“To bring in only urban, university-educated elites … is a waste both of human potential and of foreign policy, since the immigrants often get their degrees at universities in their own countries that have been funded by foreign governments to help create medical, legal and technical knowledge in the developing world. If the products of these programs all become hotel desk clerks and roofers in Western cities the entire aid agenda is wasted. … Of ‘chronically poor‘ immigrants in Canada, 41 per cent have university diploma’s. … The Canadian government was surprised to discover that the uneducated relatives of points migrants are faring better economically that the original migrants themselves … [and] when immigrants are brought over without their networks of relatives and village neighbours, they are more likely to become isolated and unsocialized, to fall into criminality or social conservativism.”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill Books 2011 (Originalausgabe 2010), S. 91-93.

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“Because arrival cities are so widely misunderstood and distrusted – dismissed as static ‘slums’ rather than places of dynamic change – governments have devoted much of the past 60 years to attempting to prevent their formation. …

[But] people move through its neighbourhoods. … they arrive very poor, … but … [poverty] rates fall sharply, especially during the first decade of residence … Nevertheless, the neighbourhoods themselves often stay poor or even get poorer, … sending its educated second generation into more prosperous neighbourhoods and taking in waves of new villagers. … The downward trend for the place is the opposite indicator of the upward trend enjoyed by the residents themselves. This paradox has created a sense among outsiders that the city‘s immigrant districts are poorer or more desperate than they really are, which leads to a misunderstanding of the forms of government investment they really need – a serious policy problem in many migrant-based cities around the world. rather than getting the tools of ownership, education, security, business creation and connection to the wider economy, they are too often treated as destitute places that need non-solutions such as social workers, public-housing blocks and urban-planned redevelopments …”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill Books 2011 (Originalausgabe 2010), S. 55, 81/82.

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“People had been moving from the country to the city since about 3000 B.C., when the first urban formations took shape around the Persian Gulf and soon spread across Asia and Europe. For the next 5.000 years, countless millions of peasants, and hundreds of thousands of regional elites, made the move to the city …

For most of those 5.000 years, big cities functioned as ‘population sumps … they soaked up large numbers of rural people, held them for a few years and promptly killed them, usually before they could reproduce or settle in any meaningful way … In every major city, deaths outnumbered births, and childhood mortality was especially high … London in the eighteenth century was so lethal that it required an average of 6.000 rural migrants a year just to maintain its population of 600.000. Cities, like armies, destroyed people almost as fast as they could take them in.

In the last half of the eighteenth century, and especially after 1780 or so, the dynamics began to change. … The tightening web of global commerce and communication had created a homogenous human pool of immunity across Europe and much of Asia, rendering formerly lethal epidemic diseases endemic (that is, turning them into mere childhood diseases). The new immunity unleashed an unprecedented population boom. …”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill Books 2011 (Originalausgabe 2010), S. 135/136.

Abb.: Olalekan Jeyifous: Shanty Mega Structures of Lagos Nigeria, 2021, Detail, Moma, im Internet.

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“To an outsider, the village seems fixed, timeless, devoid of motion or change, isolated from the larger world. We consign it to nature. To those who might glance at its jumble of low buildings from a passing vehicle, the village seems a tranquil place of ordered, subtle beauty. We imagine a pleasant rhythm of life, free from the strains of modernity. Its small cluster of weathered shacks is nestled into the crest of a modest valley. …

in peasant villages around the world, nobody sees rural life as tranquil, or natural, or as anything but a monotonous, frightening gamble. …

At the moment, only 41 per cent of Asians and 38 per cent of Africans live in cities – leaving a population of villagers that is unproductive and unsustainable. They are on the land not because it is a better life, but because they are trapped.”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill Books 2011 (Originalausgabe 2010), S. 5,6 und 22

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