Read Online Out of the Mountains by David Kilcullen - Free Book Online
Authors: David Kilcullen
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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 canât 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 âdarkâ just means itâs not immediately visibleâa systems characteristic that implies no value judgment on what the network does. In particular, the fact that a network is dark doesnât mean itâs nefarious, nor that itâs 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 cityâs 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, âwhen 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.â 41 This means that the apparently marginalized populations of the new coastal urban sprawl arenât really marginal at all: on the contrary, theyâre 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 canât 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 countryâs 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 Pakistanâs 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
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 cityâs 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, âwhen 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.â 41 This means that the apparently marginalized populations of the new coastal urban sprawl arenât really marginal at all: on the contrary, theyâre 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 canât 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 countryâs 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 Pakistanâs 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
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