Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
these sprawling concentrations informally break up into suburbs and neighborhood self-
help units, whose own local leaders are often motivated by ideals and ideologies originating
from afar, by way of electronic communications technology. Radical Islam is, in part, the
story of urbanization over the past half-century across North Africa and the Greater Middle
East. Urbanization also accounts for the far more progressive demonstrators for democracy
who overthrew various Arab regimes in 2011. Forget the image of the Arab as the nomad
or inhabitant of an oasis on the steppe-desert. In most instances he is a city dweller, of a
crowded and shabby city at that, and is at home in vast crowds. It is the very impersonal
quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious
feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and
routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into
the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drift-
ing into crime, religion has had to be reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this
way states weaken, or at least have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds
of nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization. Thus, new communities take hold
that transcend traditional geography, even as they make for spatial patterns of their own.
Great changes in history often happen obscurely. 10
A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile ranges,
and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors
and half-truths transported at the speed of light by satellite channels across the rimlands
and heartland expanse, from one Third World city to another. Conversely, the crowd, em-
powered by social media like Twitter and Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth
that autocratic rulers have denied it. The crowd will be key in a new era where the re-
lief map will be darkened by densely packed megacities—the crowd being a large group
of people who abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol.
Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Spanish Jew and Nobel laureate in literature, became so
transfixed and terrified at the mob violence over inflation that seized Frankfurt and Vienna
between the two world wars that he devoted much of his life to studying the human herd
in all its manifestations. The signal insight of his topic Crowds and Power , published in
1960, was that we all yearn to be inside some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or a mob, for
that matter—there is shelter from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. Nationalism,
extremism, the yearning for democracy are all the products of crowd formations and thus
manifestations of seeking to escape from loneliness. It is loneliness, alleviated by Twitter
and Facebook, that ultimately leads to the breakdown of traditional authority and the erec-
tion of new kinds.
Loneliness is a particular characteristic of urban existence, in which strangers are many
and true friends and family relatively few. And so the new urban geography of the former
Third World in the twenty-first century will constitute a map of intense, personal longing.
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