David Kilcullen: Nairobi foreshadows tomorrow’s urban conflicts

It is easy to see the siege at Nairobi’s Westgate mall as just another jihadist atrocity. But although the attack was claimed by al-Shabaab, the Somali group, the problem is not simply militant extremism. It also reflects a broader pattern of urban overstretch in fast-growing cities, exposing marginalised populations to multiple threats.
Since September 11 2001, armies have been fighting guerrillas in the world’s toughest terrain, much of it landlocked and mountainous, as in Afghanistan, supported by aid agencies and diplomats working to stabilise remote communities. Conflicts such as this have become the new normal. But megatrends in the global environment, including population growth, coastal urbanisation and connectivity, suggest a starkly different future.
As the pace of industrialisation has quickened, the global population has increased from 750m in 1750 to 7bn today. It is expected to level off at about 9.5bn by 2050. Meanwhile, the planet has urbanised: in 1800, only 2 per cent of people lived in cities of 1m or more; by 2050 the world will be two-thirds urbanised.
Almost all this growth will be in urban environments in developing countries and in coastal areas. Already 80 per cent of people live within 50 miles of the sea, and 21 of the 25 biggest cities are on the coast. Theorists such as Mike Davis, the US writer, predict a “planet of slums”, where shanty towns fill the spaces between existing cities. One projection shows India’s west coast as a single conurbation by 2040. Coastal megacities such as Karachi, Dhaka, Lagos, Jakarta and Cairo are already growing at a frantic pace.
In the next generation, the developing world’s coastal cities will be swamped by 3bn people – the same number it took all of history to generate, across the entire planet, until 1960. The unprecedented pace and scale of urban growth will strain infrastructure, governance and public safety, even in inland cities such as Nairobi. In coastal areas, slum growth will put more people at risk of flooding, pollution and disease.
These are longstanding trends. What is new is the rapid increase in connectivity in the past decade: 6bn people now own mobile phones, 1.5bn more than have access to clean water. Mobile phone use in India is up 24,000 per cent since 2000. Nigeria, with 30,000 mobile phone users in 2000, has 113m today. India and China have each registered a 2,300 per cent growth in internet use.
This, of course, affects conflict just as it affects all other aspects of life. In the Arab uprisings, activists exploited dense terrain in coastal cities, using online connectivity to rally global support and mobilise tech-savvy populations. Tunisian and Egyptian soccer fans were crucial to the urban revolutions of 2011, co-ordinating online while battling riot police in the street. Libyan fighters used transcontinental Skype hookups to plan attacks. Syrian rebels build homemade tanks with remote-controlled machine guns, driven by Gameboy consoles through flatscreen TVs. Coastal shipping and smuggling networks connect megacities such as Karachi and Mumbai, creating opportunities for maritime terrorism such as the 2008 attack on India’s largest city – which itself featured striking similarities to the Westgate raid.
Lower down the conflict spectrum, criminal gangs emerge in the doughnut-shaped slum areas around growing cities. These put a chokehold on urban centres that depend for water, fuel and food on access to a hinterland that gets farther away as slum settlements expand into croplands and water catchments. Places such as Mogadishu, or the garrison districts of Kingston, Jamaica, have become feral cities, outside state control. Rio’s favelas and the slums of Mumbai and Nairobi are dominated by local groups, often armed, that fill the gap left by absent governments.
It is not all bad. By mid-century, 3bn new urban-dwellers could mean 2bn more people in the global middle class, lifting billions out of poverty, improving health, opening vast new markets and unlocking enormous human potential. Denser, smaller urban settlements could relieve pressure on the environment. But freeing up the economic opportunities and advantages of scale that come with urbanisation – and avoiding a future somewhere between Mad Max and Blade Runner – will demand creative thinking and determined action.
There are no purely military solutions here, though armies should get comfortable with operating in urban, networked environments. More police is not necessarily the answer either: more underpaid officers often just mean more opportunities to shake people down.
What is crucial is to understand cities as flow systems, and improve their carrying capacity – seeking resilience rather than stability. Designing solutions with local people can help unlock their creativity, drawing on the insight necessary to secure the crowded, connected, coastal cities of the future.
If we want to succeed, rendering today’s dire projections inaccurate, we will need to get our heads into the cities and out of the mountains.

David Kilcullen is the author of ‘Out of the Mountains: the Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla’

Fonte: FT