KFC in Lagos, Nigeria. (Image by Qasamaan.)

From “Megacity,” an excellent 2006 New Yorker article by George Packer which deflated the recent romantic reconsideration of large-scale slums by Western intellectuals:

“When I first went to Lagos, in 1983, it already had a fearsome reputation among Westerners and Africans alike. Many potential visitors were kept away simply by the prospect of getting through the airport, with its official shakedowns and swarming touts. Once you made it into the city, a gantlet of armed robbers, con men, corrupt policemen, and homicidal bus drivers awaited you.

Recently, Lagos has begun to acquire a new image. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Third World’s megacities have become the focus of intense scholarly interest, in books such as Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, and Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities. Neuwirth, having lived for two years in slum neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, and other cities, came to see the world’s urban squatters as pioneers and patriots, creating solid communities without official approval from the state or the market. ‘Today, the world’s squatters are demonstrating a new way forward in the fight to create a more equitable globe,’ he wrote. What squatters need most of all, he argued, is the right to stay where they are: ‘Without any laws to support them, they are making their improper, illegal communities grow and prosper.’

Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a business strategist based in Marin County, California, goes even further. ‘Squatter cities are vibrant,’ he writes in a recent article on megacities. ‘Each narrow street is one long bustling market.’ He sees in the explosive growth of ‘aspirational shantytowns’ a cure for Third World poverty and an extraordinary profit-making opportunity. ‘How does all this relate to businesspeople in the developed world?’ Brand asks. ‘One-fourth of humanity trying new things in new cities is a lot of potential customers, collaborators, and competitors.’

In the dirty gray light of Lagos, however, Neuwirth’s portrait of heroic builders of the cities of tomorrow seems a bit romantic, and Brand’s vision of a global city of interconnected entrepreneurs seems perverse. The vibrancy of the squatters in Lagos is the furious activity of people who live in a globalized economy and have no safety net and virtually no hope of moving upward.” (Thanks TETW.)