Out of the Mountains (13 page)

Richard Norton's idea of the “feral city,” quoted at the start of this chapter, is relevant here. A decade ago, in an influential article in the
Naval War College Review
, Norton defined a feral city as “a metropolis with a population of more than a million people, in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city's boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.”
47
This kind of city, Norton points out, has no essential services or social safety net. Human security becomes a matter of individual initiative—conflict entrepreneurs and community militias emerge, Mad Max style. And yet feral cities don't just sink into utter chaos and collapse—they remain connected to international flows of people, information, and money. Nonstate groups step up to control key areas and functions, commerce continues (albeit with much corruption and violence), a black market economy flourishes, and massive levels of disease and pollution may be present, yet “even under these conditions, these cities continue to grow, and the majority of occupants do not voluntarily leave.”
48
In urban metabolism terms, these are cities whose flows have overwhelmed the carrying capacity of their internal systems: the problem is not collapse (a lack of flow, as it were) but rather a superabundance of uncontrolled flows, and the toxic by-products arising from the city's failure to absorb and metabolize them.

Like the notion of urban metabolism, the idea of the feral city is drawn from a concept in biology. A feral animal is a domesticated one that has regressed to the wild, adapting to wilderness conditions and reacquiring (perhaps over generations) some characteristics of the original untamed species. The same thing happens with agricultural crops.
49
Feral populations may be coarser, rangier, and fiercer than their domesticated counterparts.
50
Norton applies this biological metaphor to cities that keep on functioning, after a fashion, even as they regress to the wild in the absence of government authority following a state collapse or during a war or natural disaster.

Feral animals and plants do actually infest cities during and after conflict or disaster and are prevalent on the fringes of larger built-up areas.
51
In Australian slang, the term
ferals
is also sometimes applied to humans who live in shanty settlements and reject the country's metropolitan culture. (Australia, like most developed countries, is heavily urbanized and, because of the inhospitable terrain and climate of its interior, it also has a very high degree of littoralization:
89
percent of Australia's population lives in cities and
82
percent lives within fifty miles of the sea.)
52
There's a radical, antiurban streak in “feral” subculture, and even though members may come from inner-city or middle-class areas, they favor a radical chic that makes a fetish of grassroots resistance to “the Man.”
53

A variant of this culture emerged in Britain during the August
2011
riots, in which marginalized city dwellers turned antiurban violence against the very cities where they lived. The destruction led
Daily Mail
columnist Richard Littlejohn to describe the rioters, who looted shops and vandalized symbols of authority and prosperity, as a “wolfpack of feral inner-city waifs and strays.”
54
The notion of a lack of governability—the exact kind of thing Haussmann was trying to prevent in Paris, or the London authorities sought to address in their plan for the
2012
Olympics—is important here. It manifests in diffuse and apparently random patterns of crime and violence, and in self-marginalization by city dwellers who see themselves as victims of social injustice and economic exclusion, standing apart from the mainstream—in the city, but not of it—yet still maintain a high level of connectedness both with other members in their group and with the ebb and flow of the city itself.

The London riots also suggest that the idea of a peripheral settlement or population (which we've so far been using mainly in a spatial sense, meaning people or districts that are located on the edge of town) can be broadened to include people who are marginalized or excluded in an economic, political, or cultural sense, even if they live in the physical center of a city. In this reading, which is of course extremely familiar to anthropologists or urban sociologists, the “urban core” of a city isn't just the older, more central, downtown part of its built environment but also its economically, politically and culturally dominant terrain, the part of the city system that accumulates value at the expense of a periphery.
55
In fact, better-off populations in many countries have self-segregated, moving farther out of city centers to gated communities or simply to islands of prosperity in the suburbs, abandoning the city's center.
56
Urban peripheries, in this sense, aren't merely places on the physical outskirts of a city. Rather, they're areas that are dominated, marginalized, exploited, victimized, or excluded by the core—wherever they happen to be physically located. The “ferality” of the
2011
London rioters thus wasn't that of a core population attacking its own city but that of a marginalized population attacking a city it saw as someone else's.
57

It's worth pointing out here that the conditions Norton describes can exist at multiple levels within an urban fractal pattern, meaning that one level of an urban system—a few districts within a city, a few neighborhoods within a district, a few blocks within a neighborhood, or a few houses within a street—can become feral even while the broader system remains within limits, or can slip out of equilibrium even as the higher-level system is getting more stable. Conversely, ferality can bleed from one level of an urban system into another, such as when a city's broader equilibrium is compromised by war or natural disaster, when a parent city or district loses the ability to integrate its component parts, when whole periurban districts effectively secede from the larger city (part of a broader process that some political geographers call “internal secession”), or when—as in the case of San Pedro Sula, discussed in Chapter
1
—an urban metabolism loses the carrying capacity to process the by-products of the city's flows.
58
The city or district may not collapse, and as we will see, it may be far from anarchic or ungoverned, but as it slips from state control and “goes feral,” a series of overlapping threats emerges both for local residents and for the broader urban, national, and global systems that surround it.

Obviously enough, the very term
city
embodies peace, order, and tameness. English words that connote domesticity, peace, tranquility, development, and order, and which we use every day—words such as
politeness
,
civilization
,
citizen
,
civility
,
civilian
,
urbane
, and of course
police
—all derive from Latin and Greek words for the city (
polis
,
urbs
,
civis
). When Aristotle called man a political animal, he was referring to the predominantly urban habitat of our species: humans, he was arguing, are by their very nature “city-dwelling animals.”
59
This idea of the city as the culmination of human development (literally, civilization) is so deeply embedded in our thinking that the notion of a feral city, moving backward in time and downward in social order, regressing to the warlike chaos of the wild—not a noncity but an
anticity
, a perversion of the natural way of things—can be deeply shocking.

This, I suspect, is what lies at the root of our modern fascination with world-ending societal collapse, a scenario beloved of survivalists and cinematographers. Think of the box-office success of movies such as
I Am Legend
,
Mad Max
,
World War Z
, or
28 Days Later—
or, indeed, the seductive appeal of any number of zombie apocalypse or dystopian sci-fi novels, comics, videogames, and television shows—all of which tap into a deep anxiety that underlies contemporary urbanized society. Urban theorists such as Stephen Graham argue that this anxiety is actually a direct result of the very processes of population growth, urbanization, and technological modernization that we're examining here, so attacks on a city's complex system-of-systems can be seen as a form of forced de-modernization.
60
Graham quotes the architecture critic Martin Pawley, who wrote that “fear of the dislocation of urban services on a massive scale” is now “endemic in the populations of all great cities.”
61

The Battle of Mogadishu

Richard Norton cited the Somali coastal city of Mogadishu as the only full-blown example of a feral city in existence when he was writing in 2003. Almost a decade later, my colleague Anna Prouse and I were fortunate enough to briefly visit Mogadishu, working on a field assessment for an NGO that provides reconstruction assistance in Somalia. By this time (in mid-2012) the country had been without a functioning government for more than twenty years, and the city was a byword for chaos, lawlessness, corruption, and violence.

But this wasn't the Mogadishu we saw. Far from it: on the surface, the city was a picture of prosperity. Many shops and houses were freshly painted, and signs on many street corners advertised auto parts, courses in business and English, banks, money changers and remittance services, cellphones, processed food, powdered milk, cigarettes, drinks, clothes, and shoes. The Bakara market in the center of town had a monetary exchange, where the Somali shilling—a currency that has survived without a state or a central bank for more than twenty years—floated freely on market rates that were set and updated twice daily. There were restaurants, hotels, and a gelato shop, and many intersections had busy produce markets. The coffee shops were crowded with men watching soccer on satellite television and good-naturedly arguing about scores and penalties. Traffic flowed freely, with occasional blue-uniformed, unarmed Somali National Police officers (male and female) controlling intersections. Besides motorcycles, scooters, and cars, there were horse-drawn carts sharing the roads with trucks loaded above the gunwales with bananas, charcoal, or firewood. Offshore, fishing boats and coastal freighters moved about the harbor, and near the docks several flocks of goats and sheep were awaiting export to cities around the Red Sea and farther afield. Power lines festooned telegraph poles along the roads, many with complex nests of telephone wires connecting them to surrounding buildings. Most Somalis on the street seemed to prefer cellphones, though, and many traders kept up a constant chatter on their mobiles. Mogadishu was a fully functioning city.

To be sure, after much time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other garden spots, our standards of prosperity and order are somewhat elastic. (Anna, a civilian journalist by training, has eight years of continuous war zone experience in Iraq, working for the International Committee of the Red Cross, running a field hospital in Baghdad, then commanding the Italian provincial reconstruction team in Nasiriya; she tends to shrug off a little light mayhem as just part of an honest day's work.) And there were admittedly many signs of war and chaos: in the old part of town many houses remained ruined or pitted by bullets and shrapnel, and you could see the distinctive splash marks of RPG hits on many buildings. Refugees were camped in clusters of round, tarpaulin-covered, wood-framed huts in several parts of town, and (especially on the city's outskirts) civilians carried AK-
47
s casually slung over their shoulders or resting beside them as they worked. Weaving in and out of the traffic were “technicals” (pickup trucks that mount a heavy machine gun on the flatbed behind the driver's cab) crammed with Somali National Army troops in camouflage fatigues, armed police, or green-uniformed militia, and there were Soviet-made tanks and armored fighting vehicles on the roads out of town. On the fringes of the city there were signs of more recent fighting, with destroyed houses, downed trees, and the occasional shot-out vehicle or dead animal. Much of the country was still recovering from a deadly drought and famine that affected all of East Africa in
2010
–
11
, and Shabaab militants still controlled a sizeable chunk of Somalia's territory and population, though they were fast losing ground.

Some government buildings in the central Villa Somalia compound were well maintained and luxuriously furnished, but others were much less salubrious: Anna and I sat in on a meeting between an NGO and a minister of the Transitional Federal Government in his well-furnished but darkened office, the only air-conditioned room in a large, mostly empty ministry building otherwise without water, furniture, or electrical power. This minister's family had fled Somalia in the early
1990
s, and he'd lived most of his life in the United States; still, he unabashedly sought a bribe in return for helping the NGO's work by calling off members of his own ministry who were obstructing it. There was gunfire from time to time, Shabaab sent scouts and probing attacks into town on some nights, we moved mainly in South African–designed mine-resistant Casspir vehicles, and convoys belonging to AMISOM—the African Union Mission in Somalia, a peacekeeping force that had succeeded, against all expectations, in seizing Mogadishu from Shabaab over the past year—were occasionally ambushed. But it was nothing like the intensity of Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Pakistan: the conflict in Somalia in
2012
was a genuinely small war.