5

Crowded, Complex, and Coastal

Unless we imagine that such urban transformations are less gigantic than these linear projections indicate, and unless we hope that we are witnessing a retreat toward middle-rank towns, these great cities will essentially be no more than juxtapositions of flimsy houses without street maintenance, police, or hospitals, surrounding a few wealthy neighborhoods turned into bunkers and guarded by mercenaries. Mafias will control immense zones outside the law (this is already the case) in Rio, Lagos, Kinshasa, and Manila. Formerly rural people, with a few members of the privileged classes, will be the primary organizers of new social and political movements demanding very concrete changes in people’s lives. It is on them, and no longer on the workers, that the great economic, cultural, political and military upheavals of the future will depend. They will be the engines of history.

—Jacques Attali, 2006

I. The New Normal

I began this book by describing an incident that happened in early autumn 2009, in a remote Afghan valley, where watching a patrol fight its way out of the mountains helped crystallize some questions in my mind about the applicability of classical counterinsurgency theory to modern conflict. Four years later, the war in Afghanistan continues, but the outlines of a new environment are already emerging across the planet. This chapter summarizes the key elements of that environment, draws together the main ideas we’ve been exploring about the problems that will confront tomorrow’s cities, and considers how we might choose to respond to them.

As we’ve just seen, one face of the new complex of urban problems is playing out in Syria today. As I write, rebels are fighting from house to house and block to block in several cities, while vast refugee settlements are congealing around the edges of towns in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Online activists of every ideological bent, in a dozen countries, are supporting the uprising; cyberguerrillas of the Free Syrian Army are blocking regime websites, running propaganda on YouTube, and using Twitter for command-and-control. Fighters are using cellphones, global positioning systems, and satellite receivers to enable their urban swarm, and they’re building do-it-yourself weapons in the workshops of what has been called the first “maker war.”1 Food, weapons, ammunition, medicines, and communications gear are flowing into Syria via overlapping networks—official and private, overt and dark, licit and illicit—that all use the same interconnected global transportation, financial, and communications systems. Flows of money, information, and fighters follow the same pathways. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad’s Electronic Army has hacked the websites and Twitter feeds of a string of human rights NGOs and the U.S. secretary of state and is phishing for rebel supporters online.2 A “siege mentality has taken hold” in government-controlled coastal cities, while a huge influx of displaced regime supporters puts these towns under further stress.3 The Syrian army has fired Scud missiles against its own cities, and people fear the regime is using nerve gas to stifle the uprising.4 Overhead, drones—flown remotely, by crews who drive home to their families after work through suburban America—are monitoring the fighting, and the CIA is reportedly considering Predator strikes against al Q aeda–aligned militants fighting alongside the rebels. The CIA story, first reported by Ken Dilanian and Brian Bennett of the Los Angeles Times, is on Twitter, Facebook, and news blogs in minutes; in less than an hour it’s on satellite channels across the globe—including Press TV (the official Iranian outlet), which predictably calls the plan “a dangerous escalation.”5 It’s not reported in Syria, though, because the regime has Iranian software that lets it scramble satellite feeds; word has it the Iranians got the software from China.6

At the same time, halfway across Asia and at the other end of the violence spectrum, we can see another face of the new normal, in the world’s fastest-growing megacity—Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, which is also experiencing severe unrest. A general strike and bombings on the streets stopped the city in its tracks in early 2013, as opposition parties protested a government crackdown, which itself was prompted by violent riots a few weeks before. The riots were triggered by death sentences given to opposition leaders a few months before that, in government-run trials that the opposition argued were politically motivated.7 Like Daraa and Benghazi, where the Syrian and Libyan civil wars began, Dhaka is an urban ecosystem under extreme stress, operating right at the edge of its capacity. Urban economic growth—combined with poverty, soil salinity, water contamination, and land-use conflict in the countryside—has brought a massive flow of rural people into the city.8 Dhaka is growing at an incredible rate: a woman born in Dhaka in 1950 would have been a toddler in a midsized town of roughly 400,000 people; by her fiftieth birthday the place was a megacity of 12 million. Today, Dhaka’s population is almost 15 million—nearly a 38-fold expansion in a single lifetime.9 This breakneck growth puts immense strain on governance: fire, ambulance, and health services are overstretched, local government is plagued by corruption and inefficiency, and the police have ceded whole districts to gangs and organized crime. Unplanned industrialization has given Dhaka the unenviable title of “least livable city on the planet,” according to an annual survey of 140 world cities.10 Hundreds of unregulated brick kilns on the city’s outskirts pump out toxic smoke as they produce the construction materials that feed Dhaka’s urbanization—a process that’s creating vast, polluted, overcrowded, marginalized shantytowns that lack water, sanitation, lighting, and even footpaths.11 Since 1971, when “Dhaka became the capital of an independent country, the pressure on it has been enormous, [resulting in] the growth of slums on any available vacant land.”12 Government responses have sometimes been heavy-handed—as in 2007, when authorities razed squatter settlements and expelled inhabitants by force—and this is closely connected with the unrest.13

And then, of course, there’s this:

Take one of the most unplanned urban centres in the world, wedge it between four flood-prone rivers in the most densely packed nation in Asia, then squeeze it between the Himalaya mountain range and a body of water that not only generates violent cyclones and the occasional tsunami, but also creeps further inland every year, washing away farmland, tainting drinking water, submerging fertile deltas, and displacing villagers as it approaches—and there you have it: Dhaka.14

Like 80 percent of cities on the planet, Dhaka is in a littoral zone. The vast majority of its people live less than forty-two feet above sea level, making the city extremely vulnerable to coastal flooding. Floods in 1998 put 60 percent of Dhaka’s districts underwater, killed more than a thousand people, and caused more than US$4 billion in damage.15 You don’t need to believe in human-caused climate change to recognize that this is a problem. Even if you assume no climate change effects whatsoever, the city will become steadily more vulnerable over time, as more people move to low-lying areas in the next generation. If, on the other hand, Bangladesh experiences any sea level rise, the effects will be catastrophic—five feet of rise would put 16 percent of the country’s land area and upwards of 22 million people underwater, prompt massive refugee movement, and leave vast areas of cropland too salty to farm.16 It doesn’t take much to generate five feet of water—during Hurricane Sandy in November 2012, for example, lower Manhattan experienced a storm surge almost twice that height, while Hurricane Katrina generated a storm surge more than five times as high in Mississippi.17

As the evening rush hour gets under way on Dhaka’s waterfront, across the world the sun is rising through the smoke haze over La Rocinha, in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro. La Rocinha is the largest favela in Brazil, a crowded hillside slum less than a mile from the sea, with a population of 350,000 people. Before it became a shantytown in the 1930s, the area was a farming community (rocinha means “little farm”), growing vegetables and flowers for Rio’s markets. Today those commodities have to be trucked in from farms further out, adding to the city’s legendary traffic flow. La Rocinha was occupied in 2011 by Brazilian special operations police and military police trying to control crime and drug trafficking in Rio—yet another coastal megacity that has grown rapidly in the last decade and today has a population of more than 12 million. Despite being economically marginalized and politically excluded, people in La Rocinha are highly connected: cellphones are common, most houses have satellite dishes and TV antennas, Internet usage is high, many bloggers and citizen journalists are active in the neighborhood, and there are local community radio and TV stations.18 As there’s no work in the actual favela, the vast majority of people in the district who do have jobs go to work in Rio, meaning that the district is very connected—as a source of labor—to the economic life of the city. Today it’s occupied by the 28th Pacification Police Unit, which has deployed seven hundred paramilitary police in nine fortified patrol bases throughout La Rocinha, along with a hundred surveillance cameras that monitor movement. Patrols roam the narrow streets on foot and by motorcycle, working the areas between outposts and checkpoints, in an operational pattern that looks a lot like a police-led version of urban counterinsurgency, Baghdad style. Pacification of the favela has driven violent crime underground, but it feels—to at least some residents—little short of military occupation and urban warfare against the poor.19

On the other side of the Atlantic from Rio, it’s midday on Africa’s west coast, in the flooded ruins of Makoko, part of the Lagos waterfront. Makoko is (or rather, was) a famous 120-year-old shantytown built on stilts over a lagoon, and until recently it was home to 250,000 people. The government demolished it with only seventy-two hours’ warning, against strong community opposition, in August 2012. Violent clashes broke out with residents as the authorities began cutting down homes with chainsaws.20 Nigeria’s government is trying to “unclog the city and spur economic growth,” and clearing waterfront slums—where families have lived for generations, albeit without written title to their houses—is part of this effort.21 “Built on a swamp, Lagos is fighting for survival. Ceaseless migration is strangling it. City fathers foresee the doubling of the population to 40m within a few decades, which would make it the most populous city in the world.”22 But in the attempt to renew the city, it’s the people of urban, coastal, marginalized districts that suffer most. Around the time that Makoko was being demolished, up the coast from Lagos, the cities of Conakry, Freetown, and Dakar (capitals of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Senegal, respectively) were suffering a huge cholera epidemic. It was caused by the lethal combination of nonexistent sewage systems, lack of clean water, overstretched public health services, heavy rains, and coastal floods that inundated waterfront slums, spreading disease across their parent cities. The connectedness among cities along the West African coast quickly helped spread the epidemic across the region.23

I could continue this coastal tour at length, but the overall point is clear: the same patterns exist in littoral cities across the entire developing world. As well as occurring simultaneously in different cities, these problems—from poverty and social unrest to gang warfare, organized crime, insurgency, terrorism, and even out-and-out civil war—can coexist in one city at the same time. Feral cities are emerging in some countries, and feral districts have arisen in many cities. Acute violence exacerbates deeper, chronic issues, making every other problem worse and harder to get at. In the words of Mike Davis, the world is becoming a “planet of slums,” with “more than 200,000 slums on earth, ranging in population from a few hundred to more than a million people” and the emergence of “‘megaslums’ . . . when shantytowns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery.”24 The periurban world is also, as we’ve seen, highly connected: as of early 2013, more than six billion people across the planet own cellphones (that is, about two billion more than have access to clean water or toilets)—and problems in one place can rapidly escalate and spread to others.25

This, then, is the suite of problems—framed by the megatrends of population growth, urbanization, littoralization, and connectedness—that will define the environment for future conflict, and for every other aspect of life, in the next generation. How do we react to this? How should we think about the coming environment, how can we prepare for it, and what can we do about it?

That depends on what the word we means in that sentence. In cities under stress, there’s no inclusive “we,” no single unified society, but rather a complex shifting ecosystem of players cohabiting in segregated communities with competing interests, clashing cultures, and differing perspectives. Are we Baron Haussmann, trying to manicure an urban jungle, or Victor Hugo, lamenting the loss of people’s autonomy? Are we the Jamaican constabulary, or the population who get their law and order from the gang dons of the Kingston garrison communities? Are we the community organizations trying to mitigate violence in San Pedro Sula, the businesses making clothes in its outskirts, or the workforce in those factories? Or are we the American public, buying clothes and cocaine, both of which stage through Honduras on their journey to the U.S. market, supporting the deportation of Honduran gang members (and thus both funding and fueling San Pedro Sula’s astronomical murder rate), while tut-tutting as if we had nothing to do with it? Are we the entrepreneurs who run businesses (licit, illicit, or both) from La Rocinha, or the police working to pacify the place? Are we the Western militaries, diplomatic services, and aid agencies wondering how to operate in this environment if, God forbid, we find ourselves dragged into it? The examples discussed in previous chapters suggest insights for several of these groups, and the rest of this final chapter outlines some of these insights—not as definitive conclusions, but as tentative hypotheses that will need a lot of further testing. Before examining specific insights, though, it makes sense to put forward some overall observations.

II. “Bending the Curve”

The first, most obvious insight is that whatever the future of conflict may be, most of the time it won’t be much like Afghanistan. Given the historical patterns I mentioned in Chapter 1, we’ll probably see strong operational continuity (frequent irregular and unconventional warfare, stabilization operations, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief, with rare but dangerous instances of state-on-state conflict). But we’ll also see a sharp environmental discontinuity: the future environment (crowded, coastal, urban, connected) will be so different from Afghanistan (remote, landlocked, rural) that we’ll have to consciously reconsider much of what we think we know about twenty-first-century conflict.

How, for example, will drones and satellites operate over urbanized spaces where we can see any house from the outside—but not know who lives in it, or what’s moving in the sewer systems underneath it, or in the covered laneways that link it with other houses under the urban canopy? The capacity to intercept, tag, track and locate specific cellphone and Internet users from a drone already exists, but distinguishing signal from background noise in a densely connected, heavily trafficked piece of digital space is a hugely daunting challenge. How will special operators or strike aircraft engage targets in the same tenement or shack system as thousands of innocent bystanders? These people won’t long remain bystanders if we go in hard after a target and disrupt their lives in the process. How will heavy armored vehicles maneuver in streets that are three feet wide? How will battalions and brigades do population-centric counterinsurgency in cities so gigantic they could soak up a whole army and hardly notice? How will expeditionary logistics function, in cities that can barely feed or water themselves or supply their own energy needs, let alone fill logistics contracts to support an external military force? How will offensive cyberoperations help against virtual swarms of hackers when disrupting an urban population’s electronic connectivity turns out to be one of the most provocative things you can possibly do? All these things will demand hard and wide-ranging thought. (Some detailed ideas on these issues, and others, are in the Appendix.)

Don’t get me wrong: the counterinsurgency era is far from over, much as people might want it to be—historical patterns suggest that Western countries will almost certainly do large-scale counterinsurgency again, probably sometime in the next decade or two, whether we want to or not. So it’s absolutely imperative that military forces retain the lessons and skills they’ve learned in those conflicts, yet simultaneously figure out how to do such operations in the megaslums of tomorrow—a tall order indeed. Mountain warfare, with its extreme demands on troops and equipment, is also far from a thing of the past: mountain campaigns will most certainly happen again. Specialist mountain troops (such as France’s outstanding Chasseurs Alpins, who so distinguished themselves in Afghanistan), light infantry (such as the American 10th Mountain Division), and airborne (parachute) or air assault (helicopter-borne) forces will remain essential because of their ability to infest a landscape, move quickly across broken and complex terrain, engage with a population, and get right up close and personal with a determined enemy. As the world gets ever more littoral, Marines will, if anything, become even more the force of choice for the complex expeditionary operations in which they specialize.

But as a proportion of the whole, wars in remote, mountainous, landlocked places such as Afghanistan will get rarer by comparison to urban littoral conflicts, simply because wars happen where people live, and people will be overwhelmingly concentrated in coastal cities. We may be doing the same kinds of operations as today, but the places where we’ll be doing them will be radically different. Versatility and adaptability—being able to work in the widest possible variety of environments, perform the widest possible range of missions, and transition rapidly and smoothly between terrain and mission types—will therefore be much more important than optimizing for any one scenario. Terms such as full-spectrum, versatile, and adaptable are often used as a way to avoid making hard choices about capability trade-offs: by optimizing for everything we optimize for nothing. But, as Chapter 1 showed, even though we can’t predict specific future conflicts (akin to predicting the weather), we can make informed judgments based on projections about the future conditions and circumstances under which these conflicts will take place (understanding the climate). That future conflict climate, as we have seen, will be coastal, networked, and overwhelmingly urban—so we need to orient ourselves toward, rather than optimizing solely for, conflict in connected cities.

This leads to my second overall observation, which is that security thinkers need to start treating the city as a unit of analysis in its own right. Dominant theories of international relations take the nation-state as their basic building block. Western governments talk of “national security”; there are “country teams” in our embassies and “country desks” in our diplomatic services, intelligence organizations, and aid agencies. This national-level shorthand (“Indonesia,” “Pakistan,” “Nigeria,” “India,” “China”) lumps together huge and diverse areas of enormous countries as if they were single, indivisible units and flattens out the crucially important variations among population groups within them. Yet Jakarta and Merauke, Karachi and Q uetta, Lagos and Kano, Mumbai and Hyderabad, or Shanghai and Urumqi could hardly be more different from each other, and each of these cities contains dozens of distinct population groups who also differ dramatically. We need to bring our analysis down to the city and subcity level, understanding communities and cities as systems in their own right (perhaps, via the flow-modeling approach I’ve described in this book, treating cities as biological or natural systems). We need to understand how a city’s subsystems and subdistricts fit together as well as how that city nests within and interacts with regional and transnational flows and networks. Much of the work to enable this approach has already been done in the urban studies, ecology, systems engineering, political geography, and architecture communities—it’s partly a matter of taking models that already exist in other disciplines, bringing them into the national security field, building on them, plugging in new variables, and looking closely and creatively at the results. In this respect, the political science community may perhaps be able to help, applying recent research on modern and medieval city-states as an organizing framework—doing for coastal cities what Antonio Giustozzi did for Afghanistan’s city-states in his magnificent study of Afghan warlord state-building, Empires of Mud.26

A related insight is the need to conceive of a city as flow and process, rather than just place, with violence shaping and creating the landscape, not just happening in it. This jumps out at me from the Tivoli Gardens example we looked at in Chapter 2. The military traditionally treats urban terrain as a “special environment,” which makes sense at the tactical level, where combat engagements are so fleeting (seconds and minutes, to hours or days at most) that the landscape is effectively a constant. Having been brought up this way, until I studied Kingston through the lens of competitive control theory, looking at it in terms of long-term conflict between Jamaican political parties and their client gangs, I naively thought of a city as just a piece of real estate—a fixed backdrop against which the action happened. I understood how dramatic an effect urban terrain could have on conflict; what I didn’t fully grasp was that this could work the other way—that processes of conflict and competitive control at the street level could literally create the physical terrain of an urban area, demolishing entire districts in one place, creating new districts in another, determining the locations of key pieces of urban infrastructure, and defining the spatial relationships between parts of the city. And physical terrain (initially formed by conflict) can then channel and define how subsequent conflict occurs, so the urban organism both reflects and perpetuates the conflicts that created it.27 Having once had this insight (which I’m sure is entirely obvious to many people but just hadn’t quite struck me before), I can never see cities the same way again. An urban area, as it exists in any one instant, is now to me just a snapshot of a dynamic disequilibrium. Like a still image from a video clip, it’s in midflow, and it seems permanent only if you ignore what’s happening on either side of the freeze-frame you happen to be looking at in any one moment. Flow, not space, is what defines urban areas: the mathematics of cities is calculus, not geometry.

But if cities are in a state of dynamic disequilibrium, this calls into question policy makers’ emphasis on stability as a goal. Planners talk about stabilizing a country, returning to normality. The military has a whole doctrine called “stability operations,” NATO has a school for “stability policing,” aid agencies do “stabilization programming,” the World Bank and the IMF issue “stabilization loans,” and political scientists talk of “status quo powers” and “hegemonic stability theory.”28 But at the city level, none of this makes much sense—there is no status quo, no “normal” to which to return, no stable environment to police. Think about Dhaka, exploding from 400,000 to 15 million, or Lagos, growing from 3 to 20 million, or Mumbai from 2.9 to 23 million, all in the same time frame.29 These aren’t stable systems; even if you could somehow temporarily get every city function under control, the frantic pace of growth would rapidly overtake the temporary illusion of stability. In fact, that’s exactly what has occurred in many cities, where planners have repeatedly devised solutions to problems as they exist at one particular moment, only to find these solutions overtaken by events before they can be implemented. In maneuver theory terms, rapid dynamic change has gotten inside planners’ and political leaders’ decision cycles: they repeatedly develop policies that would have been adequate for a set of circumstances that no longer exists. Rather than focusing on stability (a systems characteristic that just isn’t present in the urban ecosystems we’re examining here), we might be better off focusing on resiliency—helping actors in the system become better able to resist shocks, bounce back from setbacks, and adapt to dynamic change. Instead of trying to hold back the tide, we should be helping people learn to swim.

Another insight that arises from this line of thinking is that the territorial logic of any given city—the way things work, how the place flows, what drives what, what matters and what doesn’t—will be totally opaque to outsiders, at least at first. Taking the time to observe a city for long enough to sense the flow and to see the rhythms of its metabolism turns out to be critical in understanding it. (Think about how thoroughly Lashkar-e-Taiba scoped Mumbai before the 2008 attacks, studying the city and its flow for more than a year, and compare that to Task Force Ranger in Mogadishu.) A one-time analysis, however detailed, doesn’t say much about a city’s flow. Big data can sometimes help, since advances in cloud computing and data mining now make it possible to produce dynamic visualizations of flow patterns. Analysts can track millions upon millions of data points (traffic patterns, say, or cellphone usage, or pedestrian movement, or prices in markets, or Internet hits, or bank transactions, or numbers and types of cars in parking lots)—things that dozens of businesses across the world analyze every day for marketing purposes—to understand how a city works. But how do we do that in enormous megaslums that are constantly growing and morphing and which don’t have the spatial frameworks (down to street names and building addresses, for example) that allow geo-referenced data to mean something?

Obviously enough, we go in on the ground, and we engage directly with the people who live there. Caerus field teams under Matt McNabb and Richard Tyson have done exactly this in Liberia and Nigeria over the past two years, working with marginalized urban communities to help them create maps of their own environment and thus give them a voice in negotiations on land use, infrastructure, crime, and public safety. These teams have found that in these poorly serviced and barely governed periurban settlements, basic spatial relationships and flows are highly contested, which makes them extremely hard (and sometimes very dangerous) to map. This underlines another basic insight, namely, that self-aware ignorance—a constant realization that outsiders don’t understand how things work, and therefore need to experiment, test hypotheses, start off small, and seek local context—is a crucially important mental discipline if we want to be effective. If a city is a continuous dynamic flow, then it’s also a continuous natural experiment, and taking a consciously experimental approach will be key.

Less obviously, though, the same city that baffles outsiders may be completely opaque to locals. It’s clear enough that strangers coming in—the proverbial white guys with clipboards, patting the locals on the head, telling them to “stand aside, there’s a good little fellow, while we fix your problem”—have often done vastly more harm than good. You could think of UNICEF’s disastrous intervention in water supply in Bangladesh, which, at a conservative estimate, left twenty million people with chronic arsenic poisoning.30 Or the well-meaning efforts of Western movie stars handing out mosquito nets, putting local net manufacturers out of business and thus increasing, not reducing, people’s long-term vulnerability to malaria.31 Or, indeed, the many occasions in Iraq and Afghanistan—chronicled by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Tom Ricks, George Packer, Linda Robinson, and (with a certain unconscious irony) Paul Bremer—when our efforts had tragic unintended consequences because we just didn’t get how things were supposed to work.32

But here’s the thing: just because you live in New York, London, Sydney, or Tokyo—let alone Lagos, Karachi, Rio, or Cairo—doesn’t guarantee that you understand how these giant coastal cities work, either. You can be a complete local, live your whole life in a place, yet still not understand what’s driving the problems that affect it—because you only have a partial view, because your perspective is skewed by your own interests or affiliations, because living there limits your access to certain kinds of technical or functional knowledge that you’d need to understand the problem, or because where you live is just too big and complex and variegated for any one person to fully grasp what’s going on. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, someone standing in Trafalgar Square can’t see greater London, let alone all of England.33 Likewise, a crack addict on the streets of a big American city, a social worker in the neighborhood, a nurse in the local emergency room, or a police officer on the beat may all have a profound understanding of a particular set of hyperlocal issues and conditions, but that doesn’t mean they grasp the overall pattern in their city as a whole, or understand how to fix the problems they inhabit, any more than outsiders do.

It also doesn’t mean they can form a consensus on a way forward. In fact, their intimate involvement with a set of local problems makes it, if anything, less likely that they’ll agree. Each of them is looking at a gigantic (and constantly morphing) complex system through a soda straw. For this reason a pure bottom-up approach, which privileges local insight over outside knowledge, where you “just ask a local,” isn’t the answer, either. It can be just as problematic as a top-down technocratic approach that brings in outside “experts” who ignore local perspectives. How do you decide which local to ask, for a start? And what if they disagree, suck you into local disputes, or just have no clear idea what’s going on? This is the perpetual challenge that confronts researchers in a fieldwork environment. It also bedevils aid workers, social workers, police, emergency services personnel, and military leaders who intervene in complex emergencies, and there are no easy answers. At a more basic level, as we saw in Chapter 1, the data on international interventions suggest that if outsiders understood local problems, the dozens of interventions that happen every year would probably have a greater success rate; if locals understood their own problems and could agree on how to fix them, those interventions wouldn’t be needed. Clearly, neither is the case. I think there is an approach that can work, a structured co-design technique that combines local and outsider inputs, but I’ll come to that in due course.

A further general observation is that the normative systems we’ve observed in action in Kingston and Mogadishu, in remote areas of Afghanistan, and in Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq—what I’ve called the theory of competitive control—seem to recur across rural and urban environments of all kinds, and are therefore probably hardwired into human nature, rather than habitat-dependent. This in turn means that competitive control is probably an enduring feature of human behavior, making it broadly applicable to many kinds of nonstate violence and thus potentially useful beyond narrowly defined counterinsurgency theory. Whether the group we’re examining is a militia like the Somali National Alliance or Arkan’s Tigers, a street gang like the Shower Posse or MS13, an organized crime network like the Sicilian mafia or the Honduran narcos, a soccer club like the Ultras or Red Star Belgrade, a mass movement like Hezbollah, an insurgency like the Taliban, a terrorist group like al Q aeda in Iraq, or a government, the same principles seem to hold. A group that creates predictability and consistency by establishing a normative system of rules and sanctions is thereby defining a safe behavioral space for people afflicted by terrifying uncertainty, and the safety that system creates will attract that population. In a conflict situation, people’s uncertainty arises from the presence of armed groups targeting the population; in a city that’s growing exponentially—constantly outgrowing itself—the same terrifying lack of predictability can arise simply from the pace of change. Thus a megacity under stress can offer the same opportunities for conflict entrepreneurs to control populations, provided they create a predictable rule set that makes people feel safe in the face of instability.

This occurs—and this is the critical point—because of the predictability inherent in the rules, whether people like the group or not, and regardless of the content of those rules. As we saw in Chapter 3, you don’t have to like the cops, or agree with the speed limit, for the road rules to make you feel safe. Eventually, provided the group builds consistency and order, through a wide spectrum of persuasive, administrative, and coercive measures, it may gain the subjective loyalty and support of a population. But the coercive end of the spectrum is the foundation for a normative system, since in a competitive control environment, a group that can’t fight off other groups or discipline its own members will be swept away. Support follows strength, and strength flows from the ability to enforce the rules (Mao’s “barrel of the gun”); this applies to any group seeking to control a population.

One related insight from the Arab Awakening (and the San Francisco protests) discussed in Chapter 4 is that people feel attacked when their connectivity is disrupted. In both these examples, when governments turned off cellphone networks, this alone was enough to bring people onto the streets to support previously marginalized activists. Suddenly a minority cause became a mass protest, because people felt a shared sense of grievance and indignation when the authorities pulled the plug. I think this is about more than just the convenience of electronic connectivity, though. Constant access to the digital world, letting people upload images or tweet what’s happening to them, creates a sense of security. There’s always an actual or potential witness to what’s going on: someone’s watching, ready to blow the whistle if the authorities pull something brutal or repressive. It’s as if there were always a media crew of reporters and cameramen watching out for you—but a virtual, digital, distributed crew enabled by constant connectivity. This idea of “Web as witness”—the protection that comes from virtual monitoring by independent outsiders, and the restraint this imposes on governments—is the flip side of the privacy concerns that go with our ever-connected environment. In a sense, it allows remote actors to extend their normative system into places where they can’t physically be. This idea of the permanent, universal witness is a new element in conflict, politics, and human rights advocacy alike, it’s entirely an artifact of the connected, urban world, and it’s mostly a good thing.

This leads me to a final general observation, which is that things are not all bad. I admit I’ve painted a pretty dismal picture here, and indeed, there are daunting challenges in a world that will add three billion new city dwellers over the next generation, mostly in low-income countries that were already short of resources and lacking in governance capacity. Jacques Attali, in the bleak passage from his Brief History of the Future that I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, summarizes this dystopian vision very well.34

But there are upsides, too. For one thing, population growth and urbanization tend to coincide with gains in prosperity, health, and education, so by midcentury another billion people—many in emerging markets like India and China—could be lifted out of poverty and into the global middle class, creating massive opportunities for trade and industry, unleashing immense human capital, and giving them the prospect of better lives.35 For another, there’s evidence that when population, settlement, agriculture, and energy production are concentrated in denser areas (like multistory buildings in urban zones), this reduces carbon footprint and ecological impact for a given population.36 As Robert Bryce has argued, the organizing principle for a green future is density.37

I mentioned resiliency earlier, and in a broader sense, cities throughout history have shown enormous capacity for innovation, reinvention, and self-renewal. We saw this in the case of Lagos in Chapter 1, as people adapted to the city’s lack of infrastructure and its horrendous traffic by developing their own, self-synchronized system of traffic alerts. In fact, as Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy argue in Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, increases in the size of cities tend (on average) to make them more efficient and faster, increasing innovation and prosperity, enabling more growth even as they also bring problems. “The bigger the city,” Zolli and Healy report, quoting a 2011 study, “the higher the wages were for the residents, the more patents produced there but also the greater the number of violent crimes, the more traffic, etc. ‘When you double the size of the city, you produce, on average, fifteen percent higher wages, fifteen percent more fancy restaurants, but also fifteen percent more AIDS cases, and fifteen percent more violent crime. Everything scales up by fifteen percent when you double the size.’”38

The key phrase here is “on average”—Zolli and Healy’s research reveals that growing cities, even struggling ones, have within themselves the adaptive resources they need to address their problems, provided they can unleash and apply them. But these resources aren’t evenly distributed, and it’s the unequal (or, more accurately, the perception of unjust) allocation of resources that creates conflict. Their research highlights the danger of exclusionary growth: if some subset of people is excluded from the general gain as a city grows, this creates relative deprivation and a sense of injustice that leads to violence, as we saw in Benghazi. Inequality per se might not be the problem—indeed, some argue that a certain amount of inequality, as long as it comes with opportunity, can spur people to better themselves, creating achievable, aspirational goals, and thus becoming an engine of economic growth and societal stability.39 But inequality without opportunity—permanent exclusion, marginalization without hope of improving one’s circumstances—can create lethal, city-killing resentments, when people who realize they can never join the party decide to burn the house down instead. Likewise, “cities that become overly reliant on just a few forms of value creation,” excluding parts of their population, economy, and territory from the wealth and capital they create, “can find themselves enjoying a golden age followed by catastrophic decline. (Think Detroit).”40 Conversely, if cities can generate enough carrying capacity quickly enough, they can build resiliencies that help them bounce back from crises. If cities have metabolisms, they also have immune systems—ways to deal with internal challenges, absorb toxins, and neutralize threats. Thinking of resiliency in this way makes more sense than focusing on stability, I think.

All this implies that it’s possible to “bend the curve”: that the linear projections I’ve outlined in this book need not automatically result in mass conflict and chaos, provided we figure out ways to unlock the adaptive resources that already exist in major cities. Cities are (or can be) engines of peace, justice, innovation, and prosperity, even as they also create violence, injustice, exclusion, and poverty. And actions that communities and governments take in their own cities can bend the curve toward resiliency.

III. Co-Design in Cities Under Stress

If the first part of this chapter is a description of the complex of problems that are affecting cities on a crowded, coastal, connected planet, then what are the appropriate governance, economic, and civil society responses to these challenges? Here, to be frank, the picture is much brighter, and this is where I believe the most exciting opportunities lie, as we seek to bend the curve away from the bleak vision suggested in a straight-line projection from current data. The problems are real enough, as are the difficulties in addressing them using traditional top-down, technocratic, outsider-led, state-based frameworks. But there are other approaches. Let’s consider three of these: Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, which ended that country’s civil war; CeaseFire Chicago, which seeks to prevent violent crime in U.S. cities; and Crisis Mappers, which brings together a community of online analysts and observers to build reliable maps of conflict-or disaster-affected areas in real time.

Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace

In 2003, Liberia’s civil war was in its fourteenth year, with two rebel groups fighting the regime of President Charles Taylor, heavy civilian casualties, and no end in sight. Taylor’s National Patriotic Front, which was backed (among others) by Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, had cemented its rule over most of Liberia’s population and territory, through the exact kinds of competitive control techniques we’ve been discussing. These ranged from terror and coercive violence against individuals and whole communities to administrative measures designed to keep communities quiet, to rigged elections in 1997. Two hundred thousand people had been killed in the conflict, with many more wounded or horribly mutilated. Rebel and government fighters had raped enormous numbers of women and forcibly recruited young boys and girls as child soldiers, porters, and sexual slaves. A tide of refugees fleeing this horror had swamped Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, and large squatter camps had formed on the city’s outskirts. These camps lacked food and water and were horribly overcrowded and disease-ridden, putting an already stressed and barely functioning city infrastructure under unbearable pressure.41

In March of that year, Leymah Gbowee, a social and trauma worker at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Monrovia’s coastal district of Sinkor, and the mother of four children, began a protest movement calling for peace in Liberia. The movement she started began organizing mass demonstrations and prayer vigils in a local fish market, and occupied a soccer field near the route used by President Taylor’s motorcade on Tubman Boulevard, Sinkor’s main road. Muslim women organized by Asatu Bah Kenneth joined forces with Gbowee’s group, creating a multifaith women’s protest movement. The movement attracted international media attention, forcing Taylor to meet with its leaders in April 2003. Taylor challenged the women (now calling their movement Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace) to find the rebel leaders, which they did—sending a delegation to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where rebel commanders were meeting, and convincing them through a series of nonviolent protest actions to agree to peace talks. The movement maintained its occupation of the soccer field and its prayer vigil throughout this period, which saw significant violence in Monrovia’s refugee camps and across Liberia.42 Peace talks began in June 2003 in Accra, Ghana, and on August 11 these talks resulted in a comprehensive peace agreement, President Taylor’s exile to Nigeria, and the entry of United Nations peacekeepers into Liberia. The women’s movement, led by Gbowee, remained closely engaged during the peacekeeping operation, helped ensure the peaceful disarmament of rebel and government fighters, and worked with transitional authorities and peacekeepers to organize free elections.43 They set up polling stations, registered voters, and scrutinized the electoral process. The poll resulted in the election of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on November 23, 2005, began the process of transition to democracy, and brought a sharp (though not total) reduction in violence. Leymah Gbowee and President Sirleaf were jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for their work.44

The Liberian women’s movement has been rightly praised as an example of nonviolent protest, women organizing for peace, and civil society influencing the political process through mass action. All this is true, but what’s also true is that this wasn’t solely a bottom-up, local movement. Local people (including women’s groups) had tried to oppose violence before, but they’d been brutally crushed—in 1990, many of them were killed in the same church in Sinkor where Gbowee began her movement in 2003. This time things were different, because Gbowee’s passion, courage, and insight into the hyperlocal context of the war were matched by technical and functional expertise from outsiders. Gbowee had trained as a trauma worker in a UNICEF program early in the war. At St. Peter’s, she was mentored as a peace activist by Sam Gbaydee Doe, leader of West Africa Network for Peace (WANEP), a regional peace-building network founded in 1998 in Ghana that was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the British Department for International Development, the British and Dutch branches of Oxfam, and the Catholic Organization for Relief and Development Aid, and which drew heavily on Internet and cellphone connectivity among activists. Thelma Ekiyor, a Nigerian lawyer specializing in alternative dispute resolution, was a particularly important mentor and sponsor of Gbowee’s efforts.45 Both Ekiyor and Doe had been formally trained in techniques of peace building, mass action, and conflict resolution when they attended Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) at Harrisonburg, Virginia. Ekiyor trained and advised Gbowee, gained WANEP funding for her initiative, and mentored her as Gbowee founded the Liberian women’s movement. The movement’s Ghanaian and Nigerian connections may also have played a role in the peace process, with Ghana hosting the peace talks and Nigeria accepting Charles Taylor as the conflict ended.46 The World Bank and several United Nations organizations also played roles in ending the conflict—not to mention the 15,000 soldiers and 1,115 police and civilian staff of the UN peacekeeping mission, supported by 4,350 U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel of Joint Task Force Liberia, who enforced an end to hostilities and maintained peace during the transition and elections process.47

Does this mean that an American university is responsible for Liberia’s transformation from conflict, or that U.S. and British government development agencies, international NGOs, the UN, or U.S. and West African militaries can take credit for what happened? Of course not—but Gbowee could not have done it on her own, either. The external players brought what Gbowee lacked, including training for her and her colleagues, technical knowledge, and functional skill, while she brought what they lacked, including local context, insight, and the legitimacy and grass-roots organizing ability to build a local movement and forge collaboration between Christian and Muslim communities. Most important, she also brought charismatic leadership, wisdom, will and courage. Outsiders didn’t tell Gbowee to sit down and shut up, nor were they passive funders and enablers—this was a collaborative, two-way process of co-design.

CeaseFire Chicago

In a completely different setting, on the other side of the world, the same year Gbowee was starting at St. Peter’s Church, Dr. Gary Slutkin was launching CeaseFire, a violence prevention and crime control program based on his insight that because violence follows biological (epidemiological) patterns in a population, it can therefore treated like an epidemic and can be prevented by stopping the behavior at its source.48

CeaseFire trains, mentors, and puts into the field outreach workers (known as “violence interrupters”) drawn directly from local communities. Their role is to detect, prevent, and mitigate conflict on the street before it leads to violence. Being drawn from the local community, interrupters are often former gang members, respected older women or men, or other influential members of local society.49 They rely on force of personality, street cred, relationships with key players in the community, and hyperlocal understanding of the territorial logic of their own district (how things work, what drives violence, and how the neighborhood flows). They focus on detecting and intervening in acts of violence before they occur, changing the behavior of individuals who are influential in the neighborhood system of violence or who are at risk for violent behavior, and changing community norms about violence.50 Interrupters attend a formal training program designed by Slutkin and form part of a network (both physical and online) that supports their work, helps them track progress of situations and individuals, and links them to a broader movement. After being launched in 2000 in West Garfield, then Chicago’s most violent neighborhood, the program has spread throughout Chicago, and offshoots of the program are now active in Baltimore, Kansas City (Missouri), New Orleans, New York, Phoenix, and several cities in California, as well as in Britain, South Africa, and the Caribbean.51 The program expands by proliferating small projects with a common but flexible methodology and adapting to local conditions in each new area, rather than by imposing rigid controls or attempting to create a large, monolithic, one-size-fits-all model. The movement is funded by a combination of private philanthropy and donations from local and national businesses; for a time it was also supported by government money from the city of Chicago.

Gary Slutkin grew up in Chicago, but I suspect he would be the first to admit that he’s not exactly an insider in the tight-knit, violent, low-income, marginalized, and excluded communities and social networks where CeaseFire works. He’s a doctor, a specialist in internal medicine and infectious disease control, and an academic—professor of epidemiology and international health at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. He did his initial medical training in Chicago, and his internship and residency at San Francisco General Hospital, learning infectious disease control methods (and getting intimately acquainted with street crime, gang violence, and public health) in the tuberculosis program of the San Francisco Health Department. He then spent several years working in Africa for the World Health Organization, where he specialized in reversing epidemics, including tuberculosis, cholera, and AIDS, “including being principally responsible for supporting Uganda’s AIDS program—the only country to have reversed its AIDS epidemic.”52

Thus CeaseFire, like the Liberian women’s peace movement, is an example of co-design. Slutkin is an outsider in the communities where his program is succeeding so well (in fact, he is the proverbial white guy with a clipboard, maybe even a lab coat as well). He couldn’t, and doesn’t, succeed by trying to go into other people’s communities, telling them what their problems are, making them stand aside, and then imposing his own technocratic solutions. Clearly, though, local people weren’t doing too well solving their own problems before his program arrived. What Slutkin brings to this collaborative, co-designed effort is training and mentoring, technical skill, functional (not locally specific) knowledge, a scientifically developed methodology, and a perspective on how these kinds of problems work in many different places. It’s the local community that brings the insight, hyperlocal context, and spatial understanding of the systems logic and day-to-day flow of their own districts, and who ultimately hit the streets to implement the program in their own way, with support and technical assistance from Slutkin, but bringing their own insights and leadership talents to the effort. Ultimately, too, there is a police force, mostly offstage and out of mind but with the ability to bring lethal force to bear in a complex urban environment, to prevail in a close fight, and thus to enforce a normative system (in this case, that of an elected government), upholding the coercive end of the spectrum in the districts where CeaseFire works. The enlightened and informed support of police, and in some cases integration with community-oriented policing programs, is a key external enabler, framing the program’s success.

Crisis Mappers

If the Liberian women’s movement and CeaseFire are examples of street-level co-design in dangerous urban areas under stress, then Crisis Mappers is the virtual, remote-observation analog to these local physical programs. Crisis Mappers—formally, the International Network of Crisis Mappers—was co-founded by Jen Ziemke and Patrick Meier in 2009, at the first International Conference on Crisis Mapping. The network describes itself as “the largest and most active international community of experts, practitioners, policymakers, technologists, researchers, journalists, scholars, hackers and skilled volunteers engaged at the intersection between humanitarian crises, technology, crowd-sourcing, and crisis mapping.” Crisis mapping, in this context, means applying a huge variety of techniques—mobile and Web-based smartphone apps; participatory maps (where local communities work with a tech platform or an outside expert to record their perception of their own environment, for their own use); crowd-sourced data on events such as tsunamis, earthquakes, and conflict; aerial and satellite imagery; geospatial platforms such as Open Street Map or Google Earth; advanced visualization tools; live simulations; and computational and statistical models—to provide early warning and to support rapid responses to complex humanitarian emergencies. It is a fundamentally multidisciplinary endeavor that combines local field insight from affected communities or researchers on the ground with remote observation, visualization, and analysis by people far from the scene of a crisis.

This is quite a mouthful, but what in means in practice is a network of about five thousand people spread across the world in more than four hundred organizations (private companies, academic institutions, and NGOs)—not to mention quite a few talented individuals in basements and coffee shops—who combine their efforts to monitor developing humanitarian crises and to produce accurate, up-to-the-minute, geospatially referenced visualizations of events on the ground as they unfold. Humanitarian NGOs, first responders, or local communities can then use these visualizations to shape their response to developing crises in real time. Partners on the ground can contribute data, validate what’s being reported, and update inaccurate information in real time. Crisis mappers work, like Anonymous or Telecomix in the Arab Awakening examples we looked at in Chapter 4, as an “adhocracy”: nobody gets paid, everyone contributes out of personal commitment or passion for the tech or humanitarian concern, and the ultimate outcome is the organizational manifestation of the “Web as witness” phenomenon that I described earlier—someone is watching, and she and five thousand others are making and updating a map in real time.

The map matters—because everything that happens, happens somewhere—and knowing where things are occurring is the first step toward understanding them and responding to them. In urban metabolism terms, mapping the flow requires an understanding of what’s happening where, and you need that knowledge before you can understand why it’s occurring, as we saw in the Kingston and San Pedro Sula examples. In terms of the networking between the virtual and human domains, mapping human social networks and understanding how they intersect with electronic ones is critical if you want to make them work together, as we saw in the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan examples in the Arab Awakening. And in cases of major natural disaster or conflict—such as the January 2010 Haiti earthquake, the April 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, or the efforts to map the flow and needs of refugees and displaced persons during the Libyan and Syrian civil wars—crisis mappers can provide essential information by ensuring that help can get to the right people quickly.

Crisis Mapping is an example of co-design in two different ways. First, it’s a voluntary, ad hoc, free association of motivated individuals who get together in a self-synchronized, self-directed way and swarm onto specific projects and events that interest them. Group hackathons and crowd-sourced code are used to build open-source, open-architecture systems that anyone can use, add to, and refine. Data are shared and resources are pooled. Second, the crisis mapper in a remote location is analogous to the outsider, while local civil society organizations, individual researchers and field teams, and local communities on the ground provide the insider inputs. Without the field component, a crowd-sourced crisis map is just an unverified guess; without the crowd-sourced map, the field team can only produce unstructured data. Together, though, they represent an unparalleled solution to an incredibly difficult problem—remote mappers build the apps and create the frameworks and the initial data cut (the base map, if you like), which local teams and on-the-ground partners validate, add to, and refine. Working together, these two components can produce an incredibly detailed and workably accurate map in near-real time as a crisis unfolds.

Co-Designing for Resilience

Together, as I mentioned, these examples are as hopeful for me as the military projection is daunting. They suggest that the same factors that make the future conflict environment so problematic—rapid urbanization, crowded spaces, the dramatic expansion of connectivity, the emergence of technically skilled and networked populations across the planet—also suggest the outlines of potential solutions. We talked earlier about resilience, about making actors in a system better able to handle and bounce back from shocks within it, rather than grasping to reclaim a mythical “stability” that was probably never there in the first place. We noted the work of Andrew Zolli and Anne Marie Healy, whose research suggests that as cities grow, even as they run into massive problems of urban overstretch, they also carry within them the adaptive resources needed to overcome these problems. We noted that the same factors that will swamp the world’s poorest and least-governed cities with three billion new people in the next generation will also bring unprecedented health, education, and prosperity to many of them, unleashing enormous new human potential. Part of the key to unlocking this potential may well have something to do with the idea of co-designing for resilience.

What I mean by this should be clear from the preceding examples. The co-design approach is something we seek to use in chaotic, complex environments—particularly cities under stress—where there exist problems (often involving intense violence) that local communities have been unable to solve, and that outsiders lack the knowledge or commitment to understand. The methodology tries to avoid fetishizing external, technocratic, top-down, white-guy-with-clipboard knowledge. At the same time, it also tries to avoid the magical thinking associated with treating local people as the fount of all knowledge and insight. If locals could understand and agree on the problem, let alone fix it, there’d be no need for outside intervention. If outsiders understood and could fix the problem, their interventions wouldn’t be failing so often. Both outsiders and locals need to come together, in defined spheres of expertise and in a defined process, to jointly design approaches to their problem—which, in the modern connected world, where problems in one place rapidly spread to and affect others, is a joint problem, too, not something wholly owned by a local community.

These spheres of expertise are clear. What insiders bring (what some anthropologists call the emic perspective) is insight into their own environment, an understanding of their own social and spatial system in its own terms and in their own words and images—what drives what, what matters and what doesn’t, how things work, how their district flows and breathes, what has been tried before, what typically works there, what doesn’t usually work there, and why. They also bring leadership, initiative, motivation, and a genuine desire to make a change, without which nothing else, however cleverly designed, can work. What outsiders bring is a technical understanding of relevant disciplines, functional skills, knowledge of what usually works and what doesn’t work in other places where similar problems have occurred, a large-n perspective (one that draws on a large number of examples), access to knowledge, networks, supporting data and expertise, connectivity to international public opinion, and of course access to funding and resources. They also bring humility, skepticism about the brilliance of their own insights, conscious and continuous awareness of how little they know about a local environment, and a willingness to experiment—starting small, testing hypotheses, and figuring out what works by trying things out.

There’s a third sphere of expertise, one that we can be clear-eyed about, whether we like it or not—the security sphere, the category of action that’s ultimately founded on coercion. For insiders and outsiders to sit down together and jointly work on problems, or for different groups of insiders to come together, build consensus, and figure out a way forward, there has to be a modicum of security, safety, and predictability. Someone has to guarantee that predictability, and whoever that is, they have to be able to prevail in a close fight if necessary. We’re talking about a normative system here: creating rules of acceptable behavior that give people predictability and allow them the feeling of safety that makes everything else possible. Who it is that provides that security depends on the situation. Better an insider than an outside intervener, obviously, for all the reasons discussed in the last few chapters. Better a civil society organization than an external police force, and better a police force than the military. Far better a local military than an intervening one, and so on. But ultimately, someone has to set conditions for the meeting of minds, or nothing can happen. The paradox is that although there are no purely military solutions, there are also no solutions without the ultimate sanction of coercion to enforce the order that makes joint action possible.

This is all starting to sound very theoretical and philosophical, but in practical terms it’s actually pretty straightforward. First, create a secure enough environment with enough predictability and sense of safety that locals can get together and begin to work towards a consensus on the nature of their problems. Then, provided locals have the necessary leadership and desire, bring in an external team—the smaller and less intrusive the better—with specific functional and technical knowledge relevant to the problem. The external team has to explicitly acknowledge that it has no right to tell the locals what to do, no privileged knowledge about their circumstances, and no legitimate opinion about what they should or must do. But it shares what it knows, provides data and expertise that fill the gaps in locals’ knowledge, builds the maps and visualizations that help locals understand the whole of the system they inhabit (not just their own little bit), and acts as a research and support team as the locals decide what to do next—if anything—about their problem. Then the external team takes a backseat, except perhaps if asked to facilitate, answer specific research questions, or help mediate disputes. The locals, armed with the knowledge of what has worked elsewhere, and secure in the protective bubble provided by a security system that gives them safety and predictability, take what they want from the outside perspective, discard what they don’t need, build on it, change it as they see fit, and come out at the end (perhaps) with new ideas and an agreed way forward. If appropriate, they pitch their idea to their own communities, without the outsiders in the room. And then . . . well, it’s their city, it’s their problem set, and they handle it.

What I’ve described isn’t theory. It’s what our teams do, all over the world, in conflicts and crises in half a dozen different cities. They focus on resilience rather than stability, on enhancing connectivity and building predictability, on helping local communities figure things out themselves. Is it perfect? Absolutely not: it doesn’t always work, it depends utterly on local commitment and talent, and it’s imperfect, like any other approach. But when it fails, it fails quickly and cheaply, it doesn’t involve turning someone else’s society upside down because of things that seemed to us like a good idea at the time, and it doesn’t invoke Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule” of international intervention: “if you break it, you own it.” Most important, the co-design methodology isn’t an answer to a problem: it’s just a set of ways to think toward solutions. Can it work in a high-threat, chaotic, urban conflict environment? Absolutely—and, in fact, when I think back to times when what we’ve done has worked in conflict zones, including in very high-threat counterinsurgency environments such as Baghdad, it’s always been because of something akin to this approach. Locals bring the leadership and the insight that outsiders lack, outsiders bring the technical support that fills the locals’ gaps, and someone (the less coercively, the better, but nonetheless)—someone provides the security that lets the whole thing work.

Given the dense, urban, coastal, networked environment where populations will live, and where governments, businesses, communities, and military and police forces will operate in the future, we’re really going to need these kinds of participatory design-based approaches to solving strategic problems. That is, external interveners in these environments—whether “external” in the sense that they’re foreign governments, or merely in the sense that they come from a different part of town or are members of a different community—need to begin with a conscious acceptance of their own ignorance about the environment. Outsiders need to accept that, initially at least, they don’t understand exactly what is going on, and therefore they have few useful insights about what needs to be done.

To me, the co-design approach that I’ve outlined here makes vastly more sense than trying to bring in state-based, government-driven solutions to every problem—to govern every piece of ungoverned space on the planet, or to turn every society into a mirror of our own. Q uite apart from being authoritarian and coercive, that kind of unilateralism is just too expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to be achievable. Even if it did work, this sort of approach would be problematic—it would turn Western governments, in particular, into a global version of Baron Haussmann—but the fact is that it doesn’t work anyway: we simply don’t have the money, the persistence, or the military will to make it happen.

The alternative, the kind of co-design approach I’ve described here, involves local people directly and intimately in a participative way, designing solutions to their own problems, but not left to sink or swim on their own. It looks for ways to combine local insights with outside expertise, and recognizes that neither outsiders nor locals alone can solve (or even understand) many of these problems.

In the crowded, complex, connected urban environment of the future, instead of what James C. Scott has called the “high modernist” absolutism of centralized planning or the unilateral and ill-informed prescriptions of outside designers or (worse) outside military interveners, there’s a clear need to apply collaborative methods: approaches that seek the hypercontextualized insight only locals can bring, yet also draw on outsider knowledge from fields such as urban planning, geosocial information systems, user experience design, big-data analysis, and industrial systems design. These methods can help us treat the coastal city as a system and allow people to look for intervention or impact points to move that system in a positive, more resilient direction. The same sensing methods can also stimulate, illuminate, reveal, and map the “dark networks” that nest within the dense human and political thickets of the urban environment, and can provide the international monitor, the “Web as witness,” that gives people an essential sense of security.

IV. Conclusions

We’ve covered an enormous amount of ground here, not all of it bad, but much of it complex and confronting. This isn’t the place to summarize what I’ve written, since you can always turn back and look at each section or chapter for relevant insights. But I do want to make three very brief, concluding points.

First, none of what I’ve written about in describing the future environment is a prediction. This is not how the future world will be or has to be. There will be unexpected shocks, black swans, and events (both good and bad) that will change this projection. And that’s all it is: just a straight-line projection of current trends, based on data currently available, that suggest where conflict on the planet may be heading, given its current course. This projection suggests a high degree of continuity in the things that militaries, aid agencies, diplomatic services, city governments, and other organizations in this space will be expected to do. But it also suggests a very sharp discontinuity in the environment, which will be increasingly, and intensively, urban, coastal, crowded, and connected. Because we have the data, because we can see the projection, we can change the outcome—we can bend the curve, ideally in the direction of greater resilience, unlocking the adaptive resources that are already present in the cities under stress that we have discussed here. But if we can’t prevent violence—and history suggests that, at least some of the time, we won’t be able to—then we need to be ready to prevail in the complex, messy, lethal business of irregular warfare in urban, networked littorals: not as an end in itself, but as a means to create the predictability and order, the feeling of safety, that can allow collaborative problem solving to have some chance of success.

The second concluding insight, and forgive me for sounding a little Zen here, is that the project isn’t the project. The community is the project. In David Lean’s classic 1957 movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, a demoralized unit of British prisoners is building a bridge over a river in Thailand, part of a strategic Japanese railroad. They’re laboring, under atrocious conditions, beneath the murderous tyranny of the prisoner-of-war camp commandant, Colonel Saito. Saito and the British battalion commander, Colonel Nicholson (played, in his greatest-ever role, by Alec Guinness), engage in a near-fatal struggle for control over working conditions. Having won the struggle against authority and—in essence—regained command of his men, Nicholson then proceeds to design a new and better bridge, moves the site to a more suitable spot, reorganizes the labor shifts to make the work more efficient, and begins demanding hard work and dedication from the men. He has essentially taken over the project. The medical officer, Major Clifton, puzzled that Nicholson, who so nearly died resisting Saito, is now working the battalion so hard in order to help Saito achieve his mission, confronts him. I paraphrase, but in essence Clifton says, “What the hell is going on? What we’re doing is helping the Japanese. Why are you working the men so hard, doing such a good job, on a project that’s only helping the enemy?” Nicholson replies, and again I paraphrase: “You don’t get it: the project isn’t the bridge, the project is the battalion. The men are demoralized, prisoners, without hope, without morale. The bridge is just a means to an end: we’re using the bridge to rebuild the battalion. If we didn’t have the bridge to hand, we’d have to make up some other project—but we’re using what we have, as a way to recover the cohesion and morale that we’d lost.”

Now, life is not a Hollywood movie, nor yet the excellent French novel by Pierre Boulle on which David Lean’s movie is based. But in this one respect, I do believe that life imitates art. In societies under stress, where basic systems have broken down and the very social compact that binds people together is under strain, the project we need to undertake is not the bridge—or the road, or the banking system, or the sanitation system, or whatever. The project is the community. The specifics of projects that people undertake in the chaotic coastal slums we’ve been discussing are actually less important than the community cohesion, sense of solidarity, and common purpose that those projects generate. These are not side effects of a successful project—they are the project.

The war in Afghanistan is not yet over, and even when Western troops leave, it won’t truly end: we will need to remain engaged, not least because we have friends there who have committed to us, and vice versa. But as we turn our attention back to the world after Afghanistan and Iraq, and as the dust of the last decade settles, we need to remember what we were doing before 9/11. At that time, a whole community of people was thinking hard and writing extensively about the civil and military problems of conflict in urbanized, complex, heavily populated littorals. The military dropped out of this conversation sometime after 2003, when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq really kicked off. For a decade since then, the discussion has gone on without much input from those who have been fighting the war. Companies like IBM, Google and McKinsey, several universities, and a number of think tanks have thought through most of the problems of urban growth, littoralization, and connectivity—but often without enough well-informed thought on the implications for conflict, or a systems perspective on how that conflict will affect, and in turn be affected by, the emerging environment of coastal megacities.

It’s time for the generation who fought the war to take what they learned in the hills and valleys of a landlocked conflict, and apply it to a challenging new environment; it’s time to think about the implications of the coming age of urban, networked, guerrilla war in the mega-slums and megacities of a coastal planet. It’s time to drag ourselves—body and mind—out of the mountains.