Feral Cities
One of the podcasts I’ve been enjoying as of late its Tim Harford’s Pop Up Ideas from the BBC. In the latest episode David Kilcullen talks about feral cities (direct MP3 link), which essentially flip the idea of the failed state on its head, suggesting that it’s not the state that fails the city, but rather the city that fails the state (the podcast has a deeper explanation). Here’s a bit more from a short New York Times piece on the idea from a few years ago:
Richard Norton, a Naval War College scholar who has developed a taxonomy of what he calls feral cities, says that there are numerous places slipping toward Mogadishu, perhaps the only fully feral city nowadays. As public services disintegrate, residents are forced to hire private security or pay criminals for protection. The police in Brazil have fallen back on a containment policy against gangs ruling the favelas, while the rich try to stay above the fray, fueling the busiest civilian helicopter traffic in the world (there are 240 helipads in S-o Paulo; there are 10 in New York City). In Johannesburg, much of downtown, including the stock exchange, has been abandoned to squatters and drug gangs. In Mexico City, crime is soaring despite the presence of 91,000 policemen. Karachi, Pakistan, where 40 percent of the population lives in slums, plays host to gangland violence and to Al Qaeda cells.