Read Online Out of the Mountains by David Kilcullen - Free Book Online Page A

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
    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