Environmental conditions in fast-growing
cities can be appalling. In the early 1990s I lived in Hong Kong, where the
harbour was brown and reeking, and the street level air was so foully polluted
I had to stop wearing contact lenses because nasty red veins were forming
behind them on the surface of my eyes. One evening watching TV in my small, 27th
floor apartment, I flicked on a BBC documentary to see sociobiologist Desmond Morris intone, “this is one of the most congested places on Earth”. He was
showing video from near the Causeway Bay subway station, five minutes from
where I was sitting, and Morris was marveling at humans’ ability to live in congested,
unpleasant conditions. How nice.
Of course, things could always have been
worse. About that same time I made the mistake of signing up for a bicycle tour
of Shenzhen, the industrial boomtown just across the border from Hong Kong in
China (remember, those were the days when Hong Kong was still British
territory). Whoever dreamed up that bike tour was crazy. For three days we rode
along half-completed roads, hemmed in between streams of sulfur-dioxide
belching trucks and fetid drainage ditches. The views consisted mainly of the
muddy remains of famers’ fields being torn apart to build factories and
warehouses of shoddy, slapdash construction. At night we collapsed into dirty
beds in squalid, unfinished hotels. The highlight of the tour was a visit to
the Daya Bay nuclear power plant. What I saw on that tour was a 20th
century version of what a 19th century traveller would have seen on
a visit to the outskirts of Manchester, Glasgow, or any number of other factory
boomtowns: the filthy, ugly side of industrial-based economic expansion.
Which brings me to one of the great
paradoxes in the study of environmental migration: some of the filthiest, most
environmentally degraded places on Earth attract large numbers of people from
other, less degraded locations. I am speaking here not only of the most obvious
examples, like the slums and favelas that ring cities like Caracas, Mumbai, and
Nairobi, but also the ‘special economic zones’ like Shenzhen or Mexico's maquiladora areas, where developing
countries’ governments turn a blind eye to pollution and exploitative labour
practices in hopes of fostering an export economy. I am also talking about older,
longer established industrial cities like those in eastern Europe, where
anti-pollution laws exist on paper but are rarely enforced, as well as newly
emergent cities across Africa and Asia that were but small towns fifty years
ago and never got a chance to build basic sanitary infrastructure.
As the populations of such places expand
(through both natural increase and high rates of in-migration), local
environmental conditions tend to further degrade at a comparable rate. As this unfolds,
a distinctive type of migration begins to emerge – the movement of middle class
families out of the dirty, congested cities to locations that have better
environmental conditions. Historically this has most often meant moving
to suburbs around the city centre, where the family is able to maintain its
existing employment and social networks while acquiring better quality
accommodation, cleaner air, and neighbours of similar economic means.
But today, many cities in developing
countries have grown so rapidly, have become so expansive, and are so heavily
degraded there are no leafy suburbs to retreat towards. Mexico City, Dhaka, and many other conurbations have become sprawling miasmas of factories, shops,
apartments, warehouses, vehicles, noise, dust, and standing water that
seem to go on forever in all directions. Those with the money and desire to
escape such miserable conditions must go farther afield. And that is precisely what
they are doing, as was reported in this New York Times article
describing how well-off urbanites are fleeing China’s coastal cities for
smaller centres in places like Yunnan in search of better air quality.
Urban environmental degradation in
developing countries is also leading some people to immigrate to Canada. Dr. Luisa Veronis of the University of Ottawa and I, along with graduate students Amina Mezdour,
Reiko Obokata, and Mohammad Moniruzzaman, have been studying this phenomenon.* With help from recent immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, we have
been documenting how declining ecological conditions in congested cities have
led young professionals with families to give up good jobs and economic
prospects in their home countries to start again from scratch in Canada. Often,
these immigrants find when they get here that their educational and
professional qualifications are not recognized by Canadian employers. They end
up taking entry level, minimum wage jobs for which they are overqualified, or
go back to school yet again, but it’s a sacrifice they are willing to make
because they have more hope for their children’s future than they do for the
future of the city they left behind. This month the peer-reviewed journal
Population and Environment published a research note in which we detail some of our preliminary findings and outline the complex chain of causation that generates this type of migration. The article is free and openly accessible,
click here to download a free copy.
There are serious implications for the
cities these immigrants are leaving behind if this phenomenon continues. The
middle class is the mortar with which a successful city is constructed. If they
leave, a city has no long-term future. Ask Detroit. A population that becomes
bifurcated into a great many people with little or nothing and a small ruling
class that controls all the wealth and assets is likely to descend into
political instability and economic stagnation. If you have read any of my past
writings, you will know I am an avid student of the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s. The people who fled the drought-stricken Great Plains during that period
were disproportionately young families with hard-working parents – i.e. the
middle class. The places they moved to, like Bakersfield, California,
benefitted over the long run from the unexpected influx of energetic young
people (even though Californians initially tried to discourage the migrants). I
have been to the places the Dust Bowl migrants left behind. They withered over
subsequent decades to dusty, forgettable, lifeless places. From the moment
their young families packed up the car and headed west, those places were
doomed.
Do not get me wrong, I’m not saying that Shanghai
or Dhaka or Jakarta are ever going to become abandoned; there is far too much
power, wealth, and economic opportunity concentrated in such places, and their
populations will continue to grow in coming decades. What I am saying is that
urban ecological quality needs to be of far greater priority to the governing
authorities than it presently is. If not, bright young people are going to
leave polluted cities in ever larger numbers, to the long-term detriment of the
sending countries and to the benefit of receiving countries like Canada. If urban
ecological integrity is measured as a form of societal wealth (which it
should), the future will see the rich getting richer and the poor getting
poorer.
*If interested, please read our group's review of existing research on international environment, also a free download: Obokata, R., Veronis, L., & McLeman, R. (2014). Empirical research on international environmental migration: a systematic review. Population and Environment. doi:10.1007/s11111-014-0210-7
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