Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World. Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World by Doug Saunders. Photograph by Arko Datta/Reuters Humanity, that most adaptable of species, is on the march.
The hunter-gatherers who became farmers are now halfway down the road from being agriculturalists to urbanites. Private hopes and public goods: Writers set out their visions of a 'big society' - Features, Books. Doug Saunders, the London-based European bureau chief of Toronto's Globe & Mail newspaper, tells the sisters' story alongside dozens of others from 18 exploding conurbations on five continents in Arrival City (Heinemann, £18.99).
His book not only ranks as one of the year's most engaging and important works of non-fiction. It gives a vital resource to everyone who wants to learn about the pursuit of the public good in an era of challenged or enfeebled nation-states. With sharply written case-studies from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the banlieues of Paris and the so-called "slums" of Mumbai, Saunders shows that the "arrival city" of informal communities, where migrants from rural hinterlands to urban centres gather, presents not simply one of the world's most pressing problems. It also offers us the most promising solutions. These "gateways to advancement" have set in motion an often chaotic catapult towards "upward mobility". Proto-review of Doug Saunders 'Arrival City' reveals disturbing similarities with Mr. Men books.