RESEARCH

The Great Urban Shift: How Urbanization and Our Evolving Cities are Transforming the World We Live In

By Alisa May, Research Office Student Assistant

Are urban slums an urban failure, or a stepping stone to successful urbanization?

Sanjeev Sanyal, the founder and president of India’s Sustainable Planet Institute, explained that slums are an “important part of the urban ecosystem” to students and faculty who filled Burke Auditorium in Kroon Hall on November 14, 2011. In a world that is “already more than 50% urban,” and becoming more urban every day, dense cities hold economic and social advantages for rural migrants. Seeking opportunity, people leave rural areas in great numbers. They form slums on the outskirts before becoming incorporated in cities. But slums are not a permanent condition. “We must look beyond the dirty gutters,” Sanyal says, to realize that “a constant turnover of slum dwellers arrive, find job opportunities, in many cases learn English and literacy skills, and transform into India’s new middle class.” Not only do people move out of slums, but the slums also transform slowly into cities. When policy upholds property rights—a very important caveat that is not always the case—land owners invest in development, turning slums into gentrified cities over the course of 10-15 years.

Is the transition from slums to cities always this successful? The dynamics of urbanization in India are different from that of South America and China, Sanyal admits. However, it’s important for policy everywhere to secure property rights and remove obstacles for incorporating migrants into growing cities. The great urban shift will result in environmental benefits through land use and energy efficiency, as well as jobs, education, social and financial opportunities for human welfare.

Sanyal is an economist, environmentalist and urban theorist named Young Global Leader for 2010 by the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Recent Book Award

The Banana Tree at the Gate: The History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo
by Dr. Michael Dove

Winner of the 2011 Julian Steward Award as given by the Anthropology and Environment Section of the American Anthropological Association.

The Anthropology and Environment Section awards this prize to the best monograph in environmental anthropology each year. The award will be officially presented to Dr. Dove at the AAA meetings this November at the Anthropology and Environment business meeting.

The “Hikayat Banjar,” a native court chronicle from Borneo, characterizes the irresistibility of natural resource wealth to outsiders as “the banana tree at the gate.” Michael R. Dove employs this phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system. In analyzing production and trade in forest products, pepper, and especially natural rubber, Dove shows that the involvement of Borneo’s native peoples in commodity production for global markets is ancient and highly successful and that processes of globalization began millennia ago. Dove’s analysis replaces the image of the isolated tropical forest community that needs to be helped into the global system with the reality of communities that have been so successful and competitive that they have had to fight political elites to keep from being forced out.

Published 2011, Yale University Press.