THE “CRISIS OF ROOM” - The Revenge of Geography - page 92

fluctuations in world food and energy prices, and teeming multitudes of angry, lumpen
faithful—young males predominantly—walled off in places like Karachi and Gaza (the
Soweto of the Middle East), Malthus, the first philosopher to focus on demography and the
political effects of the quality of life among the poor, has been getting more respect. Half
the population of the West Bank and Gaza is under fifteen. Indeed, while the population of
the Greater Middle East grows from 854 million to over 1.2 billion over the next twenty
years, with the Arab world in the midst of nearly doubling its population even as supplies
of groundwater greatly diminish, especially in places like Yemen, leading to explosive side
effects on politics, the word “Malthusian” will be heard more often.
Though proving Malthus right may be a useless exercise, his general worldview fits well
with Bracken's conception of a loss of room in Eurasia. Crowded megacities, beset by poor
living conditions, periodic rises in the price of commodities, water shortages, and unre-
sponsive municipal services, will be fertile petri dishes for the spread of both democracy
and radicalism, even as regimes will be increasingly empowered by missiles and modern,
outwardly focused militaries.
The megacity will be at the heart of twenty-first-century geography. There are already
twenty-five cities in the world with a population of over 10 million people, and that number
will rise to forty by 2015, with all but two in the former Third World. Greater Tokyo leads
with 35 million; Lagos is at the bottom with nearly 12 million. Thirteen of the twenty-five
are in South or East Asia. Karachi, Tehran, Istanbul, and Cairo are the megacities in the
Greater Middle East. The key fact is that there are many cities in the former Third World
which just miss making the list, and that over half of humanity now lives in urban con-
ditions, a statistic that will rise to two-thirds by 2025. There are 468 cities in the world
with populations exceeding one million. Almost all urban growth in the future will be in
developing countries, specifically in Asia and Africa. We are in an era with a significant
percentage of people living in slumlike conditions. During Mackinder's time at the turn of
the twentieth century, only 14 percent of humanity were urbanites.
As I've noted, Ibn Khaldun writes in his Muqaddimah , or “Introduction” to a world his-
tory, that desert nomads, in aspiring to the physical comforts of sedentary life, create the
original dynamic for urbanization that is then captured by powerful rulers and dynasties,
which in turn, by providing security, allow cities to flourish. But because authority requires
luxury, decay eventually sets in, as group solidarity erodes and individuals, through their
accumulation of wealth and influence, weaken executive power. Thus, systems grow brittle
and fragment, and are superseded by other formations. 9 For the first time in history this pro-
cess is operating on a global scale. Vast cities and megacities have formed as rural dwell-
ers throughout Eurasia, Africa, and South America migrate toward urban centers from the
underdeveloped countryside. As a consequence, the mayors and governors of these con-
urbations can less and less govern them effectively from a central dispatch point: so that