Out of the Mountains (7 page)

At the same time, patterns of coastal urbanization suggest that the number of people on the planet who live in this littoral influence zone is very high and growing fast. In the Mediterranean basin alone, the urban coastal population grew by
40
million between
1970
and
2000
, and three-quarters of that growth was in North Africa and the Middle East.
32
The Maghreb (Muslim northwest Africa), in particular, has exceptionally high rates of coastal urbanization, “striking examples being Libya (
85
percent), Tunisia (
70
percent), Morocco (
51
percent) and Turkey (
52
percent).”
33
The two most urbanized of these countries (Tunisia and Libya) were also the most heavily affected by revolutions during the Arab Spring of
2011
, while the uprisings in Egypt occurred almost entirely in a triangle of cities that all lie within a hundred miles of the sea, squarely within the littoral influence zone of the Mediterranean.

These uprisings also saw the use of cell phones, social media, and text messaging as organizing tools, along with cross-pollination among activists in neighboring countries and the involvement of international media (all of which are described in detail in Chapter
4
). This highlights the third major trend in the future environment: the world's newly urban populations are highly connected and networked.

This
connectedness
is both an internal and external feature of coastal cities, and it's an entirely new phenomenon. As I noted in the introduction, factors such as population growth and coastal urbanization were very well understood in the
20
th century—in the
1990
s, many military theorists and urban planners were writing and speaking about the planet's emerging urban littorals. But this was in the pre-cellphone area, before Internet access became common in the developing world, before satellite TV was widespread. What's new today is the entirely unprecedented level of connectedness that these tools allow—and this changes the picture in some very important ways. In particular, connectedness has expanded dramatically, and is continuing to expand, not only within coastal cities but also between them and their hinterlands, from city to city, and between home populations and global networks, including diaspora populations.

If you fly in a helicopter above any coastal city or slum settlement in the developing world, the most obvious rooftop feature is the forest of satellite dishes, TV antennas, and radio masts. This is just the most prominent visual indicator of how connected these areas are becoming. Indeed, in transitional and periurban areas (the informal settlements, slums, and townships that aggregate around the margins of cities and absorb a high proportion of new immigrants from the countryside) people can connect with national and international information flows to an unprecedented degree, however ineffective their government.

For example, a
2011
study found that Somalia, a country that has experienced near-anarchy and state collapse for twenty years, has rates of cell phone usage approaching
25
percent—far greater than its neighbors, including relatively well-administered Ethiopia—and that there has been a remarkable proliferation of telecommunications companies offering “inexpensive and high-quality services . . . including internet access, international calls, and mobile connectivity. Some of them are closely connected with the remittance industry.”
34
This vibrant remittance system is another major indicator of the connectivity between coastal cities such as Mogadishu, Somalia's largest urban area, and the Somali diaspora (roughly
800
,
000
people worldwide—about
10
percent of the total Somali population).
35
As one visitor to Mogadishu noted in
2011
, “older parts of the city were falling apart, but the people there were still connected to the outside world via satellite dishes that were installed on roofs that leaked. In fact, one of my most enduring memories of Mogadishu is that of satellite dishes everywhere, even in areas that were heavily-controlled by militia.”
36
This connectivity lets urban Somalis tap into global networks for the exchange of money and information, allows them to engage in trade, and lets them pursue legitimate business (such as mobile phone companies).
37

Of course, people who live in rural areas without cellphone coverage can't access these connectivity-enabled overseas sources of support. Thus, greater access to global systems of exchange—something that's available only from well-connected urban locations—has become a major reason for people to migrate to cities, increasing the pace of urbanization. This is just one part of a broader pattern of economic change, driven by increasing global connectedness, that has seen investment by diaspora networks replace agricultural surplus as one of the main drivers of rural-to-urban migration in low-income countries.
38

The same connectivity that drives diaspora investment and licit trade, of course, also enables illicit flows such as people smuggling; the trafficking of weapons, drugs, and other contraband; piracy; and terrorism. One example of an illicit flow is charcoal export from Somalia—an environmentally devastating activity that destroys precious tree cover in sparsely vegetated semidesert areas. The United Nations banned the trade in February
2012
, due to its connection with interclan violence and the Shabaab terrorist group: clans were basically fighting each other for the right to burn off Somalia's few remaining trees and sell the ashes to foreigners. This destructive trade exploits the connectedness among coastal cities in the Horn of Africa, throughout the Arabian Gulf, and in the Red Sea. It relies on Somali and Arab coastal shipping and on groups such as Shabaab, which seek access to funds and are willing to trade (on any basis, licit or illicit) in order to get it.
39
In a failed state—as Somalia was for the past two decades—concepts such as “illicit networks” ring hollow anyway, since no authority exists to declare things licit in the first place.

In a deeper sense, networks themselves, by definition, are neither licit nor illicit.
Behavior
may be licit or illicit; networks just are. People self-organize in networks of all kinds, and they use those networks to engage in complex hybrid patterns of illicit
and
licit behavior. In this context, in common with researchers such as Sean Everton, I prefer to think of “dark networks”—dark in the sense that they are invisible to the naked eye.
40
We might think of them as subterranean rivers of connectivity that run below and between the elements of the world we see. They can't be observed directly unless we do something to stimulate the network, drawing a detectable response that illuminates it. The mere fact that a network is “dark” just means it's not immediately visible—a systems characteristic that implies no value judgment on what the network does. In particular, the fact that a network is dark doesn't mean it's nefarious, nor that it's engaged in harmful activity: indeed, in the real world, dark networks engage in many kinds of activities, beneficial, neutral, and harmful, all at the same time. Understanding the presence of these networks, their multipurpose nature, and the way their flows intersect is one of the key things we need to do if we hope to understand the future environment.

Obviously enough, urbanization increases connectedness: as rural-to-urban migration continues, the newly urbanized populations that cluster in periurban settlements around an older city core may look marginalized (they literally live on the city's margins, of course, and they may be sidelined in economic and social justice terms), but electronic communications, media, and financial systems connect them with people in their home villages and with relatives and friends overseas. And because large transportation nodes (such as airports, container hubs, or seaports) are often in transitional or periurban areas and tend to draw much of their workforce from these areas, periurban populations are closely connected with international trade and with transportation and migration patterns, both internal and external. This is especially true in coastal cities: as the economic geographer Gordon Hanson argues, “when joined with globalization and developments in export-led manufacturing, coastal ports and nearby cities have greater access to international markets, thus providing key advantages for economic growth.”
41
This means that the apparently marginalized populations of the new coastal urban sprawl aren't really marginal at all: on the contrary, they're central to the global system as we know it.

At the city level, workers from periurban areas often do the menial, manual, technical, or distasteful work that keeps an urban core functioning, and they sit astride key communication nodes that connect a city to the external world as well as to its food, energy, and water supplies. Wealthy neighborhoods tend to rely on services provided by workers who can't afford to live in the upscale areas where they work, and who thus commute from outlying or transitional areas. Periurban areas therefore represent a kind of social connective tissue between a country's urban centers and its rural periphery, connect that periphery to international networks (much as, say, the port facilities in the coastal city of Karachi connect Pakistan's hinterland with the enormous Pakistani diaspora), and at the global level play a connective role in patterns of transportation, migration, finance, and trade. This exact phenomenon, as we shall see in Chapter
4
, lay behind the rapid spread of uprisings during the Arab Spring.

Getting Swamped

Taking these four megatrends together, we can see a clear pattern. Rapid urban growth in coastal, underdeveloped areas is overloading economic, social, and governance systems, straining city infrastructure, and overburdening the carrying capacity of cities designed for much smaller populations. This is likely to make the most vulnerable cities less and less able to meet the challenges of population growth, coastal urbanization, and connectedness. The implications for future conflict are profound, with more people competing for scarcer resources in crowded, underserviced, and undergoverned urban areas.

Lagos, capital of Nigeria, is one city that exemplifies both the positive and negative aspects of this kind of rapid urban growth. As the visiting journalist Josh Eells noted in May
2012
:

In the past five years, Lagos has exploded. Current estimates put the population somewhere between 15 and 18 million, with an annual growth rate of around 6 percent—one of the fastest-growing cities on the planet. By 2025 it's expected to top 25 million, making it the third-largest city in the world, after Mumbai and Tokyo. The result is a place stretched to its breaking point: a Dickensian conurbation of overcrowded slums and nonexistent services. It's also in some ways a city of the future: what happens when democracy, industrialization, and unchecked population growth collide in the developing world.
42

Lagos has the population of a megacity but the infrastructure of a midsized town. The city has only sixty-eight working traffic lights, making traffic “a force of nature”—“Lagosians have words for traffic the way Eskimos have words for snow: congestion, logjam, lockdown, holdup, gridlock, deadlock, and the wonderfully evocative go-slow. Horror stories abound: police attacking motorists with bullwhips, taxi drivers getting into fistfights, angry commuters backing over policemen with their SUVs.”
43

It's not all bad: Lagos is also a city with an amazing capacity for community-driven innovation and self-organization. It has radio stations that specialize in reporting traffic, crime, and road conditions in particular districts, drawing on self-synchronized networks of motorists and road users who text and dial in, to create locally tailored networks that help people navigate complex conditions safely.
44
Lagos
is Spanish for “lakes,” of course, and the city is an exemplar of the future in this way, too: it's built around a series of coastal swamps, low-lying islands, and lagoons—and no part of the city is more than sixteen feet above sea level. The implications for Lagos of climate change and a rise in sea level are thus potentially profound.

The Asian Development Bank estimated in
2011
that drought, desertification, and soil salinity, exacerbated by climate change, will prompt millions of rural people to migrate to cities over coming decades across Asia and the Pacific alone. As the bank's researchers noted, “the region is home to more than
4
billion people and some of the fastest growing cities in the world. By
2020
,
13
of the world's
25
megacities, most of them situated in coastal areas, will be in Asia and the Pacific. Climate change will likely exacerbate existing pressures on key resources associated with growth, urbanization and industrialization.”
45
A growing body of research is emphasizing the implications of climate change for coastal urbanization, where the slightest rise in sea level can cause major disruption.
46
Whether or not you believe in human-made climate change, the fact is that even without any sea level rise, coastal urbanization will, by definition, put more of the world's population at risk of flooding, creating greater demand for flood-related disaster relief (as we'll see in the case of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in Chapter
5
). Floods are already the most common natural disaster in the heavily urbanized Mediterranean basin, for example, and by far the most frequent natural disaster to which aid agencies and donors such as the World Bank have to respond—and as more people cluster in coastal cities, this will only increase.
47