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 1840s 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.
Figure 1.1
At a more macro level, we might think of rural-to-urban migration—driven by rural problems such as environmental degradation, energy poverty, famine, drought, or conflict—as one side of a population flow system that connects the city to its hinterland and creates a need for the city to deal with a complex array of problems such as informal settlements; economic, governance, and transportation overstretch; pollution, traffic, and border security; and food, water, fuel, and electricity shortages. Just as an urban metabolism model helps ecologists analyze material flows into and through the city, this kind of systems model can help us understand how the city transforms nonmaterial flows and how it deals with by-products such as crime, conflict, social injustice, or political unrest. This approach also helps us analyze how a city’s ecosystem nests, in turn, within a larger national and global system. It allows us to understand how coastal cities (in particular, the ports and airports that connect them to the outside world) function as exchange mechanisms that connect rural populations with urban ones, and local networks with international networks. Putting this all together, we can start to see what is happening in a city under stress.
Figure 1.2
In this model, a coastal city’s ecosystem lies at the center of a larger pattern of flows, with rural factors in the city’s local or international hinterland—things such as environmental degradation, poor rural infrastructure, and rural conflict—prompting population flows into the urban area, which in turn contribute to rapid urbanization. Along with material flows (food, air, water, electrical power, and fuel), economic flows (construction materials and other commodities both licit and illicit; ground, sea, and air traffic; and money), and informational flows, these flows of population contribute to the creation of informal periurban settlements. An accretion of slums, squatter settlements, and shantytowns grows in a transitional zone around the old city core, displacing land that was once used to provide food and other goods and services to the city, and covering the rainfall catchment area for the city’s water supply. The city’s growth puts its infrastructure under stress, so systems of governance, both within the old urban core and in newer outlying areas, now lack the carrying capacity to support the scale of the population and other inflows they are experiencing. The city’s systems lack the carrying capacity to metabolize these inputs and become overwhelmed, and this leads to a buildup of toxic effects such as urban poverty and exclusion, disease, unemployment, social injustice, and ethnic dislocation. These in turn give rise to violent crime, social and political unrest, and—in severe cases—organized conflict. Shortages of food, fuel, electricity, and water exacerbate these problems, and urban violence in turn makes it harder to deal with these shortages. The city’s connectedness (via information and money flows, and through transportation hubs such as seaports and airports) allows its population to participate in licit and illicit activities offshore, to influence (and be influenced by) conditions in the rural hinterland, and to connect with global networks, including diaspora populations. This set of interactions affects both local and international conflict dynamics.
Violent Ecosystem: San Pedro Sula
If this all sounds very abstract and theoretical (and I’m afraid it does), then it might help to describe a specific city by way of example. The city I have in mind is San Pedro Sula—the second city of Honduras—where, in early 2013, a Caerus team led by Stacia George conducted field research aimed at building a systems model of violence in what has become unflatteringly known as “the most dangerous city on the planet,” a city that happens to exemplify all the main trends we have been discussing.75
The Republic of Honduras is smack in the center of the Americas. It’s bounded on the east, southwest, and west by Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, with the Pacific Ocean to the south and the Caribbean to the north. It has a population of just over 8 millio
n, and its two major cities—the administrative capital, Tegucigalpa, in the south, and the commercial capital, San Pedro Sula, near the north coast—together account for almost a third of the total population. San Pedro Sula, for several years running, has topped the list of the world’s most violent cities, with an astonishingly high murder rate of 169 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.76 (For comparison, even at the height of the Iraq War, Baghdad had a violent death rate of only about 48 per 100,000; New York’s is 6.2; Sydney’s is 1.0; London’s is 1.2. Even Moscow, one of Europe’s most violent cities, has a rate of only 9.6.)77
Collaborating closely with local community organizations and civil society groups, and using tools and techniques developed by Caerus teams in Africa, Asia, and Latin America over the past several years, Stacia’s group tried to figure out what was driving this extraordinarily intense violence, through fieldwork aimed at developing a metabolic model of the city. The results were compelling.78 What seemed on the surface to be a chaotic pattern of violence among a multiplicity of local gangs, narco-traffickers, and other groups turned out to be the result of a small number of macro-level flows that have accelerated over the past decade. These flows, along with the city’s spatial layout, its geographic location as the country’s main economic and transportation hub, and local conditions in a series of urban microhabitats, account for virtually all of the observable violence in San Pedro Sula.
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