Out of the Mountains (43 page)

A related insight is the need to conceive of a city as flow and process, rather than just place, with violence shaping and creating the landscape, not just happening in it. This jumps out at me from the Tivoli Gardens example we looked at in Chapter
2
. The military traditionally treats urban terrain as a “special environment,” which makes sense at the tactical level, where combat engagements are so fleeting (seconds and minutes, to hours or days at most) that the landscape is effectively a constant. Having been brought up this way, until I studied Kingston through the lens of competitive control theory, looking at it in terms of long-term conflict between Jamaican political parties and their client gangs, I naively thought of a city as just a piece of real estate—a fixed backdrop against which the action happened. I understood how dramatic an effect urban terrain could have on conflict; what I didn't fully grasp was that this could work the other way—that processes of conflict and competitive control at the street level could literally
create
the physical terrain of an urban area, demolishing entire districts in one place, creating new districts in another, determining the locations of key pieces of urban infrastructure, and defining the spatial relationships between parts of the city. And physical terrain (initially formed by conflict) can then channel and define how subsequent conflict occurs, so the urban organism both reflects and perpetuates the conflicts that created it.
27
Having once had this insight (which I'm sure is entirely obvious to many people but just hadn't quite struck me before), I can never see cities the same way again. An urban area, as it exists in any one instant, is now to me just a snapshot of a dynamic disequilibrium. Like a still image from a video clip, it's in midflow, and it seems permanent only if you ignore what's happening on either side of the freeze-frame you happen to be looking at in any one moment. Flow, not space, is what defines urban areas: the mathematics of cities is calculus, not geometry.

But if cities are in a state of dynamic disequilibrium, this calls into question policy makers' emphasis on stability as a goal. Planners talk about stabilizing a country, returning to normality. The military has a whole doctrine called “stability operations,” NATO has a school for “stability policing,” aid agencies do “stabilization programming,” the World Bank and the IMF issue “stabilization loans,” and political scientists talk of “status quo powers” and “hegemonic stability theory.”
28
But at the city level, none of this makes much sense—there is no status quo, no “normal” to which to return, no stable environment to police. Think about Dhaka, exploding from
400
,
000
to
15
million, or Lagos, growing from
3
to
20
million, or Mumbai from
2
.
9
to
23
million, all in the same time frame.
29
These aren't stable systems; even if you could somehow temporarily get every city function under control, the frantic pace of growth would rapidly overtake the temporary illusion of stability. In fact, that's exactly what has occurred in many cities, where planners have repeatedly devised solutions to problems as they exist at one particular moment, only to find these solutions overtaken by events before they can be implemented. In maneuver theory terms, rapid dynamic change has gotten inside planners' and political leaders' decision cycles: they repeatedly develop policies that
would have been
adequate for a set of circumstances that no longer exists. Rather than focusing on stability (a systems characteristic that just isn't present in the urban ecosystems we're examining here), we might be better off focusing on resiliency—helping actors in the system become better able to resist shocks, bounce back from setbacks, and adapt to dynamic change. Instead of trying to hold back the tide, we should be helping people learn to swim.

Another insight that arises from this line of thinking is that the territorial logic of any given city—the way things work, how the place flows, what drives what, what matters and what doesn't—will be totally opaque to outsiders, at least at first. Taking the time to observe a city for long enough to sense the flow and to see the rhythms of its metabolism turns out to be critical in understanding it. (Think about how thoroughly Lashkar-e-Taiba scoped Mumbai before the
2008
attacks, studying the city and its flow for more than a year, and compare that to Task Force Ranger in Mogadishu.) A one-time analysis, however detailed, doesn't say much about a city's flow. Big data can sometimes help, since advances in cloud computing and data mining now make it possible to produce dynamic visualizations of flow patterns. Analysts can track millions upon millions of data points (traffic patterns, say, or cellphone usage, or pedestrian movement, or prices in markets, or Internet hits, or bank transactions, or numbers and types of cars in parking lots)—things that dozens of businesses across the world analyze every day for marketing purposes—to understand how a city works. But how do we do that in enormous megaslums that are constantly growing and morphing and which don't have the spatial frameworks (down to street names and building addresses, for example) that allow geo-referenced data to mean something?

Obviously enough, we go in on the ground, and we engage directly with the people who live there. Caerus field teams under Matt McNabb and Richard Tyson have done exactly this in Liberia and Nigeria over the past two years, working with marginalized urban communities to help them create maps of their own environment and thus give them a voice in negotiations on land use, infrastructure, crime, and public safety. These teams have found that in these poorly serviced and barely governed periurban settlements, basic spatial relationships and flows are highly contested, which makes them extremely hard (and sometimes very dangerous) to map. This underlines another basic insight, namely, that self-aware ignorance—a constant realization that outsiders
don't
understand how things work, and therefore need to experiment, test hypotheses, start off small, and seek local context—is a crucially important mental discipline if we want to be effective. If a city is a continuous dynamic flow, then it's also a continuous natural experiment, and taking a consciously experimental approach will be key.

Less obviously, though, the same city that baffles outsiders may be completely opaque to locals. It's clear enough that strangers coming in—the proverbial white guys with clipboards, patting the locals on the head, telling them to “stand aside, there's a good little fellow, while we fix your problem”—have often done vastly more harm than good. You could think of UNICEF's disastrous intervention in water supply in Bangladesh, which, at a conservative estimate, left twenty million people with chronic arsenic poisoning.
30
Or the well-meaning efforts of Western movie stars handing out mosquito nets, putting local net manufacturers out of business and thus increasing, not reducing, people's long-term vulnerability to malaria.
31
Or, indeed, the many occasions in Iraq and Afghanistan—chronicled by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Tom Ricks, George Packer, Linda Robinson, and (with a certain unconscious irony) Paul Bremer—when our efforts had tragic unintended consequences because we just didn't get how things were supposed to work.
32

But here's the thing: just because you live in New York, London, Sydney, or Tokyo—let alone Lagos, Karachi, Rio, or Cairo—doesn't guarantee that you understand how these giant coastal cities work, either. You can be a complete local, live your whole life in a place, yet still not understand what's driving the problems that affect it—because you only have a partial view, because your perspective is skewed by your own interests or affiliations, because living there limits your access to certain kinds of technical or functional knowledge that you'd need to understand the problem, or because where you live is just too big and complex and variegated for any one person to fully grasp what's going on. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, someone standing in Trafalgar Square can't see greater London, let alone all of England.
33
Likewise, a crack addict on the streets of a big American city, a social worker in the neighborhood, a nurse in the local emergency room, or a police officer on the beat may all have a profound understanding of a particular set of hyperlocal issues and conditions, but that doesn't mean they grasp the overall pattern in their city as a whole, or understand how to fix the problems they inhabit, any more than outsiders do.

It also doesn't mean they can form a consensus on a way forward. In fact, their intimate involvement with a set of local problems makes it, if anything,
less
likely that they'll agree. Each of them is looking at a gigantic (and constantly morphing) complex system through a soda straw. For this reason a pure bottom-up approach, which privileges local insight over outside knowledge, where you “just ask a local,” isn't the answer, either. It can be just as problematic as a top-down technocratic approach that brings in outside “experts” who ignore local perspectives. How do you decide which local to ask, for a start? And what if they disagree, suck you into local disputes, or just have no clear idea what's going on? This is the perpetual challenge that confronts researchers in a fieldwork environment. It also bedevils aid workers, social workers, police, emergency services personnel, and military leaders who intervene in complex emergencies, and there are no easy answers. At a more basic level, as we saw in Chapter
1
, the data on international interventions suggest that if outsiders understood local problems, the dozens of interventions that happen every year would probably have a greater success rate; if locals understood their own problems and could agree on how to fix them, those interventions wouldn't be needed. Clearly, neither is the case. I think there
is
an approach that can work, a structured co-design technique that combines local and outsider inputs, but I'll come to that in due course.

A further general observation is that the normative systems we've observed in action in Kingston and Mogadishu, in remote areas of Afghanistan, and in Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq—what I've called the theory of competitive control—seem to recur across rural and urban environments of all kinds, and are therefore probably hardwired into human nature, rather than habitat-dependent. This in turn means that competitive control is probably an enduring feature of human behavior, making it broadly applicable to many kinds of nonstate violence and thus potentially useful beyond narrowly defined counterinsurgency theory. Whether the group we're examining is a militia like the Somali National Alliance or Arkan's Tigers, a street gang like the Shower Posse or MS
13
, an organized crime network like the Sicilian mafia or the Honduran
narcos
, a soccer club like the Ultras or Red Star Belgrade, a mass movement like Hezbollah, an insurgency like the Taliban, a terrorist group like al Q
 
aeda in Iraq, or a government, the same principles seem to hold. A group that creates predictability and consistency by establishing a normative system of rules and sanctions is thereby defining a safe behavioral space for people afflicted by terrifying uncertainty, and the safety that system creates will attract that population. In a conflict situation, people's uncertainty arises from the presence of armed groups targeting the population; in a city that's growing exponentially—constantly outgrowing itself—the same terrifying lack of predictability can arise simply from the pace of change. Thus a megacity under stress can offer the same opportunities for conflict entrepreneurs to control populations, provided they create a predictable rule set that makes people feel safe in the face of instability.

This occurs—and this is the critical point—because of the
predictability
inherent in the rules, whether people like the group or not, and regardless of the content of those rules. As we saw in Chapter
3
, you don't have to like the cops, or agree with the speed limit, for the road rules to make you feel safe. Eventually, provided the group builds consistency and order, through a wide spectrum of persuasive, administrative, and coercive measures, it may gain the subjective loyalty and support of a population. But the coercive end of the spectrum is the foundation for a normative system, since in a competitive control environment, a group that can't fight off other groups or discipline its own members will be swept away. Support follows strength, and strength flows from the ability to enforce the rules (Mao's “barrel of the gun”); this applies to any group seeking to control a population.

One related insight from the Arab Awakening (and the San Francisco protests) discussed in Chapter
4
is that people feel attacked when their connectivity is disrupted. In both these examples, when governments turned off cellphone networks, this alone was enough to bring people onto the streets to support previously marginalized activists. Suddenly a minority cause became a mass protest, because people felt a shared sense of grievance and indignation when the authorities pulled the plug. I think this is about more than just the convenience of electronic connectivity, though. Constant access to the digital world, letting people upload images or tweet what's happening to them, creates a sense of security. There's always an actual or potential witness to what's going on: someone's watching, ready to blow the whistle if the authorities pull something brutal or repressive. It's as if there were always a media crew of reporters and cameramen watching out for you—but a virtual, digital, distributed crew enabled by constant connectivity. This idea of “Web as witness”—the protection that comes from virtual monitoring by independent outsiders, and the restraint this imposes on governments—is the flip side of the privacy concerns that go with our ever-connected environment. In a sense, it allows remote actors to extend their normative system into places where they can't physically be. This idea of the permanent, universal witness is a new element in conflict, politics, and human rights advocacy alike, it's entirely an artifact of the connected, urban world, and it's mostly a good thing.