There is something medieval about the dimly lit alleyways where migrants from the Chinese hinterland gather in the poorer quarters of Guangzhou. Makeshift buildings lean precariously over the lanes, and labourers hurry home through the dirt after 12 hours of toil.
The mobile telephone numbers scrawled on the walls offering forged identity papers are rather more modern. So are the nearby luxury apartment blocks, the roar of the city’s elevated expressways and the tens of thousands of high-tech factories churning out Chinese shoes and CD players for export to America and Europe.
Intrigued by what seems to be one of the turning points of history - the United Nations has predicted that next year, for the first time, more of the planet’s 6.7 billion people will be living in cities than outside them - I had come to this district of Guangzhou in search of someone who could explain why humankind was finally turning its back on the countryside.
I had imagined comparing urban Guangzhou to the northern English cities described by Charles Dickens in Hard Times. There are, after all, so many social and economic similarities between the first industrial revolution in England and the modernisation convulsing southern China and the rest of Asia today - even if it is happening on a faster and larger scale. It is no coincidence that Britain was the first country in which more than half the population were city-dwellers.
In truth, the fast-growing cities of Asia, including Guangzhou, are not so much Victorian as an awkward mix of the Middle Ages and the ultra-modern. Only the coal smoke and the smog are visibly Dickensian, yet the stories told by the migrants would be familiar to any refugee from the English countryside a century and a half ago.
“There was no work in the village.” With those words, barely audible over the Chinese soap opera playing on the television in her spartan concrete apartment, Zhang Dingnan explains why she came to Guangzhou from rural Hunan seven years ago. She is also telling the larger story of how hundreds of millions of people like her are moving from the villages of the world to its teeming cities. She is part of humanity’s greatest mass migration.
I had tried to speak to some of the hordes of rural migrants streaming in and out of Guangzhou’s main railway station that morning, but the ubiquitous policemen and plainclothes security officers made people too nervous to talk. Some migrants were sleeping rough in the square. There were villagers arriving to look for work, ex-villagers leaving to visit home, grandfathers bringing children to see their mothers, Hunanese and Sichuanese carrying bulging suitcases or sacks on bamboo poles, and labour agents hunting for cheap factory employees.
I was lucky to be guided that night to Zhang’s clean but crumbling home on the first floor of a nondescript building. With a shifting population of relatives and friends moving in and out of Guangzhou - 40 people from Zhang’s village have already come to the city - it is not clear on any given day how many live in the apartment, which is wallpapered with posters for bottled water. The rent is Rmb300 (£20) a month, and the permanent residents include her husband, who works as a security guard, and her recently arrived 17-year-old daughter. Zhang herself is 35, and she has three part-time jobs as a maid for foreigners living in Guangzhou.
Leaving children behind is one of the hardest parts of migrant life, whether the home village is in southern Africa or east Asia. Zhang entrusted her son and daughter to her husband’s parents in the village, but her father-in-law was crippled after losing a leg in a tractor accident and her mother-in-law died. The children ended up living on their own at the ages of 13 and 14, with the neighbours looking in from time to time. “Living conditions in the village are much better,” says Zhang, “but there’s no money there.” Now, in town, things are looking up. The daughter, He Yong, has landed a job at the Ramada Pearl Hotel and even speaks a few words of English. Both mother and daughter have their mobile phones lying on the kitchen table.
China is the most obvious example of the mass migration changing the face of the planet, simply because its 1.3 billion inhabitants make it the most populous nation. But that sort of transformation is widespread, be it in Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico or India, the second most populous country in the world, with 1.1 billion people.
India is poorer and - so far - less urban than China, but its cities are as modern-medieval as their Chinese counterparts. In the Greams Road slum in central Chennai (previously known as Madras), under a vast billboard advertising a Ford Fiesta, several thousand Tamils live cheek-by-jowl in shacks and tiny brick dwellings next to the dead, black stench of the Cooum River and a few thorn bushes fluttering with discarded plastic bags. Residents are plagued by mosquitoes and fevers as old as humanity. The wood and palm-leaf homes nearest the water were swept away when the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami struck the coast at the end of 2004. Yet no one wants to leave, for this slum has existed for decades, there is plenty of work in Chennai, no rent to pay, and the government hands out rice and kerosene for cooking.
In these dark and smoky homes live construction workers, servants, painters and auto-rickshaw drivers - the former villagers who power the city’s expanding economy. “This place feels comfortable,” concludes Komathi, a 34-year-old housewife. She is one of a group of cheerful women gathering round the strange visitor whose shiny shoes are now spattered with mud and worse. Her husband is a day labourer, which means he gets what work he can. Her daughter also lives in Greams Road with her husband and young son. Of her own two sons, one is studying and the other works as a mechanic. All the men are out working or looking for work. Life is difficult but not impossible, and it is getting better as Chennai reaps the rewards of the Indian economic revival.
The urban migration that is changing our world, however, is a story not only of villagers becoming servants or factory workers but also of villagers using the income to finance their children’s education. In this way the children may secure the coveted urban office job that will allow them to shoulder their way into the ranks of the new middle class.
Not far from Greams Road, in a leafy residential area of south Chennai, Mariam Ram is racing to recruit more graduates for TnQ Books and Journals, her high-tech business that prepares international scientific journals for publication. Publishers in the west have contracted out the costly and time-consuming job of preparation and editing to companies such as hers. When I saw her, Ram already had a round-the-clock operation employing 638 staff in two buildings, and she was looking for 30 more. “The lowest qualification in this office would be a first-class Bachelor’s degree in science,” she says. “The rest would be Masters or MPhils. We’re recruiting so frantically right now. It needs English, it needs science, it needs IT and it needs low wages, and you can’t get it anywhere except India.
“I think the country’s clearly more affluent,” she says. “You see change every time you come. This is a very exciting time to be in India.”
Particularly in Chennai. The city is proud of its conservative culture but also poised for the kind of headlong growth that has exhilarated and exhausted the residents of Bangalore and Mumbai. A few streets from Ram’s office, cars and trucks vie noisily for road-space with goats, cows, bicycles and three-wheelers. Outside the city, I saw a farmer using two bullocks to pull a single ploughshare in a field next to a gleaming Saint-Gobain glass factory and an IT park, while trucks bearing new wind turbines drove west towards Bangalore.
“When we started in our company, all of our employees had bicycles and some had scooters,” says Joseph Sigelman, a former Goldman Sachs banker who seven years ago founded OfficeTiger, a “business process outsourcing” company that handles back-office work for bankers, lawyers and publishers. “Today they all have scooters, and some of them have cars.” The average age of the employees - nearly 3,000 are in Chennai - is 26. “As soon as they get a job offer, they become part of the middle class.”
Chennai, like most of urban Asia, boasts a hodge-podge of architectural styles in which concrete is the common denominator, sometimes bare and brutal and sometimes dressed in an ill-proportioned neo-classical facade of polished granite. The streets are heaped with astonishing amounts of rubbish and unused building materials: piles of sand, bricks and giant pipes that eventually become part of the urban scenery.
“Clean Values, Clean City” declares a forlorn sign from the public works department on the wall of the Institute of Child Health and Hospital for Children in the central district of Egmore. Beneath the sign is raw sewage and rotting garbage, a glaring indictment of the authorities in a city where street-cleaners are neither expensive nor unavailable. Chennai has 1,200 slum districts - a third of the city’s 7 million inhabitants live there - but there are also elegant old houses and comfortable condominiums, and an “IT corridor” to the south complete with a six-lane highway under construction and office blocks of blue glass.
Chinese cities such as Guangzhou display the same incongruous juxtaposition of squalor and luxury, but in China the frenzy of investment, construction and reckless disregard for the environment exceeds anything seen in India. As you enter Guangdong province, the air thickens and the streams turn black. On an otherwise cloudless day with bad smog, you can look straight at the sun at midday without hurting your eyes. Earthmoving equipment removes hill after green hill as the concrete tide advances inexorably over the paddy fields and the fruit orchards. Yet not far from the sprawling factory complexes and the featureless dormitories for Guangzhou’s migrant workers are bright green golf courses, luxury condominiums for China’s nouveaux riches and the Longcheer Yacht Club on the South China Sea.
“The central government still judges local government leaders in terms of how fast their localities are growing and how much money they are turning over,” says Zheng Tianxiang, a professor whose thoughtful views on city development have apparently failed to make much impact on the three Guangzhou mayors he has advised in his long career as an urbanisation expert. “Maybe it’s beginning to change, but we haven’t seen much evidence of it yet.” Zheng is both proud and regretful - pleased at the wealth that has been created but sorry about some of the consequences. He lives in an apartment in a gated community called the Left Bank Residential Quarters, which comes with a swimming pool and gardens between the tower blocks. “We used to swim in the Pearl River outside Zhongshan University,” he says. “The environment was great. There was no ash in the sky. But the people were poor. I made Rmb50 a month.” Nowadays, he says, salaries have multiplied many times over. “At least we have money - not as much as you westerners - but when we’ve got enough, we’ll sort out the environment.”
That is a typical comment from an urban Asian. In trying to understand the urbanisation of humanity, I deliberately chose to visit Guangzhou and Chennai, as well as Chongqing and Bangalore, rather than capitals such as New Delhi or Beijing or familiar commercial centres such as Shanghai and Mumbai. These secondary cities may not be household names in the US or Europe, but they are roughly as populous as New York and Paris. They also exemplify the momentous process which UN-Habitat, the UN human settlements programme, describes in its latest report on the state of the world’s cities.
As migrants pour out of their villages in search of work and prosperity, the number of cities with more than a million people is expected to rise to more than 350, and the number of “megacities” - 10 million and up - will increase from the 20 or so today. This is not a purely Asian phenomenon, or one that moves precisely in step with economic development - Lagos, Cairo, Sao Paulo and Mexico City rank among the world’s biggest cities. But Asia’s massive population means that half of the world’s cities, big and small, will be in Asia. In the next quarter of a century Asia’s urban population is expected to grow by 70 per cent or 1 billion people. There is even talk of gargantuan conurbations of more than 20 million people, dubbed “metacities” or “hypercities” by the UN. Asia already has one such city, Tokyo-Yokohama, and the next one could be the increasingly joined-up conurbation of industry and commerce that includes Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Cities over 10 million, says Habitat, “will be vested with such power that at many levels they will act as city-states independent of national and regional mediation”.
Cities are as old as civilisation, or rather, civilisation is as old as the city, as the origin of both words - from the Latin civis, a citizen - reminds us. In 1200, Guangzhou, later known to the British as Canton, was already one of the world’s largest cities with a population of more than 200,000. But the scale and speed of what has been happening over the past few decades is without precedent. At Indian independence in 1947, Delhi was a city of a million people. Today it is home to 14 million. The population of Bangalore has risen from 1 million in the 1960s to 6 million or more now. Mumbai, with more than 18 million people, is already one of the most densely populated places on earth, and it continues to grow. This urban flood has spawned a whole new industry of consultants, architects, technicians and mass transport experts. Books on individual cities and on the city as a global phenomenon have proliferated as fast as urban slums. They include Joel Kotkin’s The City: A Global History, Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, Max Rodenbeck’s Cairo: The City Victorious, Stephen Inwood’s City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.
As the title of Davis’s book suggests, and as the UN-Habitat report emphasises, there are grave doubts about whether megacities can survive as viable societies when millions of the poor eke out a living in fetid slums and the rich live behind the high walls of luxury gated communities. More people live in Mumbai’s slums, the UN notes, than in the whole of Norway. Pessimists such as G. Dattatri, the former head of urban planning in Chennai, do not see cities as generators of wealth and employment for the rural poor but as refuges of last resort for landless villagers with nowhere else to go. Villagers are not pulled into town by the attractions of the city, but pushed into insanitary slums by their desperate plight at home. “For survival they come here,” says a barefoot Dattatri over coffee at his home. He calculates that construction workers earn about Rs3,000 (£35) a month when they need Rs7,000-8,000 to support a family of five; while a barely qualified office worker with a job in IT could be earning Rs25,000-30,000. “Fortunately, till now there has not been any revolutionary impact, but this will certainly lead to much more unrest. Today crime has gone up in Chennai. People live in miserable conditions, and they feel they are being exploited. So we are virtually sitting on a timebomb, particularly in the Indian cities. One thing that has prevented this happening is the whole Indian philosophy of contentment.”
Optimists in the urbanisation debate - and optimism here is a relative term - argue that India’s particular problem is not a surfeit of people in its cities, but a surfeit of people overall. In the coming decades, India will overtake China as the most populous nation and will have to find space for an additional 500 million inhabitants. That does not change the facts about cities: people want to live in them, and in the modern age they remain the most efficient way of housing and providing jobs and services to large numbers of citizens.
It is rare to meet a slum-dweller who wants to move out of free or low-rent accommodation into improved but more expensive housing, let alone one who wants to return to a home village to resume the backbreaking work of growing crops - especially when five, six or seven family members may have paying jobs in the city. Of course, people do eventually abandon the slums once that new apartment is within financial reach, or else they begin to upgrade and gentrify the slum until it is a slum no more. “I have a relative from Sichuan who came 15 years ago,” says Miles Lee, a senior research fellow at the state-funded China Development Institute in Shenzhen. “She now earns Rmb3,000-4,000 a month. A farm girl. She worked her way up to be a frontline manager in a department store. Her two-room condo costs about Rmb1,500 a month.” Shenzhen is a former fishing village that was transformed into an industrial city of 8 million migrants in 30 years, as China modernised.
Among newly urbanising Asians, there is little of the sentimentality about the countryside typically felt by long-urbanised Europeans and Americans. I knew that Chongqing, the former wartime capital of China on the Yangtze River, was supposed to be the world’s biggest city (although that is something of a cheat, since the municipality of 32 million people includes several towns and rural areas) and I knew that it was being developed at breakneck speed by Communist leaders intent on opening up the western half of China. But I was still shocked by the almost megalomaniac scale of building and the casual demolition of rocky mountains with dynamite and bulldozers. In one place I watched farmland being torn up to make way for a new commercial park servicing the food industry, next to luxury housing estates with names such as “Blue-Green Water Cambridge” and architectural features vaguely suggesting Bavarian towns or Chinese-kitsch versions of Venice.
A watchman called Zhou, however, was anything but nostalgic when I met him at the site of yet another new industrial estate. The 50-year-old, 5ft-tall security guard with a wispy beard and crooked teeth mocked the idea of anyone being upset about the dynamiting of hillsides. “Levelling the ground is good,” he declared. “Chongqing people don’t like mountains. There’s too much up and down.” He used to farm sweet potatoes, but his land was bought for development and he is buying a new apartment with the compensation money. For the moment he sleeps under canvas at the site, wears plastic sandals, black trousers and a rough blue shirt and earns Rmb600 a month. “Life is much better,” he says.
Even urban enthusiasts cannot deny that the uncontrollable growth of cities that is a feature of modern Asia brings with it many horrors, including transport chaos, poisonous air pollution and toxic rivers. “Ten years ago, I used to go fishing and there was beautiful clean water,” says Miles Lee in Shenzhen. “Now you go to the same place and all you catch is shorts and T-shirts and plastic bags.”
Bangalore, a cosmopolitan, fast-growing city that sees itself as one of the IT hubs of India, is choking on its own success. It has become a byword for a catastrophic failure of urban planning that has left the city with traffic jams so bad - 900 vehicles a day are being added to the streets - that investors have started to despair and look elsewhere to expand. They complain that it took 10 years to approve a new airport, its design capacity has already been exceeded by the existing number of passengers, and there will be no viable road or rail link from Bangalore city even when it opens. “Fundamentally, the government is 100 per cent incompetent,” said Bob Hoekstra shortly before retiring as head of Philips Software in Bangalore to become a consultant. “The state government or the federal government?” I asked. “Both,” he replied.
The failure of Bangalore and many other cities to manage their own growth, however, does not mean that urbanisation is bad for humanity. It simply means that urbanisation is being badly managed. The death in April this year of Jane Jacobs, the author who analysed and championed cities as centres of influence and wealth creation, prompted a number of articles recalling the importance of urbanisation in humanity’s advancement through the ages. Plenty of experts remain eager to further the cause of urbanisation. “Civilisations have always been urbanised,” says K.E. Seetharam, a water and sanitation expert at the Asian Development Bank in Manila. “This concept of rural development is something more recent and in my view doesn’t exist.” He concludes: “Urbanisation is not a problem. It’s a natural outcome of development.”
Indian sentimentalism about the supposed benefits of village life, and the consequent incompetence in managing cities, contrasts starkly with the ruthless pragmatism of the central and local authorities in China. Some Indian politicians and foreign donors remain obsessed with the problem of rural poverty and therefore spend scarce resources on subsidies for villagers that would be equally well spent on the nation’s burgeoning towns and cities. One reason for this apparently illogical approach is politics: India is a democracy. For historical reasons - urbanisation is recent - the countryside is over-represented in the political system and power rests with the state government, not with the cities. The result, says Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys, the Bangalore-based IT services group, is “a disconnect between the economic power and the political power”. Bangalore accounts for a 10th of the population of Karnataka state and about 60 per cent of its gross domestic product, he says, but has only 7 per cent of the state’s electoral seats. “In China you don’t have that problem. India is the only example of urbanisation [on this scale] happening with universal adult franchise.”
A baneful consequence of India’s poor infrastructure is that companies and householders end up providing many of their own services - by generating electricity, drilling for water in their backyards and even disposing of their own waste - which eliminates the efficiency gains one would expect from providing such services in a densely populated area. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who chairs Biocon, the Bangalore-based biotechnology company, says companies such as hers use the government’s unreliable electricity supply purely as a backup. Successful companies and rich individuals live cocooned from the hardships faced by others, emerging only to complain about services such as roads that they cannot provide for themselves and thus deepening the fears of the pessimists about social conflict. Yet, as Nilekani points out, it is the skilled and relatively wealthy incomers to the cities, not the masses of poorer migrants, who put most strain on the infrastructure by driving private cars and consuming other goods and services that must be brought into town.
While Indian governments have dithered and delayed in the face of the incoming tide of urban migrants, Chinese officialdom has prepared for the inevitable with the sort of ruthless efficiency only authoritarian regimes seem capable of achieving. Beijing is expecting 300-500 million rural people, equivalent to the entire population of western Europe, to migrate to Chinese cities over the next two decades, and it has encouraged city mayors and local governments to invest in the infrastructure to deal with this. (Foreigners invariably praise the country’s roads and airports.)
But there is a dark side to the relentless urge to cover the land with concrete and produce economic statistics that find favour in Beijing. “There will emerge six big cities, 25 small cities and more than 490 small towns, which will be surrounding the megalopolis-city district, like many stars encircling the Sun,” declares a typically hubristic exhibit on the 2005-2020 Chongqing master plan at the city’s urban planning museum. China is remarkable for having museums to celebrate the future rather than the past, but what you will not find out in them is the environmental and social cost of the country’s accelerated city development, the communities swept aside and dispersed in the name of progress, the rivers and fields poisoned by chemicals or the skies darkened by choking smog.
Nor will you hear much about that elusive goal of urban planners known as “quality of life”. For that - and perhaps to understand the ultimate destination of Asia’s younger megacities - one needs to go to Tokyo or Seoul. While fast-expanding Chennai and Chongqing are forcing motorways through the city, the South Korean capital is doing the opposite as it starts to suburbanise and turn green. Lee Myung-bak, who has just finished his term as mayor of the Seoul Metropolitan Government, says the amount of green space in the city has trebled in a decade.
Lee made his name by improving public transport and demolishing roads, not building them. He organised the destruction of a city-centre elevated highway and replaced it with the Cheonggyecheon stream that had been buried under the concrete. The stream immediately became a much-used pedestrian attraction in the heart of the city, and this apparently anti-urban gesture may help Lee get elected as the next president of South Korea. “We’re in a rather different situation from the cities in India and China,” he says. “About 20 years ago we did undergo a rapid expansion of population and back then we had our hands full. Now our population has stabilised and has actually started to decrease. More and more citizens want a house that better reflects their living standards - one you don’t just live in, but actually enjoy living in.”
By the time you read this, the owner of the building where Zhang had her Guangzhou flat may have carried out his threat to demolish it to make way for something more salubrious (and probably more expensive). Zhang planned to search immediately for a new place, even if it was smaller and costlier. “Of course,” she said when I met her, “we want to go back to the village eventually.” I do not believe it for a moment. In cities such as Guangzhou and Chongqing, Chennai and Bangalore, mayors and local governments are still making plenty of mistakes as they seek to grapple with the 21st-century conversion of Earth into an urban planet. But the biggest mistake of all would be to pretend that humans are destined to be anything other than city-dwellers.
