I've just read a most enlightening and thought-provoking book, Arrival City:How the Largest Migration in History is Changing our World by Doug Saunders. Saunders is an English journalist who writes for the Globe and Mail, the kind of journalist who looks beyond the headlines for the social trends and ideas that lie behind day to day events. If I was journalist, that's the sort I'd like to be. Our world, he says, is going through the largest and most rapid process of urbanisation in human history. Millions of people in developing nations are leaving their villages and heading to the major cities, most of them never to return. By the end of this century approximately two to three billion people - a third of the world's population - will have made the shift and most of the world will be as urbanised as the wealthy nations are now. At the centre of this movement is what Saunders calls the 'Arrival City' - those communities on the edge of major cities that
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson