Out of the Mountains (8 page)

Another side effect of the combination of climate change, coastal urbanization, and connectedness is a rise in infectious disease. Several studies have correlated slum settlements (particularly those created through rapid unplanned urbanization) with increased risk of insect-borne diseases such as malaria.
48
Infectious diseases are more prevalent in urban areas, and seasonal flooding—which happens more often in coastal cities, of course—has been suggested as a major cause of increased disease transmission risk.
49
At the same time, megacities create global population-mixing effects, and this makes traditional local-level approaches for disease surveillance, response, and public communication much less effective.
50
People who live in transitional or periurban areas interact with residents of the densely populated urban cores where they work, and with users of public transportation systems, airports, and seaports. Combined with the global transmission belt of increased worldwide air and sea travel, and greater connectivity across the planet, this creates pathways for the extremely rapid global spread of infectious or exotic diseases—something that was seen in recent pandemic influenza episodes and in cases of bird flu.
51

The food security effects of coastal urbanization are equally severe. Increased pollution from growing coastal cities depletes fish stocks. Fisheries that were once key sources of food for coastal towns begin to collapse under the pressure of unchecked population growth, bringing increased pollution and overfishing. This is particularly severe in low-income countries, where coastal megacities lack effective wastewater treatment systems, so enormous amounts of raw sewage flow directly into rivers and the sea. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, for example, Pakistan's largest coastal city, Karachi, generated a million cubic meters of sewage every day, creating a massive amount of coastal pollution.
52
Karachi (discussed in Chapter
2
) has the largest fishing fleet in Pakistan, mainly comprising small boats that operate close to the coast, so increased coastal pollution prompted by urban growth could put a serious dent in Pakistan's fisheries and in the livelihoods and diets of Karachi's inhabitants.
53

Onshore, meanwhile, the newly urbanized areas that surround an older city core absorb territory that was once occupied by farmland, market gardens, and orchards. As slums and unplanned housing developments expand into this space, the distance between a city's population and the food sources on which it depends increases significantly. Food has to be produced farther away and transported over ever-greater distances, increasing transportation and refrigeration costs, raising fuel usage, exacerbating pollution and traffic problems, and creating “food deserts” in urban areas. In a more general sense, “as societies urbanize and modernize, so their populations become ever-more dependent on complex, distanciated systems . . . to sustain life (water, waste, food, medicine, goods, commodities, energy, communications, transport, and so on).”
54
Food insecurity resulting from urban expansion is thus just one facet of a pervasive urban problem: reliance on complex infrastructure subsystems with many moving parts, all of which have to work together for society to function, and which require stable economic and political conditions.

Local armed groups can exert a chokehold on these systems, including a city's food supply, by preying on the transportation flows that connect the city to its hinterland: setting up illegal checkpoints, robbing travelers, or extorting protection money from farmers who need the road to get their food to market. In Kenya's capital, Nairobi, for example, gangs such as Mungiki have exploited their location astride the city's food transportation routes (as well as their relationships with figures in the Kenyan political elite) to prey on the
matatus
—the brightly colored, privately owned minibuses that connect outlying suburbs with downtown areas—extorting as much as
1
.
1
billion Kenyan shillings (US$
13
million) per year from transport operators.
55
Nairobi's population is
3
.
5
million today, and it's expected to reach
8
million by
2025
, with more than half the city's inhabitants crammed into only
1
percent of its land area, clustered in crowded shantytowns and slums around the old city core.
56
The ability of Nairobi's gangs to interdict the city's transport and food lifelines thus gives them immense influence and makes dealing with them particularly problematic.

Perhaps the most severe impact, however, is that many cities risk running out of water as they expand into the catchment areas from which they traditionally drew their supply. This problem will only get worse as populations swell and urban settlements cover rainfall catchments and exhaust the replenishment capacity of river systems, pushing cities further from clean groundwater sources. The effects of water shortage in Syria and Libya are discussed in Chapter
4
, but even in developed democracies such as Australia and the United States, analysts have argued convincingly that the pace and scale of urban development have reached a point where the ecological carrying capacity of the water cycle is just no longer sufficient for sustainable urban growth.
57
In developing countries this problem is even more severe, leading Chinese researchers to suggest that many Chinese cities will struggle with water shortages in the future.
58
In rich and poor countries alike, water supply and wastewater disposal are two of the most demanding aspects of urban governance, particularly in outlying areas. As one study pointed out in
2000
, “for many megacities . . . access to piped water generally decreases towards the city periphery. In Mexico City, for example, piped water service declines from
45
percent in the urban core to
27
percent in the perimeter, dropping close to zero in squatter settlements.”
59
In Mumbai, a population the size of greater London's lives in slums where government planners consider a ratio of one toilet to fifty people to be an “adequate” level of sanitation; the actual ratio in
2010
was one to six hundred.
60

Likewise, the growing size and complexity of cities is straining the carrying capacity of governance systems such as police, emergency responders, courts, district administrators, hospitals, schools, and maintenance services. Government presence may be extremely limited in marginalized areas, even those that are geographically close to the seat of government. Gaps in government presence and authority—urban “no-go areas,” as they're sometimes called—can then emerge. These allow safe havens for criminal networks or nonstate armed groups, creating a vacuum that is filled by local youth who have no shortage of grievances, whether arising from their new urban circumstances or imported from their home villages. As the international development researchers Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt pointed out in
2009
, urban violence makes every other problem worse:

Organized urban violence, in the form of often heavily armed territorial gangs and militias, brings together all the syndromes of urban exclusion: lack of “normal” livelihood opportunities, physical and infrastructural neglect of shanty towns, absence of the state and its public functions and moral and cultural disdain by the middle and upper classes towards the poor and excluded. It locks the urban excluded in a cul-de-sac. . . . Here we see a particularly harmful blurring of formal and informal, legal and illegal, civil and uncivil spheres. The police alternate between random violence against the shanty-town inhabitants and involvement in violent crime itself. Drug gangs defy the law and impose their own, but also maintain dyadic relations with the world of politics. Private militias, with ties to the official security services, pretend to defend law and order in
favelas
by imposing their own regime of extortion and intolerance.
61

In Kingston, Jamaica, urban garrison districts have emerged over the past generation of rapid coastal urbanization, creating no-go zones where organized crime networks and local populations collaborate to exclude government presence, even as they benefit from patron-client relations with national political figures.
62
These are discussed in detail in Chapter
2
, but even in developed cities such as Paris and London, rioting, youth unrest, and crime in periurban districts reached significant levels on several occasions over the past decade—and in low- and medium-income countries the problem is even worse.
63

The Microecology of Urban Violence

If you're one of the many soldiers, aid workers, and diplomats who got to spend a lot of the last decade in some little plywood-and-sandbag firebase, up a winding dirt road, hunting terrorists through the mountains, or trying to connect with a population in a remote Afghan valley, then some of this might be new for you. For pretty much everyone else, it's very familiar, well-known stuff that urban theorists (including Mike Davis, Stephen Graham, Mitchell Sipus, Saskia Sassen, and Diane Davis, to name just a few) have been looking at for a long time—though not always through the lens of irregular warfare or systems theory, as we're doing here.
64
Likewise, for obvious institutional reasons, organizations such as the Australian Army, the British Royal Marines, and the United States Marine Corps have written extensively on these issues since the turn of the century.
65

There's also a long-standing tradition in several academic disciplines that conceives of cities as systems: in particular, as biological systems, ecosystems, or even single organisms.
66
Central to this approach is the idea of
urban metabolism
, adapted from the concept of metabolism in biology—the “physiological processes within living things that provide the energy and nutrients required by an organism.”
67
Metabolic processes transform inputs such as sunlight, food, water, and air into energy, biomass, and waste products. Urban historians and ecologists have long applied the notion of urban metabolism to understand the environmental history of cities.
68
“Just as living things require the inputs mentioned above, so do cities. That is, cities cannot exist without those inputs—urbanites require clean air, water, food, fuel, and construction goods to subsist while urban industries need materials for production purposes. These materials may initially come from the area of the urban site itself, but increasingly over time they are derived from the urban hinterland or even farther. That is, as the city grows, it extends its ecological footprint deeper and deeper into its hinterland.”
69

The idea goes back at least as far as Karl Marx, who wrote in the
1840
s about the “metabolic rift” created by urbanization, which, as we noted earlier, accelerated dramatically during the industrial revolution.
70
Marx, of course, was writing in Europe at the end of the first hundred years of the industrial revolution, and talking about cities that had experienced a century of rapid urbanization and population growth, producing many of the same stresses, strains, and systemic breakdowns we're discussing here. In modern times, the idea of urban metabolism was repopularized by Abel Wolman's
1965
article “The Metabolism of Cities,” and his notion that researchers can understand a city as a system by looking at its metabolic flows, via what is known as a
material flow analysis
, has since become a standard academic approach.
71
It's usually applied to the ecological sustainability of cities (that is, the way cities use and transform inputs of water, carbon, air, food, and fuel, then deal with the resulting waste products). The idea is that urban systems need enough carrying capacity to absorb, process, and deal with inputs and to process (metabolize) waste products, otherwise toxicity develops in the system and it begins to break down.

In recent years, though, people have started applying this concept more broadly, looking at nonmaterial flows and systems in cities as a way to examine the “relationships between social and natural systems, cities and their hinterlands (both immediate and global) and sustainability and social justice in urban areas.”
72
Researchers in the fields of human geography and political ecology have built what we might call “urban social metabolism” models, which explore flows of population, money, trade goods, and information into a city, trying to understand how the urban area transforms these inputs, and analyzing the ways that cities manage the by-products of that transformation—including economic inequality, crime, conflict, social disruption and exclusion, political alienation, social injustice, violence, and unrest. Analyses of this sort help us understand the carrying capacity of a city's governance systems, along with its physical infrastructure, and in turn to understand the city's stability, sustainability, and resilience. This approach also helps illuminate what we might call the territorial logic—more broadly, the
systems logic
—of urban environments, and in turn helps us think about the sustainability of urban systems.
73

Much as political geographers and ecologists have applied metabolism models to cities, military theorists have conceived of conflict (especially insurgency) as sharing many characteristics of biological systems. In
2003
, for example, I proposed in
Countering Global Insurgency
that we might consider insurgencies as biological systems, thinking of an insurgent theater of operations (and the virtual theaters connected to it by global information and material flows) as a conflict ecosystem. In particular, I suggested that, far from being a discrete entity, separate from its environment, an insurgency is in fact a system state within that environment, a dissipative structure within a complex flow system, and thus inseparable from the ecosystem in which it occurs.
74
If we apply this notion to the urban environment, noting that (as I mentioned earlier) the primary threat in this environment comes from nonstate armed groups, we can start to see what an urban conflict ecosystem looks like, and to develop an understanding of what we might call the
microecology of urban violence
—the ways in which broader patterns of conflict play out in the dozens of microhabitats that make up a city under stress.