From The Conversation, November 14:
Numerous anti-government protests have paralyzed cities across the globe for months, from La Paz, Bolivia, to Santiago, Chile, and Monrovia, Liberia, to Beirut.
Each protest in this worldwide wave of unrest has its own local dynamic and cause. But they also share certain characteristics: Fed up with rising inequality, corruption and slow economic growth, angry citizens worldwide are demanding an end to corruption and the restoration of a democratic rule of law.
It is no accident, as Foreign Affairs recently observed, that Latin America – which has seen the most countries explode into the longest-lasting violent protests – has the slowest regional growth in the world, with only 0.2% expected in 2019. Latin America is also the world’s region with the most inequality.
Bolivia’s once-powerful president, Evo Morales – whose support was strongest in rural areas – was forced out on Nov. 11 by a military response to mass urban unrest after alleged electoral fraud.
In October, Lebanon’s prime minister also resigned after mass protests.
One under-covered factor in these demonstrations, I would observe as a scholar of migration, is domestic, rural-to-urban migration. All these capital cities gripped by protest have huge populations of desperately poor formerly rural people pushed out of the countryside and into the city by climate change, national policies that hurt small farmers or a global trade system that impoverishes local agriculture.
Rapid urban growth
Cities worldwide have been growing at an unsustainable pace over the past seven decades.
In 1950, the New York metropolitan area and Tokyo were the world’s only megacities – cities with more than 10 million people. By 1995, 14 megacities had emerged. Today, there are 25. Of the 7.6 billion people in the world, 4.2 billion, or 55%, live in cities and other urban settlements. Another 2.5 billion people will move into cities in poor countries by 2050, according to the United Nations.
Most modern megacities are in the developing regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. There, natural population increases in cities are aggravated by surges in rural migrants in search of a better life.
What they find, instead, are sprawling informal settlements, frequently called urban slums.
These marginalized parts of cities in the developing world – called “favelas” in Brazil, “bidonvilles” in Haiti and “villas miserias” in Argentina – look remarkably similar across the globe. Ignored by the municipal government, they usually lack sanitation, clean drinking water, electricity, health care facilities and schools. Informal urban settlements are usually precariously located, near flood-prone waterfronts or on steep, unstable mountainsides........MUCH MORE
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