of their children and often succeeding. Such arrivals, in their hundreds of millions, are changing the planet - generating wealth and perhaps leading to an environmentally manageable world.

The author exhibits a rare and admirable ability to see the world for more than what it superficially appears to be. While slums are often believed to be zones of permanent poverty, the most successful ones are places of transient residence. Meaning, people move in from the countryside, stay until they get a foothold in the middle class, then leave to make room for a new batch of arrivals. In my own experience I have seen many such neighborhoods and the transcience he describes rings true. The neighborhood stays poor but in fact it is often an engine for pulling people out of poverty.

This is a rare book that made me look at the world differently at the end (we all read with the hope of encountering such books). I picked it up while in Karachi and was stunned by how true it rang. Furthermore, its a page-turner - engagingly written throughout and evincing great understanding and empathy towards its subjects. The author does a very effective job of humanizing the people of the slums and, most valuably, gives an active voice to the people who are often falsely depicted as passive victims or worse. Highly recommended.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why Slums are a Good Thing

To understand what could be positive about something that appears to be so ugly, Doug Saunders seeks to first break the spell that country life has over some of us in the affluent West. He is talking instead about subsistence farming in developing countries:

“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. The rural village is also the predominant source of excessive population growth, with its need for large families to provide labour… Thatched roofs may be picturesque, but life beneath them is short, hard, disease-ridden and prone to bouts of starvation.”

But beyond all that, there is no future. The goal of almost every rural villager, if we are to believe Saunders, is to escape. For centuries rural people in the West have been seeking a better life in the cities, and now a similar “final migration” is happening in the developing world. This process releases land so that commercial agriculture can produce more food, and allows people in the cities to produce more wealth.

Saunders is a journalist, and this book is mainly in the form of stories. These have the advantage of revealing the real life struggles of individuals rather than give abstract generalities. The disadvantage is the possibility of selection bias. For example, I suspect he finds his rural villages through the people who have left them. Fewer people may leave successful villages.

Think of an “Arrival City” Instead

The migrants settle in what outsiders call slums, seen as horrible, crowded places with no future. In this book we are led inside to see them from the point of view of the people who inhabit them, with case studies in cities from both the developing world and the West. Slums provide an inexpensive place to live, and an informal environment that allows small businesses to form easily and the population density need for them to succeed.

There is no illusion given that life is easy for the new arrival from the countryside. “All are engaged in a daily calculation that involves the unbearable burden of rural deprivation, the impossible expense of full-fledged urban life and the broken pathway to opportunities that might someday form a bridge between the two.”

The many stories about rural migrants stress their determination to succeed, to become a part of the larger city, in spite of the obstacles placed in their way. All they need is an opportunity to work, start a small business, and accumulate capital.

Even where the slum does not appear to improve, the people move in, learn skills, save money, and then move somewhere better. What appears to be a physically static dead end is actually a socially dynamic and positive ladder to success. The message is: watch the people, not just the buildings. The “arrival city” is a gateway to a better life.

Is the Ethnic Ghetto is also a Good Thing?

When I volunteered to teach math in a grade three classroom, while almost all of the children were immigrants, it seemed each one came from a different country. The only language they had in common was English, and they learned it quickly. I never heard a word in a foreign language. My thought was that here “diversity” was working in favour of integration.

This arrangement may actually put their parents at a disadvantage. A community of people who speak the same language and share the same culture creates a mutual support network that helps the residents navigate their way to success in their strange new environment. Thus ethnic clustering does not necessarily lead to “flypaper neighborhoods”, or failed arrival cities.

Saunders seems to suggest that all cultures are equivalent when it comes to achieving material success, and any problems are due to the bad policies of the host population. He makes a good case, but I then look at the difference in success between different groups migrating to the same city and think that culture also matters.

Two-Way Migration and our Immigration One Way Street

Saunders does not draw much distinction between migration within a country and external immigration, stressing the rural to urban nature of the migration. He observes, “Nations do not migrate. Villages within nations do.” He tells us that the arrival city is linked in a lasting and intensive way to its originating villages, constantly sending people and money and knowledge back and forth, making possible the next wave of migrations form the village. This chain migration and the back and forth flow of people to and from the village allows experimental moves and a large backflow to the place of origin. We get a hybrid culture, with selection of the best. Those who stay are the toughest and smartest ones, and they can take a lot of change.

That may be how it ideally works in developing countries. When people immigrate to the West this linkage is made more difficult. Here, immigration is forever. Few choose to return to the village. The host country thus has a policy choice of either being stuck with a number of losers, or restricting immigration to avoid those costs.

Saunders points out that it is critical that there is a clear path to citizenship for migrants. It is those with no stake in their new country who turn to crime. I agree, but it would help if there was also a path to non-citizenship and leaving the country for the few who do not succeed.

Have We Already Lost Control of our Country?

I wonder if Saunders realizes how alarming the following sounds from a different perspective than his own:

"The reason why village-origin migration will continue is political. Immigrants, and their children and grandchildren, become citizens and voters and politicians and cabinet ministers and leaders, united across parties and ideologies by the overweening issue of having access to their families and fellow villagers."

"Almost all policy efforts to restrict or end immigration have failed because the subjects of those laws were already citizens, using the arrival city as a platform for its own self-preservation.”

Here is the anti-immigration worst-case scenario: immigrants only want to pump up the numbers in their own ethnic group, and do not care about the country as a whole. And it is too late to stop it.

That view does not take into account the fact that immigrants also have a stake in the success of their new country. And, at least in countries like Canada with a diversity (that word again) of immigration sources, most future immigrants will be coming from ethnic groups other than one’s own. Only the most successful immigrants will be in a decision making position. Self-interest may serve to prevent fully open immigration.

Lessons from Turkey and Iran

The connection drawn between internal migration in Istanbul and Tehran and the resulting political changes that occurred was enlightening. The migrants struggled to become a part of the urban economy in spite of the efforts of the authorities to stop them by bulldozing their homes. But in the end the new arrivals came to outnumber the original inhabitants, and began to achieve political dominance. He points out that both Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were children of migrants. For example, in Turkey,

"The unexpected New Istanbul, which emerged within the space of one generation, caught the locals by surprise. ‘A catastrophe of such a scale has only happened to us.’ This wasn’t historically correct as it was similar to the transformations that the cities of Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. But it would become a political catastrophe for the Istanbul elite, who were suddenly outnumbered by a new, arriviste middle class whose women often wore headscarves and were already adopting their own seemingly alien forms of political power."

Although individual migrants were only trying to improve their lives, their arrival led to significant political and cultural changes. I can’t help noticing that in both countries we now have authoritarian governments with a religious agenda. Large scale immigration could also eventually lead to unintended consequences in the West.

The irony is that liberals such as Saunders seem to welcome a leap into an unknown future that may put an end to our liberal culture. Conservatives instinctively resist the intrusion of the visibly different “others”, who actually share many of their values.

A Valuable Perspective

As a Canadian I am interested in how to make immigration successful.. While it is the right and the duty of any nation to decide who may live there, we also have the duty to make the immigration we choose to allow work as well as possible. A book written from the perspective of the migrants provides a lot of valuable information on what does and does not work to help migrants successfully integrate. It has changed my mind on a number of issues. For that I give it a top rating.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title refers to a concept, the "arrival city." It's a sort of long holding station that allows for a transition from rural to urban living. When it works right, a family can move from village poverty to an urban middle class over the course of a generation. When Saunders talks to these villagers in the arrival city, even when they live in a sort of hole behind a curtain in the back of a shop and send money to the village to support their children or parents, they still say this arrival city is their preference and their best hope for a better future for their family. These arrival cities present as slums, but not all slums are arrival cities, especially those that exist within cities and seem to become a hub for the down and out. Some cities don't have an arrival zone, and villagers are consequently locked out of the urban wealth engine. These arrival cities suggest that cities and even some slums are underrated, though they're hardly a fairytale and can present significant challenges to families and marriages.

I arrived at this book after reading Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline, but I'm also in the midst of reading a lot about climate change. Last I heard, 68% of our global population will live in cities by 2050. If we want to sort out atmospheric carbon, I suspect that we can't ignore this demographic shift. Saunders argues that the city not only reduces poverty but also provides younger generations with education, which means fewer children, and if you go down the line, it seems like you arrive at a higher standard of living with a lower carbon footprint.

I often see social class discussed through education and careers. We say things like "working in a post office is a gateway to the middle class." But I rarely see housing and urban planning discussed in the same way; it seems more like we gripe about sight lines and housing prices when we discuss cities.

[Sara Mobarak · Rating 5 out of 5]

To an outsider, Liu Gong Li is a fetid slum. The old pathway into the valley is now a busy street overhung with a shambles of thrown-together houses, its dirt laneway lined with phone shops, butchers, huge steaming woks full of pungent peppers at streetside eateries, merchants hawking clothes, tools, fast-spinning bobbins of thread, a cacophony of commerce spiralling away for two kilometres into dizzying back pathways and snaking staircases whose ungrounded perspectives resemble an upturned Escher engraving. Electrical and cable television lines fill the air: raw sewage spills from the concrete, runs down the sides of buildings, cascades along open gutters into a terrible stinking river beneath the concrete bridges at the foot of the valley. Garbage and waste are seemingly everywhere, accumulating in a small mountain behind the houses. A chaos of vehicles with two, three and four wheels clots every lane. There is no space without people, without activity, and none to be seen with greenery. It might seem, from this vantage, that this is a hellish refuge for the destitute, a last-ditch landing pad for the failed outcasts of an enormous nation—a place for those on the way downward.”

Chances are it didn’t take too long to conjure up the mental image of Liu Gong Li, it’s already quite vivid—you’ve seen it before. No one is oblivious to the fact that many people continue to live like this.
It’s likely you can readily locate and name these settlements in your own cities, the notorious enclaves and adjacent side streets known for their high crime rate, drug gangs, irksome, flimsy architecture, and in some parts, dense ethnic presence. For those of us who can afford to look away, what they offer is nothing more than an eyesore.
But what this passage is missing, and what Doug Saunders will continue to highlight for the remainder of the book is the human face underlying these seemingly unpleasant settlements, and their parallel origins across the developing and developed world.

Arrival City is a fascinating account of rural-to-urban migration, of people moving to neighbouring cities and across countries to escape a decaying and, often, falsely romanticised rural life. The inevitability of human movement from rural spaces to join the wave of a sweeping urbanisation is what Saunders urges us to consider, and in his words, arrival cities “are the places where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the next great explosion of violence will occur.
The most striking aspect of this book was, by challenging the nomenclature of what we have mostly come to know as slums, favelas, bustees, bidonvilles, ashwaiyyat, shantytowns, kampongs, urban villages, gecekondular and barrios of the developing world, but also as the immigrant neighbourhoods, ethnic districts, banlieves difficiles, Plattenbau developments, Chinatowns, Little Indias, Hispanic quarters, urban slums and migrant suburbs of wealthy countries, Saunders argument is hard to contend with.

I am coining the term "arrival city” to unite these places, because our conventional scholarly and bureaucratic language—”immigrant gateway,”“community of primary settlement” misrepresents them by disguising their dynamic nature, their
transitory role. When we look at arrival cities, we tend to see them as fixed entities: an accumulation of inexpensive dwellings containing poor people, usually in less than salubrious conditions. In the language of urban planners and governments,
these enclaves are too often defined as static appendages, cancerous growths on an otherwise healthy city. Their residents are seen, in the words of the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, "as an ecologically defined group rather than as part of the social system."

Through extensive research, numerous citations and firsthand interviews with people in rural to urban transition, Saunders urges us to rethink the static nature of these places and, instead, view them as areas of a dynamic and active transition, and their inhabitants as highly prosperous and ambitious entrepreneurs.
He presents us with a plethora of both successful and unsuccessful case studies of this transition. Those cities that have acknowledged the autonomy of the arrival city, the desire and potential of its community to be part of the greater economy, their aspirations and entrepreneurialism encouraged, and have actively and creatively invested in their basic right to land, to transport systems that allow ease of movement essential to a good livelihood and education of their children, and money to flow back into their villages to fund the development of their rural spaces, have successfully permitted their successors to acquire a very strong foothold of the city and its customs, and allowed them to form the country’s next generation of middle class urban dwellers. Those, however, that have failed to recognise these places as places of valuable social capital and understood their transitory nature, have often been confronted with periods of severe instability, unthinkable violence and decay. Its frustrated inhabitants, strangled by poverty and poor social mobility, have often resorted to political radicalisation that has repeatedly played a role in destabilising entire political systems —cases where the politics of the arrival city overtakes the politics of the entire city.
The most fascinating part for me was how the architecture of the arrival city—the distinctively fluid, random, haphazard, horizontal design is essential to its success.

One reason so many slum-rehabilitation plans fail is because they are based on moving people into what seems to be higher-quality housing while ignoring the larger function of the arrival city. The original slum houses in places like Karail, however squalid, offer the considerable benefit of being flexible: rooms and floors can be added as family needs change, and portions can be turned into shops or small industries to provide entrepreneurial income. They are also connected to networks of families, transportation routes and relationships that are crucial to building prosperity and permanence. In a serviced apartment block, however intelligently designed, this is often lost, and residents are reluctant to move into a home that is merely a house.

Demolition projects and vertical designs are sure way to cement people in their poverty.
Perhaps its why it was easy to conjure up a quick mental image of Liu Gong Li, perhaps because the architecture of the human instinct for survival looks the same, across cities, across oceans. If you pass by an arrival city, maybe this time you might see something else beyond the nasty shacks.

For every 20 families like them in Liu Gong Li, there is one like Xian Guang Quan's clan. He and his wife arrived as illiterate peasants, spent years sleeping on open-air slabs on construction sites, moved into a concrete hut in Liu Gong Li, and saved. In 2007, they moved across the road into a 10-storey apartment building that was constructed by Mr. Xian, 46, and his crew. It's a rudimentary structure of unpainted red bricks with a raw-concrete staircase running up the centre, but the Xian family have turned their apartment's spacious interior into something palatial: attractively tiled floors with big swathes of empty space, bright wallpaper, modernist chandeliers, big orange sectional sofa, a large plasma TV and surround-sound system. Mr. Xian, a heavyset man with a balding pate and a permanent smile, spends his spare hours on shopping trips downtown or lengthy smoke- filled mah-jong games with his old village friends, a truly middle-class lifestyle, backed by a genuine middle-class income, that belies the six years he spent here, not long ago, exposed to the elements, with no money or possessions.

[Judd Street · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really exceptional non-fiction that will change your way of seeing the world while simultaneously lining up with/building upon other excellent work.

In Arrival City, Doug Saunders explores those places that have often been labeled as ghettos, slums, or otherwise undesirable neighbourhoods. Focusing on communities that cater to new arrivals (whether from rural areas to urban or from developing countries to more developed), Saunders is really trying to explore two questions: (1) what can we do to ensure better integration and upward mobility for these new arrivals, and (2) is it possible to rid ourselves of these downtrodden neighbourhoods.

In Saunders' analysis, arrival communities are an essential part of the process of immigration and urbanization. These neighbourhoods serve essential functions - building of local networks and social capital, acquisition of cheap land/apartments to leave the rentier class, and flexibility to launch small businesses that can support oneself (and one's family, both in the arrival city and still back in the original location) - that can be much harder to achieve in a fully integrated community. Indeed, when immigrants and urban arrivals find themselves in more gentrified, more integrated communities immediately upon arrival, argues Saunders, they are much more likely to become prone to religious extremism and other undesirable outcomes (e.g., as they seek connectedness, deal with the inability to find friends, networks, and romantic support, and face an inability to actually make upwards progress in terms of economics and comfort).

Saunders also argues (albeit in passing, but persuasively) that anti-immigrant policies generally don't work. It's virtually impossible to stop incoming immigrants, and anti-immigrant policies drive these arrivals underground and away from critical supports (like the ability to own property or start businesses) while also hurting the country itself (losing possible taxpayers and creating anti-social fundamentalism, among others). As such, countries need to get serious about the inevitability of immigration and shape it in ways that will be beneficial for all involved: namely, argues Saunders, through the creation and support of effective arrival cities.

On its surface, this seems like a deeply conservative argument: the solution to integration is to create the conditions for immigrants to 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' economically, investing in property and launching businesses. It's also quite a market-based approach to development, as Saunders argues that remittances from these arrival cities play a major role in improving conditions in the home villages as well.

Yet, it's also critical to not miss the more subtle - but just as critical - thread in Saunders' argument, which requires liberal approaches as well. With /only/ a conservative free-for-all in the arrival cities, he argues, the residents end up unable to actually do any 'pulling up' at all. It's only through the investment of public services - bus lines to the downtown core, basic education and health services, utilities (insofar as they are not priced out of the range of these residents, which all-too-often happens when they get legitimated), streetlights, and non-militaristic policing - that these communities can actually achieve their promise of upwards movement. The Saunders vision of an arrival city requires both left and right elements, unified by a shared commitment that immigration be done in a way that benefits all, rather than swept under the rug.

Saunders also paints a somewhat uncomfortable picture, however: in his analysis, good arrival cities aren't going anywhere. One should not, he argues, measure the effectiveness of arrival cities through their gentrification and disappearance. The presence of favelas, ghettos, and slums is, in fact, an indication the system is /working/, because these are places that are highly effective at fostering social capital and network and progress. What should be measured instead is the /cyclical/ nature of these communities: are people transitioning through, within a generation, from arriving to establishing themselves into a more middle-class life elsewhere? In their wake, the next new family arrives into the fray of the arrival city, the fertile soil seeds need to grow transitional roots that will stabilize them in their next community.

[Ram Kaushik · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm glad to started my 2019 reading with this engrossing and informative work. Especially since we appear to be entering a new age of xenophobia and general suspicion of immigration and immigrants, this book was topical indeed. Doug Saunders has delved deeply into 20+ migrant hotspots all over the world from Bangla Desh and Bogota to Mumbai and Shenzen. His analysis uncovers that far from being hellhole ghettos that suck investment, create terrorists and spark urban riots, these "arrival cities" are dynamic sites of innovation and constant renewal. Besides, they are often the engine of economic energy for countries, providing return on investments for generations. Most interestingly, they seed economic development at both ends of the migration spectrum - the village and the city.

The best part of this book is that the author never loses the human face of migration with heartrending personal anecdotes of poor migrants suffering enormous hardships (caravan anyone?) interspersing systematic and cold factual analysis.

All in all, truly an eye-opening book, although sadly destined to be ignored by governments and urban planners everywhere. After all, xenophobia commands more votes than more complex and nuanced public policy.

[Steffi · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Arrival City' (2012). So yeah, the rural-urban migration which is in full swing and will mean like 2-3 fucking billion people packing up and leave over the next 30 years or so is MASSIVE. Forget international migration, the actual largest ever scale human movement takes place within countries: from the shitty villages to the cities. This insane movement is also expected to put an end to population growth by around 2050, once we're like 9 billion urbanites with less than 2.1 children. If you're living in Asia or Africa this is old news (or very old news if you live in Latin America where the great migration already took place). If you don't, you may not be aware of how like a third of the world is leaving behind centuries old farming lifestyles to make it in the city. 'Arrival city' are these kind of 'dynamic slums' where people - still a generation or so away from being able to actually afford the city - arrive and eek out a living in order to western union back plenty of cash to the village while trying to bring over the rest if the family to enjoy modern urban life. The kind of peeps sewing our sneakers. Obviously not all will make it and often the rural-urban migration is a back and forth process. Etc. So, in a way a great read and obviously super relevant to understand population dynamics in the developing world although these processes also take place big time in places like L.A., London and within the EU.
I dunno, man. I was hoping for some kind of political economy analysis, how this is driven by inequality and global financial capitalism etc but this sounds a bit World Bankish super positive about how magically these dynamic slum entrepreneurs drive economic growth and in 2050 we're all enjoying life with our fucking iphones and flat screen TVs.
So it's kind of bizarre looking at global poverty without naming the elephant in the room: capitalism. Then again, this is a journalist account, with plenty of interviews and 'reporting from the slum' rather than an explicit theoretical framework. Suck it up.

On the other hand, the more historic parts of the book draw interesting lines between 'arrival cities' and rural migrants and revolutions and uprisings, eg Paris in the 18th and 19th century, and Istanbul, Tehran, Caracas in the 20th and the cities of the Arab Spring ('the Arab revolutions were born of the arrival city and its frustrsted ambition').

[Emmkay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really stimulating! Saunders explores the concept of the 'arrival city,' an urban space transformed by rural-to-urban migration. He argues that rural-to-urban migration is going to be a hallmark of the coming century, and he seeks to identify the characteristics of successful arrival cities, which assist arrivals in propelling themselves upward, versus failed arrival cities, in which arrivals may stall, fall backwards, or turn to violence and instability. He surveys a variety of examples of arrival cities globally and historically, from eighteenth century Paris to twenty-first century Thorncliffe Park in Toronto.

I expected something a bit more 'journalistic,' along the lines of Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, given that Saunders is a journalist for The Globe and Mail. He does include journalistic explorations of the lives of individual inhabitants of arrival cities, but this is a quite in-depth and analytical book. I expect that it will prompt me to look at my own city, other cities, and global developments through a different lens. This is a book that decision-makers and politicians would do well to read and think about.

[Isabel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saunders celebrates the favelas of the world as sites of economic mobility, informality, and autonomy, offering histories of frontier neighborhoods' integration processes and examining successful development strategies. What can Los Angeles learn from the edges of Dhaka? Why does Kreuzberg fail where Slotervaart succeeds? (Let's just say that citizenship, density, and chaos are good.) Slums and their residents stimulate new and influential political interactions, and, over the course of a generation or two, become central parts of the old city. The same gecekondu areas where families like mine were squatters in tin houses without plumbing are now some of the most dense and livable districts of Asian Istanbul thanks to future-minded land ownership policies. Overall, the book is a planning toolkit for use against fear-mongering around migration as well as an ode to urban flexibility.

[ambyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Saunders makes interesting points, but he undercuts his own arguments again and again by mixing data and anecdote, scientific studies and his own sense of what's "probably true." As a series of interviews with new rural arrivals, this offers valuable perspective, but a rigorous policy map it is not.

[Otto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dieses 2011 erschiene Buch erscheint mir als ein ganz wesentliches Werk zur Erklärung einer uns auch 2023ff noch stark betreffenden Frage: Wie umgehen mit der Situation, dass es aus ländlichen Gegenden Zuzug in die großen Städte der Welt gibt. Wie diesen Zuzug staatlich steuernd begleiten, was unterstützt die Ankommenden, was hemmt deren Entwicklung? Saunders zeigt auch, wie dir großen Unruhen (arabischer Frühling, Aufstände in den Banlieus) genau in diesen Ankunftszentren ausgehen, wenn diese nicht gut gemanagt sind, er zeigt aber auch, dass in diesen Ankunftsstädten der Beginn eines neuen Mittelstandslebens für viele Menschen sein kann und dass diese Ankunftsstädte, gut begleitet, zur Wohlstandsmehrung in einem staatlichen Gebilde beitragen können. Unseren Politiker*innen sollte dieses Werk als Pflichtlektüre ans Herz gelegt werden, damit sie lernen, dass man die Migrationsbewegungen nicht durch Mauern, Gewalt und Lager in der Wüste stoppen kann, sondern dass man sie auch als Chance in der Entwicklung sehen muss. Wesentlich ist auch zu erkennen, dass wir nicht nur ausgebildete Menschen im Zuzug benötigen, sondern dass uns auch die vielen abgehen, die die „einfachen“ Arbeiten erledigen (man schau nur auf die Baustellen jetzt im Sommer wieder und wird erkennen, wie hoch der Migrantenanteil hier ist).

[Roshni · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the current climate of many political parties with anti-immigration stances, it really is interesting to see what the actual facts are surrounding immigration, or in this case, rural-to-urban migration. This book reviews, quite accessibly, governmental policies, cultural factors, and sociological research to paint a picture of the arrival city. He describes it as the place on the outskirts of the main city, that is often referred to as a slum, which is the connection between village and city and is a thriving economy in its own right. Through anecdotes about individual families, he shows both the micro and macro view of this migration and the successes and failures of governmental policies surrounding it. An excellent and informative read.

[Jaime · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Arrival City" discusses the implications of mass migration from rural to urban areas and how it is affecting, for better or worse, cities around the world. The focus of the book is on the “arrival city”, which is not necessarily the urban area that absorbs the migrants. Instead, it is typically the surrounding areas where the migrants first begin to enter urban society – in the suburbs, the slums, or the outskirts of town. The arrival city serves basic functions and needs of the residents, but most importantly, it is the location where the transition from poverty to the middle class is made. There are in-depth studies of a range of cities from Los Angeles and Washington DC to Bangladesh and Rio de Janeiro.

Arrival cities, a term coined by Saunders, are the essential entry mechanism from rural village life to urban area survival. Newcomers use arrival cities to establish new lives and to integrate themselves socially and economically. Slums, housing projects, and low-cost suburbs provide cheap housing for the migrants, and entry level jobs in the area provide money for family back in the village. In so many countries around the world (especially in India, China, and most African countries), parents and children are separated for years to ensure the survival of their families and a better life for their children by working (or sending them to work) in the city. Eventually, if they are successful at transitioning out of the slums and into the city, their families are reunited.

Saunders states that the arrival cities are the places where the next great economic and cultural booms will be born or where the next great explosions of violence will occur. The difference depends on how societies and governments react to mass migration. In a 2009 World Bank study, the conclusion was that the most effective route to poverty reduction and economic growth is to encourage the highest possible urban population density and the growth of migration, as long as the government provides migrants with intensive investment opportunities and infrastructure development. Unfortunately, instead of being given tools of ownership, education, business creation, and connection to the wider economy, arrival cities are too often treated as destitute places that need social workers, public housing, and urban redevelopment.

This book started off as a very interesting read about modern cities and the current state of urban migration, but quickly became difficult to read, as the author decided to make a 180 and flashed back to migration in the 1700s. This went on for several chapters and seemed irrelevant to be discussed in the depth that it was. The discussion did not return to current migration until the last two chapters, which was disappointing. But if you are looking for an interesting read, the first half of the book definitely raises a lot of questions and provides a relevant, unromanticized view of life in the modern village and gives you an appreciation of the lengths that people go to to improve their lives and the lives of their families.

[Evelyn Swift (Featherbrained Books) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The twenty-first century is entering an epoch that is reshaping our cities and economies by the appearance of Arrival Cities, a term coined by Saunders, which explains the final migration from the rural village to urban areas. This isn’t a localized event focused on the developing world, it is a global phenomenon that is effecting everyone worldwide. These arrival cities establish new lives, where immigrants integrate themselves into a new world socially and economically, to set up life for themselves and their family. Saunders explores slums, gecekondu, favlas, barriadas and various other arrival city enclaves, which provide low-cost housing usually on the outskirts of major cities for individuals to gain entry level jobs and to generally provide money for their family back in the village until they can make the full transition to urban and middle-class life.

Arrival City is a richly-themed study of migration across the world, looking at a very old problem in a new way. Saunders casts arrival cities in a positive light, especially the slums which were previously thought as dysfunctional but as he explains, are very organized and an integral part of our society. He explains clearly the role that is needed for producing functional arrival cities and more of the process of acculturation than total immersion. I personally enjoyed this book and how he provided an unromanticized view of village life which is still a big hindrance for governments resisting arrival cities as they have a warped sense of village struggles and culture. I also enjoyed how he humanized the phenomenon by introducing us to real individuals and their personal stories. From this I could make the connection from my own families immigrant history to Canada, and the migrants presented in the story, and perhaps our lives aren’t so different even thousands of miles away.

I noticed that Saunders omitted any discussion about the role of economic growth in playing a part of raising the living standards of migrants. In places like China and Brazil, countries he wrote about, their economies are growing at an alarming rate and at what point does the wealth trickle down to the poor? Following the ‘trickle-down theory’ which essentially gives tax breaks to business which in turn creates more jobs for lower and middle class individuals and leads to goods at lower prices, these seem like all things that would be very beneficial to migrants who are in need of jobs and cheaper goods but Saunders doesn’t speak much about the effect economics play into arrival cities.
Saunders raises many issues not just about what is happening right now but for the future of our cities. After I read the book, I wonder what the consequences of mass migration to cities with non-functioning enclaves in the future will be, especially if governments continue to ignore communities that feel complete isolation and then diverge into more extremist ways of living.

[Leon Erkelens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please don't make the south of Rotterdam like middle class settlements. Let it be poor, because that is where new people arriving in the city get a chance to start their better life. Places like that are needed.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arrival City is an interesting thought provoking book about flexible urban planning for the poorest inhabitants of today's mega-cities. Really, it is very interesting and remarkably hopeful.

The world has seen a huge migration from rural to urban, creating what many think of as squatter slums. Doug Saunders brings these areas alive through stories about the lives of specific inhabitants. Saunders describes the arc of a number of arrival cities in Africa, the Middle East, South America, Asia, Europe and North America. European and North American arrival cities take a different physical form from those in Asia and Africa but the same issues need to be addressed. Saunders offers examples of arrival cities that work well at integrating new arrivals into the metropolitan area and ones that do not.

[Brenda B · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great accompaniment to contemporary news. I read Doug Saunders fairly faithfully, and his topics and writing always impress me.

A quote from the book that resonate with me: "...poverty is, fundamentally, not the dearth of money or a lack of possessions or a shortage of talent or ambition but the absence of capacities - the lack of tools or opportunities needed to function as a full citizen." (Idea attributed to Amartya Sen)

After examining arrival cities in China, Brazil, Egypt, Turkey, India, Canada, and others, Saunders summarizes it beautifully: "To achieve social mobility and a way into the middle class for the rural-migrant poor, you need to have both a free market in widely held private property and a strong and assertive government willing to spend heavily on this transition."

[CTEP]

In May, I read “Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Shaping Our World” by Doug Saunders. The book discusses the implications of mass migration from rural to urban areas and how it is affecting, for better or worse, big cities around the world. The focus of the book is on the “arrival city”, which is not necessarily the urban area that absorbs the migrants. Instead, it is typically the surrounding areas where the migrants first begin to enter urban society – in the suburbs, the slums, or the outskirts of town. The arrival city serves basic functions and needs of the residents, but most importantly, it is the location where the transition from poverty to the middle class is made. There are in-depth studies of a range of cities from Los Angeles and Washington DC to Bangladesh and Rio de Janeiro.

Arrival cities, a term coined by Saunders, are the essential entry mechanism from rural village life to urban area survival. Newcomers use arrival cities to establish new lives and to integrate themselves socially and economically. Slums, housing projects, and low-cost suburbs provide cheap housing for the migrants, and entry level jobs in the area provide money for family back in the village. In so many countries around the world (especially in India, China, and most African countries), parents and children are separated for years to ensure the survival of their families and a better life for their children by working (or sending them to work) in the city. Eventually, if they are successful at transitioning out of the slums and into the city, their families are reunited.

Saunders states that the arrival cities are the places where the next great economic and cultural booms will be born or where the next great explosions of violence will occur. The difference depends on how societies and governments react to mass migration. In a 2009 World Bank study, the conclusion was that the most effective route to poverty reduction and economic growth is to encourage the highest possible urban population density and the growth of migration, as long as the government provides migrants with intensive investment opportunities and infrastructure development. Unfortunately, instead of being given tools of ownership, education, business creation, and connection to the wider economy, arrival cities are too often treated as destitute places that need social workers, public housing, and urban redevelopment.

This book started off as a very interesting read about modern cities and the current state of urban migration, but quickly became difficult to read, as the author decided to make a 180 and flashed back to migration in the 1700s. This went on for several chapters and seemed irrelevant to be discussed in the depth that it was. The discussion did not return to current migration until the last two chapters, which was disappointing. But if you are looking for an interesting read, the first half of the book definitely raises a lot of questions and provides a relevant, unromanticized view of life in the modern village and gives you an appreciation of the lengths that people go to to improve their lives and the lives of their families.

[Humza Hussain · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tells the story of social movements across the globe by using individuals in each region and following their rural-to-urban migration. In doing this, the author is able to make a very strong case as to why certain cities fail to incorporate migrants into their economic and cultural fabrics, meanwhile others are able to achieve this quite easily. What was most interesting about this book is just how convincingly it shows how the integration of migrants explains such phenomenons and radical religious extremism, effects of economic collapses and even political revolutions. This book makes it clear that although we tend to make facile arguments such as religion being the primary driver in individuals who become violent, or ruthless dictators as the reason that there is political uproar, in reality it is the manner in which society treats its poorest members. Above all else, it is the lack of capacity and the the lack of opportunity that manifests that causes just extreme responses, and this plays itself out regardless of religion, region or era.

"What comes from this work, and from the experiences of families like the Magalheses in Brazil and the Parabas in India, is a conclusion that is unlikely to please ideologues on the socialist left or the free-market right: to achieve social mobility and a way into the middle class for the rural-migrant poor, you need to have both a free market in widely held private property and a strong and assertive government willing to spend heavily on this transition. When both are present, change will happen."

"It was the economist Amartya Sen who first recognized that poverty is, fundamentally, not the dearth of money or a lack of possessions or a shortage of talent or ambition, but the absence of capacities- the lack of tools of opportunities needed to function as a full citizen. This concept has become widely used in the field of development, but it finds its most pointed and obvious truth in the arrival city. For it is here, where the most will to reach out for betterment, that people are most dangerously deprived of capacities, those knobby handholds in the otherwise smooth vertical face of the economy."

"Parla, Spain - In an ambitious program designed to deter dangerous illegal sea crossings by migrants, and end illegal immigration to Spain. While amnesties offering regularization of "illegal" immigrants have been used throughout the Western world in the post war decades. Spain's program was part of a new approach designed to make regularization an option in advance, incorporating rural-to-urban transition into the employment system. Under this program, tens of thousands of Africans each year were granted work permit, allowing them to enter the county legally and work for a year; if their employment contracts were extended, they were allowed to bring over their families and so embark on a pat toward citizenship- an effort to prevent the fragmented families and underground lives of the European arrival city, and to allow Spain to add half a million immigrants to its economy each year without creating a marginalized class on the outskirts. Suddenly the occupants of arrival cities could buy their apartments, lease shop spaces, start small businesses and form families that weren't hampered by ambiguous national status. Children of migrants attended school as Spaniards. Moroccan neighbourhoods could become, in practice, Spanish neighbourhoods with polyglot cultures. It meant that the boom created active citizens rather than rootless foreigners scrambling for money- and it meant that the subsequent Spanish economic collapse and unemployment crises would be faced in a sensible and humane way, without turning the outskirts into disaster zones."

"In montgomery County, something different happened. Citizens and officials, realizing that the immigrants were their main source of wealth creation, banded togetehr to find ways to help them stay. In gaithersburg, Maryland, a suburban town on the northern end of the county the county with an immigrant mix similar to Wheaton's, a coalition of officials, citizens and activists developed a "door-knocking" campaign to save village-born immigrants from eviction. The idea, one official explained, was to "go to immigrants' homes, engage them through friendly door-knocking campaigns, speak their language, check on problems they face, let them know about neighbourhood gatherings, help them tap available government and non-profit services, ask immigrants families about skills they might possess that may help their neighbours." The campaign was backed with a network of financial and business support services that, while not inexpensive to the taxpayers of this prosperous town, was seen as a wise investment.

Montgomery County represents one of two paths that the arrival city can follow into the urban outskirts. Everywhere in the world, it is a choice between building a community's future or seeing the stage for its demise. Without an investment now, before the next wave arrives, that choice will be made by circumstances. Without attention to their new populations, the suburbs will turn into the cruel and violent places of our irrational fears."

"Something happens to villagers when they arrive in the French urban outskirts. The culture of transition, that fertile amalgam of village and urban life, is frozen in its early stages, prevented from advancing into permanency, from growing into something that contribute's to the country's economy and culture. The parents often manage the first stage adequately, keeping one foot in the village and one in the city, holding down rudimentary jobs and supporting their villages through remittances. But they are prevented from moving to the usual next stage, from launching any kind of small business, from owning their own house, from meshing themselves with the larger urban community - they remain isolated. And their children, fully a cultured, find themselves stuck - in part by well-documented racism that denies them jobs or post codes. But behind that "post-code racism" is the reality of those locations: because of the physical nature of banlieues and the organization of its institutions, the villagers have no means to move to the next stage. This is often mid characterized as a clash of civilizations or a failure of assimilation; it is better understood as an arrested rural-urban transition. ' the problem is that these kids are made to see themselves as immigrants, France wants them, it needs people who can do this kind of cleaning and building work. And they end up stuck in les Pyramides, because it's the place where they're made to go. And their kids have nothing. They were born here, they speak the language perfectly, they can work. But they don't have work. The didn't build les pyramids with Africans in mind. There are not enough rooms, no place for markets, nothing that people from villages can use to make a start."

"Gateway cities like Thorncliffe Park: the more successful they are, the higher their apparent poverty rate. If people are able to leave within a generation for more prosperous middle-class homeowner districts, the neighbourhood will be constantly refilled with new migrants from poor rural regions. It appears unchangingly poor and segregated only if you fail to observe trajectory of each resident."

[DW Rowlands · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was definitely an interesting book, but also a problematic one. Doug Saunders discusses a number of examples of "arrival cities"—settlements, informal or otherwise—where large populations of migrants from rural villages have moved to cities. While he does discuss 19th Century examples of this in the US and Europe, as well as immigrant arrival cities in the US and Europe, he mostly focuses on "slums" in developing countries, especially in India and Brazil, but also in Iran, Turkey, China, and elsewhere.

Saunders's thesis seems to be that successful arrival cities work because of the opportunity for land ownership and entrepreneurship and, fundamentally, because of free markets. Unfortunately, Saunders doesn't really do a rigorous job of making his points. Some of his examples, particularly in the contexts of use-separated public housing projects in France and India, definitely make sense, but he seems to be depending on his intuition as often as on actual studies, and it is clear that he has a strongly capitalist bias.

I was also disturbed by how glowingly Saunders described Alberto Fujimori and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with no mentions of their histories of human rights abuses and authoritarianism. It seems like, so long as a government is right-wing on economic matters, he approves of it, regardless of anything else it may do.

[Janine Van · Rating 2 out of 5]

Op zich interessant, analyse van allerlei grote steden over de hele wereld, en hoe zich daar ‘steden van aankomst’ ontwikkelen, doordat mensen vanuit het platteland naar de stad trekken. Per gebied wordt de situatie van een gezin beschreven die (meestal) in een soort sloppenwijk begonnen is en zich heeft weten op te werken naar de middenklasse. Telkens wordt beschreven hoe sommige gebieden juist heel succesvol zijn geweest en andere vooral veel ellende (geweld, verslaving, mislukking) hebben opgeleverd. Het boek bevat wel heel veel herhaling, ook doordat telkens dezelfde conclusie wordt getrokken. De band met het dorp draagt bij aan het gemeenschappelijk gevoel, maar om succesvolle stad van aankomst te zijn is van belang dat de immigranten grond/woningeigendom krijgen, als de overheid bijdraagt aan bv riolering en scholen en als er een mogelijkheid is om kleine ondernemingen op te richten. Boek had half zo dik kunnen zijn en ook wat meer invalshoeken qua analyse had het ook interessanter kunnen maken.

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doug Saunders’s Arrival City – How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world was listed by a few people as one of the more interesting books published in 2010 and it is easy to see why. Challenging conventional wisdom every inch of the way, Saunders has a good news story to tell about migration, and he is on a mission to make sure that everyone understands its ramifications every inch of the way.

The elements in his tale are that the things so often seen as repellent, dysfunctional, chaotic slums in cities across the world ought really to be understood as social structures striving for a coherent existence as ‘arrival cities’, aiding one of the most important revolutions now underway across the face of the planet. That revolution concerns the profound transformation of the majority of people from a state of existence mired in generations-old rural poverty into city dwellers, participating in the multifarious rhythms of modernity, with all its hopes and its risks.

The arrival city takes different forms in different parts of the world. Sometimes the shantytown, favela or gecekondu of the megacities of the developing world, other times the Lower East Sides, Bethnal Greens, the Kreuzbergs and the Slotervaarts of North America and Europe, they all have the same function as the point at which migrants come into first contact with the social and economic entity into which they are seeking integration.

It is often a precarious existence, but Saunders argues that the historic direction for migration from rural to urban areas is a degree of upward social mobility which allows migrants to overcome dangerous levels of poverty and insecurity within the space of a generation. In most of the many examples of arrival cities which he presents in this book, the children of migrants have a future which puts them a lot closer to the common life of the natives than it does to their parents.

But not in every case. The notion of a ‘failed arrival city’ is present in this study. Failure takes its grip on an arrival community when the gradient between the lives of the newcomers and the established population is just too steep, and where the structure of property-ownership, enterprise, the labour market and the education system offers no hand-holds to allow a process of gradual ascent to take place.

In Saunders’s scheme, failed arrival cities occur principally in two sets of circumstances. The first of these is when the housing tenure system provides no security for the newly-arrived, generating little or no equity in the overall rising value of property which they can draw upon as capital for their own life projects. The second cause of failure is seen when the urban space is over-planned in accordance with utopian schemes of the good life, which in its mid-20th century variant required Corbusian vistas of radically separated residence, recreation, and commercial zones a central component of its plans for the city.

For initially marginalised groups like migrants to advance towards equality there seems to be a need for the compression of all these spheres into local neighbourhoods. When homes are close to shops, and shops are just a stepping stone away from businesses and employment, the costs of life are reduced for those living on restricted budgets and more opportunities exist to build networks providing solidarity and mutual aid.

Pessimists will say that this is just rationalises the ‘need’ for slums and that, once established they are with us ever. But the real life record often confounds this claim. Successful arrival cities, like the Lower East Side of New York, Bethnal Green in East London, many of the gecekondu of Istanbul, or Liu Gong Li, China, are themselves re-absorbed into the mainstream life of the city as immigrant enterprise constructs the convivial multicultural diversity which cosmopolitan middle class life seems to crave.

Saunders’s arguments have many compelling features which make them attractive to people, like those of us around MRN, who want the discussion about migration to be cast in more positive ways, recognising the role that it plays in overcoming poverty and generating greater equality of opportunity. They also allow us to see how that old bogeyman integration could also be best understand as more than the process of acculturation in the direction of a supposed traditional mainstream which it is increasing presented as by leading politicians. The integration which migrants strive for – and they do indeed strive hard – is for a place in the social and economic life of the wider community which they are frequently denied even when they have learnt the dominant language and assimilated the cultural norms of the dominant groups in society to a perfect degree.

But there are things in the arrival city perspective which require deeper questioning. Saunders omits any discussion about the role which economic growth in general plays in supporting the growth of living standards of migrants. To what extent can the success of his arrival city examples in countries like China, India, Brazil, Turkey or the UK be attributed to the famous rising tide of greater prosperity which is supposed to lift all boats, whether the sleek yachts of the wealthy or the humble barges of the poor? Will the networks which are supposed to flourish in the crowded tenements and street markets of the immigrant quarters still play such an important role in providing the first leg-up, which Saunders tells us is the great achievement of the arrival city?

But these are questions which occur only after absorption in the arguments and viewpoints set out in this richly-themed study of migrant districts across the world. Arrival City is a good way to start thinking about some very old problems.

[Apurva Vurity · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doug Sanders, a pretty well known journalist, argues for a shift in how we perceive urban migrants, not viewing them as impoverished, poor individuals forced to relocate, but as aspirational people who are seeking economic growth. Highly recommend for anyone working or interested in the space of Urban Planning and Development

Analyzing over 15 cities and informal settlements throughout different phases of history, the book says that 'arrival cities' which are basically transitional centers for migrants to arrive (like slums in Mumbai, or small towns in the periphery of Mumbai) are inevitable. The case studies are so impressive and well researched.

3 solutions that stood out for me and the book propagates are: i) land ownership ii) a blend of welfare and self-development schemes, iii) better integration

[Hans-Peter Merz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellently written. Most important topic. We are wittnessing the last great migration of people in history - billions of humans are moving from rural to urban settling, changing size and structure of traditionel cities as well as political structures of whole nations. No one should dream about keeping all those people at their places of birth-they will move and they will go to where they hope to have a future at least for their children. Western politics would be well advised to prepare in a constructive way for the need to integrate a third of mankind in modern urban structures.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great argument against the romanticised view of village life and what drives those that end up in the perceived nightmare that is slum life. Doug Saunders shows the success and failure of various government intervention attempting to stem or enable the global slums of the world. Both at a personal level and a statistical, Saunders makes a clear argument that investment in these "arrival cities" is crucial for the benefit of individuals the world over.

[Sarah Logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an excellent book. Arrival cities really are so key to moving people out of poverty and transforming lives and nations, but if their development is badly managed, they become the seeds of the religious extremism we see in many European countries today. Really insightful case studies throughout the book that explain the social issues we see in different cities. Fascinating.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book. It wasn’t an easy read (not the most difficult either). As I got further and further into the book it made more and more sense to me…the story of people making the rural-urban move is a long and storied one - but he particularly takes this current moment and shines a light where it has not been so broadly shown. I really liked it.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this exploration of arrival cities. The work encouraged me to reflect on cities I have visited around the world as well as Canadian immigration policies. I didn't like the narratives as much as his analysis of arrival cities.

[Anoushka Kolahalu · Rating 5 out of 5]

An educational and personal experiential book! In depth, from a variety of global countries to understand the root of problems in each country pertaining to migration, and the lessons learnt or not learnt from them. Insightful, and a good read to learn more about a global movement.