overwhelmed. Writes the urban geographer Matthew Gandy:61
The sprawling city now extends far beyond its original lagoon setting to encompass a vast expanse of mostly low-rise developments including as many as 200 different slums. . . . Over the past 20 years, the city has lost much of its street lighting, its dilapidated road system has become extremely congested, there are no longer regular refuse collections, violent crime has become a determining feature of everyday life and many symbols of civic culture such as libraries and cinemas have largely disappeared. The city’s sewerage network is practically non-existent and at least two-thirds of childhood disease is attributable to inadequate access to safe drinking water. In heavy rains, over half of the city’s dwellings suffer from routine flooding and a third of households must contend with knee-deep water within their homes.
The flooding observed by Dr. Gandy is a serious problem. Lagos’ extreme growth has pushed development, much of it slum, into the city’s last remaining real estate: swampy, low-lying swales that are barely above sea level. Human excrement flows in open ditches. Drainage is so bad that when it rains, the waste floats into people’s homes. Fewer than fifteen people per hundred have piped water, most instead rely on shared outdoor taps or wells. Nearly all water sources are regularly contaminated with
It gets worse. Two-fifths of the people living in Lagos are victimized by corruption, especially demands for bribes from their public officials.62 Robberies, assaults, and murders are a constant fact of life. Failed by their police and judiciary, citizens form vigilante militias with names like the “Bakassi Boys,” who fight back at criminals with machetes and shotguns.63 When government officials perceive disorder, they issue orders to shoot on sight. In general, police and soldiers are best avoided in Nigeria, as it is not uncommon for police officers to simply shoot potential suspects rather than arrest them. Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission, a domestic agency charged with monitoring the country’s human rights violations, recently compiled a heartbreakingly long list of abuses, including the following three incidents:64
[March 2, 2005] “A commercial bus with registration number, XA 344 plying the NorthBank to Wadata route was stopped by Police Constable (PC) Vincent Achuku, and without searching the bus, he demanded (money) bribe from the driver, Godwin Anuka. The driver pleaded with PC Achuku to let him continue with his journey and that he would pay on his return trip. This infuriated PC Achuku and he immediately cocked his service rifle, shot and killed the driver.”
[July 28, 2006] “In the early hours of July 28, 2006, officers of the Special AntiRobbery squad . . . went to the compound of Adulkadir Azeez, 70 years old, where he lives with his extended family. . . . The sound of a gunshot woke him up and he went out to find out the cause. Immediately he stepped out of his house, he was shot dead. The policemen then went to his son’s house (Ibrahim Abdulkadir), forced open the door and shot him dead too. The second son of the old man, Shehu Abdulkadir, heard the gunshots, opened his door and saw his father lying dead on the ground. He tried to find out what happened and was also shot dead by the policemen.”
[September 15, 2006] “On Friday, September 15, 2006, at about 3.00 P.M., a team of over 200 policemen in eight trucks from Delta State Police Command drove to Afiesere Community. . . . On arrival, they started shooting sporadically. According to media reports villagers including women and children took to their heels to avoid the bullets of the rampaging policemen. Those that could not escape were shot and killed or wounded. The policemen then looted several shops and homes before setting them ablaze. When the policemen eventually retreated around 5.30 P.M. 22 persons lay dead, 60 houses and 15 vehicles were burnt. The police also set ablaze two corpses while some were taken away and dumped in the bush. Five other victims, mostly elderly persons also reportedly died from shock over the incident.”
While all is not lost in Nigeria—it completed its first transfer of power between civilian governments peacefully in 2007, and Lagos crime rates fell sharply in 2009—it remains a dangerous place to live. Despite growing Nigeria’s gross domestic product to the second largest on the African continent, Lagos is a
Sub-Saharan Africa is a collection of countries bursting with natural and agricultural resources. Many have functioning or semifunctioning democracies. Yet, colonialism, nonsensical borders, tribal loyalties, HIV, and other problems have bogged it in muddy poverty. Nearly two-thirds of its towns and cities are slums. Recall that at current growth trajectories, these urban populations will triple in the next forty years. The still-unfolding results of the Lagos experiment do not bode well for this new African urbanism. Under the conservative ground rules of our thought experiment, it’s hard to envision how so many problems can be eliminated overnight. By 2050 I imagine much of sub-Saharan Africa—the cradle of our species—to be a dilapidated, crowded, and dangerous place.
Shifting Economic Power
Not only is the geography of the world’s urban population shifting, so also is its wealth. The economic impact of nearly two billion new urban consumers in Asia has not gone unexamined by economists. Unlike the situation in Africa, there is every indication that the rising Asian cities will be modern, globalized, and prosperous. In a thoughtful, forward-looking assessment the U.S. National Intelligence Council writes:65
The international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2025. . . . The transformation is being fueled by a globalizing economy, marked by an historic shift of relative wealth and economic power from West to East, and by the increasing weight of new players—especially China and India.
China and India—along with Brazil and Russia—are considered such economic giants-in-waiting that they’ve won their own acronym, the “BRICs” (from the first letters of
The world’s three biggest economies today are the United States, Japan, and Germany. But by 2050 most model projections have China and India leaving all other countries save the United States in the dust. The Goldman Sachs model, for example, projects U.S. gross domestic product to rise from USD $10.1 to $35.1 trillion, Japan’s from $4.4 to $6.7 trillion, and Germany’s from $1.9 to $3.6 trillion by then. In contrast, India’s GDP is projected to rise from $0.5 to $27.8 trillion and China’s from $1.4 to a whopping $44.4 trillion. Brazil and Russia are projected to rise from $0.5 to $6.1 trillion and $0.4 to $5.9 trillion GDP, respectively.68 China would thus overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy and India would become the third largest.
The 2008-09 global financial crisis only reaffirmed this picture. While the economies of America, Japan, and Germany were shrinking, the economies of Brazil, India, and China grew 2%, 6%, and 9% annually, respectively.69 By late 2009 Brazil, one of the last countries in and first out of the downturn, was again growing 5% per year and was on pace to become the world’s fifth-largest economy even sooner than Goldman Sachs envisioned, overtaking Britain and France sometime after 2014.70 New post-crisis modeling by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reaffirmed that China’s GDP would indeed surpass that of the United States, probably by 2032. By 2050 the world’s three largest economies would still be China ($45.6 trillion), the United States ($38.6 trillion), and India ($17.8 trillion) .71
While such growth rates sound dramatic, they are actually less spectacular than those enjoyed by Japan for
