A third of the world's people are in the midst of the largest population move in human history, as the last of the word's rural populations abandons agriculture and moves to the urban areas of the developing world and of the wealthy West. This shift is at the heart of the most dangerous and violent conflicts today in North America, Europe and Asia. It also has enormous potential to renew the world's economies and bring a final end to mass poverty - if conflict and clashes can be avoided. It is taking place not in the cities we know but in a new type of space, on the margins of our great cities that we rarely notice: the 'arrival city'. These spaces are becoming the power centres of the new era. It is from these, the new home of an enormous floating population of 2 billion people, that most of the world's most serious crises and explosions of violence are emerging. In "Arrival City" - both a groundbreaking work of reportage and an exciting, vivid travelogue - award-winning journalist Doug Saunders offers a detailed tour of the key points in the Great Migration, and considers the actions that have turned this enormous population shift into either a success or a violent failure.

About the Author

Doug Saunders is the European Bureau Chief of the Globe and Mail, Canada's largest and most respected national daily newspaper, and the author of a popular and award-winning weekly column devoted to the intellectual ideas and social developments behind the news. An experienced foreign-affairs writer, he has won the Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize on four occasions.

Prizes

A groundbreaking current affairs book documenting the largest population move in human history, as a third of the world's people migrate into cities, rupturing societies across the globe.

Reviews

A rural to urban migration is playing out now around the world, driven by a desire to escape rural poverty for an opportunity to attain urban middle-class status. London-based journalist Saunders (European bureau chief, Globe and Mail, Toronto) details the landscape of arrival cities-those urban subunits with larger migrant concentrations-around the world and the circumstances of today's migrant classes from arrival to assimilation. Through a panoramic look at 20 arrival cities and a seemingly innumerable number of migrant stories, Saunders argues that opportunities for education, owning housing, residing with immediate family members, and building businesses within these arrival cities determine whether migrant families are able to become successful, urban middle-class citizens or become stuck in an urban poverty turning to violence or extreme cultural or religious fundamentalism. He also evaluates the effect of arrival cities on both the villages left behind and the middle-class urban areas being striven toward. VERDICT While this book is presented as popular reading, the depth and breadth of the material often gives it more of an academic feel. Recommended to those seriously interested in current global class mobility and factors in successful migration.-Catherine McMullen, MLIS, Portland, OR (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

"Praise from the UK and Canada: "
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""Arrival City" brilliantly captures the breakneck pace of this 'great migration, ' as the peasants of the poor world relocate to their own megacities--and ours. And it brings profoundly good news from the mean streets . . . Bottom of Form
Doug Saunders, a Canadian journalist skilled in both colourful reportage and sustaining a good argument, provides a badly needed progressive and optimistic narrative about our future. This is the perfect antidote to the doom-laden determinism of the last popular book on urbanisation, Mike Davis's "Planet of Slums" . . . This may be the best popular book on cities since Jane Jacobs's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" half a century ago. Certainly, it shares the same optimism about human aspiration amid overcrowded buildings and unplanned urban jungles, and the same plea for planners to help rather than stifle those dreams . . . Few books can make rationalists feel optimistic and empowered f