“跛脚”的亚洲城市化（中）
Welcome to Megacity...
There is something medieval about the dimly lit alleyways where migrants from the Chinese hinterland gather in the poorer quarters of Guangzhou. Makeshift buildings lean precariously over the lanes, and labourers hurry home through the dirt after 12 hours of toil.
The mobile telephone numbers scrawled on the walls offering forged identity papers are rather more modern. So are the nearby luxury apartment blocks, the roar of the city’s elevated expressways and the tens of thousands of high-tech factories churning out Chinese shoes and CD players for export to America and Europe.
Intrigued by what seems to be one of the turning points of history - the United Nations has predicted that next year, for the first time, more of the planet’s 6.7 billion people will be living in cities than outside them - I had come to this district of Guangzhou in search of someone who could explain why humankind was finally turning its back on the countryside.
I had imagined comparing urban Guangzhou to the northern English cities described by Charles Dickens in Hard Times. There are, after all, so many social and economic similarities between the first industrial revolution in England and the modernisation convulsing southern China and the rest of Asia today - even if it is happening on a faster and larger scale. It is no coincidence that Britain was the first country in which more than half the population were city-dwellers.
In truth, the fast-growing cities of Asia, including Guangzhou, are not so much Victorian as an awkward mix of the Middle Ages and the ultra-modern. Only the coal smoke and the smog are visibly Dickensian, yet the stories told by the migrants would be familiar to any refugee from the English countryside a century and a half ago.
“There was no work in the village.” With those words, barely audible over the Chinese soap opera playing on the television in her spartan concrete apartment, Zhang Dingnan explains why she came to Guangzhou from rural Hunan seven years ago. She is also telling the larger story of how hundreds of millions of people like her are moving from the villages of the world to its teeming cities. She is part of humanity’s greatest mass migration.
I had tried to speak to some of the hordes of rural migrants streaming in and out of Guangzhou’s main railway station that morning, but the ubiquitous policemen and plainclothes security officers made people too nervous to talk. Some migrants were sleeping rough in the square. There were villagers arriving to look for work, ex-villagers leaving to visit home, grandfathers bringing children to see their mothers, Hunanese and Sichuanese carrying bulging suitcases or sacks on bamboo poles, and labour agents hunting for cheap factory employees.
I was lucky to be guided that night to Zhang’s clean but crumbling home on the first floor of a nondescript building. With a shifting population of relatives and friends moving in and out of Guangzhou - 40 people from Zhang’s village have already come to the city - it is not clear on any given day how many live in the apartment, which is wallpapered with posters for bottled water. The rent is Rmb300 (￡20) a month, and the permanent residents include her husband, who works as a security guard, and her recently arrived 17-year-old daughter. Zhang herself is 35, and she has three part-time jobs as a maid for foreigners living in Guangzhou.
Leaving children behind is one of the hardest parts of migrant life, whether the home village is in southern Africa or east Asia. Zhang entrusted her son and daughter to her husband’s parents in the village, but her father-in-law was crippled after losing a leg in a tractor accident and her mother-in-law died. The children ended up living on their own at the ages of 13 and 14, with the neighbours looking in from time to time. “Living conditions in the village are much better,” says Zhang, “but there’s no money there.” Now, in town, things are looking up. The daughter, He Yong, has landed a job at the Ramada Pearl Hotel and even speaks a few words of English. Both mother and daughter have their mobile phones lying on the kitchen table.
China is the most obvious example of the mass migration changing the face of the planet, simply because its 1.3 billion inhabitants make it the most populous nation. But that sort of transformation is widespread, be it in Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico or India, the second most populous country in the world, with 1.1 billion people.
India is poorer and - so far - less urban than China, but its cities are as modern-medieval as their Chinese counterparts. In the Greams Road slum in central Chennai (previously known as Madras), under a vast billboard advertising a Ford Fiesta, several thousand Tamils live cheek-by-jowl in shacks and tiny brick dwellings next to the dead, black stench of the Cooum River and a few thorn bushes fluttering with discarded plastic bags. Residents are plagued by mosquitoes and fevers as old as humanity. The wood and palm-leaf homes nearest the water were swept away when the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami struck the coast at the end of 2004. Yet no one wants to leave, for this slum has existed for decades, there is plenty of work in Chennai, no rent to pay, and the government hands out rice and kerosene for cooking.
In these dark and smoky homes live construction workers, servants, painters and auto-rickshaw drivers - the former villagers who power the city’s expanding economy. “This place feels comfortable,” concludes Komathi, a 34-year-old housewife. She is one of a group of cheerful women gathering round the strange visitor whose shiny shoes are now spattered with mud and worse. Her husband is a day labourer, which means he gets what work he can. Her daughter also lives in Greams Road with her husband and young son. Of her own two sons, one is studying and the other works as a mechanic. All the men are out working or looking for work. Life is difficult but not impossible, and it is getting better as Chennai reaps the rewards of the Indian economic revival.
The urban migration that is changing our world, however, is a story not only of villagers becoming servants or factory workers but also of villagers using the income to finance their children’s education. In this way the children may secure the coveted urban office job that will allow them to shoulder their way into the ranks of the new middle class.
Not far from Greams Road, in a leafy residential area of south Chennai, Mariam Ram is racing to recruit more graduates for TnQ Books and Journals, her high-tech business that prepares international scientific journals for publication. Publishers in the west have contracted out the costly and time-consuming job of preparation and editing to companies such as hers. When I saw her, Ram already had a round-the-clock operation employing 638 staff in two buildings, and she was looking for 30 more. “The lowest qualification in this office would be a first-class Bachelor’s degree in science,” she says. “The rest would be Masters or MPhils. We’re recruiting so frantically right now. It needs English, it needs science, it needs IT and it needs low wages, and you can’t get it anywhere except India.
“I think the country’s clearly more affluent,” she says. “You see change every time you come. This is a very exciting time to be in India.”
Particularly in Chennai. The city is proud of its conservative culture but also poised for the kind of headlong growth that has exhilarated and exhausted the residents of Bangalore and Mumbai. A few streets from Ram’s office, cars and trucks vie noisily for road-space with goats, cows, bicycles and three-wheelers. Outside the city, I saw a farmer using two bullocks to pull a single ploughshare in a field next to a gleaming Saint-Gobain glass factory and an IT park, while trucks bearing new wind turbines drove west towards Bangalore.
“When we started in our company, all of our employees had bicycles and some had scooters,” says Joseph Sigelman, a former Goldman Sachs banker who seven years ago founded OfficeTiger, a “business process outsourcing” company that handles back-office work for bankers, lawyers and publishers. “Today they all have scooters, and some of them have cars.” The average age of the employees - nearly 3,000 are in Chennai - is 26. “As soon as they get a job offer, they become part of the middle class.”
Chennai, like most of urban Asia, boasts a hodge-podge of architectural styles in which concrete is the common denominator, sometimes bare and brutal and sometimes dressed in an ill-proportioned neo-classical facade of polished granite. The streets are heaped with astonishing amounts of rubbish and unused building materials: piles of sand, bricks and giant pipes that eventually become part of the urban scenery.
“Clean Values, Clean City” declares a forlorn sign from the public works department on the wall of the Institute of Child Health and Hospital for Children in the central district of Egmore. Beneath the sign is raw sewage and rotting garbage, a glaring indictment of the authorities in a city where street-cleaners are neither expensive nor unavailable. Chennai has 1,200 slum districts - a third of the city’s 7 million inhabitants live there - but there are also elegant old houses and comfortable condominiums, and an “IT corridor” to the south complete with a six-lane highway under construction and office blocks of blue glass.
Chinese cities such as Guangzhou display the same incongruous juxtaposition of squalor and luxury, but in China the frenzy of investment, construction and reckless disregard for the environment exceeds anything seen in India. As you enter Guangdong province, the air thickens and the streams turn black. On an otherwise cloudless day with bad smog, you can look straight at the sun at midday without hurting your eyes. Earthmoving equipment removes hill after green hill as the concrete tide advances inexorably over the paddy fields and the fruit orchards. Yet not far from the sprawling factory complexes and the featureless dormitories for Guangzhou’s migrant workers are bright green golf courses, luxury condominiums for China’s nouveaux riches and the Longcheer Yacht Club on the South China Sea.
“The central government still judges local government leaders in terms of how fast their localities are growing and how much money they are turning over,” says Zheng Tianxiang, a professor whose thoughtful views on city development have apparently failed to make much impact on the three Guangzhou mayors he has advised in his long career as an urbanisation expert. “Maybe it’s beginning to change, but we haven’t seen much evidence of it yet.” Zheng is both proud and regretful - pleased at the wealth that has been created but sorry about some of the consequences. He lives in an apartment in a gated community called the Left Bank Residential Quarters, which comes with a swimming pool and gardens between the tower blocks. “We used to swim in the Pearl River outside Zhongshan University,” he says. “The environment was great. There was no ash in the sky. But the people were poor. I made Rmb50 a month.” Nowadays, he says, salaries have multiplied many times over. “At least we have money - not as much as you westerners - but when we’ve got enough, we’ll sort out the environment.”
That is a typical comment from an urban Asian. In trying to understand the urbanisation of humanity, I deliberately chose to visit Guangzhou and Chennai, as well as Chongqing and Bangalore, rather than capitals such as New Delhi or Beijing or familiar commercial centres such as Shanghai and Mumbai. These secondary cities may not be household names in the US or Europe, but they are roughly as populous as New York and Paris. They also exemplify the momentous process which UN-Habitat, the UN human settlements programme, describes in its latest report on the state of the world’s cities.
As migrants pour out of their villages in search of work and prosperity, the number of cities with more than a million people is expected to rise to more than 350, and the number of “megacities” - 10 million and up - will increase from the 20 or so today. This is not a purely Asian phenomenon, or one that moves precisely in step with economic development - Lagos, Cairo, Sao Paulo and Mexico City rank among the world’s biggest cities. But Asia’s massive population means that half of the world’s cities, big and small, will be in Asia. In the next quarter of a century Asia’s urban population is expected to grow by 70 per cent or 1 billion people. There is even talk of gargantuan conurbations of more than 20 million people, dubbed “metacities” or “hypercities” by the UN. Asia already has one such city, Tokyo-Yokohama, and the next one could be the increasingly joined-up conurbation of industry and commerce that includes Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Cities over 10 million, says Habitat, “will be vested with such power that at many levels they will act as city-states independent of national and regional mediation”.
Cities are as old as civilisation, or rather, civilisation is as old as the city, as the origin of both words - from the Latin civis, a citizen - reminds us. In 1200, Guangzhou, later known to the British as Canton, was already one of the world’s largest cities with a population of more than 200,000. But the scale and speed of what has been happening over the past few decades is without precedent. At Indian independence in 1947, Delhi was a city of a million people. Today it is home to 14 million. The population of Bangalore has risen from 1 million in the 1960s to 6 million or more now. Mumbai, with more than 18 million people, is already one of the most densely populated places on earth, and it continues to grow. This urban flood has spawned a whole new industry of consultants, architects, technicians and mass transport experts. Books on individual cities and on the city as a global phenomenon have proliferated as fast as urban slums. They include Joel Kotkin’s The City: A Global History, Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, Max Rodenbeck’s Cairo: The City Victorious, Stephen Inwood’s City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.
As the title of Davis’s book suggests, and as the UN-Habitat report emphasises, there are grave doubts about whether megacities can survive as viable societies when millions of the poor eke out a living in fetid slums and the rich live behind the high walls of luxury gated communities. More people live in Mumbai’s slums, the UN notes, than in the whole of Norway. Pessimists such as G. Dattatri, the former head of urban planning in Chennai, do not see cities as generators of wealth and employment for the rural poor but as refuges of last resort for landless villagers with nowhere else to go. Villagers are not pulled into town by the attractions of the city, but pushed into insanitary slums by their desperate plight at home. “For survival they come here,” says a barefoot Dattatri over coffee at his home. He calculates that construction workers earn about Rs3,000 (￡35) a month when they need Rs7,000-8,000 to support a family of five; while a barely qualified office worker with a job in IT could be earning Rs25,000-30,000. “Fortunately, till now there has not been any revolutionary impact, but this will certainly lead to much more unrest. Today crime has gone up in Chennai. People live in miserable conditions, and they feel they are being exploited. So we are virtually sitting on a timebomb, particularly in the Indian cities. One thing that has prevented this happening is the whole Indian philosophy of contentment.”
Optimists in the urbanisation debate - and optimism here is a relative term - argue that India’s particular problem is not a surfeit of people in its cities, but a surfeit of people overall. In the coming decades, India will overtake China as the most populous nation and will have to find space for an additional 500 million inhabitants. That does not change the facts about cities: people want to live in them, and in the modern age they remain the most efficient way of housing and providing jobs and services to large numbers of citizens.
It is rare to meet a slum-dweller who wants to move out of free or low-rent accommodation into improved but more expensive housing, let alone one who wants to return to a home village to resume the backbreaking work of growing crops - especially when five, six or seven family members may have paying jobs in the city. Of course, people do eventually abandon the slums once that new apartment is within financial reach, or else they begin to upgrade and gentrify the slum until it is a slum no more. “I have a relative from Sichuan who came 15 years ago,” says Miles Lee, a senior research fellow at the state-funded China Development Institute in Shenzhen. “She now earns Rmb3,000-4,000 a month. A farm girl. She worked her way up to be a frontline manager in a department store. Her two-room condo costs about Rmb1,500 a month.” Shenzhen is a former fishing village that was transformed into an industrial city of 8 million migrants in 30 years, as China modernised.
Among newly urbanising Asians, there is little of the sentimentality about the countryside typically felt by long-urbanised Europeans and Americans. I knew that Chongqing, the former wartime capital of China on the Yangtze River, was supposed to be the world’s biggest city (although that is something of a cheat, since the municipality of 32 million people includes several towns and rural areas) and I knew that it was being developed at breakneck speed by Communist leaders intent on opening up the western half of China. But I was still shocked by the almost megalomaniac scale of building and the casual demolition of rocky mountains with dynamite and bulldozers. In one place I watched farmland being torn up to make way for a new commercial park servicing the food industry, next to luxury housing estates with names such as “Blue-Green Water Cambridge” and architectural features vaguely suggesting Bavarian towns or Chinese-kitsch versions of Venice.
A watchman called Zhou, however, was anything but nostalgic when I met him at the site of yet another new industrial estate. The 50-year-old, 5ft-tall security guard with a wispy beard and crooked teeth mocked the idea of anyone being upset about the dynamiting of hillsides. “Levelling the ground is good,” he declared. “Chongqing people don’t like mountains. There’s too much up and down.” He used to farm sweet potatoes, but his land was bought for development and he is buying a new apartment with the compensation money. For the moment he sleeps under canvas at the site, wears plastic sandals, black trousers and a rough blue shirt and earns Rmb600 a month. “Life is much better,” he says.
Even urban enthusiasts cannot deny that the uncontrollable growth of cities that is a feature of modern Asia brings with it many horrors, including transport chaos, poisonous air pollution and toxic rivers. “Ten years ago, I used to go fishing and there was beautiful clean water,” says Miles Lee in Shenzhen. “Now you go to the same place and all you catch is shorts and T-shirts and plastic bags.”
Bangalore, a cosmopolitan, fast-growing city that sees itself as one of the IT hubs of India, is choking on its own success. It has become a byword for a catastrophic failure of urban planning that has left the city with traffic jams so bad - 900 vehicles a day are being added to the streets - that investors have started to despair and look elsewhere to expand. They complain that it took 10 years to approve a new airport, its design capacity has already been exceeded by the existing number of passengers, and there will be no viable road or rail link from Bangalore city even when it opens. “Fundamentally, the government is 100 per cent incompetent,” said Bob Hoekstra shortly before retiring as head of Philips Software in Bangalore to become a consultant. “The state government or the federal government?” I asked. “Both,” he replied.
The failure of Bangalore and many other cities to manage their own growth, however, does not mean that urbanisation is bad for humanity. It simply means that urbanisation is being badly managed. The death in April this year of Jane Jacobs, the author who analysed and championed cities as centres of influence and wealth creation, prompted a number of articles recalling the importance of urbanisation in humanity’s advancement through the ages. Plenty of experts remain eager to further the cause of urbanisation. “Civilisations have always been urbanised,” says K.E. Seetharam, a water and sanitation expert at the Asian Development Bank in Manila. “This concept of rural development is something more recent and in my view doesn’t exist.” He concludes: “Urbanisation is not a problem. It’s a natural outcome of development.”
Indian sentimentalism about the supposed benefits of village life, and the consequent incompetence in managing cities, contrasts starkly with the ruthless pragmatism of the central and local authorities in China. Some Indian politicians and foreign donors remain obsessed with the problem of rural poverty and therefore spend scarce resources on subsidies for villagers that would be equally well spent on the nation’s burgeoning towns and cities. One reason for this apparently illogical approach is politics: India is a democracy. For historical reasons - urbanisation is recent - the countryside is over-represented in the political system and power rests with the state government, not with the cities. The result, says Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys, the Bangalore-based IT services group, is “a disconnect between the economic power and the political power”. Bangalore accounts for a 10th of the population of Karnataka state and about 60 per cent of its gross domestic product, he says, but has only 7 per cent of the state’s electoral seats. “In China you don’t have that problem. India is the only example of urbanisation [on this scale] happening with universal adult franchise.”
A baneful consequence of India’s poor infrastructure is that companies and householders end up providing many of their own services - by generating electricity, drilling for water in their backyards and even disposing of their own waste - which eliminates the efficiency gains one would expect from providing such services in a densely populated area. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who chairs Biocon, the Bangalore-based biotechnology company, says companies such as hers use the government’s unreliable electricity supply purely as a backup. Successful companies and rich individuals live cocooned from the hardships faced by others, emerging only to complain about services such as roads that they cannot provide for themselves and thus deepening the fears of the pessimists about social conflict. Yet, as Nilekani points out, it is the skilled and relatively wealthy incomers to the cities, not the masses of poorer migrants, who put most strain on the infrastructure by driving private cars and consuming other goods and services that must be brought into town.
While Indian governments have dithered and delayed in the face of the incoming tide of urban migrants, Chinese officialdom has prepared for the inevitable with the sort of ruthless efficiency only authoritarian regimes seem capable of achieving. Beijing is expecting 300-500 million rural people, equivalent to the entire population of western Europe, to migrate to Chinese cities over the next two decades, and it has encouraged city mayors and local governments to invest in the infrastructure to deal with this. (Foreigners invariably praise the country’s roads and airports.)
But there is a dark side to the relentless urge to cover the land with concrete and produce economic statistics that find favour in Beijing. “There will emerge six big cities, 25 small cities and more than 490 small towns, which will be surrounding the megalopolis-city district, like many stars encircling the Sun,” declares a typically hubristic exhibit on the 2005-2020 Chongqing master plan at the city’s urban planning museum. China is remarkable for having museums to celebrate the future rather than the past, but what you will not find out in them is the environmental and social cost of the country’s accelerated city development, the communities swept aside and dispersed in the name of progress, the rivers and fields poisoned by chemicals or the skies darkened by choking smog.
Nor will you hear much about that elusive goal of urban planners known as “quality of life”. For that - and perhaps to understand the ultimate destination of Asia’s younger megacities - one needs to go to Tokyo or Seoul. While fast-expanding Chennai and Chongqing are forcing motorways through the city, the South Korean capital is doing the opposite as it starts to suburbanise and turn green. Lee Myung-bak, who has just finished his term as mayor of the Seoul Metropolitan Government, says the amount of green space in the city has trebled in a decade.
Lee made his name by improving public transport and demolishing roads, not building them. He organised the destruction of a city-centre elevated highway and replaced it with the Cheonggyecheon stream that had been buried under the concrete. The stream immediately became a much-used pedestrian attraction in the heart of the city, and this apparently anti-urban gesture may help Lee get elected as the next president of South Korea. “We’re in a rather different situation from the cities in India and China,” he says. “About 20 years ago we did undergo a rapid expansion of population and back then we had our hands full. Now our population has stabilised and has actually started to decrease. More and more citizens want a house that better reflects their living standards - one you don’t just live in, but actually enjoy living in.”
By the time you read this, the owner of the building where Zhang had her Guangzhou flat may have carried out his threat to demolish it to make way for something more salubrious (and probably more expensive). Zhang planned to search immediately for a new place, even if it was smaller and costlier. “Of course,” she said when I met her, “we want to go back to the village eventually.” I do not believe it for a moment. In cities such as Guangzhou and Chongqing, Chennai and Bangalore, mayors and local governments are still making plenty of mistakes as they seek to grapple with the 21st-century conversion of Earth into an urban planet. But the biggest mistake of all would be to pretend that humans are destined to be anything other than city-dwellers.
“跛脚”的亚洲城市化（中）
与
亚洲大多数城市一样，钦奈也有大杂烩式的建筑风格，最常见的是混凝土建筑，这些建筑有时外表裸露刺目，有时覆盖了一层不大相称的新古典风格磨光花岗岩。城市的街道上堆积着数量惊人的垃圾和建筑材料：成堆的沙子、砖头和大型管道，它们最终将成为城市景色的一个组成部分。
在中心区Egmore，儿童健康研究所和儿童医院(Institute of Child Health and Hospital for Children)的墙上，“清洁价值观，清洁城市”(Clean Values, Clean City)的标语，昭示着公共工程部门的苍白口号。标语下方是未经处理的污水和腐烂的垃圾，这是对市政当局的醒目控诉――在这座城市里，街道清洁工报酬低廉，也不难找。钦奈有1200处贫民窟，在该市的700万人口中，三分之一住在那里。但钦奈也有典雅的老房子和舒适的新式公寓，南部还有一条“IT走廊”――包括一条建设中的六车道高速公路，以及蓝玻璃办公大楼。
在广州等中国城市，贫穷和奢华也同样不和谐地并存着。但在中国，投资和建筑狂潮，以及对环境不计后果的漠视，远远超过印度。当你进入广东省后，空气变得污浊，河流颜色变黑。即便在无云的日子，由于大气中的烟雾，正午时你也可以抬头直视太阳，而不会伤到眼睛。大型掘土机把绿色的山坡一一夷为平地，混凝土建筑像一股滚滚洪流，扑向稻田和果园。然而，就在距离大片厂区和广州民工不起眼的宿舍不远处，是亮丽的绿色高尔夫球场、中国新贵的豪华别墅，以及南海边的浪骑游艇会(Longcheer Yacht Club)。
“等我们有了钱，就会对付环境问题”
郑天详教授是老资格的城市化专家，他对城市发展的深入见解，显然未能对他提供建议的三任广州市长产生太大影响。他说：“中央政府仍在根据当地发展速度和经济产出，来评价地方领导人。或许情况刚刚开始发生变化，但我们尚未看到太多的证据。”郑天详既感到自豪，又觉得遗憾――为创造的财富感到高兴，但对由此造成的一些后果觉得遗憾。他住在一个名叫左岸的封闭式小区，小区带有游泳池，大楼之间有花园。“我们过去常在中山大学(Zhongshan University)外的珠江(Pearl River)游泳，”他说。“环境很棒，天空中没有灰尘。但是人们很穷，我一个月工资只有50元人民币。”他表示，现在工资涨了好多倍，“至少我们有钱了――尽管没你们西方人富裕――但等到我们有了足够的钱，我们将对付环境问题。”
这是一个亚洲城市人的典型评论。为了理解人类的城市化进程，我有意选择了走访广州和钦奈，以及重庆和班加罗尔，而不是像新德里或北京这样的首都，或者上海和孟买等人们熟悉的商业中心。在美国或欧洲，这些亚洲的二线城市或许并不知名，但它们的人口数量却和纽约、巴黎大致相当。它们展现了联合国协调人类安居的机构――人居署(UN Habitat)在最新的全球城市状况报告中描述的重大进程。
随着移民涌出农村，去寻找工作和致富机会，预计人口超过百万的城市数量将升至350个以上，而人口达到或超过1000万的“特大城市”数量，也会在当今20来个的基础上增加。这不是一个单纯的亚洲现象，也并非与经济发展同步出现――拉各斯（编者注：尼日利亚最大城市）、开罗、圣保罗和墨西哥城都在全球最大的城市之列。但亚洲庞大的人口意味着，全球半数城市（无论大小）将在亚洲。未来25年内，预计亚洲的城市人口会增长70%，即10亿人。人们甚至在谈论人口逾2000万的超大型都市，这被联合国称为“特大城市”或“超级城市”。亚洲已经有了一个这样的城市――东京-横滨，而下一个可能是囊括香港、深圳和广州的日趋融为一体的工商业都会。人居署表示，人口过千万的城市“实力之大，将使它们在许多层面上成为一个城邦，独立于国家和地区之外。”
“城市”与“文明”一样古老
“城市”(city)与“文明”(civilisation)一样古老，或者更确切地讲，是“文明”与“城市”一样古老，正如两个词的共同起源――拉丁语“civis”(市民)――所提醒我们的那样。1200年，广州（后来英国人称为Canton）就已成为全球最大的城市之一，人口超过20万。但过去数十年所发生的一切，无论在规模和速度方面，都是前所未有的。当印度于1947年独立时，德里还是一座只有100万人口的城市。如今，它的人口为1400万。班加罗尔的人口已由20世纪60年代的100万，升至目前的600万，甚至更多。孟买的人口已超过1800万，成为地球上人口密度最高的地方之一，而它仍在继续发展。这种城市化进程，催生了一个由咨询顾问、建筑师、技术人员、公共交通专家组成的全新行业。论述具体城市和作为全球现象的城市的书籍迅速增多，与城市贫民窟的蔓延速度一样快，包括乔尔?科特金(Joel Kotkin)的《全球城市史》(The City: A Global History)，迈克?戴维斯(Mike Davis)的《贫民窟星球》(Planet of Slums)，马克斯?罗登贝克(Max Rodenbeck)的《开罗：胜利之城》(Cairo: The City Victorious)，斯蒂芬?英伍德(Stephen Inwood)的《城中城：现代伦敦的诞生》(City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London)，以及苏克图?梅赫塔(Suketu Mehta)的《极大之城：失而复得的孟买》(Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found)。
正如戴维斯的书名所显示、以及联合国人居署报告所强调的那样，人们严重质疑，当数百万穷人在臭气熏天的贫民窟勉强谋生，而富人们住在高墙内的奢华小区时，这些超大型城市能否作为可行的社会而得以生存。联合国指出，生活在孟买贫民窟的人口数量，超过了挪威的人口总数。原钦奈城市规划负责人G?达塔特(G. Dattatri)等悲观主义者，并不把城市视为给农村穷人提供财富和就业的“发电机”，而是将其视作那些无处可去、丧失土地的农民最后选择的避难所。农民并非被城市的吸引力拉进了城，而是被家乡令人绝望的境况，推进了肮脏的贫民窟。“为了生存，他们来到这里，”赤着脚的达塔特在家中喝着咖啡说道。他计算了一下，建筑工人每月大约赚3000卢比（合35英镑），但他们需要7000至8000卢比来养活一个五口之家；而IT行业一个刚够格的办公室职员，每月可挣2.5万至3万卢比。“幸运的是，到目前为止，还没有任何‘革命’影响，但这无疑会导致更多的社会动荡。目前，钦奈的犯罪率已有所上升。人们的生活条件恶劣，而且他们感到自己正遭受着剥削。所以，我们几乎是坐在定时炸弹上面，在印度城市中尤其如此。只不过是印度人的知足哲学在阻止炸弹爆炸。”
人们希望住在城市
城市化辩论中的乐观主义者――这里的乐观，是一种相对的说法――辩称，印度的特殊问题不在于城市人口的过度膨胀，而是总体人口的过度膨胀。在未来数十年中，印度将超过中国，成为全球人口最多的国家，要为额外5亿居民寻找生存空间。但这些不能改变有关城市的基本事实：人们希望住在城市，在现代社会，城市化仍是为大量居民提供住房、就业和服务的最有效率的途径。
很少遇到想放弃免费或租金较低的住所、搬到条件较好但更贵的地方去住的贫民窟居民，更别说想回农村老家，重拾辛苦的庄稼活的人了――尤其是当5个、6个或7个家庭成员在城市有一份有薪工作时。当然，一旦新公寓的价钱在其财力范围内，人们最终确实会离开贫民窟，或者他们会开始对贫民窟进行升级和改造，使其不再是贫民窟。“我有一个四川亲戚15年前来这里，”国家出资的深圳综合开发研究院(China Development Institute)高级研究员Miles Lee介绍说。“她现在每月赚3000至4000元人民币。一个农村姑娘。她一路走过来，成了一家百货公司的一线经理。她住的两居室公寓，每月租金约为1500元人民币。”深圳原是一个渔村，在中国的现代化过程中，它在30年间变成了一个有800万移民的工业城市。
（待续）
