Hard as it is to imagine, the government ought to be paying closer attention to Kibera and similar slums in urban centres.

Instead of sophisticated transit systems with futuristic hubs and hyper malls, the Vision 2030 mandarins may want to pay closer attention to what Doug Saunders has to say in Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping our World. According to Saunders, Vision 2030 will happen in Kibera.

It is predicted that by the end of this century, the world’s entire population will have migrated to cities.

If this becomes reality, then housing such large masses should be the century’s biggest talking point. Attention will be directed to these unsightly slums where the majority of residents will be crammed.

“The arrival city is both populated with people in transition — for it turns outsiders into central, ‘core’ urbanites with sustainable social, economic and political futures — and is itself a place in transition, for its streets, homes and established families will either become part of the core city itself or fail and decay into poverty or be destroyed,” Saunders writes.

But there is a slight distinction. Not all slums are arrival cities.

According to Saunders, the most insalubrious and dismal slums are usually not sites of rural-urban transition. Some, like Bethnal Green of East London in the 19th century, existed to capture those who fell out the bottom of the inner-city society, either due to indebtedness or redundancy, with few migrants from villages in their midst.

Occasionally, the arrival city will outgrow the mother city, and, like the nomad and his camel, push the original residents out of the tent. It happened in the early 1990s with Istanbul’s Mustafa Kemal gecekondus. These once-despised ‘night-settlers’ grew and took over the old city.

One of the reasons why the government might be interested in an arrival city like Kibera is because it slows down population growth better than any public campaign.

Research has shown that when rural folk migrate to towns and settle in their arrival cities, they opt to have fewer children than they would have had back in the village.

“The unimpeded arrival city is a more effective form of development than any known economic, social or population-control policy,” Saunders writes.

The question then becomes: What needs to be done with the arrival city? No doubt, at some point, authorities have to intervene. But this has to be done thoughtfully. It is easy for the middle class to hijack opportunities meant for the arrival city. It has been done.

Nyayo Highrise estate adjacent to Kibera was meant to be an upgrade of the slum. It was hijacked by the middle class. The same is already happening to the UNHabitat-backed Kensup initiative, sometimes with the connivance of the genuine house owners.

To prevent this, the authorities should study what former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, himself a product of the arrival city, did with Rio de Janeiro’s Santa Marta slum. No one moved out during the upgrade, and the new buildings were almost a replica of the old, save for the materials.

Saunders also cautions governments to have a rational approach to the problem presented by arrival cities. For one, immigrants have proved everywhere to be more enterprising than native-born city residents.

The transformation of Sao Paulo’s Jardim Angela slum shows that the enterprise is already there; all that is needed is the spark in the form of the requisite infrastructure — which is what governments need to provide in the slums.

Creation of legitimate jobs within the slums is all that is needed to bring down crime, not deployment of police in riot gear.

Otherwise, left to its own devices and deprived of access to the larger political system, the arrival city will generate a defensive politics of its own.

In Brazil it took the form of a drug gang; in Mumbai Hindu nationalism in Europe, Islamic extremism. If allowed the resources, the arrival city will flourish. If denied them, it will likely explode.

The French Revolution of 1789, fuelled by hungry rural migrants, can provide vital lessons to those governments bent on bulldozing these cities out of existence.

Governments ignore arrival cities at their own peril. History has shown that revolutions are fomented in these places. The Arab revolutions of 2011 found their driving force in places like Cairo’s Boulaq slum, whose residents were frustrated enough to do what the middle class was too scared to do. And they succeeded.

Shenzhen, the manufacturing capital of China, illustrates the power of the arrival city. After the 2008 New Year holiday, close to two million of the purpose-created city’s workforce did not return to work, opting to work elsewhere for a lower wage.

Reason? The giant manufacturing hub had failed to include the arrival city in its design, leaving the workers to feel they were living in a cold concrete-and-steel city.

Looking at the envisioned futuristic Konza and Tatu city projects in Kenya, I can foresee the same fate. The techies and other skilled workers these projects target might just start drifting back to their old haunts in Eastlands to touch base with their homeboys.

“New people create new economies...,” writes Saunders, “...and those economies develop best when these people, no matter how poor, are able to stage their arrival in an organic, self-generated bottom-up fashion. The city wants to have migrants. It does not want to meet the future of Shenzhen… a place nobody can call home.”

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