East St. Louis provides an extreme example of the urban poverty paradox, whereby public policy that helps the poor in one area can lead to a massive concentration of poverty. East St. Louis lies across the Mississippi River, in Illinois, from St. Louis, Missouri. In 1989, the annual Aid to Families with Dependent Children payment was 20 percent higher in Illinois than in Missouri. If you were out of work, it made sense to move to Illinois, and so in 1990 the poverty rate in East St. Louis was 43 percent—higher than in St. Louis or Buffalo or Detroit or any other declining Rust Belt city. Since welfare reform in 1996, the gap in welfare payments has essentially disappeared, and the povertyrate gap between St. Louis and East St. Louis has narrowed considerably.
Welfare disparities have diminished, but differences in school quality remain, and they help explain why some central cities, like Detroit, are poor while others, like Paris, are not. Paris has some of the best public high schools in the world, and prosperous Parisian parents dream of getting their children into lycées like Henri-IV and Louis le Grand. But in the United States, public school monopolies have ensured that central cities often have poorly functioning school districts. Suburbs are smaller and more competitive, attracting more prosperous parents.
Nowhere was the power of schools to cause segregation made clearer than in the strange case of busing. In the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, federal and state authorities started requiring busing among districts to achieve a constant proportion of blacks and whites within each school district. Proponents of busing saw it as a means of breaking down the intellectual isolation of the ghetto and improving opportunity for African Americans. Enemies of busing, and that included more than 90 percent of America, saw it as an intrusion that destroyed neighborhood schools and forced kids to travel long distances.
It’s easy to sympathize with both arguments but hard to see any wisdom in the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Milliken v. Bradley, which limited busing to the borders of school districts. That decision essentially meant that people within cities were forced to integrate their public schools, but suburban kids were exempt. If an antiurban fiend had tried to cause a mass exodus from the older cities, he couldn’t have done better. White neighborhoods abandoned cities like Boston en masse for suburbs like Scituate outside the boundaries of the school district. They didn’t want their children to be bused, and the Supreme Court had set things up so that they could avoid the whole thing just by leaving the city. The result isolated the urban poor even more.
The odd fact is that America’s school system could decrease segregation if it moved either to the socialist left or to the free-market right. If America imitated the best aspect of European socialism and invested enough in public schools so that they were all good, then there would be little reason for the rich to leave cities to get better schooling. If America allowed vouchers or charter schools that would foster more competition in urban school districts, then their quality would rise and might even become a draw for prosperous parents. The American system of local public school monopolies has done little to help cities and much to ensure that those cities are poorer than they should be.
Urban poverty is not pretty—no poverty is pretty—but the favelas of Rio, the slums of Mumbai, and the ghettos of Chicago have long provided pathways out of destitution for the poor. In some cases, the dream of upward mobility is not coming true, but that is a reason to continue fighting for our cities, not to place our hope in rural life, especially in the developing world. Cities bring change—for society and for individuals—and the status quo is no friend of those without food or health care or a future. The part of the world that is rural and poor moves glacially—only occasionally shocked by famine or civil war or, very rarely, something as helpful as the Green Revolution—while the part of the world that is urban and poor is changing rapidly. There is opportunity in change.
But there is a reason why people promote the myth that cities are bad for the poor. The flow of millions of poor people into cities may be a hopeful sign for those migrants, but it won’t necessarily improve the quality of life for the middle-income people who are already living in those areas. Policies aimed at reducing migration into cities, like Mumbai’s draconian limitations on building, appeal to current city dwellers who know that crowding and congestion won’t make their lives better. Density has costs as well as benefits.
Urban growth will be palatable to everyone when cities do a better job of defeating the demons that come with density. Over the last three centuries, wealthier countries have spent billions on the fights against urban disease and crime. The cities of the developing world have yet to win those battles, which are the topic of the next chapter.
CHAPTER 4
How Were the Tenements Tamed?
The Dharavi neighborhood of Mumbai houses between six hundred thousand and a million people on around 530 acres. It is a teeming mass of humanity and entrepreneurship. People aren’t sitting around Dharavi waiting for their chance to be on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. In one small, dirt-floored windowless room, a couple of guys are recycling cardboard boxes—tearing them open, turning them inside out, and then stapling them up again so the printing is on the inside. The space does double duty as a dormitory, for old boxes make an adequate resting spot. Right next door, a couple of tailors are making brassieres, which can take your mind back to the Lower East Side a century ago.
Nearby, dozens of potters work in ill-lit rooms off unpaved streets. They transform freshly delivered clay into pots, which are then fired in a large outdoor smoke-bellowing kiln. In another room, seven or eight women are sorting through used plastic goods. All this recycling makes Dharavi feel pretty green, but I’m not sure even the most ardent environmentalist can take much pleasure in the recycling of syringes.
While Dharavi’s entrepreneurial energy illustrates the upside of urban poverty—ambitious people working hard and benefiting from proximity to urban customers and inputs—the area’s dirty air and contaminated water emphasize the costs of urban concentration. The streets are unpaved. Sewage lines, when they exist, often spill into water lines. There are supposedly more than a thousand inhabitants for every working toilet, so it is common to see people defecating in the streets. In such conditions, disease is inevitable, taking the lives of far too many poor Indians. According to one study, tuberculosis is the second leading cause of death in Mumbai, and its ravages help make the life expectancy there seven years lower than in the rest of India.
In 1962, the psychologist John B. Calhoun published an article in Scientific American describing horrific consequences that followed when he created massively overcrowded rat colonies. The rats’ problems included high levels of infant mortality, cannibalism, “frenetic overactivity,” and “pathological withdrawal.” One can reasonably doubt whether hypercrowded rats have much to tell us about human life in cities, and experiments on others species, like the rhesus monkey, have found that density can lead to kindness rather than killing. Still, Calhoun’s work is a warning that reminds us that density can have considerable downsides.
Mumbai’s traffic congestion can be excruciating—taxis come to a standstill behind a bullock-drawn cart. While Dharavi is pretty safe—thanks to a well-functioning social system in which neighbors look after each other—Mumbai in general has its share of criminals, like the infamous gangsters who prey on Bollywood stars. These problems are not unique to Mumbai or to India. Every older city has battled the scourges of disease and crime. Every crowded city faces a potential congestion problem. The same density that spreads ideas can spread disease.
These problems are not intractable, but they often require the intervention of an active, even aggressive, public sector. Public-sector incompetence is often cited as an excuse for promoting rural poverty—the awful logic is that because the cities aren’t clean, people should stay in their agricultural huts. This is wrong for both moral and practical reasons. Urban governments in developing countries must do what the cities of the West did in the ninetee
nth and early twentieth centuries: provide clean water while safely removing human waste. They must make ghettos safe. They must even do what too many American cities have failed to do: break the isolation that can rob poor children of the advantages that most people get from living in a big city. The Western world’s fights against urban disease, corruption, crime, and segregation over the past two centuries offer many lessons for the developing world today, but unfortunately one of those lessons is that these fights are never easy.
The Dharavi slum simultaneously displays all that is great in the Indian people and all that is rotten in the state government of Maharashtra. Though it’s unsettling to people who, like me, have a taste for free markets, the solution to Dharavi’s problems is not for the government to disappear. There are, in fact, plenty of areas, like land use controls and business licensing, where the Indian government could and should intervene less, but there’s no free-market solution for the great urban problems facing slums like Dharavi. Cities desperately need forceful, capable governments to provide clean water, safe neighborhoods, and fast-moving streets.
It’s easy to idolize democracy, but effective city governments usually need leaders who govern with a firm hand, unencumbered by checks and balances and free from the need to heed the wishes of every disgruntled citizen. When describing his fight against crime in New York City, Teddy Roosevelt noted that “in most positions, the ‘division of powers’ theory works unmitigated mischief.” I’m not going that far—separation of powers can play a very useful role in restraining bad leaders—but TR’s attempts at curbing corruption were certainly stymied by his fellow police commissioners’ ability to veto his actions. Teddy Roosevelt’s rule for unrestrained reform seems to have been that undivided power helps prevent the forces that benefit from the status quo from blocking change. Just as we entrust our leaders with more authority in time of war, we may have to trust them more when our streets are unsafe or when every sip of water carries disease.
I have great admiration for India’s remarkable democratic institutions, which are unique among the world’s poorer nations, but that robust democracy, with its various entrenched constituencies, often impedes the forceful action that must be taken to substantially improve urban life. One of the worst aspects of Indian democracy is that power is often lodged at the state rather than the city level, and states are often dominated by rural voters who, just as in the U.S. Senate, have far more representation per capita. India’s cities need more control over their own destinies.
The Plight of Kinshasa
Dharavi exemplifies the human capacity to persevere in difficult conditions, but some cities, like Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are so dysfunctional that they seem to thwart even the most dogged effort to live a decent life. When the public sector completely fails to address the consequences of millions of poor people clustering in a single metropolis, cities can become places of horror, where criminals and disease roam freely. This failure prevents the city from fulfilling its core purpose, lifting the country by connecting talented people with each other and with the outside world. Who, other than the most dedicated humanitarians, would want to come to a place that offers so much risk for so little reward?
Kinshasa had bad beginnings. It was founded and named Léopoldville by the adventurer Henry Morton Stanley in 1881 to provide a trading post for King Leopold of Belgium, whose name became synonymous with a barbarous colonialism that forced African labor to extract resources from the earth and used mass killings as a management tool. Over time, Belgian government improved, and by the 1950s, the city had become almost pleasant, but Kinshasa deteriorated drastically after independence. For thirty-two years, Mobutu Sese Seko ruled with a rampantly corrupt regime that impoverished Zaire (as he renamed the country) by nationalizing industries, engaging in foreign military escapades, and failing to invest in either human or physical capital. Mobutu reminds us of the crucial shortcoming of Roosevelt’s rule for unrestrained reform—undivided power is only good when that power is in the right hands, and that is never guaranteed. The years after Mobutu’s ouster have hardly been better for the country (now called Congo again), as hundreds of thousands died in war, and corruption continued unabated.
As a result of protracted unrest in the Congo, Kinshasa grew rapidly even though there was no functioning state to mitigate its problems. Since 1960, the city has grown from 446,000 to an urban agglomeration of 10.4 million people.
A hallmark of one-man rule is that power radiates out from the dictator, and as a result, the capital cities in dictatorships are on average more than 30 percent larger than capital cities in stable democracies. A study of corruption in Indonesia found that the stock prices of companies whose leaders stood closest to that country’s dictator in photographs suffered most when the leader fell ill. If you wanted a share in Zaire’s kleptocracy, you would have to come to Kinshasa, to be close to Mobutu.
Some studies have found that more than one third of children in Kinshasa are infected with the malaria parasite. Hundreds died and thousands were infected in a typhoid fever outbreak in 2004-2005. On top of Kinshasa’s other problems, the city has long been at the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. The earliest HIV-positive blood samples come from residents of Leopoldville in 1959. By 1985, one random sample found that 5 percent of the population was infected. CNN recently listed Kinshasa as one of the world’s ten most dangerous cities.
Conditions in Kinshasa are awful, but the situation in the rest of the Congo has often been even worse. The U.S. State Department notes that traveling in Kinshasa is “generally safe during daylight hours” but “remote areas are less secure because of high levels of criminal activity.” The wars that tormented Central Africa’s interior between 1996 and 2003 drove many thousands to the relative safety of Congo’s capital. Seventy-three out of every thousand children born in the Kinshasa Province die before their first birthday. That’s about ten times the U.S. average, but less than the figure for rural Congo. A survey in 2001 found that more than 10 percent of the children in some Kinshasa districts were suffering from malnutrition, which sounds bad, except when compared with rates outside the capital, which sometimes exceed 30 percent. The state-run water agency has failed miserably to provide clean water. Three tenths of the Congo’s urbanites have to travel more than thirty minutes for potable water, but even that hasn’t deterred migration from the country’s interior.
Kinshasa, built by a brutal colonial regime and then ruled by an evil despot, was dealt a terrible hand. The city’s problems may seem unsolvable from the perspective of London or New York today, but New York and London once had to solve similar problems. Every one of the world’s older cities once fought epidemics of disease and violence. The ultimate success of those hard-fought battles should bring hope even to Kinshasa.
Healing Sick Cities
Plague came to Athens in 430 B.C. through its port of Piraeus and may have killed one out of every four Athenians. The city’s leader, Pericles, was one of its victims. Plague came to Constantinople about 970 years later and, according to the historian Procopius, killed more than ten thousand people every day at its height. For more than three centuries after 1350, plague routinely slaughtered the city dwellers of Western Europe. In the seventeenth century, death rates were much higher in urban areas when compared with the English countryside. Plague vanished from Europe (though not from Asia) in the early eighteenth century, but yellow fever invaded, and cholera began devastating Western cities by 1830.
While earlier public health actions against disease were mostly limited to quarantine, increasingly sophisticated urbanites like John Snow were acquiring the knowledge needed to battle the spread of pestilence. Snow was a coal worker’s son from York who was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to the doctor of railroad pioneer George Stephenson. Nine years later, Snow walked two hundred miles alone to London to get the skills he needed to become a surgeon. Two years later, he received his license and became a successful doctor and me
dical researcher, one who learned much from the city around him. His greatest success came from observing the pattern of cholera deaths in the outbreak of 1854.
London was Snow’s laboratory, and with the help of a local clergyman, he interviewed residents and produced a remarkable map of the cholera outbreak. Street by street, case by case, the map showed the geography of the disease. By examining the layout of the affliction, Snow saw that a particular water pump lay at the epicenter of the outbreak. His interviews led him to conclude “there has been no particular outbreak or prevalence of cholera in this part of London except among the persons who were in the habit of drinking the water of the above-mentioned pump well.” Nearby ale imbibers remained healthy; alcohol’s ability to kill waterborne bacteria had long helped city dwellers avoid illness.
The well appears to have been polluted by a nearby cesspit that contained infected feces. When Snow got the pump’s handle removed, the outbreak subsided. The doctor didn’t quite understand the bacterial origins of cholera, but he correctly determined that the malady was being spread by infected water. Snow’s research offered early proof of a fact that now seems obvious: Cities must provide clean water to ensure urban health. Snow also provides us with an example of self-protecting urban innovation, cities’ ability to generate the information needed to solve their own problems.
In the United States, city governments, driven more by intuition than by Snow’s science, had begun the Herculean job of providing clean water at the start of the nineteenth century. Somehow they grasped that foul water played a role in disease outbreaks, and for years they fought for cleaner water. After yellow fever struck America’s cities in 1793 and 1798, Philadelphia and New York both decided to provide their citizens with water uncontaminated by nearby cesspools. Philadelphia, guided by the English architect and engineer Benjamin Latrobe, went the public route. Expenses for both construction and operation were far higher than Latrobe’s original estimate, but eventually the city had a well-functioning public system that drew from the upper reaches of the Schuylkill River.
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Made Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier Page 12