Out of the Mountains (44 page)

This leads me to a final general observation, which is that things are not all bad. I admit I've painted a pretty dismal picture here, and indeed, there
are
daunting challenges in a world that will add three billion new city dwellers over the next generation, mostly in low-income countries that were already short of resources and lacking in governance capacity. Jacques Attali, in the bleak passage from his
Brief History of the Future
that I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, summarizes this dystopian vision very well.
34

But there are upsides, too. For one thing, population growth and urbanization tend to coincide with gains in prosperity, health, and education, so by midcentury another billion people—many in emerging markets like India and China—could be lifted out of poverty and into the global middle class, creating massive opportunities for trade and industry, unleashing immense human capital, and giving them the prospect of better lives.
35
For another, there's evidence that when population, settlement, agriculture, and energy production are concentrated in denser areas (like multistory buildings in urban zones), this reduces carbon footprint and ecological impact for a given population.
36
As Robert Bryce has argued, the organizing principle for a green future is density.
37

I mentioned resiliency earlier, and in a broader sense, cities throughout history have shown enormous capacity for innovation, reinvention, and self-renewal. We saw this in the case of Lagos in Chapter
1
, as people adapted to the city's lack of infrastructure and its horrendous traffic by developing their own, self-synchronized system of traffic alerts. In fact, as Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy argue in
Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back
, increases in the size of cities tend (on average) to make them more efficient and faster, increasing innovation and prosperity, enabling more growth even as they also bring problems. “The bigger the city,” Zolli and Healy report, quoting a
2011
study, “the higher the wages were for the residents, the more patents produced there but also the greater the number of violent crimes, the more traffic, etc. ‘When you double the size of the city, you produce, on average, fifteen percent higher wages, fifteen percent more fancy restaurants, but also fifteen percent more AIDS cases, and fifteen percent more violent crime.
Everything
scales up by fifteen percent when you double the size.'”
38

The key phrase here is “on average”—Zolli and Healy's research reveals that growing cities, even struggling ones, have within themselves the adaptive resources they need to address their problems, provided they can unleash and apply them. But these resources aren't evenly distributed, and it's the unequal (or, more accurately, the perception of
unjust
) allocation of resources that creates conflict. Their research highlights the danger of exclusionary growth: if some subset of people is excluded from the general gain as a city grows, this creates relative deprivation and a sense of injustice that leads to violence, as we saw in Benghazi. Inequality per se might not be the problem—indeed, some argue that a certain amount of inequality, as long as it comes with opportunity, can spur people to better themselves, creating achievable, aspirational goals, and thus becoming an engine of economic growth and societal stability.
39
But inequality
without
opportunity—permanent exclusion, marginalization without hope of improving one's circumstances—can create lethal, city-killing resentments, when people who realize they can never join the party decide to burn the house down instead. Likewise, “cities that become overly reliant on just a few forms of value creation,” excluding parts of their population, economy, and territory from the wealth and capital they create, “can find themselves enjoying a golden age followed by catastrophic decline. (Think Detroit).”
40
Conversely, if cities can generate enough carrying capacity quickly enough, they can build resiliencies that help them bounce back from crises. If cities have metabolisms, they also have immune systems—ways to deal with internal challenges, absorb toxins, and neutralize threats. Thinking of resiliency in this way makes more sense than focusing on stability, I think.

All this implies that it's possible to “bend the curve”: that the linear projections I've outlined in this book need not automatically result in mass conflict and chaos, provided we figure out ways to unlock the adaptive resources that already exist in major cities. Cities are (or can be) engines of peace, justice, innovation, and prosperity, even as they also create violence, injustice, exclusion, and poverty. And actions that communities and governments take in their own cities can bend the curve toward resiliency.

III. Co-Design in Cities Under Stress

If the first part of this chapter is a description of the complex of problems that are affecting cities on a crowded, coastal, connected planet, then what are the appropriate governance, economic, and civil society responses to these challenges? Here, to be frank, the picture is much brighter, and this is where I believe the most exciting opportunities lie, as we seek to bend the curve away from the bleak vision suggested in a straight-line projection from current data. The problems are real enough, as are the difficulties in addressing them using traditional top-down, technocratic, outsider-led, state-based frameworks. But there are other approaches. Let's consider three of these: Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, which ended that country's civil war; CeaseFire Chicago, which seeks to prevent violent crime in U.S. cities; and Crisis Mappers, which brings together a community of online analysts and observers to build reliable maps of conflict-or disaster-affected areas in real time.

Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace

In 2003, Liberia's civil war was in its fourteenth year, with two rebel groups fighting the regime of President Charles Taylor, heavy civilian casualties, and no end in sight. Taylor's National Patriotic Front, which was backed (among others) by Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, had cemented its rule over most of Liberia's population and territory, through the exact kinds of competitive control techniques we've been discussing. These ranged from terror and coercive violence against individuals and whole communities to administrative measures designed to keep communities quiet, to rigged elections in 1997. Two hundred thousand people had been killed in the conflict, with many more wounded or horribly mutilated. Rebel and government fighters had raped enormous numbers of women and forcibly recruited young boys and girls as child soldiers, porters, and sexual slaves. A tide of refugees fleeing this horror had swamped Liberia's capital, Monrovia, and large squatter camps had formed on the city's outskirts. These camps lacked food and water and were horribly overcrowded and disease-ridden, putting an already stressed and barely functioning city infrastructure under unbearable pressure.
41

In March of that year, Leymah Gbowee, a social and trauma worker at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Monrovia's coastal district of Sinkor, and the mother of four children, began a protest movement calling for peace in Liberia. The movement she started began organizing mass demonstrations and prayer vigils in a local fish market, and occupied a soccer field near the route used by President Taylor's motorcade on Tubman Boulevard, Sinkor's main road. Muslim women organized by Asatu Bah Kenneth joined forces with Gbowee's group, creating a multifaith women's protest movement. The movement attracted international media attention, forcing Taylor to meet with its leaders in April
2003
. Taylor challenged the women (now calling their movement Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace) to find the rebel leaders, which they did—sending a delegation to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where rebel commanders were meeting, and convincing them through a series of nonviolent protest actions to agree to peace talks. The movement maintained its occupation of the soccer field and its prayer vigil throughout this period, which saw significant violence in Monrovia's refugee camps and across Liberia.
42
Peace talks began in June
2003
in Accra, Ghana, and on August
11
these talks resulted in a comprehensive peace agreement, President Taylor's exile to Nigeria, and the entry of United Nations peacekeepers into Liberia. The women's movement, led by Gbowee, remained closely engaged during the peacekeeping operation, helped ensure the peaceful disarmament of rebel and government fighters, and worked with transitional authorities and peacekeepers to organize free elections.
43
They set up polling stations, registered voters, and scrutinized the electoral process. The poll resulted in the election of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on November
23
,
2005
, began the process of transition to democracy, and brought a sharp (though not total) reduction in violence. Leymah Gbowee and President Sirleaf were jointly awarded the
2011
Nobel Peace Prize for their work.
44

The Liberian women's movement has been rightly praised as an example of nonviolent protest, women organizing for peace, and civil society influencing the political process through mass action. All this is true, but what's also true is that this wasn't solely a bottom-up, local movement. Local people (including women's groups) had tried to oppose violence before, but they'd been brutally crushed—in
1990
, many of them were killed in the same church in Sinkor where Gbowee began her movement in
2003
. This time things were different, because Gbowee's passion, courage, and insight into the hyperlocal context of the war were matched by technical and functional expertise from outsiders. Gbowee had trained as a trauma worker in a UNICEF program early in the war. At St. Peter's, she was mentored as a peace activist by Sam Gbaydee Doe, leader of West Africa Network for Peace (WANEP), a regional peace-building network founded in
1998
in Ghana that was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the British Department for International Development, the British and Dutch branches of Oxfam, and the Catholic Organization for Relief and Development Aid, and which drew heavily on Internet and cellphone connectivity among activists. Thelma Ekiyor, a Nigerian lawyer specializing in alternative dispute resolution, was a particularly important mentor and sponsor of Gbowee's efforts.
45
Both Ekiyor and Doe had been formally trained in techniques of peace building, mass action, and conflict resolution when they attended Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) at Harrisonburg, Virginia. Ekiyor trained and advised Gbowee, gained WANEP funding for her initiative, and mentored her as Gbowee founded the Liberian women's movement. The movement's Ghanaian and Nigerian connections may also have played a role in the peace process, with Ghana hosting the peace talks and Nigeria accepting Charles Taylor as the conflict ended.
46
The World Bank and several United Nations organizations also played roles in ending the conflict—not to mention the
15
,
000
soldiers and
1
,
115
police and civilian staff of the UN peacekeeping mission, supported by
4
,
350
U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel of Joint Task Force Liberia, who enforced an end to hostilities and maintained peace during the transition and elections process.
47

Does this mean that an American university is responsible for Liberia's transformation from conflict, or that U.S. and British government development agencies, international NGOs, the UN, or U.S. and West African militaries can take credit for what happened? Of course not—but Gbowee could not have done it on her own, either. The external players brought what Gbowee lacked, including training for her and her colleagues, technical knowledge, and functional skill, while she brought what they lacked, including local context, insight, and the legitimacy and grass-roots organizing ability to build a local movement and forge collaboration between Christian and Muslim communities. Most important, she also brought charismatic leadership, wisdom, will and courage. Outsiders didn't tell Gbowee to sit down and shut up, nor were they passive funders and enablers—this was a collaborative, two-way process of
co-design
.

CeaseFire Chicago

In a completely different setting, on the other side of the world, the same year Gbowee was starting at St. Peter's Church, Dr. Gary Slutkin was launching CeaseFire, a violence prevention and crime control program based on his insight that because violence follows biological (epidemiological) patterns in a population, it can therefore treated like an epidemic and can be prevented by stopping the behavior at its source.
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CeaseFire trains, mentors, and puts into the field outreach workers (known as “violence interrupters”) drawn directly from local communities. Their role is to detect, prevent, and mitigate conflict on the street before it leads to violence. Being drawn from the local community, interrupters are often former gang members, respected older women or men, or other influential members of local society.
49
They rely on force of personality, street cred, relationships with key players in the community, and hyperlocal understanding of the territorial logic of their own district (how things work, what drives violence, and how the neighborhood flows). They focus on detecting and intervening in acts of violence before they occur, changing the behavior of individuals who are influential in the neighborhood system of violence or who are at risk for violent behavior, and changing community norms about violence.
50
Interrupters attend a formal training program designed by Slutkin and form part of a network (both physical and online) that supports their work, helps them track progress of situations and individuals, and links them to a broader movement. After being launched in
2000
in West Garfield, then Chicago's most violent neighborhood, the program has spread throughout Chicago, and offshoots of the program are now active in Baltimore, Kansas City (Missouri), New Orleans, New York, Phoenix, and several cities in California, as well as in Britain, South Africa, and the Caribbean.
51
The program expands by proliferating small projects with a common but flexible methodology and adapting to local conditions in each new area, rather than by imposing rigid controls or attempting to create a large, monolithic, one-size-fits-all model. The movement is funded by a combination of private philanthropy and donations from local and national businesses; for a time it was also supported by government money from the city of Chicago.