Cairo’s urban fabric has gone through a “shocking transformation” since the January 25, 2011, uprising. Historical neighborhoods are deteriorating and informal construction is booming, as municipalities fail the city’s twenty million residents. Two years ago, Mohamed Elshahed founded Cairobserver, Egypt’s first architecture and urbanism website. It documents the grit: which historic areas are at risk, what residents say about their own neighborhoods, and how the government reacts to endemic problems. Elshahed is currently a fellow at Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME), a multi-disciplinary research forum in Berlin. He is an architect and researcher focused on the modern architectural and urban history of the Middle East. Cairo Review Senior Editor Jonathan Guyer spoke to Elshahed via Skype on October 26, 2013.

CAIRO REVIEW: We see you as the mayor of Cairo, because you’re paying close attention to all of the details, which buildings are being demolished and which new parks are being built. You’ve created a space to talk about it. Give us a tour of what is happening in your city. How has Cairo developed since January 25, 2011? Is it better or worse off?
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: I tend to shy away from saying something is better or worse because it’s difficult to measure in those terms, but there’s definitely a lot of dynamism. Most of the things that are happening are actually not reported and not visible to people like us, because they are happening in a geography of the city that we don’t typically access. I’m talking about ‘us’ in a broader sense as English-speaking, relatively privileged residents of the city. If you notice, even on Cairobserver, the Cairo that I cover is the Cairo that I physically occupy. You’ll find that most of the topics have to do with things that are downtown-centric. I am very aware of my blind spots.

That said, since the 25th of January, in the last three years, there has been quite a lot of change happening, on the one hand. But on the other hand, some things haven’t changed at all, and they probably won’t for a while. There has been increased urbanization happening in pockets of the city that have been “frozen”—that’s literally the expression that is typically used in Arabic. You put property in the “freezer,” it means you just kind of leave it as is, untouched. That sometimes happened to entire areas of the city, where development didn’t really happen. It’s not preservation. It’s a very passive form of preservation. This was done with a very top-down approach. Once the regime loosened up a bit, or it seemed that they were gone—or whatever people thought was happening—urbanization happened with a very increased rate in those areas. I’m talking about the historical areas, the core of the city. This has transformed entire neighborhoods completely. Darb Al-Ahmar is the obvious example that everybody talks about within the architectural preservation community, because it is a shocking transformation that only happened in the last two and a half years.

CAIRO REVIEW: What is that transformation?
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: Darb Al-Ahmar is the historic area that’s kind of the antique quarter, home to the elite of the city at point, and later on the working class. Obviously it has maintained its historic quality and has a very high density of monuments and historic houses. Hence, it has been famous for being historic Cairo’s gem. It’s interesting when you have the luxury, as a city, of having an entire district that maintains its historic character. In Cairo, Darb Al-Ahmar was that. And that has completely transformed in the past three years, mostly because of all the problems in the management system of the city, especially the historic parts of the city, which had to do with monuments. Of course defining what is a monument and what is not a monument is a big question. But Darb Al-Ahmar doesn’t only have monuments, it has an urban fabric that is mostly residential. Those kinds of houses in this residential fabric weren’t protected in the same way, but it was frozen. It was that kind of gray space between being recognized by the state as a monument and therefore preserved, or just given no value at all. It was somewhere in between. Those houses were restricted, so people couldn’t renovate them, which is a problem. You couldn’t make more money out of them by rents, because of rent control issues. Once they had the chance, they tore them down and they built anew, or they sold the land and built new properties that could be then sold and rented. We’ve lost quite a lot.

CAIRO REVIEW: Are there other neighborhoods that have changed since the revolution?
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: The other area of the city that has faced significant transformation since the revolution is Giza. Giza is bizarrely not considered a part of the city of Cairo. It is part of the Greater Cairo, but it is managed by an entirely different bureaucracy since it is a totally different governorate. Giza is a largely informal part of the city. With the exception of very particular pockets—of course Mohandessin, Dokki, Agouza, the parts that were planned in the 1940’s and 50’s, and Haram Street that leads to the Pyramids—the majority of the whole governorate, its urban part, is informal. But there has always been a part that was not urbanized quite as densely, which is the part that faces the Pyramids—between the Ring Road and the Pyramids themselves. In the last several years, it has started to be urbanized more and more. Land started to be sold. When agricultural land is divided into smaller plots, their agricultural potential is limited… Now if you’re on the Ring Road, you can hardly see the Pyramids themselves from certain angles, even though they are only literally a few hundred meters away. It’s a shocking transformation. And it seems that the officials don’t mind it at all, which is a problem. All of this building is not responding to a market need. It’s not being occupied. All of the urbanization that happened in the past three years in Giza, on agricultural land, along the Ring Road—it’s all empty. It’s all vacant. And we don’t really know the status of the kinds of infrastructure that all of these buildings have access to. It’s quite a huge problem that was really exacerbated in the last two-and-a-half to three years.

CAIRO REVIEW: We’ve also seen grassroots, community-building—informal communities on the Ring Road that have developed utilities and community services. Can you talk more about this dynamism?
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: There’s a huge question of definition that always comes up. The line between the formal and the informal is not only very vague geographically—it’s very hard to draw a line of where one begins and one ends—but really those definitions are not firm.

What I just highlighted in a negative light—this rapid urbanization within the informal sector in Giza—shouldn’t reflect how I see all of informal urbanization. This is a very particular kind of business venture by people who are abusing the fact that land is cheap and is available, and the state apparatus has been weakened or distracted by focusing on the political situation. Therefore, they are using this opportunity to maximize potential profit. This is one form of informal urbanization.

There are other [examples] that are more positive, like communities that actually occupy the buildings that they were built. Informality here basically means that they were not part of the state plan. Because sometimes the building quality itself doesn’t differ much from whether it was built in another part of the city, with permits and so on. It’s a question of legality in that sense. There are some of the initiatives that have happened, such as people coming together to pave streets, to provide basic forms of infrastructure. The famous example is Ard El-Lewa, a community-driven initiative where people came together and collected money, and built an access ramp onto a highway that is nearby. Of course the highways of Cairo are not designed to serve everybody, they are designed to serve a very particular minority. Therefore the placement of on-ramps and off-ramps is very particular. Sometimes you’ll have a highway going through a very densely populated area, but this informal area has no access onto the highway.

Some people have almost fetishized this development [in Ard El-Lewa]. Basically as a way of critiquing the failures of state planning, they emphasize the positive value in this kind of initiative. But others are very critical because it means, they think, it gives the state a free pass. The state really doesn’t have to do its work, and by turning a blind eye to communities doing this kind of thing it’s like there’s no responsibility to provide access to roads.

CAIRO REVIEW: Back to the changes since the revolution: Tahrir Square has obviously been the focal point, and at one point Morsi planted grass in it and tried to give it a makeover—
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: And the army just did the same.

CAIRO REVIEW: What do you see as the future of Tahrir Square? What will it look like in five, ten, fifteen years?
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: We already have news that there will be metal gates installed, which sounds like a ridiculous idea. It is going to cost like 1.5 million Egyptian pounds to put metal gates on all of the entrances to the square. The thing that Tahrir offers as an example, as a case study, is a couple of things. On the one hand, it’s been a place—and it has a long history of this—where dreamers can project their fantasies as to what the space should be like. Sometimes these fantasies have more to do with aesthetics, and sometimes it has to do more with politics. Then there’s the reality that we function in a very particular kind of state in which public space poses a threat. Tahrir Square has already been a space that was very highly controlled and made unfriendly by the heavy fencing of all of the sidewalk space and the removal of shade trees, which had happened about ten years ago, after protests against the Gulf War and Egypt’s participation in the Gulf War. The present potentials that are offered, such as the erection of these metal gates, build on that reality. It doesn’t really build on what me, as an urbanist or someone concerned with the city, thinks the future of Tahrir should be. A conversation needs to be had about using the opportunity of Tahrir as a case study to raise much wider questions about the role of public space within a political system, such as the one that is in place in Egypt.

CAIRO REVIEW: Squares are really an orienting fixture of Cairo’s streets, whether it’s smaller residential ones like Beano’s Square or Vinny Square—or Nahda Square and Rabaa Al-Adiwiya, where protests have been cleared and protesters killed. What is the meaning of squares?
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: Instead of trying to pin which squares are important historically, geographically or culturally, it would be interesting to highlight the fact that there is no urban narrative. In Berlin, you would be walking into a particular urban space as a pedestrian and without looking for it, you might be confronted by a sign that tells you about the history of this space—that this space was the site of mass killings at one point, or the site of an important building, or something like this. An urban narrative is made visible and made present. This is what the squares and the streets of Egypt and in Cairo are missing. It’s not because the history isn’t there. It’s because there is no party—the Ministry of Culture, the governorate, the Ministry of Tourism, or whoever wants to do this—that has made urban spaces and urban events legible. Regardless of what we can agree on in this conversation about how important a particular square is, how do we translate that into a legible history for the pedestrian that is walking through that space? That’s the much more interesting way of dealing with that urban space.

CAIRO REVIEW: Bridges have become very symbolic, whether as sites of violent clashes or protests, or spaces for graffiti, or military checkpoints. What is it about Cairo’s bridges that make this a center of energy and conflict, of cafes, of everything?
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: The first thing that comes to mind is access to the Nile. The waterfront in Cairo isn’t the most friendly to pedestrians, and in many parts it’s inaccessible. Even though the water is only meters away you can’t access it. Visually you can’t see it because there are different structures put in place, or whatever. For residents of Cairo, going onto a bridge is the place where you can have a direct view of the Nile. That’s why anybody who would put a couple of plastic chairs on a bridge will probably have a customer sit down and pay a little something to have a tea. It’s partly a response to the inaccessibility and the bad design of the waterfront. This is one side of why bridges have such a prominent place in public life in Cairo.

When it comes to urban history, different bridges have layers of memory and history. For instance, Qasr El-Nil Bridge was the first bridge over the Nile, so it already had this historic weight and interesting story about the different formations of the bridge over the years. But also it became a romance spot [for young couples]. Then with the revolution it was a site of protests and clashes. Some bridges develop these kinds of hyper-dense urban narratives. People have favorite bridges, and Qasr El-Nil is still the top one in Cairo. It’s in really bad condition by the way. It’s been renovated. Just last month they started to repave the sidewalk but it was done in such an amateur way. I mean it’s shocking that this is what the state can do.

There’s another thing with some of the bridges: literally it’s also about the divide across Cairo’s geography, between the different governorates. Half of the bridge belongs to the Cairo governorate and other half of it belongs to the Giza governorate, so they have to coordinate when it comes to something like paving the bridge. And of course they have to go through the Ministry of Transport. You can also look at bridges as another case to talk about bigger issues in terms of who’s in charge of infrastructure, and how is it maintained, and why is Cairo divided into the bizarre lines where sometimes a bridge is technically part of two entities.

CAIRO REVIEW: One of the things that has baffled me is how few highways there are in this city of twenty million. Ahmed Shafik, when running for president in 2012, promised to fix Cairo traffic in twenty-four hours. Who is in charge of the roads, and how can they be improved?
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: The first response to Cairo traffic is fixing the sidewalks—not even the highways or the roads. Because this is a city where 84 or 85 percent of the population doesn’t own cars. A lot of the trips can be done on foot if people can have a safe and wide sidewalk. But they end up taking a microbus, or a taxi, or a car or whatever, simply because they can’t walk the ten minutes because the sidewalks are in such horrible shape. I know that it looks like a lot of cars, but if it is a city of twenty million people, if there are five million cars then that’s enough to clog up the whole thing. The five million cars include company cars, buses, city buses, microbuses, and private cars. I think focusing on pedestrians and public transport will do a lot. One of the proposals that is almost always put forth, but never actually implemented, is to put more public buses on the roads. The number of buses in Cairo is so low per one thousand persons, compared to other cities like Bangkok for example, or Sao Paolo. We certainly need more public buses.

When it comes to infrastructure, road infrastructure is very complex, and again this goes back to the question of governance. The structure of government in Egypt in general, but also in Cairo, is one that doesn’t facilitate things being done. If you want to do something like build a road or pave a road, you have to go through so many bureaucratic institutions, that will all have to evaluate and measure and sign off with a zillion signatures before you can take on the project. And in the meantime, people have to live. So the infrastructure is not very streamlined. They have conflicting interests. The other issue is the military and its relationship to all of this, considering that roads are basically military-owned roads.

CAIRO REVIEW: All roads are military zones?
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: Not all of them, but Sixth of October is supposed to be a military route, which is a very American thing. American highways, many of them, are supposed to be able to be used by the military if need be. This is why, for example, when curfew comes the military can quickly access different parts of the city. The other thing is the contracted companies that get all of these big contracts to build roads, and sometimes the military itself builds roads, which they can do fast if they want to. Sometimes these contracts get drawn out, and so there’s corruption involved.

CAIRO REVIEW: Tell us about Cairobserver’s mission. How do you see it supporting and engaging with the urban fabric of the city?
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: Since I moved to Egypt in 2010, I was constantly talking about things that had to do with the city, based on observations from my daily experience. At the time, I didn’t realize that there was no media outlet that was concerned exclusively with the city, discussing different topics related to its architecture, its urbanism, urban issues. When you realize it, it’s a bit shocking for a city like Cairo. Not only does it have the history; it’s a massive city—geographically it’s huge, population-wise it’s huge. There’s so much going on. How can there not be a single website dedicated to urban affairs. Of course I never thought that I would do that. I was working on my PhD [at New York University] so I didn’t think about it. But after the revolution came a phase of excitement—what can everybody do? I was encouraged by people to start a blog.

This city needs a place for commentary and reflection on its urban condition, to be expressed to a wide audience. Magazines and newspapers that are widely circulating don’t necessarily have a section about the city or urban life. And that’s for Cairo the capital, let alone other cities that don’t even have anything. The cities we live in themselves deserve to be a topic of discussion. Politics in an abstract sense, and in the more conventional political debates that take place without being tied to spatiality—that misses a lot of our reality. This is one thing that came up: that the blog—discussing different urban issues—is by default political. All of these urban issues turn out to have something to do with politics.

CAIRO REVIEW: Cairo famously doesn’t have a mayor or executive overseeing the city. Would a lot of problems be solved if it did have someone who all of these agencies were accountable to, or would it be equally a mess?
MOHAMED ELSHAHED: Of course, if there were your more typical city government structure, where at the top you have an elected mayor and at the bottom you have democratic functioning community-based municipalities, things would be significantly better and things would make a bit more sense. At least then people would take responsibility when things don’t work because they are actively part of the process. But the problem now is that it just turns into this cycle of self-hate. It’s become this totally useless exercise of throwing your hands up and saying we can’t do any better. But that’s because there is no functioning government system for the city that people can participate in, whether on the local level or, again, on the mayoral level by electing someone. But this has to do with the whole national political situation. Obviously, elected mayors pose a threat to an authoritarian, non-democratic system that doesn’t seem to be going away.

The downfall of Egypt’s elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013 has not resulted in the separation of religion and state in the country. Indeed, something quite different seems to be occurring: religion is being nationalized. Under the leadership of Al-Azhar—a complex of Islamic schools, university faculties, and research institutes—the country’s religious establishment appears to be coalescing internally, aligning itself firmly with the post-Morsi road map, and asserting its leadership of religious life throughout Egypt.

That will be good news to many who view Ahmed El-Tayeb, the current grand sheikh of Al-Azhar, as an enlightened figure, but it is already causing controversy among Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and others in Egypt. In the past, Al-Azhar’s struggles for centrality in Egypt’s religious life and for autonomy from the state have sometimes worked against each other. Over the years, pushing for greater influence has entangled the institution in political clashes that have affected its coherence and independence. Now, El-Tayeb’s dexterity, combined with emergent institutional changes in the religious establishment, offers the possibility that Al-Azhar can finally pursue all its goals simultaneously.

Given these developments, it seems clear that the result of Egypt’s post-Morsi political reconstruction will be a state that weaves religious structures into its bureaucratic fabric every bit as much as it did in the past. Islam will hardly be excluded from public life. But the vision of Islam is emerging as more coherent and more susceptible to guidance by Al-Azhar’s senior leadership.

Al-Azhar After Mubarak
Since the time of Muhammad Ali in the 1800s, Egypt’s leaders have regarded Al-Azhar as an influential tool in shaping and promoting the government’s domestic and foreign policies. Accordingly, they have gradually extended their control over the institution.

Then president Gamal Abdel Nasser moved ambitiously to reorganize Al-Azhar through Law 103 of 1961, which placed the entire institution and its endowments under the formal jurisdiction of the Ministry of Religious Endowments. The same law also made the appointment of the grand sheikh the prerogative of the Egyptian president, just as the appointment of any other state official. In subsequent years, the regime worked to ensure that Al-Azhar would act as a strong counterbalance to the growing religious influence of both internal forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists and external forces like Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism.

The social and political vacuum in Egypt that followed the fall of then president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 created space for Al-Azhar to escape this tight control. Although Al-Azhar was in some ways above day-to-day politics, it was still part of the Egyptian state. And it took advantage of the new political context to push for greater autonomy.

Al-Azhar presented a contrast to rising Islamist political groupings, including the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and Salafist groups like the Nour Party. Unlike the Islamists, Al-Azhar was scholarly and not mired in politics. Unlike the Salafists, its approach to religion could be presented as more consistent with the needs of a twenty-first-century society. And unlike both, Ahmed El-Tayeb posed as a promoter of consensus, leading national dialogues and issuing widely supported statements and documents to guide the tumultuous political process.

In 2012, Al-Azhar’s break from state control was formalized to a degree. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the body that governed Egypt after Mubarak’s fall, made a hasty move days before the first meeting of the parliament that had been elected in late 2011 and early 2012. It unilaterally promulgated amendments to Law 103 that effectively granted Al-Azhar quasi-independent status. This status was then reinforced by article 4 of Egypt’s 2012 constitution, which stipulates that Al-Azhar is “an encompassing independent Islamic institution with exclusive autonomy over its own affairs.” The amendments to the 1961 law restored the Council of Senior Scholars of Al-Azhar and the council’s right to elect the grand sheikh and nominate the mufti. The 2012 constitution mandated that the council be consulted on matters of Islamic law.

These changes offered more than autonomy; they also cemented El-Tayeb’s position within the institution. He was allowed monopoly control over the initial composition of the Council of Senior Scholars. Because the council was given the power to name the mufti, a traditional rival position was effectively brought within Al-Azhar’s orbit. Moreover, the amendments confirmed that the law was intended to keep the existing leadership of Al-Azhar in place and empower El-Tayeb to act in the best interests of Al-Azhar without further discussion among the institution, save among those the grand sheikh himself designated.

Despite the major steps made toward autonomy, there is still some distance to travel. The amendments failed to address the issue of financial independence—Al-Azhar remains dependent on the government in this area. Other possible reforms within Al-Azhar—such as long-expected attempts to develop its educational curriculum—have also had to wait.

The Rise and Fall of Brotherhood Rule
Morsi’s election as president in June 2012 represented a possible challenge to the new arrangements concerning Al-Azhar’s relationship to the Egyptian state. Morsi was backed by the Muslim Brotherhood. So his rise meant that a religious movement formerly independent of the state—the Brotherhood—was taking the political reins of power through the Freedom and Justice Party. The Brotherhood also had some support among the faculty and especially the student body of Al-Azhar.

The differences between the Brotherhood and Al-Azhar were not necessarily doctrinal—the Brotherhood, after all, claimed to be a centrist movement and had long called for Al-Azhar’s independence, the resurrection of the Council of Senior Scholars, and a restoration of Al-Azhar’s prestige. But many Al-Azhar leaders, in particular El-Tayeb, clearly regarded the Brotherhood as more of a political movement than a religious one. They were suspicious that the Brotherhood would gradually place its own figures in key positions in the state religious establishment. And indeed, while charges that Morsi was “Brotherhoodizing” the Egyptian state were often exaggerated, there does seem to have been some attempt by the Ministry of Religious Endowments to fill state ranks with Brotherhood figures.

But as Morsi settled into the presidency, the leadership of Al-Azhar avoided a full confrontation. Indeed, it maintained a generally cordial public relationship with the presidency. Some tiffs occurred—such as a perceived snub of El-Tayeb at Morsi’s inauguration—but no clashes followed. On some occasions, when the Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement on women’s rights, for example, or when the upper house of parliament passed a law on Islamic financial instruments, Al-Azhar’s leadership used the opportunities to present its independent voice. But it never did so in a tone that suggested a direct challenge.

Yet by the end of June 2013, as public discontent with Morsi’s rule ran high, the grand sheikh apparently felt he could no longer stand above the brewing confrontation in Egyptian politics. On July 3, Minister of Defense Abdel Fattah El-Sisi announced that Morsi had been deposed and the 2012 constitution suspended. El-Tayeb (along with the Coptic pope) was by El-Sisi’s side, clearly endorsing the move. Al-Azhar’s position as a symbol of national unity and consensus was a critical part of the military’s pitching of the ouster as a broad public rejection of Brotherhood rule rather than a military coup.

Al-Azhar strove to make the move appear nonpolitical and a continuation, rather than a repudiation, of its position of standing above the fray. “It was clear that we had to choose between two bitter choices,” said El-Tayeb. He went for the less harmful option of removing Morsi from power and supporting the Egyptian military’s post-Morsi political road map. Yet, despite the enduring respect for Al-Azhar among the majority of Egyptians, its credibility and neutrality were tainted, at least in the eyes of Morsi and Brotherhood supporters.

Since Morsi’s ouster, Al-Azhar has called for a comprehensive and inclusive national dialogue to plan and complement the political agenda. However, these calls have not produced any concrete results, in part because the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party boycotted the dialogue, blaming Al-Azhar for siding with the coup leaders. The other reason for the dialogue’s failure is the lack of interest from the military and the interim government in making any concessions or even discussing elements of the transition plan. In addition, almost immediately after Morsi’s ouster, the interim government and media began championing a “war against terrorism” campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, which has made it even harder to bring the differing parties together.

In response, an alliance of the Muslim Brotherhood and some Islamists has been calling for a restoration of the 2012 constitution and decrying the July 3 regime change. These forces have been leading weekly rallies and protests to condemn the coup leaders and the interim government.

Last August, large public demonstrations were forcibly dispersed, and they have since subsided. But campus protests have become a daily occurrence since the beginning of the academic year. Interestingly, they have been most marked at Al-Azhar University, an institution where the students are far less hostile to Islamists than on other campuses. Since classes began on October 19, student demonstrators have called for El-Tayeb to be dismissed and have denounced the coup against Morsi. University officials have dealt uncertainly with the protesters, whom they decry as an unrepresentative minority of students.

But the close proximity of the Al-Azhar campus to the Rabaa Al-Adawiya mosque, where pro-Morsi protesters camped out before being forcefully dispersed, fuels the students’ motivation to march from the campus and attempt to stage sit-ins. Despite warnings from the university’s president against politics on campus, protests escalated to the extent that the university called in the police on October 30.

Whether it wanted to or not, Al-Azhar has thus been caught up in the post-2011 political upheavals. And it has been divided internally as well, as the student demonstrations illustrate most forcefully.

Uniting the Religious Sector After Morsi
Despite the short-term tumult, over the longer term, the institution may reap handsome rewards from the post–July 3 environment.

In the months since Morsi’s overthrow, there have been two notable developments concerning the place of religious institutions in Egyptian public life: more unified leadership in the main state religious institutions and the promise of a greater role for these establishments in public life. These developments have primarily occurred not within Al-Azhar but in the structure, personnel, and scope of the Ministry of Religious Endowments. Yet they offer a leading role for Al-Azhar in shaping religious life in Egypt.

Long regarded as a foe of Al-Azhar’s authority, the Ministry of Religious Endowments is now working with Al-Azhar to implement regulations to recruit preachers, bring mosques under the ministry’s jurisdiction, and regulate the content of sermons and the issuing of fatwas. Last month, the minister of endowments, Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa, declared that prayers would be allowed only in mosques controlled by the ministry and that only Al-Azhar-qualified imams would be allowed to preach in mosques. The minister also stripped thousands of imams of their preaching licenses, closed mosques smaller than 80 square meters (860 square feet), which are often led by independent imams, and banned the collection in mosques of donations that “go to those who do not fear God.” What’s more, Gomaa ordered that the boards overseeing state-owned mosques be reformed.

As reasoning for the moves, he cited misuse of mosques during Morsi’s rule, incitement of violence and apostasy, and the recent clashes inside mosques because of the polarized political situation. Moreover, according to a source within the ministry, the minister before Gomaa had appointed Muslim Brotherhood members to high-level positions. Gomaa dismissed these Brotherhood appointees, and afterward some observers called for second- and third-tier ministry personnel to be removed as well on the basis of their membership in the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.

These decisions stirred up controversy among preachers and religious groups. The Salafist Nour Party criticized the ministry’s move, calling for preachers to be chosen according to “scientific criteria, not loyalty to the authorities or security considerations.”

While the Ministry of Religious Endowment’s steps may seem to simply be an attempt to dismantle and weaken the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, the situation is in reality more complicated. The regulations in fact suggest a plan to nationalize religious practice in Egypt.

But the plan may not be feasible. This is hardly the first time the Egyptian government has tried to extend its supervision over the country’s mosques; past attempts have foundered because the task is immense. How can the ministry ensure that the mosques are following the preaching guidelines or that Friday prayers are only taking place in mosques bigger than 80 square meters? How can the ministry deal with the “popular” preachers who do not have a degree from Al-Azhar? Is the ministry going to seek help from the police to implement policies and arrest the violators? Another concern is the backlash these policies might invite from groups that have long been building, teaching, and preaching in mosques all over Egypt.

In a recent interview, an Al-Azhar official acknowledged the challenges of carrying out these policies. The institution fully supports the changes pursued by the new minister as long-needed reforms that have been delayed due to the dismissiveness of the former governments and the religious leadership at Al-Azhar and the ministry. But Al-Azhar also recognizes the magnitude of the task.

Al-Azhar’s intention is still modest: not to control the religious apparatus, only to regulate and promote its centrist interpretation of Islam. As a first step, the ministry and Al-Azhar decided to establish a Supreme Council for Preaching under the leadership of the grand sheikh. The council would be responsible for training imams and preachers and overseeing all matters related to preaching. Gomaa, who was a member of the grand sheikh’s technical office until his appointment, has been leading efforts to send Al-Azhar-educated preachers into remote villages and communities, like Upper Egypt and North Sinai, to overcome the influence of other extreme visions of Islam.

Nonetheless, the most visible forum for Al-Azhar’s new predominant role is the Committee of 50, which is currently working on a comprehensive revision of Egypt’s constitution. Al-Azhar has three representatives on the committee (the mufti and two others), and those representatives are in a far more powerful position than their predecessors were in the 2012 drafting body.

In 2012, Al-Azhar was in more of a defensive and reactive position, seeking to defend the institution’s interests and vision while non-Islamist, Salafist, and Brotherhood committee members battled over various religious clauses. The result was a document that gave the institution more than it might have wished for. One clause gave Al-Azhar a consultative role over issues relating to the Islamic sharia principles, while another adopted Al-Azhar’s definition of those principles.

Such a powerful role seems a bit more formal than what the body’s current senior leaders desire. They seek supreme moral authority, not definitive and codified political authority. In the 2013 constitution, the clauses in question are likely to be watered down or eliminated, hardly reducing Al-Azhar’s influence but making it less a matter of constitutional text.

Al-Azhar and the New Order
However gradual its efforts and however modest its stated vision, Al-Azhar is now leading Egypt’s religious establishment into a new era. Traditional rival institutions have been brought into far tighter coordination, and the grand sheikh and the Council of Senior Scholars stand at the head of the more unified apparatus. The mufti and the Ministry of Religious Endowments work more closely with Al-Azhar, and all seem to acknowledge the moral authority of Al-Azhar’s approach to Islam.

Not all dissident voices have been silenced—the demonstrations by Al-Azhar students and the continued presence of Salafists in public debates make that clear. But the position of the grand sheikh and Al-Azhar remains secure, with dissident voices losing some of their force and influence without being suppressed.

Perhaps the most telling symbol of the new order is Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, one of the most prominent Islamic scholars active today. Although Egyptian and trained by Al-Azhar, Al-Qaradawi is based in Qatar. He has championed his own centrist approach to Islam but makes no secret of his support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Qaradawi, characteristically unrestrained, was openly critical of Morsi’s overthrow, and he extended his criticism to the position taken by El-Tayeb. But Al-Qaradawi also sits on Al-Azhar’s Council of Senior Scholars. Though the council reacted with outrage to his comments and even met to discuss how to respond to them, in the end, Al-Qaradawi retained his seat. He shows some signs of having tamed his voice but remains isolated within that body.

Not only has Al-Azhar gained coherence; it has also been able to enhance its prestige and centrality. El-Tayeb’s appearance at El-Sisi’s July 3 announcement may have appeared to be a political move, but it also cemented Al-Azhar’s position as the conscience of the Egyptian nation.

For Egyptians of a wide variety of stripes, Al-Azhar represents the true and best face of Islam as it is understood and practiced in Egypt. Those opposed to Islamist rule have rallied around Al-Azhar as an alternative and have reacted positively to Al-Azhar’s enhanced post–July 3 voice as a repudiation of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood bears considerable resentment toward El-Tayeb, but it still claims to support Al-Azhar as an institution.

The current moment is one of tremendous opportunity for Al-Azhar. The institution seems to be on the brink of achieving more autonomy and influence than it has ever had in the modern era.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It can be accessed online at: http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/2013/11/08/egypt%E2%80%99s-al-azhar-steps-forward

Ahmed Morsy is a nonresident research associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Nathan Brown is a non-resident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and professor of political science at George Washington University.

Patriotism is a natural feeling, but can the same be said about the dislike of government?

There can be no doubt that all Egyptians love their country with a passion and are incensed when any slight is directed at it. While it may be true that each of us has his or her way of exercising that love, it is also true that some love kills. Undoubtedly Egyptians’ feelings towards their country are positive. At times, though, their actions closely resemble those of a bear who spots a fly perched on its face and hurls a rock at it, only for the insect to take flight unharmed; the bear, of course, never awakens from its slumber.

Egyptians’ sentiments toward the government, on the other hand, are entirely negative. By government I do not mean the current cabinet, or any other in particular, but rather that feeling of disdain that recurs at, every cabinet reshuffle and every newly formed government. The resentment has clearly accumulated continuously for as far back as Egypt’s collective memory goes, since Egyptian genes began to store the negative experiences they underwent in government-population relations. This begs the question of whether or not the relationship of patriotism and hate for government is a causal one. That is, do people’s love for their country push them, necessarily, to hate the government? And is it fair to do so? These questions are not limited to the Egyptian context, but extend, instead, to many other societies. But it is a question that is especially pertinent in Egypt’s case, which is characterized by a level of extreme complexity wherein much of the terminology used is ambiguous. It is important then to ask, before we get carried away with the matter, whether citizens can differentiate between the nation and government. If so, what do they see as being the difference between the two?

It is possible that citizens’ perception of the exact difference between the government and nation does not correspond to formal definitions of political science and public administration texts. Citizens may simply reduce the government to an unjust mayor, extortionate traffic officer, bribed health inspector, manipulative agricultural co-operative official, graft accepting district engineer, or a bureaucrat who makes citizens’ lives a living hell. On the other hand, one’s grasp of the government can extend to include other institutions of the state, such as the judiciary, parties (especially the majority party), parliament and perhaps even the National Football Association. In both cases, the government shares responsibility with others for failure, but fails to share responsibility for success.

Despite the variations in understanding the essence of government, citizens usually don’t differentiate between the institute of the presidency and that of the parliament. In bygone eras, the prime minister was primarily a scapegoat. When he did well, it was attributed to the wisdom of the president and his sound guidance, and when he did badly, he was held accountable, despite the president’s having endorsed, or even ordered those actions. The media machine has cleverly patronized citizens’ intelligence and would—if it sensed public discontent— portray the president as being engaged in a struggle to correct the mistakes made by the prime minister or ministers.

The heavy price paid by the government in terms of its popularity is often due to the absence of transparency and a systematic failure to disclose information. Some of that information is concealed unintentionally by virtue of habit, and could reveal government achievements that are not communicated to citizens. Meanwhile, information that demonstrates government failure is intentionally concealed. This too carries a heavy price, as it is sometimes subject to amplification and exaggeration, which only serves to heighten citizens’ awareness of that failure.

This negative energy directed at government—in the broader sense, in the minds of most citizens—has an effect that cannot be underestimated with regard to elections. There are plenty of examples of punitive voting, among which are the Student Union elections conducted in Egyptian Universities, that were exposed to government and security interference prior to the January 2011 revolution. In the early nineties, the security apparatus would eliminate leftist candidates from these elections, before concentrating on the elimination of candidates aligned with political Islam. Nevertheless, Islamist groups would win these elections with a comfortable share of the seats. Worthy of note here is the fact that the results of elections held last year, during the tenure of the Muslim Brotherhood’s government, were unfavorable for Islamist candidates. Muslim Brotherhood candidates who ran during the elections without security interference, failed to achieve the kind of success they had attained as victims of the “government”— seemingly an attempt by voters to lend their support to those who opposed the government, rather than a show of support for any particular ideology.

Similarly, in a number of Union elections, the Islamist factions were victorious when they occupied the role of victim, and unsuccessful when they occupied the opposite position. This complicated environment places an imperative on the current government to achieve a greater level of effective communication with its citizens. The communication strategy required for that should take into consideration the following:

1) The citizen places upon the government before him the burden of the problems it inherited from previous governments, and is now quick to anger and unlikely to accept government’s excuses.

2) A communication strategy ought to be varied, whether it be in the content of messages that are appropriate for reaching different age demographics and educational and economic strata, or in the manner in which the message is delivered, given people’s different cognitive patterns. Moreover, the utilization of rapidly developing technology and means of communication, cannot be overlooked.

3) The political struggle currently underway in Egypt has acquired a class dimension, which the communication strategy must address, and requires the use of means and messages that avoid portraying government officials as patronizing, if even unintentionally. It must also avoid consecrating the position of elites in a society wherein the rates of illiteracy and poverty are increasing (Only 15 percent of those eligible to vote are college graduates).

The failure of government to communicate effectively with the citizen— a plague that Egyptian governments have been unable to avoid in many years— leaves open the floodgates of declining government popularity, especially in light of a climate teeming with elites that are experts at one-upmanship. Media highlights bad news as a tool to combat corruption, thereby activating a sort of absent accountability.

The drafting of a new national constitution might be an important opportunity for citizens to become familiar with the authorities and responsibilities of government, and understand the space within which government can operate without impacting other authorities. Societal awareness in this regard is extremely limited, and I would argue that the government has a direct interest in raising awareness among citizens of the limits of its authority and responsibilities, so that it is not blamed for wrongs it did not commit, and so that it is not burdened by expectations it cannot meet.

Magued Osman is the CEO and managing director of the Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research, Baseera. This article originally appeared in Al-Shorouk.

Egypt’s military-backed roadmap—criticized by some activists and commentators as undemocratic by virtue of its inception following President Mohammed Morsi’s ouster on July 3—is in a crucial phase. The drafting of a new constitution for Egypt has the potential to put the country on the right course. Ninety years after Saad Zaghloul guided the country to a constitutional monarchy, Egypt once again requires a blueprint for a sustainable democratic system. Following the calamitous errors since the January 25 uprising and the colossal failures of Morsi’s 2012 constitution, what Egypt needs now is a legal framework built on a set of ideals that will continue to resonate years from now.

So far, the debate over Egypt’s constitution has been a disappointment.

The plan announced on July 3 stipulated the creation of a ten-member panel to revise and make changes to the 2012 Constitution. The ensuing draft would then be sent to an assembly of fifty political and legal figures who would submit their amendments to the smaller, more technical panel. A popular referendum would then decide whether or not to accept the final draft. The roadmap might not be perfect, but it is likely to achieve a much more balanced and univocal result than the Muslim Brotherhood’s version, which was infamously compiled during one nineteen-hour session of Morsi’s Constitutional Assembly.

Remarkably, the first of the fifty-member assembly’s sessions descended into farce, as leading figures argued over whether they had been tasked with “writing a new constitution” or “amending the existing constitution.” Of course, there is no difference; either way Egypt will have a new constitution, whether it is drafted as such or amended to the extent that it appears so. For observers of the proceedings this episode exemplified everything that is wrong with Egypt’s modern political elite. Too often meaningful debates become petty arguments and potential opportunities become missed chances.

This moment in Egypt’s history should be seized as a chance to lay down laws that are so fundamental that they define a nation. Rights that have so often been denied to Egyptians must be made sacred and defined as such. These include the right to life, liberty, religious belief, privacy, sexual orientation, due process and a clear prohibition on torture.

Perhaps one advantage to be drawn from having to draft a constitution in 2013 is the vast wealth of resources that can be looked to for guidance: from the United Kingdom’s ‘unwritten’ constitution based on centuries of due process, to the American Bill of Rights, built upon the premise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In these times of heightened anti-American sentiment, taking examples from anything Western is often met with accusations and conspiracy theories. But the reality is that democracy is a liberal theory, and to implement it we must be similarly liberal in our mind-set.

Enduring constitutions have been drafted after uprisings. Examples should be taken from France; the post-revolution Declaration on the Rights of Man remains vital to this day. In the United States, the post-American revolution Bill of Rights remains the basis of that country’s system of government today. Add to the mix the Human Rights Act of the United Kingdom, the European Convention on Human Rights, the constitution of South Africa—there are countless examples of constitutions drafted with human freedoms as their priority. Following World War II, the Grundgesetz, or Basic Law, was implemented in Germany. It guaranteed human rights and provided the world with the immortal ideal: “human dignity is inviolable.” Concepts such as these are what Egyptians are crying out for.

Most of all, what this constitution needs to achieve is the building, for the first time in Egypt’s history, of a connection between a government elected by the people and the people to be governed. That relationship is glaringly absent and a major cause of the disillusionment with politics Egyptians still harbor. It is interesting that the ten-member panel that submitted the current draft document removed the prohibition on political participation for former representatives of either Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party or the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. The move makes sense in the long term; such prohibitions would affect too many individuals who cannot credibly be tied to either regime’s corruption. And yet, it smacks of a conservative and cautious approach to building a new Egypt while simultaneously translating into a tacit admission of a fear of a counter-revolution, or of upsetting too many influential figures.
While the proceedings continue in the fifty-member assembly the mainstream debate in Egypt’s media outlets has been vapid. The media, a hotbed of nationalist sentiment following Morsi’s ejection and proud champion of the ‘revolution,’ has contributed precious little to the debate on Egypt’s future. Noticeably missing is any serious discussion of the need for laïcité in Egypt. This is either for fear of alienating viewers or for a distinct lack of any interest in the subject.

Of the several bold decisions suggested by the ten-member panel, including the return to plurality in elections and the proposal of a unicameral parliament, the decision not made is the one that stands out the most. If this past year has made one thing clearer than any, it is that religion and politics do not mix.Laïcité, or more simply, the separation of church and state, must be seen as the answer. The removal of Article 219, which institutionalized a hard-core interpretation of Islamic Sharia and was widely seen as the most egregious of the 2012 Constitution’s stipulations, is a necessary start. But the reluctance to completely ban parties of a religious nature, or at least suggest it, is foolish.  Furthermore, the air of inviolability surrounding Article 2—which famously declares Islam to be Egypt’s official religion—must be shattered. Unfortunately, it is widely thought that suggesting a removal of Article 2 would be political suicide.

As an Egyptian, it is difficult not to feel cheated. The opportunity of the ages has been presented before us. Unlike the 2012 transitional period, a serious technocratic government is in place, and a constitution will be submitted to popular referendum before any elections take place whatsoever. The roadmap is putting Egypt on the path to democracy. It is just a shame that those implementing the roadmap are refusing to accept that a true democracy must guarantee essential, non-violable freedoms, and that the surest safeguard for a democratic future is ensuring a separation of church and state, difficult as that may be.

Seifeldin Fawzy is a political commentator. He is a trainee lawyer at the Ziad Bahaa-Eldin Law Office and Thebes Consultancy, a Cairo-based law firm. He is also a member of the NGO Sheraa – The Independent Association of Legal Support.

Yemen remains the only country to have gone through the Arab Uprisings with neither a descent into civil war nor an abrupt course reversal. The good news is that Yemenis from all factions and regions are still talking; the bad news is that a couple of large bumps on the road need to be dealt with before the political dialogue reaches fruition.

A violent regime crackdown on protesters and clashes between supporters and opponents of President Ali Abdullah Saleh defined the beginning of the uprising, from January 2011 through the handover of power to Abed Rabbu Mansour Hadi on to the February 27, 2012. But it stopped short of an all out conflagration. The new, interim president and cabinet have, under UN guidance, moved along a fairly civil national dialogue (ND). Though not yet fully successful, the negotiations have already tackled some of the thorniest issues in the country. The National Dialogue process is nearing completion, and the UN Security Council is seized with the issue.

The good news is on several fronts. A group of donor countries, known as the Friends of Yemen (the Gulf Cooperation Council, plus EU, the UN and the U.S.), just concluded a meeting in New York, with a reaffirmation of pledges of assistance and renewed vigilance over the transition process in what is arguably the poorest and least developed of the Arab countries. Eight billion dollars have been pledged by the Friends of Yemen, and an executive bureau has, at least in principle, been established to oversee and coordinate how the assistance is disbursed. Closer to home, the U.S. government has seriously upped its civilian assistance and promised to support the ND process politically and financially. So what is the catch?

The National Dialogue, expertly and patiently chaperoned by the UN special envoy, Jamal Benomar, was supposed to produce a new constitution for Yemen, to be followed by a referendum and elections. The process has now gone into overtime, ostensibly to allow the drafters time to refine the finished product. In reality, the time is needed to iron out serious differences that remain between northern and southern delegates to the ND. Secessionist sentiment in the south remains strong and even the moderates among them are only willing to accept a federated union if the south remains unified as a large component of the whole, with an option to secede at a future date should a plebiscite indicate that that remains the strong wish of the people of the south. The north and south of Yemen have already fought a civil war in 1994 over this question, with the north prevailing in that conflict. The secessionist sentiment has not disappeared but rather simmered on a slow burner, flaring up again during the uprising in 2011. North of Sanaa, the Zaidi Houthis, who have accepted to stay in the union, are facing an amalgam of Salafi Islamists, including odd bedfellows from the mainstream Islah party and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. These regional issues are the main obstacles facing the National Dialogue, and are far more serious than a mere refinement of the language of the final document.

The U.S. government has supported the GCC transition plan for Yemen, which eased out president Saleh and ushered in the current transitional process. U.S. diplomacy complimented Benomar’s efforts and, in consultation with Saudi Arabia, encouraged the main parties in Yemen to participate in the ND. The U.S. also supported the ND process with 10 million dollars and has pledged to help fund the needed institution building to follow.

A U.S. 2012 aid package amounted to $356 million, of which roughly a 100 million went to humanitarian, civil society and democracy building programs. This is many times what USAID’s budget was for the years 2004-2008, and reflects a realization in Washington of the importance of a peaceful transition in Yeme. The U.S. is beginning to recognize that long-term security comes from democracy and stability.

All that constitutes a step in the right direction. The main challenges, however, remain the same: keeping the country together and keeping the deteriorating security situation from scuttling the good efforts of the UN and the Friends of Yemen.

U.S. Policy in Yemen, despite the praiseworthy increased emphasis on the civilian side of assistance, continues, nonetheless, to suffer from ambivalence, uncertainty and conflicting goals. On the diplomatic front, the U.S. is not heavily invested in the mediation efforts between north and south and not at all involved in helping to end the fighting in the north. Further, the short term security strategy against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, relies heavily on drone strikes. This risks further inflaming an already delicate security atmosphere in the country and turning the entire population of Yemen against the U.S.

UN special envoy Benomar needs all the assistance he can get from Western governments to help keep north and south Yemen together and to end the violent clashes between Salafis and Zaidis in the north. But U.S. diplomacy has, thus far, shied away from engaging southern leaders, both on the ground in Aden and outside Yemen. The fighting in the north involves a complex set of internal and regional alliances, requiring very delicate negotiating. Short of dedicating a full time envoy from Washington, the U.S. may not be able to conduct such negotiations directly. It could, however, encourage regional players who enjoy closer relations with the fighting parties to do the heavy lifting. In the end, the U.S. national interest, and Yemen’s, would be better served with more skillful diplomacy and far less firepower.

Nabeel Khoury is Senior Fellow for Middle East and National Security at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He previously served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Yemen (2004-2007), Deputy Director of the Media Outreach Centre in London (2002-2004), and Consul General in Morocco (1998-2002). In 2003, during the Iraq war, he served as Department spokesperson at U.S. Central Command in Doha and in Baghdad.

A political prisoner freed. An affidavit documenting police abuse. An audience with lawmakers. When Egyptians rose up in 2011, human rights campaigner Heba Morayef dared to hope that such incremental accomplishments were giving way to freedom and democracy. But the dream didn’t last for long. As the Egypt director of Human Rights Watch sees it, conditions scarcely improved during interim military rule or under the administration of the first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi. Now, after the dramatic overthrow of Morsi and the bloody security crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood group last summer, Morayef is taking a decidedly somber view. “This moment is infinitely depressing,” she told me over coffee in mid-September.

Morayef believes that the violent dispersal by security forces of Morsi supporters on August 14, after a six-week sit-in outside Cairo’s Rabaa Al-Adawiya mosque, is an ominous indicator of where Egypt may be headed. “While we fully recognize that security forces have a right to use lethal force, that right is not absolute,” she says. In the aftermath of Rabaa, indiscriminate arrests based on political affiliation and prolonged detentions without trial have become more common. Egypt’s decision-makers, she believes, “have made a decision to go for a full-blown security response to deal with the political crisis, and for that they want a blank check.”

To Morayef, part of the problem is the failure of the state as well as Egyptian society at large, in the midst of the post-revolution euphoria, to embrace important rights concepts such as proportionality and accountability. The country, she says, tends to see human rights as an abstract long-term goal, rather than something to be practiced every day.

Intense pressure to support the military crackdown, with more than a whiff of xenophobia in the air, has made the work of human rights advocates even more trying. In private, some Egyptians accuse human rights defenders of being Muslim Brotherhood supporters, or working as spies for the West. Human rights campaigners are shunned by Egyptian media, lest they counter the official narrative of the summer crackdown—that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization and had lost the right to govern.

Morayef’s path to becoming a rights advocate began as an undergraduate at the American University in Cairo, where she studied international law and human rights. After earning a degree in political science, she worked at the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Rights Capacity Building Project in Cairo. Later, while getting a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science, she worked at Article 19, an organization defending freedom of expression, and at Amnesty International. As chief of Human Rights Watch’s Egypt office, she has compiled reports on everything from abuses by Egyptian security forces and election fraud to harassment of opposition activists. It is sometimes grim work that can include trips to the morgue—forays into the “little corners” of society, as she puts it.

It is also work that never ceases in Egypt these days. As we talked, Morayef’s smartphone beeped. The Egyptian coast guard, said an email message from a colleague, had opened fire on a boatload of Syrian refugees off the port of Alexandria; two people were killed. The news is disturbing, yet she stays calm, responding to more emails pouring in, and continuing our conversation. “You have to show some empathy, but you learn to do that a bit artificially,” she says. “You have to struggle to contain any emotional response.”

Morayef speaks about the challenges ahead; one of her greatest fears is that Egyptian society may begin accepting human rights abuses as something normal. “We’re back in damage control mode,” she says before going off to deal with the next human rights crisis.

Egypt’s changing of the guard in July brought a number of AUC alumni into the interim government formed by President Adly Mansour. Nabil Fahmy, who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the university, became foreign minister. To assume his post, Fahmy took a public service leave from AUC, where he is the founding dean of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy(and editorial board chairman of the Cairo Review). Meanwhile, Ziad Bahaa El-Din became deputy prime minister and minister for planning and international cooperation; Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour was tapped as minister of industry and foreign trade; Ahmed Galal is the new finance minister; and Abdel Aziz Fadel was named minister of civil aviation. In a September 28 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Fahmy told the international community that new presidential and parliamentary elections would be held by next spring. The ouster of President Mohammed Morsi last July, Fahmy added, “showed the world that the will of the people cannot be broken. That it can grant authority, just as it can remove it from the hands of those who abuse it.”

At a fashionable home in Brentwood in September, a few hundred people gathered at a function hosted by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California to honor Daniel Ellsberg. Hector Villagra, the group’s executive director, called the ACLU award recipient “a man who blew the whistle, who went public with the truth that the government didn’t want told, and in the end helped stop a war.”

Ellsberg, 82, is America’s most famous whistleblower. Or he was until the sensational leaks by Chelsea Manning, an army private sentenced to prison in August for providing thousands of secret diplomatic and military documents to WikiLeaks, and by Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who fled to Russia in June after revealing the scale of domestic surveillance to the Guardian newspaper. In 1971, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. He had been a Vietnam specialist as a defense department and state department official and later as a RAND Corporation analyst. His release of the Top Secret history of the Vietnam War fueled opposition to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, and led to his indictment on theft and espionage charges. Ellsberg explained after turning himself in to authorities: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”

A federal judge eventually dismissed the case on grounds of government misconduct; the Nixon administration had carried out illegal surveillance of Ellsberg, including a break-in at his psychoanalyst’s office. Ever since, Ellsberg has been a prominent peace activist, advocate for civil liberties and press freedom, and author. He is the subject of the 2009 documentary film The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

Cairo Review Managing Editor Scott MacLeod interviewed Ellsberg in Los Angeles on September 29, 2013.

CAIRO REVIEW: Let’s get right to Edward Snowden. What’s the significance of what Snowden has revealed?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: He’s revealed that at least under the George W. Bush administration and continuing into the Barack Obama administration, these two administrations have laid the full technical infrastructure for a police state. We don’t have a police state, for sure, or this interview wouldn’t be taking place. I would probably be in detention. And we don’t have the process that the Stasi in East Germany embodied, which was not only as total surveillance of their population as they could achieve, but involved bringing people in constantly for questioning and possible detention, possible torture. We don’t have that here in this country. We do have at this point, Snowden has revealed, a surveillance apparatus that goes far beyond what the East German Stasi could even have imagined.

Remember, in the period let’s say [depicted] in the movie The Lives of Others, which shows the Stasi at work (and got an Academy Award some years ago), there was no email, there was no Internet, there were no chat logs, no digital credit card transactions, no banking done by this way, no faxes. So these channels of data didn’t even exist. And you didn’t have smartphones, and you didn’t have the GPS system, which enables NSA to know at any moment where a possessor of the smartphone is, within feet. So it amounts to what Admiral [John] Poindexter proposed years ago, under Bush, Total Information Awareness, TIA, which was supposedly voted down by Congress, defunded by Congress, but simply took up shop under a different name, apparently, in NSA, but has now gone far beyond what even he could have imagined.

It’s not only the collection of all this data, but the analysis of the correlation of it, largely by computer, correlating where you are and where I am at any given moment—they put us together very quickly. And, of course, the telephone calls, which have led to at least a couple of the prosecutions recently for whistleblowing that have been instituted by Obama. They found very quickly who had been calling the reporter whose byline appeared on the story, when they had met, when the reporter had been to the State Department and so forth. They knew total movements and total communication. Moreover, something that hasn’t come out yet in terms of documents, but which has been testified to by William Binney of NSA and Kirk Wiebe of NSA, Russell Tice of NSA, and Tom Drake—four major whistleblowers have all said that by no means is their collection limited to the so-called metadata, the subject headings and the data as to who was called and when and where. But that they are collecting the content of all of these calls.

And whereas, as recently as six or seven years ago, they could not store all that data, that problem has been solved. And now they can essentially store all of the content, even of audio and video, which takes more room, and text, and they are building a huge data center in Utah for the storage and analysis of all this material. So they have what a police state needs in the ability to identify suspects and identify troublemakers, and they also have the ability to identify every source of every journalist very quickly. So we have a country now, I’d say, where the problem of knowing who leaked a particular classified or embarrassing piece of information is technically very easy to solve at this point. It’s hard for me to imagine that a free press, an independent press and investigative journalism, can actually exist with the executive branch having knowledge of every source for every story, and being willing to prosecute, without having an Official Secrets Act of the British type, which has always, with one exception, been rejected by Congress as being unconstitutional, incompatible with the First Amendment. And yet Obama has been willing to prosecute now eight people, plus the almost surely sealed indictment of [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange, which is asserted by his lawyers, that exists in Virginia. That would be three times as many as all previous presidents have prosecuted altogether for leakers or whistleblowers. So you have both the ability to identify the defendant, the suspect, and the willingness to use the Espionage Act to prosecute, to put them behind bars.

Even without prosecution, the ability to identify means you’re able to use a great variety of administrative sanctions against the leaker. Even before the age of prosecution under Obama, the government could take away their clearance, take away their access, which really means destroying their career, not just their job. It probably means a great loss in income and thus children’s education and where they live. Great pressure on marriages, in fact. All of these things without prosecution. Tom Drake of NSA, for instance, basically lost all of his savings trying to defend himself against almost entirely spurious charges, which in the end were dismissed virtually contemptuously by the judge―but after years under indictment, where he lost all of his savings, mortgaged his house, put tremendous strain on his marriage. Having been a high official in NSA, he is now a consultant at the Genius Bar of an Apple store. Russell Tice, fired from NSA, has not been able to find a job at all and he was one of the high technical people in NSA, and he wasn’t prosecuted. Without investigative reporting, you don’t get congressional hearings, really. They’re mostly stimulated by the press in reality, even if you had an inclination by Congress to investigate, which we haven’t seen since 9/11 or before. So you have an executive branch without oversight, without checks and balances. I would say it’s the death of democracy, or at least the paralysis of democracy, and the question is whether we can possibly resuscitate it.

CAIRO REVIEW: You refer to the James Risen case?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes, James Risen of the New York Times. He’s the reporter, and the leak was allegedly by Jeffrey Sterling, who was linked to Risen through telephone calls. They had telephone records. And James Rosen of Fox News was identified. He was the reporter, linked to Stephen Kim for a leak on Korea, and again that was entirely through telephone records. They could see that a particular report had come out, they knew that Rosen had telephoned Kim asking for information before that, they knew from the content that he was asking―not just the fact there was a phone call―and then they had Kim calling almost immediately after the report had come to him. Clearly the circumstantial evidence here is very powerful, and probably they had the content of the calls, but haven’t yet admitted that.

CAIRO REVIEW: People assumed for a long time that the government had the capability to store lots of data on people, so what specifically has Snowden revealed?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Documents. People have always sort of assumed that we were being listened to. But the difference between assuming it and knowing it is quite significant. It’s very inconvenient to act as if you are being listened to at all times, to encrypt everything, to use spy trade to try to protect your sources and so forth. It’s a lot of trouble. That’s what NSA relies on, people just not taking the trouble. Remember, the ‘knowing’ has always gone in the face of denials, very explicit denials, by the president and by the heads of intelligence, with [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, just this year, saying, “We do not collect data on millions of citizens,” when in fact the answer is, “Yes, we do collect data on millions, hundreds of millions in fact.”  A direct lie to the intelligence committee. And going back a ways, with Bush saying, “We do not listen in on communications with Americans without a warrant. Period. As the Fourth Amendment requires.” He said that on television. False. That was a lie. And in that case, the Congress was not able to get documents, or real testimony from anybody in the government. They demanded the testimony and people just said, “No, we won’t give it to you.” And in that case, I don’t think any documents actually ever did surface.

But in the case of Snowden now, the documents are just there. They can’t deny it. In the case of the Pentagon Papers, you had four thousand pages that I gave to the newspapers, plus several thousand that I gave only to the Senate. There you had documents, and a lot of documents, over a long period of time, a very comprehensive record, as Snowden has provided. And that makes a difference. For forty years, I’ve been putting out publicly that I wish someone would put out a lot of documents that could not be dismissed on the grounds that, “Well, that’s one document, but we reversed that the next day,” or, “That was the attitude of one agency, but the president decided otherwise.” Or, “That’s old stuff,” and so forth. [In the Pentagon Papers] you had a record of all the different agencies weighing in, the pros and cons, the controversy going on, and finally a decision being made. It made it very clear that the public had been lied to, and that Congress had been lied to, systematically by a series of presidents over a period of years, as is clearly true now coming back to the NSA issue. It’s very hard for people to really believe that a president is lying to them—lying, not just being cute or misleading a little bit, not telling the whole truth, but actually lying—unless they have a document.

CAIRO REVIEW: The Pentagon Papers had that effect, you think?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I failed in what I basically hoped to do with the Pentagon Papers, to get people to understand that the same pattern of lying about the Vietnam War that I was documenting for four different presidents, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, was being pursued by a fifth president, the then-current President Richard Nixon. And I just hoped that people would extrapolate there a little, and say, “Well, all these other presidents did it, two different parties, same situation, they all deceived about what they were planning to do, what they were doing, what the costs would be and how the war was succeeding. Nixon’s doing the same.” But I didn’t have documents on that. I couldn’t get people to believe that, even people like Sy Hersh or Norman Mailer or people I put it to who are generally regarded as very sophisticated, very cynical even. I remember saying to Norman Mailer at the Miami Democratic Convention in 1972, having failed to convince him that Hanoi was likely to be bombed by the end of the year, that that was part of the pattern of the policy. He said he just couldn’t believe that the plan was that coherent. I said, “You know, it isn’t as though they would have hoped to do these things.” They didn’t want to do them. They wanted to win without doing them—mining Haiphong, renewing the bombing of North Vietnam, and so forth—but I could predict that they would not succeed in their aims with the earlier measures, and I predicted on the basis of the Pentagon Papers that they would carry out what they’ve planned. Plans exist. He couldn’t believe it. I remember standing under an awning in the rain waiting for a taxi with Mailer and I turned to him and I said, “How would you feel if you believed what I believe?” And he said, “I think I’d go mad.” And I said, “Well, maybe I’ve gone mad.” But by the end of the year, we were bombing Hanoi, after hearing “peace is at hand” from Henry Kissinger just before the election. And then the heaviest bombing in human history over a two-week period. That wasn’t very gratifying to me to have that prediction confirmed. What I’d been doing since ’69—and this was ’72—was trying to avert that, and I’d failed. But I’d failed in considerable part because without documents, people just could not believe that this president, even a president they had not voted for, would simply be carrying out a secret foreign policy and getting away with it.

CAIRO REVIEW: One of the things Snowden has said is that his biggest fear is that what he’s done won’t have any impact.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Chelsea Manning said exactly the same thing to Adrian Lamo, the person sheunfortunately confided in. She said, precisely, that her greatest fear was that nothing would change. Her hope was that there would be informed discussion, that there would be debate and change in policy worldwide, and not just in the U.S. But again, would anything change as a result? Now, Manning had very little effect in this country, I would say, in terms of policy, though a very big effect abroad. The revelation that the U.S government knew very thoroughly of the corruption by [Zine El-Abidine] Ben Ali in Tunisia persuaded resisters in Tunisia to believe, when they read that in Le Mondethrough WikiLeaks, that if they revolted, maybe the U.S. with this knowledge being public would not feel open to backing Ben Ali. They might be embarrassed to be backing this admittedly corrupt and tyrannous dictator. There were stories around the time that Mohammed Bouazizi burned himself—another critical element there by one person—that this is the first “WikiLeaks Revolution.” The two were both critical: Bouazizi and Chelsea Manning’s revelations through WikiLeaks. There grew a website called TuniLeaks to reprint the WikiLeaks revelations on the Internet when the regime tried to cut it off. Without the discussion there, Bouazizi’s burning himself to death I think would not have had the resonance that it did have in Tunis—that “this is enough, this is it, let’s react to this.” Then, within weeks, that led to the Cairo occupation in Tahrir Square, and again in a surprisingly short time non-violently that regime was overthrown. Chelsea Manning could hardly have been unhappy. I don’t know how much she knew about that in prison, but she knew some. We did hear that she was aware. But it didn’t have that effect in the U.S.

CAIRO REVIEW: The effect of Snowden?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Snowden has had as much discussion and reaction in Congress as you could hope for at this stage, and may or may not lead to major change. That remains to be seen. I’d say the immediate effect was far more in terms of Congress than the Pentagon Papers had. The Pentagon Papers was seen as very interesting, but history. I think the major difference between the impact here of Snowden and Manning is that Manning was revealing what our government was doing to ‘them,’ ‘others,’ not ‘us,’ not ‘we the Americans,’ but to foreigners far away. And Americans do not and did not rise to that as much as they would to, let’s say, American casualties, or something being done to us. Snowden, on the other hand, was revealing what the government, our own government, was doing to us here at home, and I think that made a very big difference. I don’t think this is a peculiar nature of Americans. I think it’s very human, that all countries pretty much react that way. That is, unfortunately, very true of our species. Manning said to Lamo, “If there is no discussion and no debate, I will officially despair of our species.” At first glance, that would seem to most people a very grandiose statement. Very sophomoric, you might say. Not to me.

CAIRO REVIEW: Why?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Because I’ve seen this as a species problem for quite awhile, and the lack of concern about the impact of our own actions on people who are defined as ‘other,’ not ‘us,’ is a species characteristic that in the nuclear era, and in the era of climate change also, forecasts our self-extinction. And not only our self-extinction, but with us most other large animals. All of which could be annihilated today, as we speak, by a false alarm that set off the two doomsday machines in Russia and the U.S. Each of which is able to create smoke from burning cities that would reduce sunlight and create a nuclear famine. Nuclear winter. And if not winter, nevertheless kill harvests for a period of years, perhaps a decade. And we would all go.

My principal concern for many years, going back to ’58, that’s almost sixty years now, has been this problem: the possibilities of nuclear annihilation. I was working on nuclear war plans as early as ’59, ’60 and ’61, and I’m very conscious of what I just told you: that the land-based missiles and the submarine missiles that we have right now are capable of killing everybody and the animals with us, down to the level perhaps of bacteria and insects. That I didn’t know until the ’80s, twenty years after I’d worked on the war plans, with the nuclear winter studies that came along. And yet, those studies, which have now been confirmed in the last five and ten years very thoroughly—the situation being even worse than was conjectured or asserted in 1982 and 1983—have been essentially ignored by the public as if the nuclear problem had gone away. Yet, the capability of doing this, with no conceivable strategic or national rationale for it, is still in place. ‘Ready to go.’ ‘On alert.’ Efforts to get it off alert have all failed.

What I did become aware of in 1961, twenty years before the nuclear winter studies, was that the joint chiefs of staff told the president, in answer to a question I drafted for the White House, that the effect of the U.S. conducting its plans for general nuclear war would be to kill some 600 million people. Six hundred million people. Including not only some 325 million in the then-Soviet Union and China, but 100 million of our allies in Western Europe, 100 million in the “captive nations” in Eastern Europe, and 100 million in neighboring countries to the Soviet Union, like Afghanistan, Japan, India, Austria, neutral countries, Finland. Which revealed to me then that the people I was working with were capable of being, you know, totally oblivious or unconcerned about the prospective impact of their planning, our planning, on non-Americans.

That was a time, by the way, when an attack might have been carried out with no loss at all that you could see in the short run in the U.S. Because in ’61, the Soviet Union had four ICBMs that could reach us, and perhaps 150 or so long-range bombers, all of which we could destroy very easily in a first strike. And a year later in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the joint chiefs were pressing Kennedy to take actions that would have triggered this war: immediate attack on the missiles in Cuba, with the understanding that that could easily quickly escalate to a U.S. first strike. So we had joint chiefs who had those values, who were willing to do that. That told me something about the human species. I did not assume that Americans were uniquely vicious and brutal. I didn’t doubt that there were plans in Russia as they acquired nuclear weapons that were very similar, and would be in other countries. What are French and English nuclear weapons targeted on? Only cities. They’ve said that explicitly. They don’t have as many. They’ve got to make the best use of them they can, and that means cities. Where are Israel’s weapons targeted? I saw recently an estimate that Israel had eighty nuclear warheads. I looked at that and said, eighty? That’s impossible. Mordechai Vanunu back in 1985 was talking about 300 and possibly 600 warheads. Have they been getting rid of them? Then I looked at the fine print and I saw those are not including tactical nuclear weapons, which are mostly Hiroshima-size or Nagasaki-size. Where are they for, exactly? The whole world should be interested in what they have in mind. Just as they should be interested in what the U.S. has in mind.

I got off on this because we’re talking here about secrecy, having concealed this from the world. Something that in fact the whole world has an interest in knowing. India and Pakistan. Pakistan now has more than a hundred fission-type weapons, and India has more than fifty. Calculations have been made scientifically that with one hundred Hiroshima bombs you wouldn’t get nuclear winter on cities from the smoke. You would get a diminution of the sun’s energy reaching the earth of about 7 percent, which would be enough to increase drought, kill off harvests, and in various places sufficient to kill about 900 million people who are at the marginal levels of nutrition. It’s a calculation done by the Physicians for Social Responsibility. That suggests to me that the entire world has an interest in preventing that, and to start with, asking them what they have in mind with this, and how dare they propose to inflict this on the people of the world. That is all the more so with the larger arsenals, above all of the U.S. and Russia.

And all of it is behind a veil of secrecy. The figure I gave you of 600 million deaths has never appeared in any official government statement in the last fifty years. There is no estimate of who would be killed by an ‘American option’ in any of our nuclear war plans. When you see estimates, they nearly all come from me, actually. I’ve traced the footnotes, and they come from the fact that I drafted that question and I held in my hand a Top Secret answer from the joint chiefs of staff, but that remains Top Secret including from Congress.

Coming back now to this surveillance aspect, I would like to see a Snowden at the kind of level that I was in ’61, with access to the war plans, put out this kind of classified data, with documents, on a large scale. I would like to see that in every nuclear weapons state. Had there been a Snowden or a Manning in India before their nuclear weapons tests, would we have had an Indian and Pakistani to tell us that they were preparing a test? Had that been revealed, there’s at least a possibility that there would have been some public discussion and some international pressure. As it was, it was a fait accompli. In every nuclear weapons state that has conducted a test, the public of that nation has fallen in love with their new nuclear weapon very quickly, even when there was a lot of skepticism and a lot of resistance to it beforehand. In no single case has the decision been made to acquire nuclear weapons by the entire cabinet, let alone the parliament, other legislature or public discussion beforehand. Not in one case. Israel is a good example. There was strong opposition to that within the Israeli cabinet. I’m saying the situation might have been different had somebody inside that process, and there would be thousands and thousands of people in the process, decided the world should know this, or the rest of my countrymen should know this. That’s what Vanunu did, for which he was kidnapped, drugged, court-martialed, and put eighteen years in prison, eleven and a half in solitary confinement. And he revealed not just that they had nuclear weapons, which virtually everybody assumed at that point, but that the scale was much larger than the CIA or anybody else had imagined.

There’s a case, by the way, I would say of a whistleblower who spent the eighteen years in prison with no perceptible effect on policy, in Israel or anywhere else, that you can see. I went over to Israel several times in his defense. He’s very clear that he did not regret what he had done. In fact, he was forbidden to talk to reporters, but he continued to do that, for which he was put back in prison, after the eighteen years. So he’s not in regret. I believe that Chelsea Manning will not regret what she did, or Snowden, whatever comes of it. I identify very much with them. As Manning said to Lamo, she didn’t mind so much the prospect of prison for life or even being executed. She said what she did mind was the prospect that her face would be plastered all over the world as a boy: because she already thought of herself in gender terms as a woman. And she was willing to go to prison. When I read that I thought, “I haven’t heard that for forty years.” That’s the way I felt in ’69. And in ’71, I expected to go to prison for life, for a chance that it might shorten the war. And that seemed to me, and I’m sure to them, a very natural, not very hard, choice to make, if you had a chance, a small chance, of having an effect on these very large events. So I felt I had waited forty years for someone who would do what these two did, namely put out so much material, classified, that it had a chance of actually affecting policy and making a change, but at the same time expose them to a near certainty of being identified and thus being prosecuted. When I did it, I wasn’t aware that no one had ever been prosecuted for putting out classified material before me. Did you know that?

CAIRO REVIEW: No.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Very few people know. Most countries do have a law like the British Official Secrets Act, which criminalizes any revelation of government protected information, whatever the intention and whatever the effects, whatever the motives. All irrelevant. It’s simply criminal to do that. We don’t have such a law, but there are words in the Espionage Act that do read as though that does apply. The Espionage Act was intended from 1917 onward for espionage, and was used a lot against spies who secretly gave information to help a foreign power, or hurt the United States, or for money. It had never been used against a leak to the American public, because it was understood to be unconstitutional if used in that way. That that would be a violation of the First Amendment. My case was the first experiment to see if they could get that past the Supreme Court. And if my case had not been dismissed for government misconduct, it probably would have been dismissed by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional, according to major legal scholars of the day like Melville Nimmer. That’s not so true today. The Constitution is the same but the court is different, very different. And the interpretation of the Constitution has evolved over the last forty years in ways that do not favor the First Amendment.

CAIRO REVIEW: What signs do you see that Manning and Snowden may actually effect change? You mentioned the uproar in Congress over the NSA revelations.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: There have been two. At first, there didn’t seem to be any movement for change in this country as a result of Manning’s revelations, which were about Iraq and Afghanistan: wars which the president claimed to be in the process of ending. In the case of Snowden, there have actually been introduced a number of bills that would rein in the NSA from their blanket dragnet surveillance of all Americans and all their digital communications. There is the Amash-Conyers bill, which would deny funds to the NSA for blanket surveillance of all Americans. That bill got a very surprising amount of support. It almost succeeded right away after the Snowden revelations. Then Obama has been led to describe a series of reforms, almost all of which are clearly sham reforms, with no teeth in them. Such as putting an adversary in the proceedings of FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] who would argue for openness, taking account of the fact that the FISA court right now consists of judges all of whom have been selected by one justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Roberts. Did you happen to know that? Like himself, they’re nearly all Republicans appointed by a Republican president. Which may have something to do with the fact that they have been a pure rubber-stamp for the intelligence community. Out of some thirty thousand requests for warrants, they have denied eleven. So it’s a pure formality to have the existence of that court. If they put an adversary on the court, a devil’s advocate of some sort, they’ll still get only the information the government gives them. The court, as much as a rubber stamp as it is, has complained that the NSA has continuously lied to them, deceived them and withheld information from them. The justice of that court said we have lost confidence in the NSA. That won’t be improved by putting one more spokesperson on that court.

CAIRO REVIEW: That seems like a limited impact, then.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The public has risen to this issue in terms of polls, with 60 percent of younger people saying that Snowden did the right thing, this guy who already is facing federal felony counts for what he did. The question is, will the public press Congress enough to put some spine in them for them to demand information from NSA and to act on it, and, for example, not allow officials to lie to them under oath with no consequence, which they do regularly, as they did with Clapper. Will they demand true testimony on these matters? Will they refuse to be content with hearing from government officials, “We’re not going to give you this information. State secret. You can’t have it.” Which is the way [former Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales talked when the issue came up when the Times first revealed the widespread surveillance.

CAIRO REVIEW: The warrantless surveillance?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The telephone surveillance revealed in 2005, the Times having kept that secret for a year at the request of the White House until it was about to come out in a book by their correspondent, James Risen. The Times finally revealed this warrantless wiretapping that was going on, which at the time was clearly illegal under a number of domestic laws, as well as unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. So you had in 2005 a four-year record of massive criminality by the executive branch under the president. Not one indictment followed from that, nor did the practice change. They just got opinions within the Office of Legal Counsel that maybe it wasn’t so illegal, which was ridiculous. Then they got Congress to legalize it. That doesn’t make it constitutional under the Fourth Amendment. That’s not how we amend the Constitution. A majority in Congress can’t just wipe out an amendment, but they purport to have done that, so now it’s legal.

In fact, all of the criminal acts that were taken against me by President Nixon, which led to his facing impeachment and his resignation, and incidentally to the dropping of charges in my case, all of those acts are now purportedly legal whether they’re constitutional or not. I was overheard on warrantless wiretaps. A White House team of CIA assets burglarized my former psychoanalyst’s office for information with which to blackmail me. You couldn’t get a clearer contradiction of the Fourth Amendment than that. The CIA was used against me, an American citizen, in a variety of ways, which was then illegal against their charter. And eventually a dozen CIA assets were brought up from Miami to Washington, DC, with orders “to incapacitate Daniel Ellsberg totally.” I asked a prosecutor, “What does that mean? Kill me?” And he said to me, “Well, the words were ‘to incapacitate you totally,’ but you have to understand, these guys were all CIA assets from the Bay of Pigs, and never use the word ‘kill.’” He thought they were meant to kill me, and that was from the White House. The Patriot Act makes the use of the CIA in domestic matters legal now. The FISA amendment act makes the warrantless wiretaps legal. The CIA has become in effect a domestic police agency along with the FBI. And even the assassination effort, Congress has not passed a law legalizing that, but President Obama virtually boasts—he leaks, to put it in another way, he leaks to the New York Times—that on Tuesdays he picks out people to kill, including Americans, by drones or assassination squads. At least two have been killed, others are on the list: Anwar Al-Awlaki and his sixteen-year-old son, both American citizens, killed by drone attacks. No challenge to this by Congress or anybody else.

In effect, protections, liberties and guarantees of due process, which go back to the Magna Carta 800 years ago, have just been swept away in part by legislative process. In every case preceded by secret faits accomplis by the executive branch, then legalized by Congress or simply not challenged. And now we have Snowden showing that the surveillance is not just happening on a large scale, it happens on a total scale, every American is subject to this, every communication. Russell Tice has made the point that in addition to this dragnet surveillance, when he was in NSA he was involved in and knew personally of a great deal of targeted surveillance, targeting individuals including the heads of and staff members and the members of the intelligence committees, the armed services committees—everyone who had any bearing on the budget or investigation of NSA, journalists, news agencies like Associated Press and the others, and justices of the Supreme Court. So a government which was founded on the principle of checks and balances among three separate independent branches of government, plus a Fourth Estate, the press, protected by the First Amendment, has been replaced basically by a one-branch government, the executive branch, that knows every detail of the private life and the private communications of every member and staff member, home and office, of the legislative branch, the judiciary and the press.

The idea that these can be independent in their oversight or can have any real oversight function is absurd under those conditions. And I would say that the basic conditions of democracy that were built into our Constitution and the Bill of Rights have essentially been subverted, have been eroded. Mainly since 9/11 and with the acceptance of most of the population.

CAIRO REVIEW: The Snowden impact does not seem too promising then.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: There are two very promising effects. One, the bills to restrict the NSA are now proliferating in Congress. We’ll see whether they reach majority and whether they get obeyed. But at least there is resistance here because of popular concern. The biggest effect is the fact that the president was facing loss of his request for support to attack Syria. He almost certainly would have lost by a huge margin in the House both among Republicans and Democrats. No parliament has ever denied the funds for an imminent war. It was so obvious that they were going to do that in the House, in contrast to Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, the drone war in Pakistan. The House wasn’t going to go along and there was only one reason, and that was public opinion. The House was in recess and they were being approached by their constituents who buttonholed them and said more emphatically than these congressmen had ever heard before, “Do not attack Syria.” And the reason was not a concern about Syrians per se but because of certainty that the president’s assurances, and the secretary of state’s assurances, that there would be no American casualties, no American boots on the ground, were ridiculous. And the public said, “We don’t believe that.” The public didn’t address the question, “Are they lying?” It was, “We don’t care what you think, the fact is that if we start throwing cruise missiles in there, we are going to be involved on one side of a very complicated civil war that’s going on and we will be led to back up that commitment by troops and in a quagmire, a hopeless quagmire.”

CAIRO REVIEW: Snowden’s revelations caused the public to be more skeptical of presidential authority?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I’d say yes. They’re so conscious right now of having been lied to, and Iraq and Afghanistan are sufficiently fresh in their memory, as to keep us out of Syria if the public has a voice in it. And, for once, the public did have a voice. Amazingly enough, [Robert] Gates and [Leon] Panetta, two of Obama’s defense secretaries, both in a panel just last week, criticized their former boss very strongly. For what? That he went to Congress. That he obeyed the Constitution, which gives the power, the decision on war, exclusively to Congress—although various administrations have claimed that that language is ambiguous and it just has to do with declaring war which is just a formality, and that the decision is really in the hands of the president. That argument, made by John Yoo, the [former] legal counsel in the Office of Legal Counsel, is absurd. It’s ridiculous. In fact, it’s very clear in the discussions of the Constitution that the way it was interpreted, it was the intention of the [constitutional] congress to put that decision exclusively in the hands of Congress, not for them to be consulted, and not to share responsibility, but to have that responsibility. That was an invention of the Founders, based on their reading of two thousand years of history, going back to the Greeks and Romans, that you should not have the power of war and peace in the hands of one man. That it should be in the hands of a representative body. So here we have the president observing that for the first time in years. People actually cared strongly about it and they got it.

CAIRO REVIEW: Curious thing, Obama is a constitutional lawyer.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: He’s a constitutional lawyer, as is John Yoo, and I think he’s pretty much the same kind.

CAIRO REVIEW: You voted for Obama, right?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Strictly speaking, I didn’t vote for him this time. I live in California, a solid blue state; I didn’t have any reason to vote for him. I did the first time. But both times I did urge people in swing states to vote for Obama, and I got a lot of flak for that from various people on the left.

CAIRO REVIEW: What explains Obama’s role in the rollbacks you’ve described? What explains his drone assassinations and so on?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I don’t have the explanation. I didn’t expect him to eschew any of the powers that had been bequeathed to him by George W. Bush because I don’t know of any president who has ever done that, who said, “I don’t want that much information, I don’t want that much power. That’s not what the presidency is supposed to do.” If anybody sounded as though he might do that, it was Obama. I still didn’t expect that he would go beyond Bush, as he has done in many ways. Why the eight indictments [of government personnel for leaking classified information]? Why more use of the state secret’s privilege?  More opacity, I would say, than Bush. More secretive than Bush, on the whole. He enormously extended the drone campaign, assassination campaign, in a country with which the U.S. is nominally not at war, Pakistan. It is nominally our ally, a sovereign state, which officially at least complains that their sovereignty is being invaded. Here is a country that is, I would say, in the most dangerous situation in the world, with a very unstable government, with Islamic fundamentalists wanting control of the nuclear arsenal and with a record of having shared their nuclear technology with other countries in the past. To take actions which predictably had the effect of making the United States the most hated country in the world by Pakistanis seems to me—I could say imprudent, but that would be laughably euphemistic—seems wildly reckless, irresponsible and dangerous. The only basis that I can give for having urged people to vote for him in swing states and not regretting that, is that I believe [Mitt] Romney would be even worse. Or [John] McCain. If McCain or Romney were president right now, I believe we would have been at war with Iran for some time and we would be heavily involved in war with Syria. And so with all I’ve said here about Obama, I’m happy every day that Romney is not president. That’s the state we’re in.

CAIRO REVIEW: Do you regard Snowden and Manning as American heroes for what they’ve done?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: They’re heroes to me. I identify with them because of their willingness to pay a personal price in order to inform their fellow citizens and the world of information that the public needed in order to change a disastrous policy. It ought to be normal, I would say natural, for people to do that. It doesn’t seem to be that way statistically. It seems to be very, very hard, I mean almost impossible, for people to confront paying a personal price for the benefit of ‘others’ not ‘us.’ People will readily sacrifice their lives on the battlefield for their country, supposedly, if they’re convinced that it’s for their country, often mistakenly. People will even sacrifice their careers at the orders of their boss. But to do it against the boss, to really lose their job, seems to be very, very hard. The price of that is ostracism and disrespect and being called very bad names like traitor, and people will put up with any abuse rather than suffer those names. Most people.

CAIRO REVIEW: In leaking the Pentagon Papers, what was your thinking at that time?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I was a Cold Warrior in the late ’50s, a Cold War liberal, a Cold War Democrat. I felt myself very liberal in domestic matters, say, on racial questions, or unions. In fact, I planned to be a union organizer or a union economist. At Harvard, I studied labor economics. But I’d become very convinced by the black-and-white vision of the Cold War as opposing a virtually Hitler-like opponent, just as I had been an enthusiastic youngster in World War II. I had the usual Cold War attitudes. The president had more secret information than I did and I assumed had our best interests at heart and shared the values of democracy. I was about to get out of the Marine Corps in June 1956, after two years. And when my battalion was scheduled to go to the Mediterranean with the 6^th Fleet for six months, the Alsops [newspaper columnists Joseph and Stewart] were predicting war, especially when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. I couldn’t stand the thought that I would be back at Harvard while my battalion would be in combat.

So I extended for a year, on the possibility that there would be combat. In the course of that year, we were steaming toward the southeast corner of the Mediterranean, with the British and French and the Israelis working their way up the canal, not knowing whether we would be attacking or participating against Israel or Egypt. As the assistant operations officer in charge of training, I was asked to do a briefing for the flotilla of ships we had, five or six ships, on the merits of the crisis. I went to the ship’s library and looked up Britannica and several encyclopedias and I read Arthur Koestler’s book on the Middle East and a number of other books, and came to the startling conclusion that Nasser had had a perfect right to nationalize the canal, and that he was right in saying that the British had been exploiting Egypt with their operation of it all this time. And [it] appears that the British and French are waging aggression, our closest allies here, and Israel, too. I was at that time almost the only Jewish infantry officer on that ship. I was impressed that Eisenhower, who I had not voted for, was denouncing our closest allies as committing aggression. I was proud of that, as an American. I thought, that’s why I joined the Marine Corps, to fight against aggression.

The idea was not that we would be invading but that we might have to evacuate all the [American] citizens from one country or the other, from Egypt or Israel, and that it might have to be an opposed landing, because the country involved might want to keep American citizens there as kind of hostages, in effect. We were sent to Alexandria, and there was a question whether they would really let us have the evacuees. At one point before the people came aboard, my boss, an operations officer, Major See, said to me, “It may be that they’re going to intern us, that they will not allow us to take people off.” I said, “What do you mean, ‘intern us’?” He said, “Well, we’ll have to go ashore, and they’ll put us in an internment camp.” I said, “Are you kidding? This is a reinforced Marine battalion. Are you saying that I’m going to be interned by Egyptians?” I apologize here for American chauvinism. I said, “I’m not going to be interned,” and he looked at me very sternly and said, “That means you, Lieutenant Ellsberg. If we’re interned, you will be interned.” I thought to myself, “Well, f— that.” So I looked around the ship, found a rowboat that could be lowered by hand, I got maps, and I drew my .45 from the ship’s armory. In my mind I picked out a couple people to go with me in this boat. We were going to go, I figured, before we would let ourselves be interned.

My reason for telling that story is that that was very much in my mind when I was looking at command and control problems of nuclear weapons a few years later at the RAND Corporation. I got very interested in the question: could a highly conscientious, patriotic and motivated officer, who felt that the time had come to use a nuclear weapon, and the communications simply had broken down, launch a nuclear weapon on his own initiative? What I discovered in going all over the Pacific for the commander-in-chief Pacific was that in every case rules that were meant to keep a single individual from launching nuclear weapons were consciously being bypassed and overruled to make sure that if communications from Washington failed somehow, which happened part of every day in the Pacific, that they would be able to use nuclear weapons. And the supposed two-man rule, which was to keep any one individual ever from making that decision on his own, was universally ignored in the field. As I expected from my own experience—and this not by rogues or madmen, but by people who wanted to carry out their patriotic duty.

CAIRO REVIEW: Was it this individualism that led to your decision to leak the Pentagon Papers?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Interesting question, but I wouldn’t say that.

CAIRO REVIEW: How do you explain it?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I had been to Vietnam in ’61 and understood it to be a real losing situation. We had only advisors there then, less than a thousand. But I was convinced by the people there that President [Ngo Dinh] Diem was a total loser. That he had no popular base whatever. He was, after all, a Catholic president in a Buddhist country, which very few Americans noticed as anomalous. You know, how did that come about? Could it be as a result of foreign influence? Because normally Buddhists wouldn’t vote for a Catholic president in Vietnam. But in this case, they’d voted like 102 percent for him in the Saigon area. So there was no way that you could succeed in Vietnam unless with U.S. troops, and they wouldn’t succeed either, any more than the French had. That was the impression I got in ’61. But when I went into the government in ’64, having worked on nuclear war plans in between, President Johnson decided to go into Vietnam. It didn’t seem like a good idea to me. It seemed like a bad idea. But he was the president, and the point was to do as well as we could under the circumstances, see what we could do over there.

So I went over there with General [Edward] Lansdale in the hope that his insight into insurgency and counter-insurgency would allow us to make something of this very unpromising situation. What I learned in two years was that there was no progress being made, and there wasn’t any progress going to be made. That our prospects there were no better than they had been for the French or the Chinese, to go far back. My close Vietnamese friend, Tran Ngọc Châu, told me, “You know, you have to understand we are a country that thinks of ourselves as having defeated the Chinese, although it took us a thousand years.” That introduced me to the idea that they were on a different time scale here from what we were used to in the United States, and that we were not going to defeat these people. Period.

I came back with hopes of getting us out of Vietnam and working within the government and consulting with people like Vice President Humphrey and [Robert] McNamara, the secretary of defense, the number two man in the state department, and Walt Rostow in the White House, that there was not going to be any progress, that we were killing people to no end and losing people, and that we should stop doing that. But that was not the president’s choice. Then I was to participate in the Pentagon Papers study, as someone who had worked on escalation in Vietnam in ’64 and ’65. Eventually in ’67, back at the RAND Corporation, I read the entire study. I had the whole study I was given for research. I was the only person doing research for government on lessons of Vietnam and being paid to do that. The last thing I read was the earliest part of the study, ’45 to ’54, which I left to the end on the assumption that it was the least relevant for me. I realized from reading about that early period that it had been an American war from the earliest days, in that we were encouraging and supporting the French in pursuing their intent to re-conquer a former colony. And just as I discovered in ’56 that our allies were involved in fighting their way back into a former colony in Egypt, and that that was illegitimate by any American standards, I discovered that we had supported the French to the extent of 80 percent of their costs. By 1950, and for the next four years of the war, we were pressing the French to continue, lest we lose, lest an American president lose, Vietnam, the way Truman was accused of having ‘lost’ China. We had been founded in a national war of liberation from the world’s greatest empire. So the war to me had been illegitimate from a U.S. point of view not just from ’61, or ’65, or ’54, but from ’45 and ’46, from the very beginning. And that meant to me that every person killed in Vietnam in that war was a victim of unjustified homicide, illegitimate homicide, which I read as murder. And that was something that I should not be part of, even another week, and I should do what I could to prevent it, to stop it. Whereas for the two years previous to that, I had done everything I could inside the government to stop it, I’d stopped short of saying anything that showed the president to have lied, which I knew by that time and was rampant, or that we were acting illegitimately. I wanted us to stop as gracefully with as little loss of face as possible, as were a lot of other people interested in doing inside the government. Virtually everybody I knew knew that this was a hopeless, useless slaughter. But they weren’t doing anything that would risk their career or their promise to keep secrets or their loyalty to their president.

It could have been argued that that was disloyal to their oath to the Constitution. But none of us thought of that, including me. We thought of ourselves as working for the president. And just like for Panetta and Gates, we thought it’s for the president to decide whether we’re at war or not, which is, as I say, a violation of our oath, which is not to the president and it is not to secrecy, it is to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. And when the president is violating the Constitution, your oath should oblige you to reveal that and oppose that, but no one sees that. I can’t say that I saw it at that time. What I did see was that the war was going to go on, and that to trust the president was not just naïve, it was irresponsible. Because I had read a study now of four presidents in a row—and I knew that a fifth was doing the same—who had consistently made the wrong decision to escalate in Vietnam, to involve ourselves. They had acted—from a national point of view—stupidly, and lied about it every day of the week and every year. And that this wasn’t going to change unless Congress could be brought to use their power to cut off the funding for it. Ultimately, I realized Congress was not going to do that unless the public caused them to do it.

I went through two more stages. I decided to give the study to Congress in ’69, in the hopes that it would lead to hearings. But Senator [J. William] Fulbright, who could have put it out and promised me he would put it out, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, quickly concluded that he would let me put it out and take the risk of the certainty of going to prison. He had no risk of going to prison. But he did risk being denied classified material from the Pentagon and being denied his role of being in charge of foreign military aid. So rather than risk that loss of status and power, he didn’t put it out. After two years, I gave it to the New York Times. Then, when they were enjoined, for the first time in our history, in violation of the First Amendment, I gave it to seventeen other newspapers plus theWashington Post, nineteen in all. And the Supreme Court finally ruled that they were legally able to print this material, which had come to them even though it was classified, but I was prosecuted, facing 115 years in prison. That was no surprise to me because it took another year to realize, to discover by research, that there had after all never been another prosecution like that. And for the reason that it was unconstitutional to use the Espionage Act this way.

As I say, it’s still unconstitutional, properly interpreted. But Obama, the constitutional scholar, like John Yoo, is acting on the assumption that the president when acting as commander-in-chief in a time of emergency is constrained by nothing. Not the Constitution. Not treaties. Not laws. Not Congress. Not public opinion. Not allied opinion. Nothing. He is an absolute monarch.  That’s the explicit doctrine of John Yoo, or David Addington, [former Vice President Dick] Cheney’s counselor, or Cheney, or probably Bush. And I would say Obama has inherited that attitude.

CAIRO REVIEW: How do you respond to the argument that it is not the right of individuals who are not elected to make the decision to leak classified information that can change history?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: It certainly involved my breaking my promise to keep these secrets. I made that promise many times, as did Snowden and Manning. But there was a conflict between keeping that promise and, if we want to talk in legal terms, keeping my oath to support the Constitution. In all three cases the Constitution was being blatantly and clearly violated by the president in a consistent way.

In Vietnam the Pentagon Papers showed that President Johnson had violated Article 1, section 8, which assigns the responsibility to going to war to Congress, by lying Congress into issuing a blank check for war (as President Bush did in Iraq). The Iraq field reports showed Manning that President Obama, as had Bush, was violating constitutional, domestic and international laws against complicity in torture, including knowingly handing over prisoners to an ally that would torture them, and refusing to investigate or prosecute torture done either by Americans or allies: all in violation of his oath of office to faithfully execute the laws and to support the Constitution. Snowden found that the NSA, under Presidents Bush and Obama, was massively violating the Fourth Amendment by suspicionless surveillance with or without “general warrants,” themselves forbidden by the Fourth Amendment. And in each of these cases—as Manning, Snowden and I also became aware—the violations were being covered up.

The only way for the public or Congress or the courts to know that the violations were occurring was for someone who knew the truth to tell the truth to Congress at the risk and the almost certainty of going to prison for a long time, or in Snowden’s case, and mine, too, though I didn’t know it at the time, being assassinated. I think Snowden is taking a great risk of being assassinated. Not so much in Russia but in other places. And maybe in Russia, if [President Vladimir] Putin gets tired of him. So you have to be willing to take such risks. I do what I can to support such people because I think that without them, the chance that we will change our nuclear, climate or imperial policies is nil. Our chance to regain our democracy is nil without more Snowdens and Mannings.

CAIRO REVIEW: Is this latest escalation of violations of the Constitution because of 9/11?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: 9/11 happened unfortunately to coincide with the administration including Dick Cheney, who as vice president—who was almost an acting president—had quite explicitly been deprecating the restraints of the Constitution, going back thirty years to the Pentagon Papers specifically and Watergate. He did not think that President Nixon should have faced impeachment for breaking the law. He thought that Nixon had every right to do everything that he did against me and everybody else. And he thought that Reagan had every right in the Iran-Contra scandal to be violating the Constitution and the law by getting money to the Contras that Congress had voted down. In short, Cheney in his full patriotism and his conscience—which I’m sure is as great as anybody else’s, mine or anybody’s, but with a different content—felt we needed a different Constitution, one that gave the president full plenary prerogative powers, and 9/11 gave him the excuse to put that fully into effect with the public’s acceptance.

CAIRO REVIEW: A dozen years later, you’ve got prominent commentators, such as Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, writing that despite their respect for civil liberties, they are more worried about another 9/11 than the government’s abuse of privacy. How do you address their concern?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Rather easily. His point is, that if you can reduce the chance of another 9/11, that’s worth—you have to infer his value here—that’s worth giving up every wisp of privacy of every American in the country. Because that’s what we’re talking about. To endorse this particular program on the grounds that it reduces the chance of a 9/11 is to say there are no restraints left on the government in their efforts to reduce 9/11 and everything is permitted to the executive branch.

William Binney was one of the very top officials of NSA, who actually devised the program that they are using to collect all this data. He did so with privacy restraints on it that would lead to the encryption of data that they didn’t need; that is, private data that was encountered among Americans, that could only then be decrypted by court order, so that you would only collect and store unencrypted and share information that seemed to be necessary to track terrorists, people for whom you had a warrant to go after. He has pointed out that in devising this program, that the first thing you do is to go after the phone data, including content, of people who are suspected of being associated with a terrorist organization. He says then you take what they call a first hop, you look at all the phone messages to and from those people. You look at all the people now who are communicating with those suspects, who may be a very large number of people to start with. They have a list right now of over a thousand people who are serious suspects. In the second hop, you look at all the communications to and from those people. So now you enlarge that to all the people who have made a phone call or digital call or any connection with those people. Now you’ve got a very large set of people. He said you have now encompassed anybody that there is any realistic hope of finding any connections or associations [with] that will do you any good for intelligence purposes. He said to go to the third hop or fourth hop, as NSA actually does, gets you essentially to everybody. Meaning that you’re swamped in data, overtaxing your ability to analyze anyway, except in the most shallow machine forms, but he says that with no benefit to an actual intelligence investigation. It will not give you anybody who is associated with ‘those people’ that you started with or the terrorist organizations. He said that in his program initially the idea was there are all those people that you were gathering in that were American, but were not on the first or second hop, that that data would be discarded or encrypted, and not available to the FBI, the local police, anybody else or even to the intelligence community.

What he’s saying is that this dragnet association—contrary to Friedman’s intuition, which is after all based on no expertise whatsoever in the intelligence field—is vastly more information than has any conceivable relation to intelligence gathering. But it does give you the ability to look up anybody that you develop an interest in in terms of politics, dissent, blackmail capability, manipulation of any kind. It gives you a blackmail capability basically, a manipulative capability on everybody in the country. What Stasi would have dreamed of having but couldn’t possibly achieve. So, in short, the first hop already involves you in potential violations of the Fourth Amendment, but the idea that you have to go to this three-or-four-hop dragnet for national security purposes is not based on any professional intelligence judgment. And was for a long time simply denied by Clapper and the others that they were doing that. They weren’t saying, “Yes, we’re doing this because we have to.” They don’t have to. They were denying it because they don’t have to and it’s illegal and abusive.

CAIRO REVIEW: You mentioned the potential chilling effect on the media in terms of investigative reporting.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: No reporter now can offer any source assurance of anonymity.

CAIRO REVIEW: Is that necessary in the Internet era? With organizations like WikiLeaks?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: WikiLeaks would be totally out of business if it weren’t for the Freedom of the Press Foundation of which I’m a part—I’m a co-founder—which has channeled money to WikiLeaks, which had run totally out of money thanks to the illegal, or non-legal, extra-legal embargo that was instituted by Amazon, PayPal, Bank of America, everybody, refusing transactions that would support WikiLeaks. The Freedom of the Press Foundation makes it possible to contribute money to WikiLeaks and other websites that do investigative reporting, and will do that for WikiLeaks as long as it’s under this kind of embargo. What I’m saying is you don’t just have WikiLeaks. They’ve done everything they can to close down WikiLeaks. I should add, there are increasing indications that they’re preparing to go after journalists directly. Specifically, James Rosen of Fox News is named in an affidavit by an FBI guy who was looking for phone records, as having aided and abetted the criminal activity of Stephen Kim, who [allegedly] gave him information. That’s saying that the journalist who prints the information is aiding and abetting, conspiring in other words, with a criminal. That’s a pretty strong indication that they feel themselves legally able to go after the press directly. If there is a sealed indictment against Julian Assange, as is probably the case, that’s against a journalist, a journalistic enterprise. I think they’re hoping he will be perceived by other journalists as ‘not one of us,’ you know, not fully journalistic. Bill Keller of the New York Times said that he couldn’t recognize it as journalism, although he opposes prosecution of WikiLeaks. That’s an indictment of journalistic enterprise. If they can go after Assange, they can go after the New York Times.

CAIRO REVIEW: Is the press standing up to this?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: By the way, the figure I gave you earlier of 600 million dead from our plans in 1961; as far as I know, that remains Top Secret. That’s never been released. It’s never been declassified. I’ve said it publicly very often and they haven’t drawn attention to it by going after me on this. But under their criteria you, if you publish that, would come under the wording of the Espionage Act. Are you authorized to receive that? No. Do you have a clearance? No. Are you giving it to people without a clearance? Yes. Then you come under 18 U.S.C. 793 paragraph E for unauthorized possession of classified material. And so do your readers, amazingly enough! Sorry, feel free to take it out if you want. But there it is. Now they haven’t actually brought such a prosecution because in the past they would have expected a Supreme Court to have ruled that part of the law unconstitutional, and then they would have no law to quote. But now they’re edging up closely to doing that. I think they figure that with the current Supreme Court, they could get away with it.

CAIRO REVIEW: Is the American press doing enough?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: No, not at all. They’re only slowly beginning to wake up to the fact that Assange really is one of them in the eyes of the administration. I think the AP wiretaps woke them up considerably. Then the affidavit on Rosen has gotten their attention. Because if a reporter can be accused of aiding and abetting just by using a source, they’re obviously all under the gun. They haven’t actually prosecuted Rosen, but Risen has now been held by a circuit court that he has to testify or face jail on contempt as to who his source was. So it’s getting very close to home. I think what they should realize is that it is important to establish the legal principle that the use of the Espionage Act against an unauthorized disclosure for the purpose of informing the public and benefiting the country is not a crime. That’s to say that what I did might not be a crime if the jury agreed with me as to my motives. And to prosecute such things without any mention of motive or whistleblowing or intent to help the enemy, which is the current situation, that that’s unconstitutional. And to use the Espionage Act as an act against disclosures is unconstitutional. That would happen in Britain, but Britain doesn’t have a First Amendment. They didn’t have the revolution that we had.

CAIRO REVIEW: Have you been in contact with Snowden or Manning?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I tried to have contact with Manning but I was escorted out immediately when I said hello to him in court. They said you can’t talk to the defendant. Snowden I have been in indirect contact with.

CAIRO REVIEW: For what reason?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Oh, to tell him how much I admired him, what he was doing.

CAIRO REVIEW: Did he respond?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah.

CAIRO REVIEW: What did he say?

DANIEL ELLSBERG:  He said among other things that he and his partner—who he left behind in Hawaii, he wasn’t able to tell her anything what he was doing—had together gone to see The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers a year ago. He said, “That definitely hardened my resolution to do what I did.” And he had also been educated by Manning’s example. I think Manning had inspired him but also taught him that he had to be out of the country when he revealed this. Otherwise, unlike me, who was able to speak freely and raise funds for my trial throughout my indictment, which lasted almost two years, he would be in a cell like Manning, in isolation that whole time. We’d never see him again or hear from him. No reporter has talked to Manning since she was first arrested more than three years ago. She’s been incommunicado.

The twenty-first century marks the consolidation of a demographic shift that was set in motion by the industrial revolution and has not stopped gaining momentum since. Around the world, the supremacy of rural populations over urban ones has been reversed and cities have experienced accelerated growth. They have been through deep transformations that have left a legacy of fantastic possibilities and challenges.

According to the 2007 UN Habitat Global Report on Human Settlements, approximately one billion human beings live in slums—and the figure is growing. Likewise, in environmental terms, it is estimated that 75 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are linked to cities, as many sources including United Nation agencies and the Clinton Global Initiative point out.

Therefore, the search for solutions to enable lifestyles that can bring about a more harmonious relationship between our civilization’s social, economic and cultural demands and nature is ever more pressing. It is in the cities that decisive battles for the quality of life will be fought, and their outcomes will have a defining effect on the planet’s environment and on human relations.

There are those who portray an urban world in apocalyptic colors, who depict cities as hopeless places where one cannot breathe, move or live properly. I do not share these views. My professional experience has taught me that cities are not problems; they are solutions, and so I can face an urban world with optimism instead of fear.

My strongest hope resides in the speed of transformation. For instance, the demographic projections based on the high birth rates of twenty or thirty years ago have not been confirmed, allowing us a more encouraging view on the growth of cities for the next years and decades. This opens up an increasingly positive perspective of evolution in which a doomsday scenario is not the only alternative.

Renewable energy sources, automobiles emitting less pollution, new alternatives of public transportation and communication technologies that reduce the need for travel are preventing the chaos that was predicted for large urban centers. The evolution of technology and its democratization are presenting new perspectives for cities of all shapes and sizes.

In terms of physical configuration, cities of the future will not differ significantly from the ones of yesterday and today. What will differentiate the good city will be its quality of life. Socially just and environmentally sound cities—that is the quest.

By having to directly deal with economic and environmental issues, this quest can foster increasingly positive synergies between cities, regions and countries. As a consequence, it will motivate new planetary pacts focused on human promotion.

You may say I’m a dreamer. But, if I may quote John Lennon, I’m not the only one. The experience of Curitiba, a city where I had the honor of serving as mayor for three terms, among many other cities that have taken these issues to heart in the past decades, shows that this positive scenario is possible.

But for that, a certain sense of urgency is vital. The idea that action should only be taken after having all the answers and all the resources is a sure recipe for paralysis. The planning of a city is a process that allows for corrections, always, especially if you are open to feedback from the people involved.

The lack of resources cannot be an excuse not to act. Some resource-rich cities have seriously compromised their future with costly and equivocated interventions, such as the channeling of rivers and the building of extensive infrastructures for private transport.

To innovate is to start. Hence, it is necessary to begin. Imagine the ideal, but do what is possible today. Long-term planning is necessary, but we need urban policies that can generate change beginning now. The present belongs to us and it is our responsibility to open paths. In the roots of a big transformation there is a small transformation. The essential thing is to make it happen and then take the rest of the time enhancing it. Start creating from simple elements, easy to be implemented, and those will be the embryos of a more complex system in the future.

For instance, the Integrated Mass Transit System of Curitiba (which later became known as Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT), which started in 1974 with one twenty-kilometer axis of dedicated lanes transporting twenty-five thousand passengers per day, has evolved into a system that now transports daily over 2.2 million passengers in the capital and its metropolitan region with a single tariff in over eighty kilometers of dedicated lanes.

Those responsible for managing this urban world must have their eyes looking at the future, but their feet firmly on the ground at the present time. Those that only focus on the daily needs of the population will jeopardize the future of their city. On the other hand, those who think only about the future, disregarding the daily demands, will lose the essential support of their constituents and will not accomplish anything.

Urban Acupuncture

Many cities are losing the battle against degradation and violence exactly because they settled for the view that difficulties were too big and could only be dealt with after all planning instruments and financial resources were in place. Thinking this way only exacerbates the problems, which encourages citizens to believe that a solution is no longer possible.

A city is a collective dream. To build this dream is vital. Those responsible for the city must react. It is crucial that they project a more optimistic outcome for its future, by presenting successful scenarios that can be desired by the majority of the population to the point that citizens will commit to them. To build this dream, this scenario, is a process that acknowledges and welcomes the multiple visions that inhabitants, managers, planners, politicians, businesses and civil society have of their city, and demands the setting of co-responsibility equations to make it happen. The more generous this vision, the more grounded the equations, the more good practices will multiply and, in a domino effect, the more rapidly they will constitute a gain in quality of life and solidarity.

Once the priorities are set, we have to make it happen, and to make it happen quickly. Strategic punctual interventions can create a new energy and help the desired scenario to be consolidated. This is what I see as urban acupuncture: it revitalizes a sick or worn-out area and its surroundings through a simple touch at a key point. Just as in the medical approach, this intervention will trigger positive chain reactions, helping to heal and enhance the whole system.

What I see is that many cities today need urban acupuncture because they have neglected their cultural identities; others because they have neglected their relationship with the natural environment; others still have turned their backs on the wounds left by economic activities. These neglected areas, these scar marks, are precisely the target points for stimulation. The contemporary world demands increasingly fast solutions, and it is the local level that can provide the quickest responses. But it is necessary to have a strategic view, to plan to make it happen for the people and not for centralized and centralizing bureaucratic structures.

It is necessary then not to lose track of the essence of things, to discern within the amazing meanders of today’s available information what is fundamental and what is important, to distinguish the strategic from the daily demands. A clear perspective of future objectives is the best guide for present action. That is to say, to bind the present with a future idea. There are three imperative issues to be addressed when establishing the priorities of a city and considering its scenarios: mobility, sustainability and identity.

In terms of mobility, every city has to make the best out of each available mode of transportation. The secret to success resides in not having competing systems on the same space and using everything that the city has in the most effective way: buses, metro, cars, taxis, bikes, pedestrian areas. For instance, non-proprietary individual modes of transportation can be part of a transit network, such as Paris showed us with the Vélib’ bicycle system. The same concept could be used for compact, energy efficient cars.

It’s my belief that the future of mass transport is on the surface due to its greater flexibility, lower costs and shorter implementation time. Using a mix of features (such as dedicated lanes, on-level and prepaid boarding and high frequency), it is possible to achieve a performance similar to more expensive underground systems. A healthier city happens where the car is not the only comfortable option of transportation; where the energy of unnecessary displacements is saved; where walking along its streets, parks and avenues is encouraged.

Regarding sustainability, the main idea is to focus on what we know about the problem instead of what we don’t. We must remember to transfer this knowledge to our children, who will then teach their children. Simple things from the day-by-day routine of cities can be part of the solution: how each one can help by reducing the use of cars, separating garbage, living closer to work or bringing work closer to home, giving multiple functions during the twenty-four hours of the day to urban equipment, saving the maximum and wasting the minimum. In my last term in office as mayor we implemented a recycling program that was embraced by most of the households and increased exponentially the percentage of recycled garbage in Curitiba. Called “lixo que não é lixo” (garbage that is not garbage), it had school children as its main ambassadors. We developed an educational campaign with specially designed characters (a Familia Folhas, the Leafs Family) that would visit the schools and talk to children about recycling. In turn, the children would take that knowledge home and make sure their parents knew about it. It was an outstanding success.

Sustainability is an equation between what is saved and what is wasted. Therefore, if sustainability equals saving/wasting, when wasting is zero, sustainability tends to infinity. Waste is the most abundant source of energy.

Although the use of basic construction materials such as cement, metal, glass, wood and plastic in the most sustainable way possible can help improve the situation, as certifications such as the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program recommend, these advancements will be of little consequence if all that happens is that people move from one sustainable building to the next in an unsustainable urban environment.

Therefore, it is in the conception of cities that the largest and most significant contribution to a more sustainable urban environment can be made—again, provide the city with a structure of growth that does not segregate life and work. A sustainable city, for instance, cannot afford the luxury of leaving districts and streets with good infrastructure and services vacant. Its downtown area cannot remain idle during great portions of the day. It is necessary to fill it up with the functions that are missing.

Last but not least, there is the issue of identity. Identity is a major factor in the quality of life; it represents the synthesis of the relationship between the individual and his/her city. Identity, self-esteem, a feeling of belonging: all of these are closely connected to the points of reference people have about their own city.

Rivers, for instance, are important references. Therefore, instead of hiding them from view or burying them in concrete, cities should establish riverbanks as valuable territories. By respecting the natural drainage characteristics, cities can make sure the preserved areas provide necessary episodic flooding relief channels and still be used most of the time for recreation in an economically and environmentally friendly way. Parks can work within a similar logic, providing areas that people can relate to and interact with.

Historical districts are also major reference points, closely related to the city history since its inception. However, these areas often suffer a process of devaluation and degradation. Finding ways to keep these districts alive by connecting identity elements, recycling outdated uses and hosting a mix of functions is vital.

Cities are the refuge of solidarity. They can be the safeguards of the inhumane consequences of the globalization process; they can defend us from extraterritoriality and the killing of identity. The main component of a more humane city is diversity—of functions, of incomes, of ages, of uses, of typologies and so on. The greater the sociodiversity, the higher the quality of life.

The democratic city is the city without ghettos—be they healthy or poor; housing complexes segregated in remote peripheries or luxurious gated communities within cities. Democracy requires diversity, the coexistence of multiplicity that brings benefits to all. The democratic process requires that all strata of the population participate actively in the making of the city.

Soul of a City

The resources to implement change can be attained through co-responsibility equations: mechanisms to articulate efforts, potentials, and capabilities of the government, private and social sectors.

Nowadays, in the environmental area, mechanisms of compensation for carbon reduction have been created and are being implemented little by little. Let me recall one possible co-responsibility equation aimed at substantial gains for the environment, social development and quality of life. At the United Nations Conference on Global Solidarity: The Way to Peace and International Cooperation, in 2000, I proposed a UN Solidarity Bonus as a compensation mechanism. The country that accomplishes actions of environmental preservation/recuperation would earn an environmental bonus, which could be exchanged for a social bonus such as the relief of foreign debt or direct social investment—and preferably both.

The UN can be the coordinator of such compensation, setting up with the member states an equation that encompasses local governments and accredited NGOs that would share their social mobilization skills, in a virtuous effort of income generation and educational advancement throughout the world.

Especially in the developing world, there are large numbers of people—often unemployed—living in unhealthy, unsuitable areas and, with that, contributing to further deteriorating the environment. The favelas that emerge in large numbers often in fragile environmental areas, such as riverbeds and mountain slopes, are an increasingly more visible reality. The illegal occupation of seemingly vacant land grows, for housing or income-generation activities. These people could be mobilized to preserve their environmental heritage, being paid for it and receiving more access to information and education through the solidarity bonus. This mechanism creates a win-win situation: the less-developed countries would simultaneously diminish their financial debts and also their social debts.

The environmental agenda is a life contract that the present signs with the future. This apparently simple, even naïve mechanism, can have a huge impact in the reduction of poverty in cities all around the world. It is an equation that can rapidly alleviate the needs of the most needy. For the wealthier ones, this equation would ensure, in addition to the environmental benefits, an economic gain in the sense that it would lead in time to the growth of consumer markets in these countries, with the inclusion of large and new contingents. It also represents insurance for democracy and world peace. It is an example to illustrate how help to the environment and to a parcel of the population can be for the benefit of all.

Poverty, ignorance and environmental degradation, among others, are unacceptable debts and can no longer be postponed. And these debts cannot be paid without a global effort and strategy. If we want peace, we must create possibilities to disseminate more rapidly the wealth, knowledge and effective participation of all peoples in the designs of humankind. It cannot be just a ‘mitigating solidarity,’ incapable of generating lasting results. It is critical that we move toward the practice of ‘preventive solidarity,’ capable of generating better perspectives to all peoples. Our fiercest wars are happening in cities, in their marginalized peripheries, in the clash between wealthy and deprived ghettos; the heaviest environmental burdens are being generated there due to our lack of empathy for present and future generations. And this is exactly why it is in our cities where we can make the most progress toward a more peaceful and balanced planet.

A city is a structure of change, even more than a model of planning, than an instrument of economic policies, than a nucleus of social polarization. The soul of a city—the strength that makes it breathe, exist and progress—resides in each one of its citizens.

Jaime Lerner is an architect and urban planner. From 1994 to 2002, he was governor of the state of Paraná, in southern Brazil. He previously served three terms as mayor of Curitiba, Paraná’s capital. Among his many awards are the United Nations Environmental Award (1990), the Child and Peace Award from UNICEF (1996), and the World Technology Award for Transportation (2001).

“You go to the police station at four in the afternoon to declare that you exist…
You stand still in a street that devours you, just as you in turn devour your rage and defeat.
What is homeland? To hold onto your memory—that is homeland.”

—Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief

February 23, 2013, early morning: with no warning, armed state government officials descend on Badia East, a centrally located shack neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria, and smash rickety houses and businesses to the ground.

In the days that follow, the Lagos state commissioner for housing is adamant that the eviction and demolition were a public service. “It’s a regeneration of a slum,” the honorable Adedeji Olatubosun Jeje told the New York Times. “We gave enough notification. The government intends to develop 1,008 housing units. What we removed was just shanties. Nobody was even living in those shanties. Maybe we had a couple of squatters living there.”

The residents told a different story: people were sleeping when the bulldozers descended. Later, they discovered that the government had, in fact, informed the baale (the area’s traditional ruler), a man they seldom communicate with and who lives far across town in a different neighborhood. What’s more, they noted, they had been uprooted once before, in 1977, when the federal government built the nearby national theater and relocated families living on that site to Badia, which was under federal jurisdiction because a railroad line ran through the area.

The way the residents understood it, this transfer gave their new community implied federal recognition; the state could not simply come in and destroy their homes and livelihoods. “We were moved to this place by the federal government,” said Biola Ogunyemi, a local activist whose home escaped demolition—for now—as we walked through the wreckage of Badia. “Now they want to evict us again, without coming here to discuss with us. Lagos State has stolen our rights away from us.” A white pickup full of gun-toting state government forces cruised by as we spoke. The residents, who had done nothing to resist the storm troopers, grew quiet and waited for the commandos to depart. Our conversation picked back up as the truck pulled away, and one resident whispered the obvious: the sole purpose of the armed drive-by was intimidation.

As many as nine thousand people were pushed out of Badia East that morning, the Social and Economic Rights Action Center, a local non-governmental organization, has reported. Days after the eviction, a hardy few were scavenging scrap from the demolition site, seeking boards they could use to rebuild and rubber or metal they could resell. Months later, scores of families were still living nearby on makeshift platforms they had erected above a swamp or encamped on the open dirt with no shelter at all.

Perhaps the residents assumed that their thirty-plus years of occupancy gave them some sort of possession right. Perhaps they believed that the federal government would not betray them by allowing them to be pushed out a second time. Perhaps they simply couldn’t comprehend that their less-than-modest community could be of interest to anyone else. But they didn’t reckon with the new mega city plan championed by Lagos State Governor Babatunde Fashola, whose policies are altering the city in staggering style.

Fashola believes that shantytowns and street markets are a visual and moral blight, and his administration has been avidly getting rid of them. Badia, a sea of shacks in a bustling neighborhood not far from the port, is in the crosshairs because of its location. It sits in the shadow of a busy elevated highway interchange and directly across the street from the 7-Up bottling plant in adjacent Ijora. Under Fashola’s plan, Ijora will become the temporary terminus of one of the new light rail lines under construction in the city. All rail passengers coming from the east, along the Badagry express road and the major interchange called Mile 2, and heading to Lagos Island, Victoria Island or Lekki—the most popular areas of the city for big businesses—will have to disembark in Ijora. Badia, neglected for years, is suddenly desirable turf.

A Tattered Atlas
Now imagine a different scenario. Suppose, starting back in 1977, that the people of Badia, shocked by their forced relocation from the national theater site, had created a map of their new community as they developed it and determined to chronicle all the changes they experienced as the neighborhood moved forward. After three decades of ceaseless editing, this always-up-to-date map would be incredibly fragile—frayed from countless erasures and pencil marks and innumerable times being folded and unfolded and folded again. Despite its tenuous condition, this tattered atlas of the community would be invaluable.

It would document the neighborhood’s history: the structures, stores, pathways, alleys, houses, ditches, pilings; the local landmarks and how they changed over time; the names of the traditional healers and juju men and women’s circles and self-created community institutions; the locations of latrines and garbage heaps and self-built wooden bridges that snake across the mud flats, offering a sketch of the privately owned but communal infrastructure that has made life better in the community. And it is crucial that this document be ink-on-paper. Yes, there are currently a number of worthy digital projects, like Map Kibera, an online effort to chart the contours of Nairobi’s largest shantytown. And yes, digital maps don’t degrade. But they also don’t have the same local reach—because most people in Badia and Kibera and other shantytowns and street markets don’t have personal computers, smartphones or broadband connections stable enough to access and continually update an online map.

Suppose that, long before the state swooped in to raze their homes, the people of Badia had presented annual copies of this living map to the local and national governments, to the United Nations, to the World Bank (which has given the state government $85 million for drainage projects, including one in Badia East). Suppose they had given a copy to the baale, to the local politicians and all the political parties. Suppose they filed copies with the local land records office and with the court and gotten copies to all the newspapers in town. Suppose they had, in short, used the map as a tool to declare, “We exist—and we don’t have to go to the police station to declare it. We matter. We are important.” Would the government have found it quite so easy to evict them then?

Every squatter neighborhood needs to be its own troubadour, every street market its own cartographer, every informal community its own town crier. In this way, each can demonstrate its history, importance and value. Think of how powerful Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, whose tragic self-immolation ignited the Arab Spring, might have felt if he had been on a city map—literally, his location, products, accomplishments and value recorded on paper and filed with the government. He might not have felt the need to set himself ablaze in front of a government office to declare his existence. He might have found another route, in concert with his fellow vendors, to make his frustrations known.

This, of course, represents a seismic shift in strategy for squatters and street merchants. In the early days of their encroachments, squatters and street hawkers hid from the authorities, figuring that flying under the radar was their best guarantee of survival. If they successfully avoided detection, they felt, they could achieve a level of freedom and stability. But as cities pursue growth at all costs, spending wildly to attract international sporting events, or trying to build themselves up as business and tourist destinations by copying the planning techniques of the West, there is no longer any hiding.

Under his mega city plan, Governor Fashola wants to recast the massive Nigerian commercial metropolis to be more like Dubai. In pursuit of this goal, Fashola has criminalized street vending, sent squads of paramilitary police to smash down massive street markets, outlawed most okada, or motorcycle taxis (there were perhaps one million motorcycle taxis operating in Lagos and banning them trashed an industry that, in a very conservative estimate, generated a turnover in the neighborhood of $500 million a year—money that mostly circulated locally), and turned loose the bulldozers on shack communities. Even gigantic markets like Oshodi—which for decades sprawled over a highway interchange and became so massive that it was like an immovable chaotic commercial cosmos that took over buildings, sidewalks, streets, a train line, and even the highways—are at risk. Indeed, Fashola’s vengeful quasi-police force, the squadron called Kick Against Indiscipline, made quick work of Oshodi, destroying most of it in 2009, meeting almost no resistance.

In this kind of environment, spontaneous neighborhoods and markets can no longer imagine that they exist in a vacuum. Rather, they must declare their presence and take charge of their interaction with government and the rest of the city.

To Possess a Roof
Around the world, cities are drawing up master plans with little public input and then using those plans as policy weapons of mass destruction, rushing to demolish impoverished communities and destroy vital informal markets in the name of progress and civic betterment. The estimated 900 million squatters who live in self-built communities are generally not part of these plans. Nor are the majority of working people (1.8 billion people, 60 percent of the workers of the world) who labor off the books, in the informal markets or on the streets or who get paid with cash under the table.

Mumbai officials have pointed to Shanghai as their development model and have periodically razed shantytowns and pushed hawkers off the streets. São Paulo and Kigali have claimed Singapore as a model for development—and São Paulo recently pushed out the street merchants on Rua 25 de Marco—where trade was so brisk that, if it were a single corporation, its annual turnover would make it one of the five largest Brazilian-owned firms in the country. Rio de Janeiro has demolished favelas and street markets as it spruces up in anticipation of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games.

What these cities forget is that they have their own culture and development patterns. They don’t have to turn themselves into somewhere else. It hardly seems an accident that Dubai, Shanghai and Singapore, these purported models of urban excellence, are authoritarian cities where big government and big businesses run the streets. There is little citizen empowerment in these municipalities. Rather, they are notable for central control of development decisions, for devoting development efforts to attracting tourists rather than making life better for residents, and for enforcing strict laws regarding personal conduct.

What would happen if every one of the informal outposts and enterprises in these cities made their own equivalent of a map? If the vendors in São Paulo’s massive street markets had mapped their stalls and the global journeys merchants took to get their products and the distance their customers traveled to get to the market? If the okada drivers, rather than folding up shop and selling their bikes, had mapped all the trips that they made in every neighborhood of the city for a month, thus showing that they were a necessary and well-accepted provider of public transport? If all street hawkers recorded their itinerant journeys, showing where the best spots were to sell and how many miles they walked every day? If the metal scavengers and plastic recyclers mapped their routes and where they found the most valuable material? If the garbage dump scavengers mapped where the trucks came from at what times of day? If the communities threatened with demolition drew themselves into existence?

Every second, the urban population of the world edges upward by two people. That tiny increment, compounded over minutes, hours and days, makes an avalanche: cities around the globe are growing by 60 million people a year. Almost all of these new urban residents will be in the cities of the developing world. They will be the root of urban population growth and at least 50 percent of global economic growth. Simply put, there’s no government, no global or local non-governmental organization, no private developer, who can build enough housing for these new urban residents at a price they can afford.

The novelist Patrick Chamoiseau said it best: “To be is first and foremost to possess a roof.” For the 60 million new urban arrivals to exist—for them to be full-fledged individuals, workers, citizens, to raise families, to participate in social and civic life—they must have a roof, and to do this they must build for themselves, even if that means constructing their homes illegally. The world’s squatter communities are neighborhoods of strivers. Squatter communities may not yet have water, electricity, sanitation or sewers, but they have something else: incredible individual and collective energy and spirit. Despite the obvious degraded conditions, the residents live with great gusto. They buy food and household items and, when they can (more often than you might expect, actually), they party. Indeed, it’s fair to say that every one of the world’s shantytowns, no matter how small, has at least one grocery store, one restaurant and one bar.

The Umbrella Market
Major makers of consumer goods and beverages have recognized just how big the shantytown market can be. From laundry detergent and toothpaste to beer and soda, major multinationals have made it their business to get their products into the stalls, stores, saloons and salons of these self-made communities. Selling to firms in the shantytowns is no different than selling to any other businesses—though perhaps involves more cash-in-hand transactions than credit cards.

It’s the same with street markets. Major firms know that selling on the street represents a powerful tool. Procter & Gamble, a multi-billion dollar consumer goods company, has recognized that its continued global growth requires getting its products into street stalls and shantytown stores in the developing world—and it has adjusted its policies to include them. “No matter the legislation or fiscal structure of the country,” Paul Fox, P&G’s chief PR man, told me, “we want to make sure these stores are financially viable.” All told, these small but high frequency shops account for 20 percent of P&G’s business—making them the company’s largest, most important, and fastest growing market segment.

The mobile phone providers of Africa are one of the enduring examples of creative use of a street sales force. The press has been full of stories of the emergence of the mobile phone economy—a continent with just 16.5 million mobile subscribers in 2000 saw mobile accounts rocket to 650 million by 2011. This makes Africa a bigger mobile market than either the United States or the European Union—with very little analysis of why this leapfrog technology has grown so quickly.

What accounts for the success? Two things stand out: street selling and piracy.

Mobile phone providers in Africa were willing to tap into a ready-made, unlicensed sales force of street vendors. In much of the developing world, phones are pay-as-you-go—meaning that you have to buy airtime credit to make calls. Since most mobile phone providers on the continent don’t sell many phones or monthly contracts, those minutes are the key to their corporate profits. They sell the airtime through unlicensed sidewalk merchants and street hawkers. This roving sales force is so big and so profitable that the mobile phone companies consider it a legitimate distribution channel. They call it the umbrella market, in honor of the umbrellas that these roadside vendors use to shade themselves from the sun and rain.

Here’s how the system works: the mobile providers produce recharge cards. They sell them in bulk to distributors, who in turn sell to sub-distributors who sell to the roadside vendors. If the vendors buy in bulk, they can get a discount, and that discount is the source of their profit. “We don’t have a direct relationship with the gentleman or lady on the street,” said Akinwale Goodluck, who at the time we spoke was general manager for -regulatory issues for the South Africa-based mobile provider MTN, which has a 40 percent lock on the Nigerian market. Nonetheless, he told me, most mobile providers in Africa earn the bulk of their cash by selling recharge cards, and roadside sales account for the bulk of profit. “The umbrella market is a very, very important market now,” he said. “No serious operator can afford to ignore the umbrella people.”

The existence of the umbrella market ensures that people don’t have to go out of their way to buy airtime. There’s always someone selling recharge cards—whether on the corner, on the sidewalk or threading their way through traffic—and it’s this presence that has helped make mobile service convenient and popular. In this way, street hawkers function as a social good, and a key driver of profits for major corporations.

Pirates, too, had a hand in the spread of phones. Take Kenya. When I was first there a decade ago, the mobile phone revolution had not reached the masses. Entrepreneurs, businesspeople and politicians all had mobile phones. So did the creative class. But I was hanging out in Kibera, the largest mud hut neighborhood in the Kenyan capital, and few of the folks I knew there had mobiles. Fast-forward ten years and the situation is totally different. There are now 30 million mobile phones spread among 24 million Kenyans over the age of fifteen—an effective penetration rate of 125 percent. Most of my friends in Kibera now have mobiles. Even scavengers at Dandora, the city’s noxious garbage dump, have them.

What explains the ubiquity? Pirate manufacturers, most of them from China, drove the cost of a handset down. A decade back, a mobile phone was a luxury item out of the reach of the poor. Knockoffs, when they arrived, cut the price, and the sudden arrival of cheap phones helped mobile usage explode. In this way, piracy served the public good (and, not coincidentally, the corporate good). When I was in Guangzhou, China, I met dozens of merchants seeking to get their hands on pirated phones. They didn’t call them pirated or counterfeited or even fakes. To these entrepreneurs, the pirated phones were, in the words of Chief Arthur Okafor, who had a small (if you can call $40,000 in pirate purchases per trip to Guangzhou small) but highly profitable business smuggling pirated Nokias into Nigeria, “real copies.”

Indeed, Nokia, the largest-selling phone brand in Africa (the Finnish firm, whose mobile business was recently bought by Microsoft, still boasts around a 60 percent market share on the continent), has recognized that the way to win the African market is to outmaneuver the pirates. In March 2013, when I was last in Nigeria, I discovered that a new Nokia handset cost just $19. That’s less than half what I paid five years ago. When a phone is that cheap, there’s almost no reason for it to be pirated. Nokia has even learned a trick or two from the pirates. For instance, around 2009, some savvy pirate operators started producing phones that could handle two SIM cards simultaneously—two lines that you could switch between as if you were using call waiting. Now Nokia offers its own dual SIM phone for just $29. In effect, Nokia has copied the pirates. And the firm is continuing to ensure that prices will remain low as it rolls out smartphones for the African market. For example, the company recently released what you might call a semi-smartphone that retails for less than $100. With a hyper-long battery life—advertised as seventeen hours of talk time and forty-eight days of standby—the phone seems specially designed for the shantytowns and street markets of the world, areas that have limited access to electricity.

With the price of name-brand handsets falling, Kenya was able to take the controversial step of canceling service on pirated phones. Overnight on October 1, 2012, the Kenya Communications Commission deprived 1.9 million people of the use of their mobile phones. But the move went off without much protest because customers could now find legal replacements at an affordable price.

From Slum Dwellers to Policy Makers
Squatter communities and street markets need to publicize these positive facts. Mapping is only one idea. There are other possibilities. A street market could form a claims club, a kind of cooperative neighborhood registry in which each vendor would record where he did business and what kind of business he did; in this way establishing a non-binding, unofficial claim to his kiosk or place in the market. Claims clubs like these were common in the United States a century and a half ago, as homesteaders and squatters who led the western migration across the continent (and in the process boosted the country’s economy) looked for a way to stake their tenuous claim to the land where they had settled. A community could conduct a census, simply documenting how many people lived there. A market could start a newspaper or initiate a cooperative improvement association, taking tentative steps toward public betterment by, perhaps, paving a road or installing a few battery-powered streetlights.

Of course, simply making a map, establishing a local claims registry, convening a mini planning tribunal, or opening a local media outlet are not sufficient for people to gain a right to the city. These do-it-yourself strategies are simply a start. They’re no replacement for direct action. Squatters and street vendors will have to go public. They will have to show that, if government wants to push them out, they will not go gentle into the night. They will have to engage in a campaign to take control of their futures. This may take the form of organizing a large public pressure group to push for proper policy changes. It could also involve joining the system and even entering the political arena and running candidates for office. And, in a move that would be truly transformative and dynamic, squatters and street vendors could establish new civic ventures based on a three-way partnership between residents, vendors and their customers. These could offer strong, parallel, cooperative systems of governance that would ensure that squatter communities and street markets could never be considered unstable or dangerous or undemocratic or socially destructive.

On the other side, governments need to understand that development is not purely technocratic and that planning rules cannot be inflexible. Rather, politicians and policy makers have to learn to listen to the residents of the discredited neighborhoods called slums and the vast numbers who are derided as criminals because they do business on the street. They are the key component in any true form of urban development. With their own effort and ingenuity, these long-neglected citizens have started on the road toward equitable urban growth. They have created their neighborhoods and businesses out of nothing. They have democratized the spread of technology. They have built sustainable incomes and are increasingly creating steady jobs. We need to turn development upside down and give it back to the people who are creating the new urban world.

Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

—Jack Spicer, Psychoanalysis: An Elegy

Robert Neuwirth is the author of Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy and Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. His articles have appeared in the Nation, New York Times, Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, Scientific American, Forbes, Fortune, Metropolis and City Limits, among others. He is writing a book about self-governance and outlaw citizenship. On Twitter: @RobertNeuwirth.

The world has witnessed the rise of new economic powers in the past decade, such as the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and Mexico and Turkey, among others. These new economic powers, or NEPs, have begun to define the global economic game, having a profound impact on most markets, from capital and commodities to luxury goods. They have ensured their economic success by leveraging their resources to navigate the waters of an economic system in the midst of a deep transformation toward freer and larger trade, motivating common values and more global institutions. And they have done so hand in hand with a continuing or even accelerating process of urbanization, which to a large extent has emulated the growth path of Western cities.

While the world economic landscape seems to have changed given the new relevance of the NEPs’ urban centers, the rules defining the economic game remain the same. The parameters being used to guide and assess prosperity and progress are still gross domestic product (GDP) and consumption levels. This is reflected, for example, by Chinese President Hu Jintao’s commitment to quadruple GDP per capita by 2020 over its 2000 level, or in his pursuit to shift the Chinese economy into one centered further on consumption.

Yet cities in the NEPs are catching up within an economic system that is today showing signs of environmental, social and cultural crisis. These cities are mostly being developed to foster GDP growth and often seek the prestige of becoming global cities. There are three problems with this course of urban development.

Western cities may be setting the benchmark, but they themselves are facing sustainability challenges that are difficult to solve. The new global cities risk experiencing a lock-in effect caused by current decisions made on infrastructure, technology and product design. Given the large scale and high-speed urbanization process, it becomes easier to repeat ills already experienced in other cities. Finally, along the way in this path of urban development, many local traditions and values are being left behind.

Paradoxically, it is precisely these practices that are aligned with a more sustainable urban life, and indeed they are being adopted as new models for addressing sustainability challenges in the West.

Rethinking the notion of prosperity is crucial to ensuring a sustainable urbanizing process and economic development. Given their economic weight, growing cities in the NEPs can lead and drive change by advancing new sustainable models that simultaneously adopt local values, resources and traditions. To drive a more sustainable and prosperous urban life, it is essential to look at the lifestyles of urban dwellers and understand the impact of their consumption patterns.

Global Cities
Urbanization has a huge transformative effect. As Brian Roberts and Trevor Kanaley rightly synthesize in the study “Urbanization and Sustainability in Asia” (Asian Development Bank, 2006), urbanization redefines lifestyles, employment, welfare, social structures and institutions as well as power relationships in households, organizations and government. Nowadays, the world is witnessing an urban shift of multiple facets. The world’s urban population is now greater than its rural population. While this is already telling, one must look to other trends for a comprehensive picture of the global urban landscape. The direction and shape of this transformation bears great relevance to envisioning sustainable approaches to urban life. Let us look at the main trends and projections.

First, the growing power of urbanization has created a network of global cities that in many fields replaces the traditional system of nation states. Illustrating this, the report “Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities” (McKinsey Global Institute, 2011) recommends that foreign services align their trade-related diplomatic efforts with the twenty-first century’s urban reality.

Second, cities are increasingly the basis of economic growth. According to the McKinsey report, 38 percent of the world’s population is hosted in large cities, and these cities generate 72 percent of global GDP. Projections run by the McKinsey Global Institute Cityscope database show that the 2,000 cities being monitored will contribute 75 percent of global growth by 2025.

Third, as urbanization increases dramatically in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, and as cities continue to drive economic growth, the center of gravity of the global economy has shifted to these regions, especially to those in the East. This shift became especially evident during 2007-2010. The contribution to global GDP by cities in the NEPs rose, while that by large cities in the developed countries fell.

Fourth, economic growth will largely be driven by middleweight cities ranging from one to 10 million residents. Only twenty of the 440 emerging cities monitored by the McKinsey database have populations above 10 million; these are considered megacities. While the McKinsey Global Institute explains that economic growth will be primarily in the hands of mid-size cities, this group comprises a set of cities featuring diverse population sizes. Therefore, urban development strategies will have diverse landscapes to work upon.

Finally, these fast-growing cities will host a critical mass of new consumers. As cities develop and become the centers of economic growth, waves of new consumers arise. There has been a substantial increase in the rate of growth of consuming classes (people earning a disposable income above $10 at purchasing power parity per day); between 1970 and 1990, the increase was 1.7 percent per year, 3.5 percent between 1990 and 2012 and it is expected to grow at 3.7 percent per year till 2025, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.

Supply-Side Bias
The world has evolved from an approach of pollution control in the 1970s and 1980s to one of pollution prevention in the 1990s. The past decade saw an increased involvement of the private sector through corporate commitment to lessen energy and water consumption. Today, public authorities and private firms are approaching sustainability considerations and management as a source of opportunity rather than only for risk minimization. Current leaders in corporate social responsibility are moving toward net positive programs that aim to move beyond the concept of ‘less bad.’ A noteworthy example of this is Kingfisher Plc, a European home improvement retailer, which is working towards a reforestation rate greater than the deforestation caused by the business.

These public and private efforts are needed and should be further developed, but they should work in conjunction with a focus on the demand side. Up to now, the type of initiatives advanced by cities as well as corporations and most non-governmental organizations (NGOs) reflect a bias toward tackling sustainability from the supply side.

Despite the fact that the concept of sustainable consumption has been around for some time, the initiatives meant to promote it have largely aimed to make goods and services more environmentally and socially friendly rather than attempting to tackle dysfunctional consumption patterns. An example of this is the Puma Eco-box, a box/bag that reduces cardboard use by 65 percent, among other benefits. This is a case of higher efficiency in the supply chain and an appropriate advance in the design phase, yet such a change does not necessarily affect the consumption scale and pattern. Joel Makower, author and chairman of GreenBiz Group, describes such efforts as “smarter consumption” rather than sustainable consumption.

Many initiatives are still focused on how to make the products we consume less bad, but fall short in fostering sustainability through an integral and systemically conceived strategy. To do so would require incorporating a sophisticated metric analysis of the urban dweller’s aspirations and consuming behavior. Not doing so results in inefficiencies, due to the investment required to green a supply chain that serves a demand not necessarily or completely aligned with the goals of sustainability.

A World of Trash
Consumers have a huge impact on sustainability, as personal choices constitute the key basis of markets, as well as social and political forces. Addressing consumption levels and patterns becomes crucial for ensuring economically, socially and environmentally sustainable urbanization.

As the population grows, urbanization advances and the middle class rises, consumption increases and the demand for natural resources keeps accruing. The higher levels of consumption call for a greater absorption of fossil fuels, metals, minerals, trees, land for crops and cattle, and so on. In the report “The New Frontier in Sustainability” (Business for Social Responsibility, 2010), Linda Hwang underlines that population growth, increasing per capita consumption and technological capacity have led to ever greater levels of production and consumption, threatening the quality of the ecosystem services supporting our existence.

A 2008 study from Goldman, Sachs and Company titled “The Expanding Middle: The Exploding World Middle Class and Falling Global Inequality” reminds us that preceding periods of massive middle class expansion (for example, in the late nineteenth century in Europe and the United States) reflected large progress, though it came coupled with political, social and environmental change.

It is important to highlight two things from this report. First, when comparing the resource constraints then with those being felt today (related to water, food and fuel, for example), this study concludes that the situation is arguably more tightly controlled nowadays. Second, the report doesn’t specify what type of progress happened in the past, but it could be said it refers to economic progress and standard of life measured by life expectancy for example, which is actually different from measuring the quality of life. The latter would incorporate the social dimension at least. Moreover, the resulting environmental degradation returns in the form of risks to economic activity and threats to human wellbeing.

Besides the pressure in resource demand, the increase in consumption has a direct correlation with increase in waste generation. As disposable income increases in tandem with the growth of cities and the rise of middle classes, consumption of goods and services expands, stimulating greater generation of waste. In June 2012, a “rubbish map” published by the Economist showed that 1.3 billion tons of annual municipal solid waste is produced globally by cities, an average of 1.2 kilograms per city dweller per day; by 2025, estimates project a rise to 2.2 billion tons, or 1.4 kilograms per person. About half of the current waste is generated by the member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the United States continues to lead the ranking in solid waste output per capita. Brazil, China, India and Mexico are among the top ten solid waste-generating countries, in great part due to the size of their urban populations, but also because as income per capita rose, their city dwellers adopted lifestyles based on higher consumption levels.

China has surpassed the United States in the national aggregate level of solid waste generation. As an illustrative comparison, the Economist chart projected that China’s urban population will generate 1.4 billion tons of waste in 2025, representing an increase from the 520 million tons today, while United States waste generation will go from 620 million tons today to 700 million tons in 2025.

The waste problem does not end there; one must also consider the types of waste being produced. Urbanization and affluence promote an increase in inorganic material disposed, such as plastics and metals. What is more, as urbanization advances and the amount of waste increases, the space for landfills becomes scarcer. This constriction, coupled with the pressures of the housing demand, challenges the social dimension of sustainability and heightens the environmental impact of urbanization, especially since waste needs to be transported, at times internationally.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of the United Nations Environment Programme links the destruction of ecosystem services with economic growth, demographic changes and individual choices. These three factors present the qualitative link between consumption and socio-environmental impact, whereby wellbeing is often and largely associated with material possession. As Manish Bapna, managing director of the World Resources Institute put it in a 2011 blog post titled “Seven Billion: The Real Population Scare is Not What You Think,” the resource-intensive lifestyles characterizing the high and middle classes represent much more damage to the planet’s capacity to absorb human impact than the booming birth rate in low-income countries. Decoupling wellbeing and prosperity from material possession and natural resource use must be a guiding principle to advance sustainable urban and economic development.

What is the impact of consumption on urban sustainability at the level of the individual? In a 2008 report called “Sustainable Consumption: Facts and Trends from a Business Perspective,” the World Business Council for Sustainable Development found that although consumers are increasingly aware of the implications of their choices, many have not supplemented efforts in the public and private sector with shifts in their own lifestyle and purchasing decisions. This report cites a survey of consumers run by McKinsey in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 2008.

The surveys revealed that environmental and social issues represented a concern for 53 percent of the interviewees, and yet they were not willing to act accordingly at the shops. Another finding was that 13 percent would not mind paying more to support efforts in tackling social and environmental issues, but were not currently doing so. In other words, despite the greater awareness and concern by consumers, they seem to expect that the change should and will come from the actions of businesses and governments. Driven by their own need for profit and GDP growth, firms and public authorities respond by affecting the supply side to satisfy demands for consumption as usual. This reduces the possible impact of sustainability actions. Addressing the demand side should be an integral component of sustainability efforts.

On Your Bike
Tackling urban sustainability requires big investments, and addressing the demand side calls for new policy approaches. Fortunately, both provide opportunities for ensuring the wellbeing of urban dwellers while fostering a healthier economic development.

First, there are positive changes occurring in consumer values. In her 2011 book Putting the Luxe Back in Luxury: How New Consumer Values are Redefining the Way We Market Luxury, Pamela Danziger explains that affluent consumers’ values are moving away from indulgence, reflecting a search to transcend the ambition for getting more ‘stuff.’ This trend is strengthened by the appearance of Generation Y (born late 1970s-2000s) as a demand segment, an important factor supporting the consumption preferences shift. This younger generation is expressing concern for unethical production and the environmental impact of business activities.

Second, the cities that are to host the new classes of consumers are still in the beginning stages of urbanization, which affords opportunities to adjust the course of urban development. This is critical in terms of environmental impact as well as cost efficiency and savings.

Third, enhancing cleaner production and more sustainable consumption patterns opens up areas for innovation in business models, thus strengthening the acumen and identity of cities. These new areas of dynamic economic activity may also align to a more sustainable urban development, even while generating high-productivity employment.

Fourth, the tools are at the tips of our fingers. There are various habits and traditions in the high-speed urbanizing cities which are more socially and environmentally friendly and are being seen by Western cities as new models to tackle sustainability challenges. A good example is the case of the beauty products company Lush and their non-packaged goods such as shampoo, or the growing number of farmer’s markets in New York City. These are targeting the high-middle income segment with processes and business models that are still alive and culturally embedded in other places.

According to the Future Leaders team of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a great part of India still buys small, unpackaged goods from low-cost, family-run shops. While some of these shops could certainly improve their resource intake, the habit of consumers aligns with a more sustainable way of consuming daily goods (that is, refilling, buying in local shops, in bulk and/or unpackaged). Currently, raising income per capita risks driving habits toward more resource-intense lifestyles including the purchase of plastic soft drink bottles instead of returnable glass bottles, and the use of automobiles rather than public transport or bicycles. But policies, regulation and business practices (such as branding and marketing) could work to promote lifestyles that balance higher standards of wellbeing with more sustainable habits. The case of Beijing is illustrative: once a cycling paradise, it is now epitomized by polluted air and traffic jams, only to start promoting bike riding once again.

These opportunities provide ground for action in fast-growing cities toward a more sustainable urban economic development and to tap into the benefits of adopting early changes. The need for such an approach is an urgent one.

Local and national authorities, as well as not-for-profit organizations and private companies, could pursue action in three broad ways: 1) better assessing lifestyles and demand of citizens/customers, 2) supporting smarter consumption through less resource-intensive production, and 3) promoting more sustainable urban lifestyles.

These lines of action need to be pursued together to forge a well-intentioned circle and ensure mutual reinforcement. The aim is to stimulate a creative process in policy making for a new urban lifestyle based on principles such as the importance of systems thinking.

What Citizens Desire
As cities grow, they do so in tandem with changes in population, neighborhoods and lifestyles. Developing, updating and monitoring the necessary methods and parameters to assess these changes are critical for ensuring appropriate policy changes. In fast-growing cities, regulation might be missing or falling behind real needs of residents. The Citizens Housing and Planning Council of New York (CHPC) has put forward an initiative that attempts to overcome this problem in the housing sector. The relevance of the case is compounded by the fact that housing demand will be one of the most pressing issues in quickly urbanizing areas, where buildings account for the largest shares of greenhouse gas emissions.

While lifestyles continue to change, housing standards in New York City have remained largely untouched. Existing regulations promote the construction of larger units rather than smaller ones, and penalize residential density. CHPC’s research reveals that only 18 percent of the city’s housing units host traditional nuclear families (parents and two kids), while 33 percent are occupied by individuals living alone, 23 percent share the home (6 percent of these do so with unrelated flatmates), 15 percent serve couples with no children and 10 percent belong to single parents.

Acknowledging these changes in the city’s housing patterns, in 2007 CHPC created the Making Room initiative. It aims mainly to expand housing options by improving demographic research, heightening the role of design and promoting pragmatic policy in order to serve unmet or underserved demand. Applying such an approach to New York’s reality showed that there was a need for small, efficient studios designed for single-person households, legal shared housing options for unrelated adults, and accessory units to make a single family home more flexible for extended families or additional renters. What is more, a comprehensive analysis of the city population, housing stock and regulation proved that to provide these much-needed options, improving existing housing stock (rather than new construction) would deliver greater benefits.

While the same approach might deliver different results when applied to different cities, it is instructive to recall that housing standards and design are influenced by society’s values, and that demand for sharing homes is an increasing need in many cities and an opportunity to raise efficiency in the use of resources such as land, energy and water.

Once the demand dynamic has been understood, design should follow as a critical element to ensure people find the needed and desired options to consume goods and services that require less natural and material resources and generate less waste.

Designing Lifestyles
Mainstreaming sustainability at the design phase is overwhelmingly important and builds to a large extent on understanding current lifestyle patterns. As Hwang highlights, the design stage is a point at which critical decisions are made concerning a wide range of human and material resource flows. This is true for public as well as private goods and services.

Moreover, design is largely judged by its success in meeting a need, therefore, the concept of sustainability should be embedded as a need in the design process, rather than an ad hoc feature. By making production and distribution processes more sustainable, consumers will have more options for smart choices. Succeeding in providing these smarter options should reflect the incorporation of systems thinking and a thorough understanding of the target population in the design phase, rather than solely the introduction of new technology. An illustrative example of smarter consumption of public goods and services is the case of the Parisian bicycle-sharing system Vélib’.

Promoting public transport as a first choice is critical in advancing more sustainable cities, as well as ensuring that public goods and services are produced in a cleaner way. The Vélib’ system succeeded in becoming part of the city’s identity largely because it was advanced in tandem with complementary efforts directed at the boundary of the transport system (reducing traffic congestion, air and sound pollution, revitalization of public spaces). An example of this is that together with expanding the network of pedestrian priority-shared streets, the city promoted Quartier Verts (green neighborhoods). These simultaneous efforts at the transport and neighborhood level align with the development of a more locally based economy and shopping patterns (buying in small local pastry shops rather than at big supermarkets). Not least important is the fact that the Vélib’ bikes are largely recyclable and JC Decaux, the developer of the bikes, has set up a recycling network for worn bike tires, being the first one of its kind in France. This shows how designing for smarter consumption opens up opportunities for new businesses within a more sustainable urban economy. Vélib’ should be a model for transport systems and urban development in urbanizing cities to gradually turn to a greener urban growth model.

The transport sector carries greater relevance for the growing cities in the NEPs, where the auto market is showing an exponential growth. Research from the Goldman Sachs Economics, Commodities and Strategy Team in 2010 estimated that world auto sales could grow up to 104 million units per year by 2020―from 70 million in 2010―and that half of the sales by then will represent purchases from consumers in BRICS nations. What is more, the design of the transport system has huge impact on the lifestyles urban dwellers will carry. As many cities in the United States showcase, designing the urban context with cars in mind implies wide and deep impact on the environment and social dynamics through roads, parking spaces, pollution, and energy requirements. Once the model based on car use is implemented, it becomes difficult to reverse the negative effects.

Businesses have made advances in the private goods supply chain’s energy and cost efficiency, as well as improving reporting and other sustainability management areas. These efforts contribute to reductions in the environmental and social impact and can help raise the global prestige and reputation of the city. To enhance the benefits from actions pursuing more sustainable business models, policy making in the NEPs should look at identifying the income thresholds at which the different products’ adoption paths start, and varying adoption curves reflecting the relation between the local consumer and product or service. The sectors at which the adoption curve kicks off earlier could be prioritized for policy actions on the supply and demand side, ensuring positive feedback on public and private efforts.

Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neill highlighted in a 2008 Global Economic Paper for the firm that consumer durables hold their penetration sweet spots on the low-to-middle income threshold and beyond, but within the middle class income. As a result, in the NEPs growing cities there will be an accelerating demand for washing machines, TVs, refrigerators, radios, DVD players, autos and others. Consumers in the BRICS countries for example still allocate a relatively low share of their expenditure to durables; therefore, now may be a good time to set up policies to boost the greening of these sectors, an example of which is Japan’s Top Runner program for energy efficiency in appliances.

While mainstreaming sustainability and heightening the role of design to improve production is needed to decouple wellbeing from material consumption, it does not affect the scale of consumption. There is a need not just to make products greener, but to redefine consumption through favoring services over material products, de-materializing, and responding to needs rather than increasing sales. Efforts to heighten consumer engagement in better use and end-of-use habits should be integrated, especially to extend the life cycle of goods and avoid waste generation. The notion is to focus on the quality of experiences, rather than simply providing more ‘stuff.’ In getting there, it is important to understand and shape more sustainable urban lifestyles.

Chasing the Dream
The economic model on which a city bases its development influences in multiple ways individual consumption choices of public and private goods and services. Current trends show that those choices are creating constraints on the environmental and social capacity to bear them. Therefore, policies guiding more sustainable urban lifestyles are necessary and strategic to cities undergoing the initial or middle phases of the urbanization process.

It is encouraging to know that while people tend to consume more when their income rises, concerns for issues like fair trade and environmental degradation appear to become stronger too. Furthermore, there are already initiatives in place to address the unsustainable consumption pattern through redefining prosperity. Among these is Bhutan’s concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH), coined in 1972 and based on four pillars: economy, environment, community and personal wellbeing. Other countries can incorporate the GNH concept as the philosophy guiding urban development.

The project China Dream advanced by the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration for Clean Energy (JUCCCE) represents a big and tangible step arising from the private and not-for-profit sector. Based in Shanghai, JUCCCE has set actions to promote sustainable consumption besides its two programs on sustainable urbanization and sustainable industry. As Randall Krantz summarizes in his blog Bhutan Chronicles, China Dream addresses the challenges found in the questions: Why should Chinese citizens aspire to an unsustainable American Dream, one built on a model of consumption and growth? Would it not be more appropriate to have aspirations based on local culture and values? The China Dream project has two specific objectives: to shape social norms by creating and seeding a visual lexicon for the new China Dream, and to guide consumer behavior by introducing local policies. The approach involves reaching out to stakeholders from green practitioners to ad agencies in a multi-channel process involving government, media, brands, academic institutions and more. Due to the success and great outreach, the initiative and methodology have now expanded to the United Kingdom with the launch of the UK Dream at the beginning of 2013.

Initiatives such as China Dream go straight to the heart of prosperity aspirations, holding enormous power for long-term deep impact in aligning prosperity, wellbeing and urban development. Krantz also explains that shaping culture and aspirations is substantially more difficult than greening individual products, yet it promises greater margin for action by those that can influence and shape them. In addition, it allows aligning supply and demand toward a more sustainable economic dynamic. The lack of effective demand for more environmentally friendly products and services is often seen by the private sector as a barrier to hold bolder initiatives toward building sustainable business models. Aligning consumption choices with sustainability efforts put forward by city policy makers is crucial to overcoming the barrier in the private sector.

Rethinking Economic Growth
Urban development is a dynamic process that occurs in constant dialogue with the economic growth model followed and the lifestyle urban dwellers pursue. Any action to conduct a more sustainable urban economic and infrastructure development should envision the decoupling of wellbeing from natural and material resource intake.

Addressing this point is a strategic necessity for those cities undergoing high-speed urbanization. To make their current successes endure for generations to come, sustainability must be mainstreamed in the urban as well as economic development models. To accomplish this, the lifestyles of citizens in general and their consumption patterns in particular should be studied in order to guide proper design and ultimately tackled by modifying lifestyle aspirations.

Business strategies and government measures have a great stake in advancing actions to promote innovative business models based on less resource-intense production and more sustainable urban lifestyles that support responsible consumption. This is a pressing side of urban economic development that while often ignored is essential to rethinking the economic growth and prosperity of cities.

Christian Déséglise is a managing director at HSBC Global Asset Management. He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University, and the co-founder and co-director of the university’s BRICLab, a forum on Brazil, Russia, India and China. He is the author of Le Défi des Pays Émergents, une Chance pour la France.

Delfina Lopez Freijido is a consultant and policy analyst specializing in sustainable economic and urban development. She is a Ginsberg Fellow at the Citizens Housing and Planning Council in New York City, conducting research, analysis and stakeholder engagement for a green building initiative.

The city of the developing world will be the defining feature of global demography in the twenty-first century. This fact is creating new and uncomfortable challenges for which conventional wisdom about urban planning and management is largely irrelevant. Chief among these challenges is the phenomenon of informal housing systems whose scale, complexity, and resilience to formal means of control bedevil countries in Africa, South America and most of Asia.

Also called extralegal, spontaneous or non-authorized housing, informal urban development can be narrowly defined as processes that contravene urban land use plans, subdivision regulations and/or building permit regimes. Much is written about the phenomenon: analytical, prescriptive, and even confused and pejorative—including unhelpful generalizations that equate the dynamic of informal urban development with the creation of slums, shantytowns and bidonvilles, with their deplorable and even inhuman conditions. As is often the case, trying to make glib global generalizations is counterproductive, and the reality varies dramatically from region to region and country to country. The discussion—as well as attempted solutions—is most extensive in the South Asian, Southeast Asian and South American contexts.

In Arab countries, where the phenomenon is usually called munatiq ‘ashwa’ia, or random areas (or, in Syria, manatiq mukhalifa, illegal areas), such urban processes have become, in the last forty or fifty years, an important if unwelcome component of many Arab cities. Looking at the nature of urban informality in these cities and the largely unsuccessful struggles to suppress or accommodate it illuminate much about the contradictions inherent in applying Western-inspired models of planning, financing and regulation by Arab governments and their supporting elites. It also helps expose the paradox of why the pervasive efforts of the international development establishment to offer more nuanced and inclusive approaches toward informal urban development have had so little effect, in spite of its huge scale, popularity and obvious advantages as a generator of durable, affordable housing solutions. A glance at Egyptian cities where these contradictions are most evident, as well as in urban areas of Syria, Yemen, Jordan and Tunisia, can yield insights that go beyond technical analysis and implicate as obstacles the stubbornly high modernist approaches of Arab regimes in their search for political legitimacy.

Cairo to Casablanca and Beyond

In some of the larger urban agglomerations in non oil-dependent Arab countries, informal urban development now accommodates at least half the resident population, and in many others it represents a sizable minority of the total population. Informal settlements, which have existed at least since the 1970s, have tended to establish themselves on the urban fringes or around existing satellite towns and villages, and these have been absorbing both rural migrants and lower-income households decamping from poor conditions in the city centers. Most informal areas have been provided with basic infrastructure and services, although coverage and standards are everywhere much lower than in the established formal parts of cities. One important feature is the progressive development of these areas over time, with residential densities continuing to increase as existing plots of land are further subdivided and as additional floors are added to buildings.

Solid information about the extent and characteristics of informal urban development is lacking in most cities, and even definitions are much debated. Curiously, most of what is known about the phenomenon comes not from municipal or national authorities but from small studies carried out by foreign development agencies and institutes. The former seem for the most part to either ignore the phenomenon or try, usually unsuccessfully, to stop it, without any attempts to assess the scope or understand the dynamics. In any event, in no Arab country is there an exhaustive body of knowledge about informal housing and informal settlements. What is known remains very much partial and piecemeal.

Egypt seems by far to have the most extensive informal urban development of any Arab country, and it is increasing at a very rapid rate. In mapping studies carried out first for Hernando De Soto’s Institute for Liberty and Democracy in 2000 and subsequently for the World Bank in 2008, it was found that informal development, starting in 1960, had at the time of the Census of 2006 accounted for roughly a third of the built-up area and, remarkably, had become the residence of over 62 percent of Greater Cairo’s population. And, even more remarkably, of the additions to the agglomeration’s population between 1996 and 2006, 78 percent was absorbed into these areas, both in existing ‘ashwa’iat and in the informal peri-urban fringes of Giza and Qaliubia governorates. In contrast, formal Cairo absorbed less than just 7 percent of this growth, and the government’s much-hyped new towns in the deserts around Greater Cairo only accounted for 15 percent. By 2011 it was estimated that of Greater Cairo’s 18 million inhabitants, some 12 million or almost 67 percent were to be found in informal areas.

Furthermore, since the January 2011 uprising, informal building all over the metropolis has exploded since any government control has virtually disappeared. Anecdotal information points to a two to threefold increase in informal construction as compared to pre-2011 rates.

Much less is known about the extent of informality in other Egyptian towns, although it would be safe to say that informal areas accommodate in excess of 40 percent of inhabitants in the second city of Alexandria (total population 4.5 million) and probably a higher proportion in the numerous secondary towns in the Delta and Upper Egypt. Practically all such informal development occurs on agricultural land sold by the original owners. Only in the towns of the Suez Canal Zone, where there is ample fringe government land upon which many social and cooperative housing schemes have been built, is the informal urban phenomenon less, probably accommodating just 25 percent of the residential population.

In Syria informal urban development is very common, although the scale is not quite as prevalent as in Egypt. According to a 2008 study carried out by the German Technical Cooperation agency in Aleppo, of a total metropolitan population of 2.4 million inhabitants in 2004, over one million or 40 percent of the population resided in informally developed settlements, mainly on the southern and northern fringes. And it was estimated that the population of these areas was increasing at 4 percent per annum, compared to a citywide average of 2.9 percent. In Greater Damascus, with an estimated population of 4.1 million in 2005, informal development―mainly located in the many small municipalities of the Governorate of Rif Damascus that surrounds the city proper―probably already made up at least 30 percent of the total metropolitan population, and almost all additions to this population were occurring in these areas. Studies carried out by the Institut Français du Proche Orient and by World Bank consultants have shown the many means that informal land subdividers and individual builders used to circumvent the regulations of municipal agencies, in spite of the otherwise strict control that the Syrian regime imposes on society.

In the main cities of Yemen, informal urban development is not, strictly speaking, particularly prevalent, simply because there are few urban laws that are applied. On the books building licenses are required, but these simply involve paying a small fee and there are no subdivision regulations. The only planning mechanisms are the Detailed Neighborhood Plans drawn up in cookie-cutter fashion in central government offices. These offices are supposed to specify land uses and street alignments, but their main impact is to raise land prices. A study carried out in Sanaa by World Bank consultants in 2007 identified thirty-three fringe areas of the city that were the most deprived but also rapidly developing neighborhoods planned mainly by poor families. These areas alone contained roughly 21 percent of the then-metropolitan population of 2.4 million persons. However, in Yemen’s third city of Al-Hodeidah, where all fringe areas are state-controlled desert lands, a World Bank study in 2008 inventoried twenty-three very poor and deprived squatter areas and pockets that, together, already accounted for over 50 percent of the city’s 900,000 inhabitants. These informal settlements, which by any definition could be called shantytowns, are an exception to the norm in Arab cities.

It was reported in a 2005 World Bank document that 23 percent of urban dwellings in Morocco were informally constructed. Many more such dwellings could be found in fringe urban areas outside municipal boundaries. Most of this informal housing had been created by lotisseurs clandestins, or clandestine land subdividers, which has and continues to result in quite acceptable three- and four-story apartment blocks. A minority of this housing was to be found in dense single-story bidonvilles, or shantytowns, for the most part clustered in and around the Casablanca and Tangiers agglomerations. Following the suicide bombings in Casablanca in 2003, the Moroccan government launched a program called Villes sans Bidonvilles that targeted the elimination of these pockets through a relocation of inhabitants into new and expensive satellite towns.

In Jordan and Tunisia, urban informality is much less prevalent than in Egypt or Syria. In these small countries the scale of the problem has been less, governments have had—at least until the Arab Spring—stronger police powers to control development, and they had benefited from considerable financial and technical assistance from donors. Both countries have also carried out systematic upgrading of deprived neighborhoods, have well-developed housing mortgage systems and, in general, have been doing the right thing. Yet even in these two countries informal housing exists in many urban fringe pockets and anecdotal information points to a resurgence of unauthorized building in several peri-urban areas. This is especially true in Tunisia, where government figures for 2010 recorded only some 4,000 building violations being issued—representing 10 percent of annual national housing production. However, this seriously underestimates the phenomenon, since a huge amount of informal housing is being built on marginal land outside municipal boundaries or in zones not designated for residential use and not issued with violations, especially within the geographic orb of Greater Tunis.

Even rich, oil-dependent Arab countries are not immune to the phenomenon of informal housing, although the scale is considerably less, as certain anecdotal information shows from Saudi Arabia and Libya. For example, the devastating flash floods in Jeddah in 2009, which destroyed thousands of homes and caused at least one hundred deaths, exposed the fact that the whole affected area had been designated a flood wadi reserve but had been completely built over by low-cost, informal construction. A number of real estate developers and municipal officials were eventually jailed. And in 2009 the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN Habitat) engaged a consultant to assist the Libyan Urban Planning Agency to come up with a strategy to address the uncomfortable fact that masses of inhabitants of Tripoli were ignoring the city’s carefully crafted growth plans (again made by foreign consultants) and were leapfrogging south into the main agricultural belt where very nice homes and villa compounds could be built, illegal as this might be.

Do-It-Yourself Homes

All informal housing in Arab countries has been built in the last forty or fifty years and, with a few exceptions, the informal housing stock is made up of multistory houses and small footprint apartment blocks that are remarkably well-built and durable. This fact sets urban informality in Arab cities dramatically apart from the shacks and shantytowns normally found in Asia and Africa and in most of Latin America. Some commentators have gone so far as to postulate that Arabs have a cultural affinity to make every effort to build solid housing that will last for generations, even if it is far beyond their means and even if it takes many years. It is true that tiny pockets of precarious shantytowns have emerged in some Arab cities, but in all cases these began as opportunistic squatting on marginal lands where land tenure is very insecure. The Arab norm, in contrast, is to purchase private agricultural land, thus land tenure is quite good and is recognized as so by the surrounding neighbors. Arabs are also known to squat on state desert land, but in large enough numbers that quickly provide a critical mass of people that confounds attempts by authorities to remove them.

An important feature of informal housing in Arab countries is that it is built or occupied mainly by low- to moderate-income families and, through the resulting market of units for rental or sale, represents the most affordable housing solutions to be found within Arab cities. It is sobering to think what the situation in Arab cities would be today had there been no informal housing.

There are many advantages inherent in informal housing processes. A small parcel of land can be found (which may not be the case in regulated areas), and the price per square meter will normally be much cheaper. The process is incremental, with land acquisition usually preceding construction by many years, and with construction itself being carried out in stages, that is floor by floor or even room by room. This fits well with family finances that are often irregular. There are no banks or government or corporate entities involved. The substantial extra costs associated with meeting subdivision and building codes can be avoided (procedural expenses and taxes as well as physical costs). A higher exploitation of land parcel is possible, in terms of building heights and floor-area ratios, than in controlled areas.

Furthermore, a family that manages construction itself can do away with formal contractors, employ unregistered laborers or relatives and shop for the cheapest materials. Studies in some countries have shown that under this owner-builder process construction costs can be reduced by at least 30 percent compared to fully compliant contractor-built housing. And since it is likely to be the builder’s family and his relatives who occupy the finished housing units, it is very much in his interest to ensure that the construction process results in a structurally sound building.

Although the creation of housing is the main aim of informality, another advantage of the process is that it allows for the creation of ground-floor businesses and workplaces. As informal settlements mature, considerable commercial, service, and even petty manufacturing activities become common, to the extent that in many such areas a very significant number of job and business opportunities are generated. And the high residential densities in informal areas support commercial life and, parenthetically, very sustainable pedestrian modes of transport. In other words, these areas do not remain marginalized dormitory settlements but take on most if not all of the heterogeneous attributes of urban life.

Still, it is important not to take an overly romantic view of informal urban areas and ignore the disadvantages found in many of them. The lack of any control means that the public interest—in terms of open spaces and parks, land for schools and other services, even minimally acceptable street widths—will suffer greatly. Also, over time an informal area can become seriously overbuilt, with many apartment units lacking sufficient air and light. And older areas may acquire a drab and monotonous appearance that affronts the sensibilities of those for whom the urban aesthetic is all important.

Allure of High Modernism

It should be obvious that the huge scale and continuing popularity of illegal or unauthorized housing in many cities of the Arab world indicate that something is lacking in state responses to the phenomenon. After all, informal urban processes have been around for decades and it would seem impossible for high-level government officials to ignore their massive weight. These officials themselves would likely say that they have in place strict laws and programs to prevent new informal housing and offer attractive alternative housing solutions to those of limited incomes, very much a carrot-and-stick approach. These officials might also add that they have adopted a policy of upgrading the infrastructure and services of existing informal neighborhoods wherever possible, and of relocating inhabitants to new housing estates if demolition and clearance are unavoidable. These responses sound quite logical, but their effectiveness throughout Arab countries has proven very elusive.

All Arab states have a large set of laws and related regulations, decrees and circulars that control urban development and construction carried out by private individuals and companies, in almost all cases using legislation adopted either from their former colonial masters or from European models. Building codes aim to ensure that buildings are safe and provide reasonable space, light and ventilation. Subdivision laws set minimum standards for plot sizes, road widths, utilities and public spaces. Urban plans designate allowed land uses, major rights of way for transportation and maximum building heights. (In some cases regulations may also specify particular building styles and facades.) In addition, there are laws that define private property and the means of its registration and transfer, and another set of laws that prescribe the evaluation and imposition of property taxes.

In all cases, this compendium of legislation specifies in detail the government agencies, committees and officials that are responsible for applying regulations and monitoring compliance, as well as the associated bureaucratic steps and fees. For most planning, subdivision and building rules, it is local government (municipalities for the most part) that are charged with such enforcement. It is they who are on the frontline, so to speak, in the struggle to prevent illegal subdivision and construction. Unfortunately, these bodies are almost invariably underfunded and their staff poorly qualified and grossly underpaid. Commonly, inspectors don’t even have access to vehicles to cover their large and growing territories. It is no wonder that they rarely inspect and that bribery is rampant. In fact, a position in building control departments is seen by many as a very lucrative post that is much sought after, however predatory it may seem. And in almost all countries once an illegal structure is finished and inhabited it becomes next to impossible to evict inhabitants, mainly because of the threat of resistance from the community and a cultural aversion to tossing people out into the street. It is no coincidence that informal housing tends to cluster together and creates a critical mass that makes collective eviction a political nightmare. And those building informally have learned how to circumvent the control system, even where it is applied. Building at night and during holidays is common, as is screening a building site from view or hiring gangs to block roads and create diversions. Sometimes people are paid to sit in unfinished buildings simply so they appear occupied. And building owners will take advantage of weak coordination among state authorities, for example by acquiring an electrical and water connection or a dubious title deed as part of a paper chase to prove legitimacy.

It is interesting to note that the only large and rapidly urbanizing Arab country where informal settlements were practically unknown, at least in the major cities, was in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The main factor was his use of the country’s considerable oil wealth to develop extensive and heavily subsidized subdivisions and housing estates that practically all citizens could afford. But another factor that certainly discouraged official connivance of informality was the fact that corrupt practices in local as well as central government were punishable by summary execution.

In effect, the stick approaches that are applied by most Arab governments to prevent informality have been, shall we say, not up to the mark. But what about the carrot alternatives? Most Arab countries have national social housing programs that offer low-cost housing for families of limited means and in theory should represent an affordable alternative to informal housing. These programs have been in place for decades in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt and to a lesser extent in Jordan and Syria. However, such housing schemes have never been on a scale that would come anywhere near meeting gross demand, and in any event the selection of beneficiary families has been bureaucratic and arbitrary, with those ‘most in need’ rarely qualifying. In the 1980s and 1990s social housing units in some countries were heavily subsidized, making them very affordable, but at the same time they represented a huge drain on national budgets. More recently, social housing programs such as those carried out by La Société Nationale Immobilière de Tunisie and under the Egyptian National Housing Program have shifted to become more financially viable, although the near-market prices of units have put them far out of reach of the lowest-income families and in fact have become attractive to the emerging, modern middle classes.

Another government mechanism that should in theory lessen the demand for informal housing are programs that provide financial packages to ease the burden of purchases on the formal housing market, usually through mortgage systems. Most of these imply subsidies and have limits imposed to help lower-income families qualify for modest units. These programs, along with the required legislation and a host of players (banks, brokers, assessors and foreclosure agents) have been in place in Tunisia and Morocco for decades and were emerging in Egypt in the 2000s. In every case these were based on Western models and have received considerable foreign donor support. Also, in every case they require registered properties, borrowers with steady incomes and strong enforcement of foreclosure. Only in Morocco and Tunisia have a significant number of lower-income families acquired housing units under these mortgage systems. In Tunisia this has been achieved mainly through the subsidized program Fonds de Promotion des Logements pour les Salariés; as the name implies, those without steady, provable incomes cannot apply. Also, Tunisia’s relative success was partly due to the simple fact that the market cost of borrowing was quite low and stable. In contrast, a main factor that has made mortgage finance unattractive in Egypt is that interest rates must be kept high, now well above 14 percent per year—which means that over the life of a mortgage a family will end up paying installments whose total value is over three times the cost of the dwelling. Another factor that makes housing mortgage systems unpopular, one that is found in all Arab countries, is an aversion to incurring debt, especially debts that are locked in for fifteen to twenty years. Religious injunctions against usury also discourage many.

The prevention of informal housing through laws and police power have had little success in Arab countries, and neither have programs that offer alternative, formal paths to affordable housing. Yet another determining factor that encourages informal housing is the high and costly standards implicit in formal planning and building control regimes. The physical standards relating to land exploitation and structures are themselves expensive to comply with, and additional heavy costs relate to the procedural requirements needed to conform fully with legislation. Seen from the point of view of a low- or even middle-income family, these costs are imposed without any apparent justification, and such extra costs seem superfluous in their herculean struggles to mobilize funds. It should be added that in no Arab country have simplified, lower standards been adopted for popular areas that would suit the small footprint and modest types of housing most prevalent under informal processes.

Empowering the Poor

Arab government responses to the informality phenomenon have been disappointing, to say the least. This is in spite of the fact that over decades a solid narrative has developed among Western academics and professionals that sees tremendous value in the informal dynamics of the struggles of individuals and families in the cities of the developing world to house themselves. This narrative influenced multilateral and bilateral aid agencies and led to a number of attempts to encourage governments to take a more nuanced approach to the phenomenon. Proponents of this approach argued that there are ways to harness the informal dynamic and guide it toward creating formal, legal neighborhoods where poor and moderate-income families, including small entrepreneurs, can progressively create affordable and appropriate housing at little cost to the state.

It could be said that the narrative began in 1966 with the appearance of a seminal paper by British urban planner John F.C. Turner called “Uncontrolled Urban Settlement: Problems and Policies,”prepared for the UN Centre for Housing, Building and Planning. Based on Turner and his team’s investigations of land invasions in Peru, the ideas soon gained international traction, and by the late 1970s and 1980s had spawned a number of programs and pilot projects supported by donors in several developing countries. These were mainly ʻsites and services’ projects on urban fringes where small land parcels were prepared with infrastructure for families to build their own dwellings progressively. Parallel initiatives were developed for in situ upgrading where existing informal neighborhoods were provided with lacking infrastructure and services and land titles, and only minimal or no demolition and resettlement. However, by the 1990s ‘sites and services’ schemes had fallen into disfavor, partly due to the reluctance of host governments to devote precious land and resources to them, and partly due to donor fatigue toward projects that took long time spans to succeed and which incurred a host of bureaucratic problems. On the other hand, in situ upgrading of slums and older informal areas has gained in popularity in many developing countries, usually with donor support.

In Arab countries sites and services had only a short life, mainly restricted to Egypt and Jordan. The first scheme spun out of the Ismailia Master Plan prepared by British consultants with financing from the UN Development Programme, in which Turner was involved. The main project, begun in 1978, was the Hay Al-Salam neighborhood developed on state land on the immediate fringe of the city. With only a small amount of foreign technical assistance, the area was fully planned and progressively developed by the Governorate of Ismailia for citizens to build their own housing with only minimal controls. Better called a ʻsites and then services’ project, it was a resounding success. The required infrastructure and services were largely auto-financed through land sales, considerable individual investment in housing was attracted, and the area grew to house almost 100,000 inhabitants within less than twenty years. In spite of this, the project had virtually no subsequent demonstration effect on the Egyptian government, which continued its romance with expensive new towns in the desert and with heavily subsidized public housing, in spite of the fact that at the same time informal housing was becoming the defining feature of Egypt’s urban landscape.

In the 1980s there were a number of sites and services neighborhoods developed by the Urban Development Department (UDD) in Jordan, with massive World Bank financial and technical support. These however were so bureaucratic that they practically killed the very informal dynamic they were trying to attract and were never replicated. Currently pro-poor policies of the Housing and Urban Development Corporation (the successor to the UDD) are restricted to housing finance and ways to stimulate low-cost housing production by the private sector. This last objective has recently become quite a popular approach in a number of Arab countries, but getting the private sector to build and market affordable housing units has everywhere proven almost impossible without significant subsidies.

It should be added that there was one successful sites and services project in Yemen. The Sawat Saawan project in Sanaa began in the early 1990s, was promoted and financed through a World Bank loan and included housing construction loans to beneficiaries, all of whom were government employees.

Urban upgrading has had a somewhat better track record than sites and services in the Arab world, although efforts have been nowhere near the scale required and areas that had been upgraded have frequently reverted to the old status quo. Only in Tunisia has such upgrading been comprehensive and notable for its success, mainly through the Agençe de Réhabilitation et de Rénovation Urbaine, although even it has been unable to keep up with the recent proliferation of informal areas in the peri-urban fringes of main cities. In Egypt foreign donors and a couple of elitist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have tried various upgrading initiatives in a few informal neighborhoods of Cairo and Aswan, but these have had virtually no demonstration effect, and it seems that efforts have aimed more at advancing donor feel-good agendas of community participation than any concrete change on the ground. In Jordan and Morocco there have been small upgrading efforts promoted by the World Bank, and preparations for more were under way in Yemen prior to the uprising in 2011.

The recognition of the value of progressive informal housing as part of any solution to urban housing problems in developing countries is still alive and well, at least as part of the global development narrative. An admirable report was prepared by Patrick Wakely and Elizabeth Riley for the Cities Alliance (an arm of the World Bank) in 2011 called “The Case for Incremental Housing.” It argued convincingly that informal incremental development, where low-income people develop their homes and neighborhoods often to surprisingly high standards, can be justified in economic, financial, social and governance terms and, given the scale of the urban housing affordability challenge, is practically the only way forward. Unfortunately, as is often the case with development literature, it seems that this paper was largely a self-referential exercise among the already convinced. For example, of the twenty-two institutions referred to in the report, thirteen were donor agencies and Western universities, seven were international NGOs and institutes, and only two were banks or agencies in developing countries.

Curse of Ambivalence

The paradox is stark. Tens of millions of Arabs live in informal urban areas and millions more are added to these areas and to new ones every year. All indications are that the pace is increasing. Most of these areas suffer from a host of infrastructure, basic service and employment problems, not to mention poor transportation, near-total exclusion from political processes, the taint of illegality and at best condescension from a sizable segment of their fellow citizens. Virtually all past and present attempts by government, donors and NGOs to improve the livelihoods of residents do not affect more than a tiny fraction, and viable formal housing alternatives have and continue to attract only a miniscule subset of housing demand. At the same time more and more sprawling informal areas are being created on urban fringes, and it seems the only response is to subject them, eventually, to upgrading initiatives that are always too little and too late. And, we should add, until now the Arab uprisings, which have set in motion dramatic political changes in many ways, have not at all included any fresh approaches to the issue of informal housing.

How can this state of affairs be explained? First, it seems that most Arab governments are preoccupied, even mesmerized, by the physical appearances of modernity and look to Western cities or to dazzling Dubai, Singapore and Shanghai for inspiration and emulation. In the past some may have looked at the ordered regimentation of socialist cityscapes as models, but now all faith is put in the miracle of the corporate real estate sector—both domestic and transnational—to build and transform their cities, especially if such transformation is bankrolled by Gulf Arabs. The needs of a city’s common people may receive grudging attention in government pronouncements, but the messy, chaotic and complicated reality of urban informality is the antithesis of the kinds of urban order that in a modern city should prevail. Better to ignore or wish away the phenomenon and concentrate on what can be controlled: formal, mainly corporate modes of urban planning and development. And better to frame urban informality as simply the product of those who are ignorant, uneducated and backward.

This, in a way, is understandable. The legitimacy of an Arab state, as the vanguard or at least the guiding hand of progress and development, is entwined with the application of its laws and norms. By definition informal urban processes contravene a host of these, and what government wants to explicitly admit that it has lost control? In addition, important sectors of the economy depend to a large extent on the demand created by formal urban development and the cozy relations with government such development generates. From construction to manufacturing and from finance to the professions—those who are part of these sectors can be counted on to enthusiastically support the state’s rejection of and biases against informality.

But these are not sufficient explanations. Why have the considerable efforts of the international community over decades to influence the policies of Arab governments had so little traction? One can understand the mindsets of older officials in government structures who are incapable of absorbing uncomfortable ideas that do not come directly from their superiors and for whom informal areas are an anathema that cause nothing but headaches. But younger professionals both inside and outside government have been heavily exposed to the alternative narrative. Not only have innovative urban projects that demonstrate how to accommodate informality been supported and financed by donor agencies in most Arab countries, but large and continuing efforts have been made by donors and institutes to train young Arab architects, planners and engineers to grapple with the complexities of rapid urban growth. Thousands of such degree holders have either gained graduate educations from Western universities or have been sponsored to attend diploma courses in specialized institutes in such places as London, Rotterdam, Berlin and Cambridge, Massachusetts, usually with the specific aim of returning to their countries with their newfound orientations. Some universities in Arab countries have recently also launched similar courses. Moreover, donor agencies have, under the rubric of capacity building, sponsored thousands of in-country as well as out-country training courses, symposiums and conferences on effective tools and policies of sustainable urban development, to which key municipal and ministry officials are always invited.

And what are the results of all this education and capacity building? The more astute Arab professionals with graduate degrees—who demonstrate an understanding of urban complexities and have good foreign language skills—are usually quickly employed by international or bilateral donor agencies themselves, where they pursue comfortable and rewarding careers. But for others, it seems whatever new orientations they might have acquired are quickly lost or put aside upon their return to their countries or to their old jobs there. There is simply no appreciative audience, and their career prospects, whether in government or more often in local consulting firms and academia, are not likely to benefit from propounding what only the very few want to hear. In any event, it is extremely rare that they are in a position to influence urban policies. After all, the real decision-makers are either non-professionals—usually former generals, successful businessmen and parliamentarians—or engineers who are already members of the ruling political elites. It is precisely these people whose accumulation of power depends upon their obedience to the modernist ethic and the conviction that only the corporate system, sometimes in combination with the army or super-state agencies, can deliver it. One needs only to look at the hyper-modern urban makeover schemes and mega projects that have been advanced for Cairo, Tunis, Amman, and Damascus to see where most attention of those in power is placed.

Of course there are dedicated academics and professionals in every Arab country who recognize that the high modernist status quo will never address the real issues of Arab cities, but these are few and their voices are rarely heard. One can only hope that freer environments and new political spaces coming from the Arab uprisings will allow for a more appreciative audience. And one also hopes that the same expanded political space will allow the disenfranchised scores of millions who live in urban informality and who are—or soon will be—the majority of the potential electorate in many cities to fully articulate their demands. After all, isn’t social justice what these revolutions are all about?

David Sims is an economist and urban planner with forty years of experience in Arab, African and Asian countries. He is the author of  Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control.

The Aga Khan Trust for Culture sponsored a conference in Egypt in 1984. It was called “The Expanding Metropolis: Coping with the Urban Growth of Cairo.” There was an urgent need for more green space in the city. One study had found that the amount of green space per inhabitant in Cairo, the center of the largest metropolitan area in Africa and the Middle East, was the size of a single footprint. At the conference, the Aga Khan announced his intention to finance and create a park in the city.

The task ahead was formidable. The available space was a thirty-hectare site in the Islamic heart of Cairo. It was surrounded from the north and west by poor, densely populated neighborhoods dating from medieval times and noted for their mosques and other architectural treasures, and from the east the City of the Dead, a sprawling fifteenth century cemetery. The site had been a rubbish dump since the late Mamluk period; indeed, over hundreds of years, the accumulation of garbage and building debris was nearly forty meters deep in some areas. After six years of work, Al-Azhar Park opened in 2004 to international as well as local acclaim. The initiative includes not only a vast green space for the people of Cairo, but the restoration of Islamic historical sites, revival of ancient crafts and revitalization of adjacent neighborhoods. “The result is an urban vision that is startling in its scope,” wrote New York Timesarchitecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, who praised the project for “reversing a trend in which unchecked development has virtually eradicated the city’s once-famous parks.”

The context served as a challenge to revitalize the heritage of Islamic Cairo and use it as a catalyst for cultural, social and economic development. In other words, it was clear that the construction of the park should act as a stimulus for the rehabilitation of the Al-Darb Al-Ahmar neighboring district and its 200,000 residents. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) initiated projects that would uplift the living conditions in the vicinity of the park. However, Egypt’s notion of environmental improvement was new, untested and limited to planting trees in a few streets. The government was skeptical about the project even after granting approval for the site.

Other challenges included the lack of environmental awareness and understanding of the profession of landscape architecture in Egypt: even today, there are no Egyptian academic institutions offering a degree in landscape architecture. The building industry does not supply quality products for use in outdoor space. In addition, there are no specialized contractors that are qualified to execute proper landscape works.

Design and Construction
The design of Al-Azhar Park was initiated in 1998. To form the main guiding principles for the park design, AKTC worked with several design firms including Sasaki Associates of Boston. Sites International was appointed as the lead consultant to take on the central organizing role in the development of the final master plan and landscape architecture design of the park. There were several design and construction challenges: the historical context of the old city and Islamic monuments; the serious geotechnical limitations of a soil unsuitable for planting or construction; the existence of three water tanks on site supplying water to Cairo; and the lack of local commercial plant materials and landscape products. Recognizing these challenges, our vision was to develop a paradigm shift in public space design and education in Egypt.

The first visit to the site was a nightmare; hills of garbage and construction debris were all over the site. Soil would reach up to your knees as you walked. The historical wall to the west was buried under the garbage, and the scene of three large concrete water tanks, each eighty meters wide, was depressing. There were no signs of life on site; no plants and no birds.

During the earthwork of the site’s western slope descending toward the Al-Darb Al-Ahmar district, crews uncovered the Ayyubid wall built by Saladin in the twelfth century to defend the city from the Crusaders. The 1,500-meter wall represented the new urban edge for the project after being restored from rubble. The existence of the wall fostered the notion of utilizing the park as a panoramic platform from which to view the heritage of old Cairo, and to create a historic wall promenade along the park’s perimeter.

The geotechnical survey revealed a soil profile of thirty to forty meters of garbage, construction debris and highly toxic/salty soils unsuitable for construction or planting. Over 765,000 cubic meters of soil were removed and 160,000 cubic meters were used as a fill elsewhere on the site. A further 605,000 cubic meters were geotechnically treated and mixed with 60,000 cubic meters of special sand and topsoil. Soil replacement created a layer of good soil ranging from a half to two meters deep. An impermeable clay layer 0.5 meters thick, placed two meters beneath the top soil, was added to prevent irrigation water seepage and soil settlement. Raft foundations or pilings were used beneath buildings. Roads and paths were built on structural fill ranging in depth from one to two meters.

Earlier in the planning stages of the project, the General Organization for Greater Cairo Water Supply announced its intention to install three underground water reservoirs on site. Each reservoir is eighty meters in diameter. The reservoirs had to be placed on significant piling. Furthermore, the insertion of such a system increased the constraints and risks to the infrastructure. This also prompted the landscape architects to provide maintenance access to the reservoir tanks and distribution lines. The authorities prepared a set of design guidelines for common areas between the park design and the reservoir system. Landscaping the three water tank tops required careful and detailed consideration of the tanks’ structural limitations and waterproofing.

Sites International developed an indigenous and adaptive plant list for the park, detailing species and required sizes at installation. More than 650 species were planted in Al-Azhar Park. Palms, trees, shrubs, citrus groves and ground covers play a functional, visual, aesthetic and environmental role. For example, the palms contribute in defining the linear space and orienting pedestrians toward the impressive view of the Citadel; Cassia nodosa trees with their flowering canopies were used to mark the major walkway to the Citadel View restaurant. Greening the site posed some unique challenges as chemical property tests confirmed low levels of nutrients, high levels of alkalinity, very high levels of salinity and Ca CO3 content. Thus, the need for appropriate soil conditioning was a major issue for some plants to survive. Drought tolerance, soil stabilization and erosion prevention were key plant selection criteria, and complete subsurface drainage was needed to protect the historic wall from any runoff.

Most plant materials were not commercially available in Egypt, in either the required quantity or size. Thus, a limited on-site plant nursery was established for horticultural testing and a larger off-site nursery was established to support the main stock. The off-site nursery was created in early 1998 on a twenty-hectare plot. It yielded all the required species and quantities needed for the park.

Almost everything for the park—furniture, lighting, bollards, seats, trash receptacles, drinking fountains, playground equipment, pergolas—had to be custom designed by the landscape architect and manufactured by local artisans. In the process, artisans reclaimed some old techniques in stone work that had almost died out.

The strategy of AKTC and Sites International was to divide the work into two parallel tasks. First, to address the site limitations, including the poor soil, the historical wall, the concrete water tanks, in addition to addressing the issue of poor supply of plant materials, especially trees, in local nurseries. Another immediate issue was the poor quality of local site furniture and lighting. The second task was the detailed planning and landscape design. This included creating several alternatives, obtaining approvals and testing prototype areas on site. This would be followed by preparing complete construction documents for the park design.

Given that all this was pioneering work with many unknowns to be encountered, it was agreed that the design could evolve and change over time to adapt to constraints and opportunities.

The design intent was to provide green open space for the residents of the adjacent districts and the greater Cairo population, and to utilize local artisans and laborers in the construction of the park as an effort to improve their economic status. The design theme was derived from the contextual historical Islamic heritage of old Cairo, a distinctive interpretation of the Islamic garden design criteria. The design was equally keen to protect and incorporate the historic wall into the park.

The main pedestrian spine is the key feature of the park, running north-south. It is characterized by sophisticated geometric pavement patterns, accentuated by various water features; fountain bowls, and narrow water runnels. The axial boulevard also incorporated rows of palms, aromatic plants and shade trees. On both sides of the main spine are secondary walkways with secluded sitting areas as well as sunken gardens and citrus orchards. The series of geometric, sequential gardens blend meaningfully with the curvilinear and rolling topography of the site, creating an oasis-like feeling of freshness and greenery.

Since the planning theme of the park was derived from the heritage of old Cairo, the main spine is directed to a view of Cairo’s Citadel and Mohammed Ali Mosque. To further integrate the context, original gates of the Ayyubid wall served as a major entrance to the park from the Al-Darb Al-Ahmar district.

AKTC created a local Egyptian company, Aga Khan Cultural Service of Egypt, to maintain and operate the park, the idea being that the park be economically sustainable. Furthermore, AKTC aimed to implement the Islamic endowment system, using income to sustain the running of public facilities. Thus, income generated from tickets, parking and restaurants in the park is used in maintaining the facility and helps support urban rehabilitation projects in the adjacent neighborhood. A large staff was hired including personnel for security, gardening, irrigation, fountains and food outlets. Al-Darb Al-Ahmar residents were given priority in hiring.

Achieving Harmony
The success of the Al-Azhar Park is the result of the environmental revitalization of the land in addition to the rehabilitation of the adjacent district. The project is a physical translation of cultural, social and economic development.

The park is considered an urban intervention that successfully addressed the context of the Al-Darb Al-Ahmar district. It saved the surrounding urban fabric by giving it a future and creating jobs for residents of the neighboring district. Furthermore, the surrounding cultural monuments and homes were renovated with the aim of improving the overall urban fabric. At the micro level, the community prioritized a list for refining the district; training programs were developed, houses were rehabilitated, micro projects were financed. At the macro level, Al-Azhar Park is viewed as a green oasis serving the Al-Darb Al-Ahmar district, old Cairo’s historic sites and indeed the city at large.

Despite the numerous green areas of the park, it conserves water resources. A water irrigation system optimizes the use of water and arid plants that consume far less water than lawn areas were used.

The park is a recreational space for the community and the Cairene society to gather and perform activities in a welcoming green space. It has become a destination for tourists and an educational botanical garden visited by students from planning, architecture and agriculture schools. It provides a wide range of activities in its playgrounds, gardens, walkways, restaurants and amphitheater. The park has proved to be a success and a source of pride for Egyptians.

Maher Stino is principal partner of Sites International, a consultancy with projects in Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. He is a professor of planning and landscape architecture at Cairo University.

Cities are the places where people have most modified nature. Buildings protect people from extremes of heat and cold by air conditioning. Vegetation is managed by elaborate planting, watering and fertilization systems. Introduced and invasive species often dominate, if not overwhelm, native ones. Rivers are channelized, embanked and diverted. Water supplies are pumped from deep aquifers and piped from distant reservoirs, often hundreds of kilometers away. Health care systems, albeit variable in effectiveness and accessibility, protect much of the world’s urban population from the worst communicable diseases.

Urban areas are often comfortable, congenial and civilized places in which to live, yet urban dwellers ignore nature at their peril. History shows that large modern cities are vulnerable to extreme events. To recall a few recent examples: Hurricane Sandy on the east coast of the United States in 2012; the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan; the fires in Dhaka in 2010 and in Manila in 2011; the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010 that left an ash cloud over Europe; the list could go on and on. Meanwhile, every day nature affects our urban lives through disease vectors; rain, sleet and snow; floods and droughts; heat waves and cold snaps; landslides and subsidence; tree falls, weed and mold infestations and insect pests.

To cope with all these natural events, cities have to be well managed and well governed. The degree to which individual cities can provide security and protection for their inhabitants is in part related to the severity, magnitude and frequency of natural events; in part influenced by the extent to which buildings and infrastructure are able to withstand those events; and in part dependent upon the resilience of urban society. The latter comprises its ability to adapt to both abrupt major events and to the slower more gradual changes, such as the consequences of local urban growth and land-use change and of global economic, technological and environmental change, especially climate change. Improving urban conditions requires taking a holistic view, seeing the problems at a range of scales from the individual household to the whole metropolitan region, appreciating the relationship between an individual’s daily activities and the changing character of the city, and realizing how altering one component of the urban environment affects a whole series of other aspects of the built-up area.

The Wu Xing
In modern municipal administrations, responsibilities are usually divided into strict professional departments, with planning and environment frequently separated from public health, education, finance and engineering. Addressing environmental issues usually requires cutting across these departmental divides. Today many urban managers, designers, planners and scientists are looking at cities as complex social-economic-natural ecosystems in which political, social, cultural and economic phenomena interact with the components of the natural environment.

Societies have long recognized the importance of such interactions for human health. In the eleventh century, the Persian scholar Avicenna (Abu Ali Al-Husayn ibn Abdallah ibn Sina) wrote in his Canon of Medicine of the four humors: hot, cold, moist and dry, which were related to the weather. Medieval Europeans described the four humors as blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, again relating them to the seasons, but also to elements of nature.

This four-fold division may be compared to the five traditional elements of the Chinese Wu Xing: water, metal, earth, fire and wood, which are used as the natural subsystem framework for analysis of complex urban systems in China. In the United States, much recent research has explored the nature of coupled human-natural systems or urban socio-eco-biophysical systems, because the understanding of urban life gained from the social, behavioral and economic sciences has to be linked to ecological and earth surface processes; the latter to explain how nature works in cities under complex human influences. This approach helps to develop workable reactions to nature’s responses to urbanization and the effects of environmental change on urban inhabitants.

In the current Chinese social-economic-natural complex ecosystem approach, which uses the Wu Xing in a modern context, the five natural elements form a physical subsystem, with economic, social and scientific subsystems as well. The core subsystem features three elements with which to deal with the Wu Xing: knowledge, culture and institutions. These three elements may be considered to represent the key human drivers of urban change and management. Knowledge embraces science and technology together with traditional understanding and community awareness. Institutions range from governments to corporations and professional and influential civil society elites, and include urban management systems and non-governmental conservation and environmental organizations. Culture embraces lifestyles and family life (which dictates size and type of dwellings), as well as the way residential preferences and attitudes to nature affect the character of the built environment and the types and amount of urban green space. Human use of natural areas within and around cities varies greatly with social factors including age and ethnicity.

The multiple environmental tests faced by modern cities need long-lasting sustainable responses that often require thinking over much longer timespans than those between democratic elections of mayors or municipal councilors. The knowledge available to municipal institutions is abundant, but not always in a form that busy people can rapidly assimilate.

The five Wu Xing natural components can be taken to deal with five critical spheres of urban and global change: the atmosphere (fire or energy), the biosphere (wood or life), the hydrosphere (water), the pedosphere (earth or soil) and the geosphere (metal or minerals). These spheres overlap; water, essential for all life, is found in the atmosphere, the pedosphere and the rocks of the geosphere. Nevertheless, they offer a workable framework within which to organize discussions about urban environmental challenges.

Element 1: Water
An essential factor in the location of urban areas is drinking water. Most ancient settlements were located on rivers or by springs. Many inhabitants sunk wells and found groundwater within a few meters of the surface,while the Romans constructed great aqueducts to carry water to the majority of their cities. By the twentieth century most large cities depended on remote sources, such as the surface water Mono Lake supply to Los Angeles; the 2,820-kilometer Libyan network of pipelines carrying fossil groundwater from beneath the Sahara to coastal towns, cities and farms; and the approximately 900-kilometer Ras Azzour to Riyadh pipeline, planned to convey one million cubic meters per day from the world’s largest desalination plant, to be located on Saudi Arabia’s Arabian Gulf coast. Even so, many cities have inadequate supplies, with piped water not available twenty-four hours a day, and many dwellings having, at best, a standpipe or well within a few minutes’ walk. The quest for safe, clean, reliable, accessible, affordable water remains. Combinations of water sources, such as surface water from rivers, groundwater, rainwater harvesting, desalination and water reuse are being adopted in many Asian cities, both on a well-planned municipal basis (as in Singapore) or by a combination of public supply, private enterprise distribution, individual household and business rainwater harvesting, and well sinking (as in New Delhi).

Even more serious is the provision of safe sanitation. Over the period from 1990 to 2013, globally 1.9 billion urban and rural people gained access to sanitation. However, around 2.4 billion people will be using unimproved, inadequate sanitation facilities in 2015: not much of an improvement over the 2.7 billion doing so in 1990. Although much of the improvement was in towns and cities, the trick is to do more than keep pace with the growth of global urban population.
The other side of the water challenge is to deal with water excess. As the world’s urban population has become increasingly located in tropical regions―because the only areas in which they can find land to build homes are in floodplains prone to heavy thunderstorms, cyclones and rapid storm-water runoff, more and more people are becoming exposed to flood risks. That the urban areas are paved or roofed only increases the risk of local flooding within specific areas of the city. Such impacts are arising in cities everywhere, but ways of reducing them exist, particularly in terms of sustainable drainage systems, where the passage of water is slowed down and infiltration is encouraged.

Element 2: Metal
The Wu Xing element metal (or minerals) includes materials such as concrete, brick, glass and steel used to build, furnish, decorate and ornament urban areas. Concrete is particularly important as it is used for most of those paved surfaces that accentuate flood risks, but is also part of flood control systems in terms of urban drains and river flood walls. Abstraction of these minerals means new uses have to be found for quarries or gravel pits. Significantly, the topsoil from brick pits in China is put aside and later used to recreate agricultural land at a lower level after the brick clay has been removed. Success in reducing mineral raw materials use for urban institutions will require applying the available knowledge of alternatives to concrete drains and flood walls. This will involve particularly utilizing green infrastructure by installing green roofs, grassed suburban waterways and more natural urban rivers, including the converting of concrete channels or the reopening (or daylighting) of small streams that were diverted into underground pipes when the city first expanded.

Recycling of construction and demolition waste is becoming widely adopted on a commercial scale, particularly in large cities where transport costs are high. On another scale, many poor rag-picking communities in South Asia are finding ways of using other people’s waste materials to create building components, such as walls made of glass bottles or flooring made of broken crockery. More advanced materials reuse technologies including utilizing power station fly-ash for brick substitutes and making plaster board alternatives out of pressed and glued fragments of waste material. Although these forms of reuse are commercially viable, cultural constraints sometimes prevent their adoption. Several British supermarkets say they will not use recycled materials for fear of contamination in their buildings.

Element 3: Earth
Earth relates to soils and to the ground on which the city is built. Many cities experience geomorphological problems such as landslides, subsidence and soil erosion. Often these risks are not widely understood and purchasers of property may not always know of their existence, particularly in cities where the events happen infrequently, or generally only occur when the ground is disturbed and local conditions are altered by construction activity. Cities with frequent landslides, such as the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, often have detailed landslide hazard mapping. Hong Kong has developed a highly sophisticated geotechnical control system to reduce landslide risk when building on steep slopes. Helped by detailed computer mapping systems and databases, this planning and building control system has reduced actual landslide damage considerably. Other cities with similar geology and deeply weathered rocks have begun to adopt some of the general principles, but  elsewhere lack of information and building control means that unwise excavations on landslide-prone terrain continue to put urban lives at risk.

Subsidence is a persistent problem that is often aggravated by urban development, mining and groundwater extraction. Bangkok, Venice and Mexico City have frequently suffered flooding as a result of irregular lowering of the ground surface through groundwater removal. Restrictions on pumping and on unlicensed wells can help to alleviate the situation. Mining for coal, salt and other minerals also often leads to subsidence, long a problem in old coal mining areas in Europe and North America. More difficult to cope with is the subsidence due to subsurface cave collapse in soluble rocks such as the frequent sinkhole formation events occurring in limestone in Florida. Again, careful geological survey and building design can avoid the worst of these risks.

The major volcano hazards threatening many cities are partly predictable by close seismic monitoring of earth movements around the volcano. However, earthquake prediction remains difficult, but effective earthquake emergency response training and evacuation procedures can save lives. Good earthquake building codes and building control measures can help to save even more lives. Tsunamis caused by earthquakes are likely to become more threatening to coastal cities as sea levels rise as a consequence of global warming, making existing sea defenses less effective.

Element 4: Fire
Much of the current global warming is related to fire, to energy consumption, particularly the use of fossil fuels in all types of machinery including air conditioners and heating boilers—and the release of greenhouse gases and heat into the atmosphere. The extra heat keeps large city centers four or more degrees centigrade warmer than adjacent rural areas. However, large parks, such as Hyde Park in London, reduce the heat island intensity locally. This suggests that by careful planning of urban green spaces, heat island temperatures can be lowered over larger areas. Many cities are encouraging the creation of green roofs and establishing more parks and street trees in an effort to reduce heat stress on hot days and to gain other health benefits through exercise and recreation in the open air.

Urban energy consumption has long had health consequences through air pollution. Much of the smoke and sulphur dioxide from coal burning that affected Western cities until the mid-twentieth century has gone, but has been replaced by new problems due to oxides of nitrogen and photochemical smog associated with the widespread use of oil and gas. Now extremely fine particles emitted from diesel engines are seen as a major health issue. Rapid expansion of motor vehicle numbers and traffic congestion has made such air pollution so severe in rapidly industrializing cities of Asia and South America that measures to restrict car use have been attempted. Urban traffic management remains a headache for most cities despite massive investments in urban rapid transit systems and bus services.

Congestion and long queues of vehicles with their engines running are common problems in Asia from Istanbul to Beijing and are growing in Africa from Cape Town to Cairo. Road pricing and congestion charging are unpopular, although often effective, because the private motor vehicle gives the driver the freedom to travel, but that is also the freedom to pollute.

Urban air pollution affects all living things within urban areas and far beyond, having significant impact on agriculture as contaminated soils and plants will affect food supplies. Further afield it has damaged forests, corroded iron work and acidified lakes. In this way we can think of cities as having a pollution shed, or contaminant fallout zone, extending well beyond the metropolitan boundary, especially where carried away by the prevailing wind. The spread of acid rain across northwestern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s showed how urban emissions can become a transboundary problem, with the consequence of energy consumption in one country being felt in another. International agreements can sometimes cope with such issues, but the difficulties of getting a global agreement on lowering greenhouse gas emission show just how hard this task can be, regardless of how urgent the problem is. Some international coalitions of city mayors already indicate a greater willingness of some municipal authorities to collaborate than their national governments have done.

Such external impacts of urban environmental problems now extend to the heart of the Pacific Ocean, where a great gyre of finely comminuted plastic, dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, threatens marine life. Some estimates say the debris field is twice the size of the continental United States. Reducing these far-reaching externalities is a collective urban problem that may be forgotten among more immediate local issues, particularly as the voices of the small Pacific Island states most seriously affected by damage to life in the oceans and by rising sea levels are seldom listened to in international meetings.

Element 5: Wood
The Wu Xing element wood implies the whole biosphere and all forms of life. The main environmental concerns faced by city administrations often relate to human well-being and social care, public health, to the avoidance of epidemics and the impacts of disasters such as earthquakes. World Health Organization environmental standards help urban managers to recognize when problems such as air pollution are most severe, but sometimes economic and social considerations make the adoption of the most effective alleviation and control measures difficult. Measures such as mass immunization, avoiding contact with zoonoses (infectious diseases, such as rabies, that are transmitted between species, sometimes by a vector, from animals other than humans to humans) and preventing the transmission of viral infections are not always effective in every major city. The zoonosis West Nile virus appeared in the United States in 1999 in the New York City area and spread rapidly across the country in 2002. Urban practices and conditions such as the sale of live animals in many Asian markets greatly affect the transmission of zoonoses. With malaria and dengue fever remaining problems in many tropical areas, despite large international campaigns, climate change may lead to such diseases moving poleward, reappearing in cities from which they have long been eradicated. Urban authorities and health institutions must be able to detect and control such events rapidly.

Urban environmental conditions and diseases also affect other urban animals and plants. Bird and mammal survival in urban environments is affected by collisions with manmade objects, food acquisition, predation and disease. Over decades, many urban animals adjust to urban conditions, showing physical, behavioral and genetic differences from their rural cousins. Small creatures adapt and evolve more quickly than larger organisms. The way that dark peppered moths (Biston betularia) survived in the soot of industrial cities demonstrates how selection and evolution in cities can lead to distinct differences between urban and rural animals. Changes can be difficult to spot; for example, white blood cell (monocyte) counts are higher in house sparrows (Passer domesticus) in urban areas than in rural areas, suggesting immune system adaptation to the urban environment.

The food urban people put out for birds and other animals helps to stabilize small bird populations and to make predatory mammals more numerous. Nonetheless, urbanization tends to reduce the numbers of large mammals, such as coyotes in the United States. This allows meso-predators, such as domestic cats, more opportunities to hunt, leading to the deaths of many of the most abundant urban birds, with feral cats hunting more often than free-ranging domestic cats. At the same time, there are concerns about the impact of agricultural chemicals in the urban environment, with pesticides and herbicides influencing bird populations, both directly and indirectly, by affecting birds’ growth, development and survival. Some insecticides have had profound effects on predatory bird populations, such as the sparrow hawk, but others have been used for decades with no apparent impact on non-target organisms.

Complex chemicals in the urban environment remain a major problem, with huge quantities of pharmaceuticals being used every day. The world’s chemical and biomedical companies are constantly searching for new products, materials and medicines. The outcomes of their research and development help people everywhere to improve their lives, avoid and recover from disease, grow higher-yielding crops and manage plant and animal pests and diseases. Many characteristics of these chemical compounds alter other chemical and biological processes and these substances can enter food chains, particularly those of aquatic ecosystems, into which they are carried by rainfall, sewer overflows, and releases from unregulated manufacturing and farming activities. Not all pharmaceuticals are removed in normal sewage treatment and their residues may be consumed by microorganisms in river waters and thence by invertebrates that eventually are eaten by fish, which may be caught for human consumption, or eaten by larger fish that are harvested for human food. Evidence of serious problems for human health from such contaminants is patchy, but their effects on fish are well-documented.

Chemicals are becoming a significant problem for water supplies and for the management of fisheries in waters (lakes, ponds, reservoirs, canals or rivers) in and around towns and cities, particularly those close to megacities, and large industrial and transportation complexes. These chemical compounds are part of the urban circulation of chemical elements, but many national or municipal environmental monitoring agencies do not yet have either the means to test for them or sufficient aquatic sites at which to monitor their concentrations. Many of these compounds are known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and have been found in high concentrations in fish off river mouths. They are also carried by winds to agricultural areas so that the global extent of food transfers means the POPs entering a food chain in one region may be carried to urban areas remote from both their source and the locality where they first accumulated in plants. Each individual city and each individual chemical user in that city, at home or in industry, has a potential impact on the global movement of potentially harmful chemical compounds.

The task is to raise awareness of this invisible environmental problem and to take measure to avoid accidental or unintended releases to air, water or soils. This again is in part an issue of personal freedom to use pharmaceuticals, beauty products and other toiletries against reducing the risk of contaminating the environment and affecting food chains. Governments can only legislate to curb the most severe risks, but other impacts, such as the careless disposal of chemical compounds, have to be reduced through education that enhances individual responsibility and awareness of potential side effects.

Another important aspect of biota in the urban environment is the use of greenspace for physical and mental health improvement. Contact with green space, even viewing it from a hospital window, can improve mental health and feelings of well being, while physical exercise in open space is sometimes prescribed by doctors as an alternative to taking more pills. These health benefits are one reason why local authorities in countries such as the United Kingdom have set open space accessibility standards, suggesting criteria such as there should be a green area within ten minutes’ walk or 600 meters of every home. Public housing developments are often good at providing some open space, for example Singapore features open-space facilities for children’s play within all its public housing developments. Open-space requirements may be imposed on private developers, but sometimes the space they provide is awkwardly situated, near road intersections or relatively inaccessible, and not suitable for children’s play or human relaxation.

Multiple benefits are gained from well-located urban open spaces, particularly those with trees and other vegetation. They improve health, reduce the urban heat island effect, trap some pollutants, provide habitat for animals, support biodiversity, can be parts of sustainable drainage systems and enhance the visual attractiveness of towns and cities. Ideally such green spaces are parts of green networks, or the green infrastructure of urban areas, helping to provide a series of interconnected patches and corridors facilitating the movement of both wildlife and pedestrians, be they walkers, cyclists or horse riders. In many countries the principle of having such greenways or green infrastructure plans is well developed, excellent examples being found in the Netherlands and in Germany.

Our Grandchildren’s Children
The consideration of the five Wu Xing elements has led us to see that they are indeed highly interconnected. Living in the city means that we are constantly using the benefits, and sometimes the disservices, that they bring. We cannot ignore the character of the air above us, the vegetation, animals and insects around us and the ground beneath us any more than we can ignore the changes of the traffic lights or the ringing of our cell phones.

What we also have to be aware of is that ways of meeting these challenges do exist. In rapidly developing urban areas, opportunities to forestall problems are found both in the construction of new urban areas (as in the Tianjin Eco-city in China that is being built in collaboration with Singapore) and in the way old cities (like Freiburg, in Germany) have been converted into much more sustainable places through a series of planning measures and retrofitting old buildings.

The brilliant 2008 Brunel Lecture by Peter Head demonstrated that existing technologies could make existing urban areas more sustainable and cut greenhouse emissions by 80 percent, by retrofitting buildings and changing transportation, water, energy, and waste management systems. Cities would have comfortable zero emissions mass transport; water collection, storage and recycling systems with separate potable and grey water mains. Organic waste fed to biodigesters would create both energy and compost for urban food growers. Buildings would be heated and receive hot water through district combined heat and powers systems, while much renewable energy would be generated by large scale desert solar, tidal power and wind turbine installations. Distribution of goods and many human needs would be greatly assisted by smart information systems. The ideas and technologies exist, the willingness to change behavior, make appropriate political decisions, and to act collectively for the benefit of future generations is less evident.

The key to the urban future is first of all to ensure that new developments are more environmentally friendly than in the past and that the mistakes already made are not repeated. Secondly, we have to retrofit both for sustainability, and to mitigate and adapt to global climate change. The technologies are there, from household solar panels to community-combined heat and power, from window boxes to urban greenways. Integrated, holistic lateral thinking is required, along with political emphasis on solving present problems through techniques that will make urban living better for both present and future generations. Sustainability is all about thinking of our grandchildren’s children.

Thinking about and addressing urban environmental problems has to occur at all levels, from the individual and the household to the local community, the individual district or local authority, the metropolitan government and the whole urban region including the surrounding countryside intimately linked to the major city. Improvements are achieved through both small things and major schemes.

Changes in habits—such as levels of home cooling or heating, reusing goods or recycling of things no longer required, walking rather than driving—contribute to better health, urban heat island effect reduction, slashing greenhouse gas emissions and cutting back on use of raw materials. Achieving similar behavioral change in the workplace adds to the benefits. Community schemes for recycling furniture, composting garden waste, growing vegetables and even removing litter from drains all assist in reducing some of the problems of materials use, energy consumption and storm water flooding. This emphasizes that people can do things for themselves and often can take a lead that prompts local government into action.

Equally important is the initiative taken by individual elected councilors to promote environmental action through their local authorities. Mayors have been particularly effective in some cities, exerting political leadership to reduce the environmental impact of their municipality’s operations and encouraging local businesses and the community to do the same. Some introduce fines to discourage practices such as increasing paved areas around homes: Hamburg charges for every square meter of extra impermeable paving put in place, in order to reduce storm water flooding. Governments can show similar leadership. Taxes can be used positively, for example the UK Landfill Tax has forced local governments to greatly improve recycling rates. Charges for plastic bags in supermarkets reduce plastic waste while deposits on bottles encourage reuse and feed-in in tariffs for renewable energy encourage non-fossil fuel electricity generation and prompt power companies to use biomass. Equally, the planning of urban green space and green infrastructure can change the character of urban areas and provide multiple benefits for local climate, water management and biodiversity.

Such measures can be found in many cities, sometimes as part of an integrated move toward sustainability, but too often they are piecemeal responses to a series of initiatives. Local biodiversity action plans are not necessarily linked to climate change adaptation plans which in turn are not connected to transport infrastructure policies and to public health strategies. Meanwhile, there are many cities in which the imperatives of public order, water supply, health, education and housing are so great, and the financial resources so small, that little forward planning is possible. There are persistent differences between successful growing cities with adequate investment and those with few financial resources, whether in declining industrial areas or in regions where millions of poor people are migrating from rural areas to cities in search of better livelihoods.

Knowledge is not simply that held by the technocrats and in libraries, it is also the community understanding of local conditions and ways of coping with them. Neither top-down nor bottom-up schemes alone will deal with all situations. There has to be mutual respect, understanding, sharing and will to tackle the challenges on all fronts.

Ian Douglas is an emeritus professor in the School of Environment, Education and Development at the University of Manchester. He is president of the International Council on Ecopolis Development and author of Cities: An Environmental History.

Smartphones in hand—over a billion worldwide by 2016, according to Forrester, a market research firm—we are reorganizing our lives and our communities around mass mobile communications. Talking on the go is hardly a new idea—the first mobile phone call was placed in the United States in 1946. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that personal mobility came to so dominate and define our lives and demand a telecommunications infrastructure that could keep up. By freeing us to gather where we wish, our mobiles are a catalyst for density; the most robust cellular networks are those that blanket stadiums in bandwidth so spectators can share every score by talking, texting and photos sent to the social web. But these same networks can be a substrate for sprawl, a metropolitan nervous system conveniently connecting our cars to the cloud. They may be our most critical infrastructure and seem to be our highest priority. Even as we struggle to find the public will to fund basic maintenance for crumbling roads and bridges, we gladly line up to hand over hard-earned cash to our wireless carriers. Flush with funds, the U.S. wireless industry pumps some $20 billion a year into network construction. While the capital stock invested in the century-old power grid is estimated at $1 trillion in North America alone, nearly $350 billion has been spent in the last twenty-five years on the 285,000 towers that blanket American cities with wireless bandwidth.

The transition away from wires is almost complete. Mobile phones are the most successful consumer electronic devices of all time. Some six billion are in service around the globe. Three-quarters are in the developing world. In just a few years, it will be unusual for a human being to live without one.

The final transformation of 2008 caught us by surprise. The urban inflection point and the ascendance of wireless were two trends demographers and market watchers had long seen approaching. But just as we verged on linking all of humanity to the global mobile web, we became a minority online. We’ll never know what tipped the balance—perhaps a new city bus fired up its GPS tracker for the first time, or some grad students at MIT plugged their coffee pot into Facebook. But at some point the Internet of People gave way to the Internet of Things.

Today, there are at least two additional things connected to the Internet for every human being’s personal device. But by 2020 we will be hopelessly outnumbered—some fifty billion networked objects will prowl the reaches of cyberspace, with a few billion humans merely mingling among them. If you think banal chatter dominates the Web today, get ready for the cacophony of billions of sensors tweeting from our pockets, the walls, and city sidewalks, reporting on minutiae of every kind: vehicle locations, room temperatures, seismic tremors and more. By 2016, the torrent of readings generated by this Internet of Things could exceed 6 petabytes a year on our mobile networks alone (one petabyte equaling one billion gigabytes). It will drown out the entire human web—the ten billion photos currently archived on Facebook total a mere 1.5 petabytes. Software in the service of businesses, governments and even citizens will tap this pool of observations to understand the world, react and predict. This “big data,” as it is increasingly known, will be an immanent force that pervades and sustains our urban world.

This crowded and connected world isn’t our future—we are already living in it. Comparing today’s China to his first glimpses of the Communist state in the 1980s, U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke captured the historic nature of this shift. “Now…it is skyscrapers, among the tallest in the world,” he told PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose on the air in early 2012. “It is phenomenal growth…using smartphones everywhere you go. The transformation is just astounding.”

But the transformation is just getting started. How we guide the integration of these historic forces, the intersection between urbanization and ubiquitous digital technology, will, to a great extent, determine the kind of world our children’s children will inhabit when they reach the other end of this century.

Symbiosis
The symbiotic relationship between cities and information technology began in the ancient world. Nearly six thousand years ago, the first markets, temples and palaces arose amid the irrigated fields of the Middle East and served as physical hubs for social networks devoted to commerce, worship and government. As wealth and culture flourished, writing was invented to keep tabs on all of the transactions, rituals and rulings. It was the world’s first information technology.

In more recent eras, each time human settlements have grown larger, advances in information technology have kept pace to manage their ever-expanding complexity. During the nineteenth century, industrialization kicked this evolutionary process into high gear. New York, Chicago, London and other great industrial cities boomed on a steady diet of steam power and electricity. But this urban expansion wasn’t driven only by new machines that amplified our physical might, but also by inventions that multiplied our ability to process information and communicate quickly over great distances. As Henry Estabrook, the Republican orator (and attorney for Western Union) bombastically declared in a speech honoring Charles Minot, who pioneered the use of the telegraph in railroad operations in 1851, “The railroad and the telegraph are the Siamese twins of commerce, born at the same period of time, developed side by side, united by necessity.”

The telegraph revolutionized the management of big industrial enterprises. But it also transformed the administration of city government. Police departments were among the earliest adopters, using the tool to coordinate security over growing jurisdictions. Innovations flowed from government to industry as well—the electro-mechanical tabulators invented to tally the massive 1890 census were soon put to use by corporations to track the vital signs of continent-spanning enterprises. By enabling business to flourish and municipalities to govern more effectively, these technologies removed critical obstacles to the growth of cities. By 1910, historian Herbert Casson could declare matter-of-factly what was clear to all about yet another technology. “No invention has been more timely than the telephone,” he wrote. “It arrived at the exact period when it was needed for the organization of great cities and the unification of nations.”

For anyone who has telecommuted to work or watched a live broadcast from the other side of the planet, it seems counterintuitive that the growth of cities and the spread of information technology are so strongly linked. Many have argued the opposite—that new technologies undermine the need for cities and all of the productive yet expensive and sometimes unpleasant proximity they provide. In 1964 science-fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke articulated a vision of the future where, thanks to satellite communications, “It will be possible…perhaps only fifty years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali, just as well as he could from London.” More recently, as the Internet began its meteoric rise in the mid-1990s, tech pundit George Gilder wrote off cities as “leftover baggage from the industrial era.” But instead of disintegrating, London grew bigger, richer, more vital and connected than ever. Instead of undermining the city, new telecommunications technologies played a crucial role in London’s success—it is the hub of a global tangle of fiber-optic networks that plug its financiers and media tycoons directly into the lives of billions of people all over the world.

We experience the symbiosis of place and cyberspace every day. It’s almost impossible to imagine city life without our connected gadgets. In my own pocket, I carry an iPhone. It is my megacity survival kit, a digital Swiss Army knife that helps me search, navigate, communicate, and coordinate with everyone and everything around me. I have apps for finding restaurants, taxis and my friends. A networked calendar keeps me in sync with my colleagues and my family. If I’m running late, there are three different ways to send a message and buy some time. But I’m not alone. We’ve all become digital telepaths, hooked on the rush we get as these devices untether us from the tyranny of clocks, fixed schedules, and prearranged meeting points. The addiction started, as all do, slowly at first. But now it governs the metabolism of our urban lives. With our days and nights increasingly stretched across the vastness of megacities, we’ve turned to these smart little gadgets to keep it all synchronized. It’s no accident that the most common text message, sent billions of times a year all over the world, is “where r u?”

The digital revolution didn’t kill cities. In fact, cities everywhere are flourishing because new technologies make them even more valuable and effective as face-to-face gathering places.

Struggle
Beginning in the 1930s, men like Robert Moses began rebuilding cities around a new technology, the automobile. Moses was an autocrat and technocrat, a master planner and “power broker” (the title of Robert Caro’s epic biography). His disdain for the accumulated architectural canvas he inherited was no secret. “You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness of laying out a New Delhi, Canberra or Brasilia,” he said of the new capital cities of that era, “but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis you have to hack your way with a meat ax.” For three decades, in various public posts in New York and elsewhere as a consultant, Moses brought to life the dazzling vision of a middle-class, motorized America first unveiled by General Motors at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. To make way for the future, he bulldozed the homes of over a quarter-million unfortunate New Yorkers.

Today, a new group of companies have taken GM’s spot in the driver’s seat and are beginning to steer us toward a new utopia, delivered not by road networks but by digital networks. Instead of paving expressways through vibrant neighborhoods, these companies hope to engineer a soft transformation of cities through computing and telecommunications. “Drivers now see traffic jams before they happen,” boasts an IBM advertisement posted in airports all over the world. “In Singapore, smarter traffic systems can predict congestion with 90 percent accuracy.” With upgrades like these, unlike Moses, we may never need to pave another mile of roadway.

For the giants of the technology industry, smart cities are fixes for the dumb designs of the last century to prepare them for the challenges of the next, a new industrial revolution to deal with the unintended consequences of the first one. Congestion, global warming, declining health—all can simply be computed away behind the scenes. Sensors, software, digital networks, and remote controls will automate the things we now operate manually. Where there is now waste, there will be efficiency. Where there is volatility and risk, there will be predictions and early warnings. Where there is crime and insecurity, there will be watchful eyes. Where you now stand in line, you will instead access government services online. The information technology revolution of the nineteenth century made it possible to govern industrial cities as their populations swelled into the millions. This revolution hopes to wrest control over cities of previously unthinkable size—ten, twenty, fifty, or even one hundred million people.

With a potential market of more than $100 billion through the end of this decade, many of the world’s largest companies are jockeying for position around smart cities. There are the engineering conglomerates that grew to greatness building the systems that control our world: IBM, which sprang from the company that built the tabulators for the 1890 census; Siemens, which got its start by wiring up German cities with telegraph cables; and General Electric, which lit up America’s cities with artificial light. But there are newcomers, too, like Cisco Systems, the master plumber of the Internet. For each, success in selling us on smart cities will pave the way for decades of growth. Peering out from the cover ofForbes in 2011, CEO Peter Löscher of Siemens summed up the hopes of corporate leaders everywhere as he gushed at the prospect of supplying infrastructure for the cities of the developing world, “This is a huge, huge opportunity.”

By the 1970s, the construction of urban expressways in the United States had ground to a halt, stopped by a grassroots rebellion that held very different views of the role of cars, how city planning should be conducted and even the very nature of the city itself. The first signs of a similar backlash to corporate visions of smart cities are now coming to light, as a radically different vision of how we might design and build them bubbles up from the street. Unlike the mainframes of IBM’s heyday, computing is no longer solely in the hands of big companies and governments. The raw material and the means of producing the smart city—smartphones, social software, open-source hardware, and cheap bandwidth—are widely democratized and inexpensive. Combining and recombining them in endless variations is cheap, easy, and fun.

All over the world, a motley assortment of activists, entrepreneurs and civic hackers are tinkering their ways toward a different kind of utopia. They eschew efficiency, instead seeking to amplify and accelerate the natural sociability of city life. Instead of stockpiling big data, they build mechanisms to share it with others. Instead of optimizing government operations behind the scenes, they create digital interfaces for people to see, touch, and feel the city in completely new ways. Instead of proprietary monopolies, they build collaborative networks. These bottom-up efforts thrive on their small scale, but hold the potential to spread virally on the Web. Everywhere that industry attempts to impose its vision of clean, computed, centrally managed order, they propose messy, decentralized and democratic alternatives.

It’s only a matter of time before they come to blows.

Experimentation
At the middle of this emerging battlefield sits City Hall. Encamped on one flank are industry sales teams, proffering lump sums up front in return for exclusive contracts to manage the infrastructure of cash-strapped local governments. On the other flank, civic hackers demand access to public data and infrastructure. But even as they face the worst fiscal situation in a generation—in the United States, in Europe, even in China—cities are rapidly emerging as the most innovative and agile layer of government. Citizens routinely transcend the tyranny of geography by going online, but local governments are still the most plugged in to their daily concerns. Yet citizen expectations of innovation in public services continue to grow, while budgets shrink. Something has to give.

For a new cadre of civic leaders, smart technology isn’t just a way to do more with less. It’s a historic opportunity to rethink and reinvent government on a more open, transparent, democratic, and responsive model. They are deploying social media to create more responsive channels of communication with citizens, publishing vast troves of government data on the Web and sharing real-time feeds on the location of everything from subways to snowplows. There’s also a huge economic opportunity. By unlocking public databases and building broadband infrastructure, many cities hope to spawn homegrown inventions that others will want to buy, and attract highly mobile entrepreneurs and creative talent. Looking smart, perhaps even more than actually being smart, is crucial to competing in today’s global economy.

Zoom out from the local to the global scale and, like a satellite photo of the earth at night, a twinkling planet of civic laboratories comes into view. According to Living Labs Global, a Barcelona-based think tank that tracks the international trade in smart-city innovations, there are over 557,000 local governments worldwide. As they begin to experiment with smart technology, each faces a unique set of challenges and opportunities with a different pool of resources. Much as there are mobile apps for every purpose we can imagine, smart cities are being crafted in every imaginable configuration. Local is the perfect scale for smart-technology innovation for the same reasons it’s been good for policy innovation—it’s much easier to engage citizens and identify problems, and the impact of new solutions can be seen immediately. Each of these civic laboratories is an opportunity to invent.

But each local invention is also an opportunity to share with other communities. For the last few decades, as the pace of globalization accelerated, multinational corporations were the primary means by which technological innovation spread from place to place. Industry would love to play the role of Johnny Appleseed again with smart-city technology. But cities have become highly adept at sharing and copying new innovations on their own, as evidenced in an accelerating diffusion of good ideas. Bus rapid transit, a scheme for improving the capacity of bus lines with dedicated lanes and other clever tweaks, has taken forty years to spread from its birthplace in Curitiba, Brazil, in 1974 to over 120 cities all over the world. Public bike sharing, which surged onto the global stage with the launch of Paris’ Vélib’ system in 2007, has reached a similar footprint in just a few years. Today, there is a bustling trade not just in case studies and best practices of smart-city innovations but actual working technology: code, computer models, data and hardware designs. These digital solutions can spread quite literally overnight.

The spectacular array of local innovations being cooked up in the world’s civic laboratories will challenge our assumptions about both technology and cities, and how they should shape each other. Technologists often want to cut to the chase, find the killer app and corner the market—this dynamic is already at work in corporate plans for cookie-cutter smart cities. But if we want to get the design of smart cities right, we need to take into account local quirks and involve citizens in their creation. Over time, we’ll surely extract the essence of what’s reusable and share it widely. But building smart cities is going to take time. It will by necessity be a long, messy, incremental process.

Crash
Every city contains the DNA of its own destruction—some existing fissure that, under pressure, can erupt into conflict or cascade into collapse.

Smart technologies are already fueling conflict between factions in divided cities. The extent of the role played by social media in the 2011 urban uprisings of the Arab Spring has been hotly debated. But Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were a mere sideshow to the torrent of text messages that turned angry crowds into smart mobs, as they have done numerous times since 2001, when they summoned some 700,000 Filipinos to protests against corrupt President Joseph Estrada. These wireless channels, which provide what is for all intents and purposes a rudimentary form of telepathic communication, were so important that at the height of the Egyptian uprising authorities lobotomized Cairo by ordering a shutdown of the nation’s cellular networks. While this act didn’t stop the revolution (and probably hastened the flow of remaining bystanders out into the streets), blacking out cities’ wireless networks is becoming a disturbingly appealing option for security officials in the West as well—in August 2011 transit police jammed cellular signals during antipolice protests in San Francisco. The same week officials in the United Kingdom discussed blocking the BlackBerry Messenger mobile messaging service and other social media being used to coordinate widespread urban rioting.

Smart cities may also amplify a more commonplace kind of violence—that inflicted by poverty—by worsening gaps between haves and have-nots. This may happen by design, when sensors and surveillance are used to harden borders and wall off the poor from private gated communities. Or it may simply be an unintended consequence of poorly thought-through interventions.

In 2001, the government of India’s Karnataka state set out to reform the way it tracked land ownership, ostensibly to root out village-level corruption. Bhoomi, as the new digital recording system was called, was funded by the World Bank as a model for e-government reforms throughout the developing world. But it had the opposite impact. The village-level officials who had administered the old system had always taken bribes, but in return, they interpreted documents for the illiterate and provided advice on how to navigate complex legal procedures. Bhoomi certainly curbed village level corruption—the number of persons reporting paying bribes fell from 66 percent to 3 percent. But centralizing records merely centralized corruption. Wealthy speculators with deep pockets simply targeted officials at higher levels, allowing them to rapidly appropriate land in the expansion path of the region’s fast-growing capital, Bangalore. As one development scholar has noted, “While in theory, the initiative was intended to democratize access to information, in practice the result was to empower the empowered.” As similar digitization efforts transform government everywhere, the stakes for the poor are enormous. In this new computational arms race, poor communities will be at the mercy of those who can measure and control them from a distance.

Even if there is peace and equality, the smart city may come crashing down under its own weight because it is already buggy, brittle and bugged, and will only become more so. Smart cities are almost guaranteed to be chock full of bugs, from smart toilets and faucets that won’t operate to public screens sporting Microsoft’s ominous Blue Screen of Death. But even when their code is clean, the innards of smart cities will be so complex that so-called normal accidents will be inevitable. The only questions will be when smart cities fail, and how much damage they cause when they crash. Layered atop the fragile power grid, already prone to overload during crises and open to sabotage, the communications networks that patch the smart city together are as brittle an infrastructure as we’ve ever had.

Before it ever comes close to collapse, we might tear down the walls of the smart city ourselves, for they will be the ultimate setup for surveillance. Will smart cities become the digital analogue of the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 prison design, where the presence of an unseen watcher kept order more effectively than the strongest bars? In the 1990s, the Surveillance Camera Players staged sidewalk performances at camera locations in New York City to protest the rapid spread of video monitoring in public spaces. As we install countless new devices that record, recognize, influence and control our movements and behaviors, this whimsical dissent will seem quaint in retrospection. For as the true value of these technologies for governments and corporations to spy on citizens and consumers alike becomes apparent, the seeds of distrust will bloom. In 2012, concerned about the risks of face-recognition technology, U.S. Senator Al Franken said, “You can change your password, and you can get a new credit card, but you can’t change your fingerprint, you can’t change your face—unless, I guess, you go through a great deal of trouble.” But devious countermeasures are already spreading. In the place of protest, more pragmatic responses are popping up, like Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle. A face-painting scheme based on World War I antisubmarine camouflage, CV Dazzle is designed to confuse face-recognition algorithms.

A New Civics
If the history of city building in the last century tells us anything, it is that the unintended consequences of new technologies often dwarf their intended design. Motorization promised to save city dwellers from the piles of horse manure that clogged nineteenth-century streets and deliver us from a shroud of factory smoke back to nature. Instead, it scarred the countryside with sprawl and rendered us sedentary and obese. If we don’t think critically now about the technology we put in place for the next century of cities, we can only look forward to all the unpleasant surprises they hold in store for us.

But that’s only if we continue doing business as usual. We can stack the deck and improve the odds, but we need to completely rethink our approach to the opportunities and challenges of building smart cities. We need to question the confidence of tech-industry giants, and organize the local innovation that’s blossoming at the grassroots into a truly global movement. We need to push our civic leaders to think more about long-term survival and less about short-term gain, more about cooperation than competition. Most importantly, we need to take the wheel back from the engineers and let people and communities decide where we should steer.

People often ask me, “What is a smart city?” It’s a hard question to answer. ‘Smart’ is a problematic word that has come to mean a million things. Soon, it may take its place alongside the handful of international cognates—vaguely evocative terms like ‘sustainability’ and ‘globalization’—that no one bothers to translate because there’s no consensus about what they actually mean. When people talk about smart cities, they often cast a wide net that pulls in every new public-service innovation from bike sharing to pop-up parks. The broad view is important, since cities must be viewed holistically. Simply installing some new technology, no matter how elegant or powerful, cannot solve a city’s problems in isolation. But there really is something going on here—information technology is clearly going to be a big part of the solution. It deserves treatment on its own. I take a more focused view and define smart cities as places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects and even our bodies to address social, economic and environmental problems.

I think the more important and interesting question is, “What do you want a smart city to be?” We need to focus on how we shape the technology we employ in future cities. There are many different visions of what the opportunity is. Ask an IBM engineer and he will tell you about the potential for efficiency and optimization. Ask an app developer and she will paint a vision of novel social interactions and experiences in public places. Ask a mayor and it’s all about participation and democracy. In truth, smart cities should strive for all of these things.

There are trade-offs between these competing goals for smart cities. The urgent challenge is weaving together solutions that integrate these aims and mitigate conflicts. Smart cities need to be efficient but also preserve opportunities for spontaneity, serendipity and sociability. If we program all of the randomness out, we’ll have turned them from rich, living organisms into dull mechanical automatons. They need to be secure, but not at the risk of becoming surveillance chambers. They need to be open and participatory, but provide enough support structure for those who lack the resources to self-organize. More than anything else, they need to be inclusive. In her most influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the acclaimed urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Yet, over fifty years later, as we set out to create the smart cities of the twenty-first century, we seem to have again forgotten this hard-learned truth.

But there is hope that a new civic order will arise in smart cities and pull every last one of us into the effort to make them better places. Cities used to be full of strangers and chance encounters. Today we can mine the social graph in an instant by simply taking a photo. Algorithms churn in the cloud, telling the little things in our pocket where we should eat and whom we should date. It’s a jarring transformation. But even as old norms fade into the past, we’re learning new ways to thrive on mass connectedness. A sharing economy has mushroomed overnight, as people swap everything from spare bedrooms to cars, in a synergistic exploitation of new technology and more earth-friendly consumption. Online social networks are leaking back into the thriving urban habitats where they were born in countless promising ways.

These developments are our first baby steps in fashioning a new civics for smart cities.

Where You Live
For the last fifteen years, I’ve watched the struggle over how to build smart cities evolve from the trenches. I’ve studied and critiqued these efforts, designed parts of them myself and cheered others along. I’ve written forecasts for big companies as they sized up the market, worked with start-ups and civic hackers toiling away at the grassroots, and advised politicians and policy wonks trying to push reluctant governments into a new era. I understand and share much of their agendas.

But I’ve also seen my share of gaps, shortfalls and misguided assumptions in the visions and initiatives that have been carried forth under the banner of smart cities. And so I’m going to play the roles of myth buster, whistleblower and skeptic in one. New technologies inspire us to dream up new ways of living. The promise of technological fixes to complex social, economic and environmental problems is seductive. I get nervous when I hear people talk about how technology is going to change the world. I have been around technology enough to know its vast potential, but also its severe limitations. When coarsely applied to complex problems, technology often fails.

What’s much more interesting is how we are going to change our technology to create the kinds of places we want to live in. I believe that’s going to happen at the roots, and I hope my vision of the tremendous resilience and potential for innovation in every city will carry through the darker moments. I think there is an important role for industry, but my objective is to put an end to the domination of corporate visions in these early conversations about the future of cities.

Above all, I’m an advocate for cities and the people that live in them. Technology pundits can preach from behind a screen, but cities can’t be understood only by looking inside City Hall or a boardroom. You have to connect the schemes of the rich and powerful with the life of the street. That means taking a broad historical and global view of the landscape. To understand the choices we have ahead of us and the unintended consequences, and articulate a set of principles that can better guide our plans and designs moving forward, we need to reexamine how cities and information and communications technologies have shaped each other in the past. The smart city is a work in progress.

Still, the struggle will remain. The technology industry is asking us to rebuild the world around its vision of efficient, safe, convenient living. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince us to pay for it. But we’ve seen this movie before. As essayist Walter Lippmann wrote of the 1939 World’s Fair, “General Motors has spent a small fortune to convince the American public that if it wishes to enjoy the full benefit of private enterprise in motor manufacturing, it will have to rebuild its cities and its highways by public enterprise.” Today the computer guys are singing the same song.

I believe there is a better way to build smart cities than to simply call in the engineers. We need to lift up the civic leaders who would show us a different way. We need to empower ourselves to build future cities organically, from the bottom up, and do it in time to save ourselves from climate change. It can be done, one street corner at a time. If that seems an insurmountable goal, don’t forget that at the end of the day the smartest city in the world is the one you live in. If that’s not worth fighting for, I don’t know what is.

Excerpted from Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, by Anthony M. Townsend. Copyright © 2013 by Anthony M. Townsend. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Anthony M. Townsend is research director of the Technology Horizons Program at the Institute for the Future. He is also a senior research fellow at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. He is the author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. 

Detroit has become a synonym for urban rot. The litany of its ills runs on and on—racial tension, rampant crime, broken schools. In July came another sign of decline when the City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 9 of the U.S. federal code, becoming the largest city to ever do so. Kevyn Orr, the city’s emergency manager, a fiscal overlord appointed by Michigan’s governor, estimated that Detroit’s long-term debt and unfunded pension and health care liabilities total $18 billion to $20 billion. For a municipality of 700,000 people, that is a staggering figure. Then in October, when it seemed that the city’s reputation couldn’t sink any lower, a former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was sentenced to twenty-eight years in federal prison on corruption charges.

Such is its fall from grace that other struggling metropolises are in the habit of citing the city to put their own difficulties in a more favorable light. “At least we’re not Detroit,” utter urban managers from coast to coast. Conservative politicians scapegoat the city in their rhetoric, warning that progressive policies will lead to the ‘Detroiting’ of other American communities.

The Detroit experience is worth close examination for what it says about the plight of once-great industrial centers. But it is also necessary to dispel some of the myths surrounding Detroit’s fall. As satirist Jon Stewart observed on his popular Daily Show television program, many of the journalists fascinated by Detroit’s supposed demise file their reports from Chicago, some three hundred miles and two states to the west. Detroit, in fact, is not dead. A new city, constructed on an innovative twenty-first century model, is slowly emerging.

Situated at the heart of the Great Lakes, Detroit was founded by the French explorer Antoine de Lamothe, sieur de Cadillac, in 1701. The colonial fur-trading outpost became a farming community and, later, a center for manufacturing enterprises. With its mechanical and engineering talent, access to raw materials, and access to land and sea transportation networks, Detroit became the mighty capital of the world automotive industry in the twentieth century. One of the age’s greatest industrialists, Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, grew up on a nearby farm. If the city was a byword for anything back then, it was for progress, or modernity. Detroit was affectionately known as Motor Town, or just Motown after becoming the unofficial capital of soul music in the 1960s.

Detroit is emblematic of industrial cities in the twentieth century. Whether it is Turin, home to Italy’s Fiat automotive enterprise, or the steel city of Pittsburgh closer to home, such cities attracted enormous capital investment as they built up huge industrial infrastructures. Immigration soared as companies hired large workforces. These vertically integrated operations served as paternalistic overseers of their host cities, creating schools, hospitals, recreation facilities and other civic goods, as well as paying high wages to blue-collar workers. The good times lasted for decades, until foreign competition and other challenges forced the companies to downsize, relocate or close for business.

Detroit grew as fast and as large as any of the world’s industrial hubs. From about 300,000 residents in 1900 the city grew to one million by 1920 and nearly two million by 1950 before urban flight. The city’s land area swelled from about thirty square miles at the start of the automotive age to 139 square miles by 1926.

Shortly after the war ended, the exodus from the crowded city to the spacious new suburban communities began. Typically cities spread into the farmland at their perimeters. Automakers and road builders eager to sell cars, home builders eager to sell new houses, village mayors eager for new taxes all promoted suburban growth. So did the federal government, with subsidies and tax incentives. Looking for elbow room, families in crowded cities like Detroit began moving to the new communities. Discriminatory practices such as redlining—denying minority buyers mortgages and access to homes in white neighborhoods—made the experience of suburbanization in Detroit and many other cities an ugly one. Unscrupulous real estate agents encouraged white flight by stoking fears of African-Americans moving in next door. Rancor ran deep. Experts warned of two Americas: one suburban, privileged and white; the other urban, poor and black.

Just as corporate genius made Detroit a great American success story, corporate failure helped send the city on its downward spiral. America’s auto industry contracted and then all but collapsed as it struggled with competition from Europe and Japan. Once renowned for sleek engineering, Detroit, along with other failing industrial centers in the northeast United States, became part of the Rust Belt.

Beset by falling tax revenues, Detroit’s municipal government initially responded by raising taxes on residents to the highest levels in the State of Michigan, and eventually by borrowing huge sums in the municipal bond market to carry on city operations. The city ran annual operating deficits beginning a decade ago, borrowing to sustain the operation with little if any hope of paying off the debts. Even with layoffs of half the city’s municipal workforce, services to residents deteriorated. Today, nearly half of the city’s streetlights don’t work on any given night, leaving entire neighborhoods in darkness. Police are notoriously slow to respond to calls for help in the ensuing lawlessness.

An Urban New Deal
The vacuum in city leadership has been filled, at least in part, by civic-minded corporate executives, leaders of charitable foundations and nonprofit neighborhood groups, university programs and others. There is a sharp distinction to be made between the indebtedness and broken bureaucracy of the mismanaged city government and, on the other hand, the broader Detroit community and economy.

Certainly the automotive industry has recovered dramatically from its own brush with bankruptcy a few years ago, thanks to the Obama administration’s rescue package and the nation’s seemingly insatiable appetite for new cars and trucks. Detroit’s downtown and Midtown districts, home to the city’s banking, legal, university, hospital and museum operations, are thriving and fast filling up with new workers and residents. Long-planned civic improvements like the replacement of a blighted, formerly industrialized riverfront with a five-mile-long recreational promenade called the RiverWalk are proceeding apace. The local music and entertainment scene remains vibrant. Detroit’s brand, that elusive identity that is always part fact and part fiction, seems to be improving, benefiting from the American love of a comeback story. Moviegoers were treated to a poignant twist on the theme in Searching for Sugarman, chronicling the career resurrection of Detroit balladeer Sixto Rodriguez; the film received the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2013.

Make no mistake, Detroit is a deeply troubled city. Poverty and unemployment run high, among the worst in urban America, and the scourges of crime and poorly performing schools still scar far too many neighborhoods. Blight remains endemic; estimates vary but the city probably contains at least fifty thousand to seventy-five thousand abandoned buildings and perhaps a hundred thousand vacant residential lots. Municipal services are miserable. The bankruptcy case looks to drag on for at least a year before the city emerges as a leaner, more fiscally sound enterprise.

The combination of enormous need and the vacuum in municipal leadership has brought forth efforts to ‘reimagine’ Detroit. That is, instead of pursuing traditional economic development activities like building new sports stadiums or downtown showcase projects, many Detroiters are now independently acting to reinvent their city with neighborhood revitalization projects, hyper-local economies and new localized governing structures. These nascent efforts, which can be seen in other post-industrial cities as well, promise something entirely new in urban America.

With Detroit’s civic government unable to deliver adequate services, the city in recent years has spun off pieces of municipal governance to a series of quasi-public conservancies, public authorities and similar nonprofit bodies that are professionally managed. Most or all are thriving under their new management. Multiple parts of city government have been offloaded in recent years, including Detroit’s Cobo Center convention facility in 2009; its Eastern Market public market and the Detroit Historical Museum, both in 2006, and the construction and operation of the RiverWalk and the city’s central Campus Martius Park over the past ten years.

The nonprofit bodies running Cobo, the art museum, the RiverWalk and other assets work well under a new structure due to various factors. Among them: more efficient operations once freed from the city’s bureaucracy. The Detroit Historical Museum has fewer than half the employees it had in 2006 when it left direct city control. Cobo Center slashed operating expenses by 28 percent to $14.5 million last year. Cobo’s utility costs dropped nearly 42 percent from about $4.8 million in 2010 to about $2.8 million in 2012. Cobo maintains the same workforce even though the authority picked up several new functions that were previously based elsewhere in city government, including finance and accounting, payroll, human resources, marketing and sales. Sheila Cockrel, a former city council member, told me: “These new authorities are able to create more flexibility in job descriptions and setting standards for acceptable performance, and I think that has had an impact.”

New funding sources open up once operations are out of the city’s direct control. The Cobo regional authority now benefits from new hotel and liquor taxes. Projects like the RiverWalk and Eastern Market have benefited from foundation grants and other donations from entities such as the Kresge Foundation and General Motors.

Finally, there is more focused management. Oversight of Eastern Market once bounced from city department to city department. But once the nonprofit Eastern Market Corporation took control in 2006, a new professional management team was brought in. Similarly, the new Cobo regional authority and the RiverWalk are being run by professional management. “The spinoffs are able to procure faster with less bureaucracy, get better prices,” Cockrel said. “These institutions aren’t bogged down with the financial chaos that has impeded efficient operation in Detroit for so long. People get paid on time.” Cockrel said the new management structures offer greater flexibility. “It’s sort of like hardening of the arteries, plaque building up,” she said of the former direct city control. “The inability to move in a nimble manner feeds on itself and makes things less and less able to function properly. Then it costs more. It’s a vicious circle.”

The authorities and conservancies that manage the assets are led by appointees rather than by democratically elected and thereby accountable public officials. Dale Thomson, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who has studied the new management structures, said the city needs to balance the potential for service improvement with the potential for diminished accountability or democratic control. But in the end, just spinning off a piece of city government seems to unleash new energy. “Creating a new organization, changing the rules, even if you’re dealing with the same people, there’s a sense of liberation,” Thomson told me. “There are a lot of great people working in city government who feel overwhelmed, and if they were put into a new setting like this, they might thrive.”

Community of Gardeners
Detroit during its twentieth century peak was a city of neighborhoods. Unlike, say, New York or Chicago, with their housing stock consisting largely of brick or stone apartment buildings, Detroit’s housing stock consisted mainly of single-family houses—bungalows and one-story ranch-style houses for the factory workers, or, in the more upscale districts housing professionals, two-story Tudor-style homes with brick facades, hardwood floors, high ceilings and other amenities. As the population dwindled, these wood-frame houses did not hold up well to abandonment. Water damage, vandalism, arson and other ills could quickly reduce a once-useful house to a ruin in a matter of months. As the city demolished abandoned houses as part of blight removal programs, neighborhoods thinned out. Today, the amount of vacant land inside Detroit’s 139-square-mile footprint has been variously estimated at twenty to forty square miles, or from roughly 15 percent to 30 percent of the city’s land mass. This vacant land is often overgrown with scrub vegetation and quickly becomes the site of illegal dumping of trash.

Detroit has recently begun to attack this blight with ramped-up demolition programs funded by the state or federal governments. Tens of millions of dollars of outside aid have been earmarked for demolition of abandoned buildings and for cleaning up trash-strewn vacant lots, and new blight oversight structures have been created. These efforts promise to speed up the process of removing the eyesores. But ordinary citizens have long since taken in hand the challenge of repurposing vacant urban land.

The most common locally determined new use is community gardening, in which volunteers clear one or more vacant lots in a neighborhood and plant fruits and vegetables as a community project. The city now sports more than one thousand of these small, volunteer-based, nonprofit community food plots, with the produce either given away to food banks for the poor or consumed by the growers and their neighbors.

Detroit is now in the midst of a debate over when large-scale, for-profit farming operations ought also to be welcomed in the city. One such proposal, known as Hantz Farms, first proposed about four years ago commercial farming of perhaps two thousand acres of vacant land scattered throughout the city’s east side; when finally approved by a closely divided City Council, the farming proposal had shrunk to about 150 acres on which Hantz Farms will be permitted to plant hardwood trees for eventual harvesting. Opposition to such large-scale projects stems largely from local mistrust of the corporate for-profit motive and what it may mean to the nonprofit community growers. Many of the most active community gardeners believe that growing food and controlling land rectifies historical social injustices, particularly for Detroit’s largely African-American population. The for-profit growers insist that there is more than enough vacant land in Detroit to go around. This debate continues.

Meanwhile, in early 2013 a team of urban planners and community organizers, funded by foundations and working in semi-isolation from city government, produced Detroit Future City, a visionary template for Detroit’s future recovery. The plan envisions widespread repurposing of vacant urban land including growing food, reforestation, recreational corridors, mixed-use ‘green’ neighborhoods that are semi-rural in nature and ‘blue’ infrastructure—creation of rainwater retention ponds and other watery infrastructure to capture rain and keep it from running off into the city’s sewer systems and thus saving millions of dollars in taxpayer money. All these proposed new uses are in the very earliest stages of implementation, and indeed Detroit Future City suggests that implementation will take place over years and decades. But if still mostly a vision, these proposals to turn Detroit’s vacant-land liability into an asset for the city’s recovery have taken root in the city’s imagination. An implementation team of about ten professionals has been hired to push the Detroit Future City recommendations forward, mainly by looking for pilot programs to illustrate the concepts in actual practice. And both candidates in the 2013 mayoral election have cited Detroit Future City as part of their inspiration for their neighborhood recovery schemes.

The bankruptcy filings by General Motors and Chrysler in 2009 marked an emphatic and symbolic end to Detroit’s automotive century. Even though the companies and the domestic auto industry have recovered, the industry will never again employ the hundreds of thousands of factory workers it did at the midpoint of the twentieth century. And much automotive production has long since moved out of Detroit anyway, finding more corporate-friendly climes in the American South, Mexico, China, and other areas. This has produced staggeringly high unemployment rates in the city of Detroit, with peak joblessness hitting about 25 percent during the 2008 recession and unofficial estimates running much higher.

Motown to TechTown
Business leaders have begun to promote a smaller scale, more entrepreneurial approach to energizing the city’s economy. A number of formal and informal business incubators have sprung up in recent years, offering training, networking, seed financing and other help to entrepreneurs hoping to start their own businesses. Most notable of these efforts are TechTown, affiliated with Wayne State University, and the M@dison, a hub of digital entrepreneurs bankrolled by Dan Gilbert, the billionaire founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, an online mortgage company. Gilbert moved his Quicken Loans to Detroit’s central business district in 2010 and since then has become the city’s biggest promoter, helping to underwrite creation of a new light-rail transit line to start construction in late 2013 and promoting the growth of retail and entertainment options in the downtown area. His M@dison hub includes several small but promising start-ups as well as the local offices of Twitter. A number of slogans are heard now that try to capture this new entrepreneurial energy—“Outsource to Detroit,” “Opportunity Detroit,” “Detroit 2.0” and, in a nod to the city’s main street Woodward Avenue, “Webward Avenue.”

As with the repurposing of vacant urban land, these entrepreneurial efforts remain in the early stages, but without doubt they have created a sense of enthusiasm in and around the city’s central business district. The downtown and Midtown districts are filling up with smart, educated young people, and apartment rental rates are rising. New housing is under construction, including several projects that are repurposing long-vacant 1920-era office towers for residential use. Whatever troubles beset the city’s poorer neighborhoods, the central heart of the city is recovering nicely. This has raised the level of public debate on issues of equity, social justice and who should benefit as Detroit recovers. But certainly after so many years with little but bad news for Detroit, the recent surge in entrepreneurial vigor has given many cause to cheer.

Detroit, then, is doing its best to reimagine itself in new and creative ways. These efforts are drawing worldwide attention; no longer do the journalists, artists, academics, and documentarians flock to Detroit simply to record the city’s devastation, a phenomenon locals dismiss as ‘ruin porn.’ Now many come to study the recovery strategies, and the number of accounts of Detroit’s comeback are growing.

The comeback stories may be premature, as Detroit remains a deeply troubled and wounded city. But no longer do people believe that Detroit represents just the ‘end’ of something, as though history stopped when the factories closed. Something new is happening in Detroit, and the city of 2050 will be as unimaginably different from 1950 as the city of 1950 was from 1850. The city’s municipal bankruptcy obscures signs of recovery, but a journey to the future is underway.

John Gallagher has been a reporter for the Detroit Free Press since 1987. He is the author ofReimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City and Great Architecture of Michigan. His latest book is Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Urban Reinvention. On Twitter:@JGallagherFreep.

China’s urban expansion is breathtaking. In 1980, fewer than 200 million Chinese people lived in towns and cities. Over the next thirty years, China’s cities expanded by nearly 500 million—the equivalent of adding the combined current populations of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Italy. Today more than 700 million people are crammed into urban areas, a little over half the population. By 2030, China’s cities will be home to one in every eight people on earth.

Nowhere is China’s urban transformation more striking than in Chongqing, the largest city on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, with a population of around seven million. Once a rusting laggard, marooned far from the dynamic cities of the eastern seaboard, this rough-and-ready river port is undergoing spectacular change.  Over the past decade, hundreds of towering apartment blocks have sprouted from the city’s deep red soil and new bridges have soared across its muddy riverbanks. Chongqing’s skyline, now a thicket of skyscrapers, resembles Hong Kong’s. And the construction frenzy shows no sign of slowing down. On the city’s northern outskirts, bulldozers flatten wooded hills and lush ravines to satisfy property developers’ insatiable appetite for land. Near the airport, teams of construction workers lay track on a new monorail that will eventually run to nine lines. And at the heart of the old city, wreckers armed with pickaxes hack at a tangle of grimy slums.

Yet Chongqing’s experience also shows the dark side of the urbanization process. Amid the city’s development, it is easy to miss the poverty on the ground. Urbanization has brought enormous wealth, but the millions of rural migrants who work on building sites, serve in restaurants and rub flesh in massage parlors remain poor. Many new arrivals from the rural counties that surround the metropolis struggle to scratch a living. On Chongqing’s streets, scrawny men flog pirated porn DVDs from pavements sticky with cooking slop, rows of women sweat at sewing machines in dank basements and crowds of unemployed migrants gather at an outdoor labor market. On the mossy stone steps that lead down to the Yangtze River, shirtless old men toil as porters, balancing their cargo of goods on long bamboo poles. Chongqing’s stick men are just as much a part of the modern city as businessmen sipping cocktails in glitzy bars.

Chongqing’s leaders want many more rural people to migrate to the city and other towns within the larger municipality, which is home to 28 million people. They believe that faster urbanization will unlock economic growth and boost rural incomes. Their ambitious goal is to double the municipality’s registered urban population from ten million in 2010 to twenty million by 2020. This kind of direct promotion of urbanization is new: for the past fifty years or more, China deliberately held back the pace of migration, partly for fear that cities would not be able to cope with a vast influx of migrants. Chongqing’s plan jibes with a shift in national policy: China’s 12th Five-Year Plan, for the period from 2011 to 2015, explicitly calls for more urbanization and supports the emergence of megacities. Li Keqiang, China’s new premier, has consistently expressed his support for speedier urbanization nationwide. He believes that encouraging millions of farmers to migrate to the city, and building consumer-oriented cities to house them, will underpin future development.

The journey from farm to city is the story of China’s transformation from a poor underdeveloped country to an economic superpower. The driving force behind the biggest migration in history is economic: workers who migrate to the city earn far more than those who stay on the farm. The twin processes of urbanization and industrialization also bring huge productivity gains for the national economy—moving hundreds of millions of people out of economically insignificant jobs on the land, and into factories and onto building sites in the city, produces enormous economic growth. Mass migration to the cities makes sense both for individual farmers and for the country as a whole. For this reason, nothing is likely to halt the huge migration from farm to city—barring economic collapse, political turmoil or some other cataclysmic event. Historical experience, economic logic and government policy all point to the same conclusion: by 2030, or not long after, one billion Chinese will live in cities.

What kind of lives will China’s urban billion lead? The shape of China’s cities in 2030 will depend on whether leaders are willing to forgo short-term economic gains and make the changes needed to create a healthier form of urbanization. China’s urbanization numbers are impressive, but they hide an unpalatable truth: a large chunk of Chinese urbanization is essentially bogus. Around 250 million people in Chinese cities do not live genuinely urban lives, because rural migrants are not entitled to urban social security and face institutionalized discrimination in the cities. China’s household registration system (known as hukou) legally ties migrant workers to their rural home, preventing them from putting down proper roots in the city. Rural migrants in the city lead segregated lives, hidden away in worker dormitories or slum villages. The rapid modernization of urban China over the past couple of decades is astonishing, but social stratification is worsening.

The Hukou Trap
When farmers leave Chongqing’s rural counties to seek work in the city, many end up in the teeming slums of Eighteen Steps. The dripping alleyways are lined with dank, squalid houses patched with filthy tarpaulin. “We live in the city, but we do not feel urban,” says Zhong, a migrant from rural Sichuan, who shares a windowless concrete cell with five other migrant workers. “We have no proper home, and no social security.” Inside, a man with crippled legs lies on a bed fashioned out of bamboo poles and heavy cotton blankets. Cheap suitcases and nylon-thread bags are stacked on a ledge above his head. Outside, a crude, hand-written sign hangs from a stick, advertising beds for three renminbi per night, about forty cents. Lodgers walk through a brick entrance past a pile of empty bottles, cardboard boxes and other scrap, which the proprietor collects and sells for change. Rats are common companions.

The migrant workers in Eighteen Steps live at the bottom of the urban heap. Officially classed as temporary residents, they lead temporary lives. Chongqing is engaged in perhaps the most radical experiment in hukou reform nationwide, but these men have yet to qualify, even though they have lived in the city for several years. Under the initial reforms, only long-term migrant workers with stable jobs and accommodation can convert to a local urban hukou. So they live in the city, but with little access to public services or social welfare. “I won’t go home because I’m not used to the life there anymore,” says Yang, a young migrant worker with hedgehog hair who was born in neighboring Fengdu County. “I don’t belong in the countryside and I don’t belong in the city.”

Today, one in three people living in China’s cities are treated as second-class citizens. If China does not begin to untie migrant workers’ social-security entitlements from their hukou status, the proportion of disenfranchised urban residents could grow to one in two. By 2030, nearly 500 million people could effectively belong to a giant urban underclass, without proper housing or access to basic public services. The potentially explosive political ramifications of this bleak picture mean that some reform is unavoidable, as local governments have already found. The big question is whether the central government has the political will to address the roots of the problem. This is a central question for China’s new leaders. Premier Li says a “New Urbanization Plan,” due by the end of 2013, will be a blueprint for creating a healthier form of urbanization.

The first task is to reform the hukou system, giving migrants access to schools, health care, housing and social security in the cities in which they work. Delinking access to basic services from hukoustatus has already begun in several localities nationwide. Since 2009, several cities have introduced alternative residence permit systems that entitle migrant workers to access local social services. Some permit systems—which operate independently of the national hukou system—offer easy access to an extremely limited number of services. Some, such as Shanghai’s, set a high eligibility threshold but offer a comprehensive social insurance package. Other systems offer a mix of both, giving limited entitlements to temporary permit holders and full entitlements to permanent residents. In time, these local residence permit schemes could be extended nationwide. So far, local hukou reforms have been slow and piecemeal, but more migrant children are receiving a state education, and more of their parents are enrolled in social insurance programs.

The second task is to make progress on the most divisive issue of all: land reform. Currently, land in China is divided into two types: urban and rural. Urban land is owned by the state but leased for seventy-year periods to developers, companies and homeowners. Rural land belongs to village collectives that lease parcels of land to farmers for extendable thirty-year periods. Rural land is further divided into two broad types: farmland and rural construction land, occupied by homes, public buildings and roads. Rural collectives have the right to sell the land they own, but cannot sell it directly for urban development. Only local governments have the legal power to turn collectively owned land into state-owned urban land, which can then be used for construction. Because urban construction land is worth far more than rural land, local governments are able to pocket the difference between the low price they pay for rural land and the much higher price they can sell it for as urban construction land. This lucrative game is a huge money-spinner for local governments, which rely on land sales for a substantial chunk of their income.

Collective ownership of land is supposed to protect farmers from rapacious landlords and developers. All too often, however, it merely makes them the victims of corrupt village chiefs and local officials who sell communal land to developers for enormous personal profit. Individual property rights would help protect farmers from greedy officials and allow them to gain more value from their land. Yet for many of China’s Communist leaders, land reform is ideologically unpalatable. Along with state ownership of the country’s biggest enterprises, collective ownership of land is one of the only old Communist policies that remains sacrosanct. Well-meaning conservatives also worry that liberalizing the land tenure system risks returning farmers to the dark old days of feudal China when, according to party propaganda, peasants were rent slaves bound to landlords. Giving uneducated farmers the right to transfer their land, they fear, will allow a new class of unscrupulous land barons to monopolize the country’s farms. Far from creating a mass of consumers, too much reform risks breeding a lumpenproletariat of landless peasants crammed into urban slums.

Despite this opposition, a bunch of land reforms are gathering momentum, even if overall progress remains sluggish. Some of the reforms are sanctioned by the central government; others are promoted at the local level. Chongqing and neighboring Chengdu have experimented with using property exchanges to open up agricultural land transfers to market forces. More innovatively, both cities have extended the system to allow farmers to sell their use rights to rural construction land to urban developers. The exchanges enable farmers to find buyers and fix prices for their land, allowing them to leave for the city with money in their pocket. The southern boomtown of Shenzhen is also experimenting with allowing village collectives to sell their rural construction land directly to urban land developers rather than indirectly via government officials. This means they can capture the market value of their land.

These are useful advances. More land transfers should help to redistribute land efficiently, raise rural incomes, produce a more sustainable pattern of urbanization and, ultimately, help to stimulate domestic demand. Allowing farmers to sell their residential land rights to urban buyers is a small but important step toward unifying the rural and urban land markets. Yet farmers still cannot sell their land on an individual basis. It is indefensible that urban citizens should enjoy full individual property rights while farmers remain chained to village collectives, especially when collective ownership has patently failed to protect farmers from scheming officials and village cadres. Any discussion of private ownership remains political dynamite, but the only logical trajectory of reform is to give individual farmers more rights over their land.

Skyscrapers and Slums
The third task for China’s new leaders is to build more social housing for people who cannot buy their own. If they truly want to shift toward a more a socially sustainable model of urbanization, they must give migrant workers in the city somewhere decent to live. As municipal governments demolish the thousands of slum villages that riddle China’s cities, they need to replace them with rental housing that migrant workers can afford. So far, China’s urbanization process has not generated the kind of massive, cankerous slums that blight other developing cities around the world. But as more rural migrants bring their families to the city, and as these people begin to settle permanently, China’s cities will struggle to avoid this horror. As Chinese cities become more prosperous, these people should move out of slums and into social housing.

Yet social housing is not a silver bullet. Cities with aggressive urbanization policies, such as Chongqing, need to beware herding millions of farmers into cities who have few, if any, useful urban skills. Long-term migrants know how to survive in the city, but many farmers will struggle. The fear is that they will end up living, unemployed and on benefits, in vast housing estates. This gloomy path is well trodden in the Western world: the United States has its drug-infested projects, Britain its sink council estates and France its rundown banlieues. But China’s policy makers have given little thought to the social canker that can fester among disadvantaged communities in public housing, especially where there is social discrimination and a shortage of jobs. In China the emphasis is on replacing decrepit housing with modern apartment blocks. But without very good management, towers of shoddily built flats peopled by hopeless ex-farmers could deteriorate very quickly.

A more immediate concern is how cash-strapped cities will pay for all this new housing, not to mention the cost of integrating millions of migrants into city life. If ambitious local hukou reforms such as those in Chongqing are extended nationwide, the financial pressure will be intense. At the moment, local governments rely on land sales to plug their funding shortages. But this cannot be a long-term solution to the problem: China only has limited farmland and there is no guarantee that land prices will rise quickly enough to replenish local coffers.

If local governments cannot rely on flogging land to shore up rickety local finances, how will they pay for social housing, public services and city infrastructure? The answer is that the central government must shoulder its fair share of the spending burden. Local governments currently finance nearly all public services, including 80 percent of basic health and education expenditure. Since a large slice of locally collected taxes goes into central government coffers, most local authorities struggle to meet their financial responsibilities. By contrast, the central government is swimming in cash. Increasingly, the challenge facing China is not a lack of funds as such, but how to channel them to the right places and to the right people. That means reforming the country’s dysfunctional fiscal system so that the central government covers more social welfare, education and health services spending. This may prove the toughest task of them all.

These are all big, difficult and painful reforms. Dismantling the current hukou system, abandoning collectivist land ownership and redesigning the country’s fiscal system will require enormous political courage. Building enough homes for hundreds of millions of new urbanites and integrating them into the urban welfare system will be extremely expensive. The previous administration, headed by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, did not have the stomach to press ahead with such reforms. President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, who are set to hold power over the coming decade, need to show more gumption. Otherwise China risks repeating the experience of Latin America, becoming a country with pockets of extreme wealth and an educated middle class, but whose cities teem with enormous slums and suppurate with entrenched social divisions.

Since 1978, China’s leaders have made all the necessary changes to ensure that the country’s economic growth machine keeps humming along. It is now time to make further changes. The fact that China’s cities have grown by 500 million people during that time without sparking greater social unrest is a remarkable achievement. But the present model cannot continue. If China’s cities are destined to accommodate one in every eight people on the planet, its leaders must find a healthier, more inclusive and, ultimately, sustainable model of urban development.

This article is adapted from China’s Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History, by Tom Miller, published in December 2012 by Zed Books.

Tom Miller is managing editor of the China Economic Quarterly, a publication of the research company GK Dragonomics. He is the author of China’s Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History.

The September 11 attacks live on in the everyday security artifacts and practices that remain in their wake. Even as there is a decline in U.S. boots on foreign grounds, there are guards at entries to museum lobbies, subway stations and airport departure gates in the homeland. There is also a heavy security component in how buildings are being constructed. Rather than blindly accept the inspections, intrusions and blockages, Americans, and people in other countries similarly affected, should call them into question.

The security measures exact huge costs; financial and otherwise. Organizations and individuals are put through complex and tedious maneuvers. Agencies change how they run and people have to alter their lives. And there is good reason to doubt any net positive results. So it is not a matter of a ‘trade-off’ between security and other life goals. It’s just a net loss.

“See Something, Say Something”
Let’s look down in the New York subways, a place that my co-researcher Noah McClain and I examined closely over a two-year period with funding from the National Science Foundation. We were able to apply some common (and not so common) social science techniques to learn how the various security protocols were doing in the real world of turnstiles, train cars and waiting areas. We spent a lot of time interviewing more than one hundred workers in the system, including train conductors and drivers, cleanup crews, and station agents (the people who sit in the booths dispensing information and keeping an eye out for trouble). We also spent many hours just watching on the platforms, examining workers’ routines and their interactions with passengers, looking in particular for the ways they deal with danger. In some instances, we took up employees’ invitations to observe them on the job to see just how they worked equipment and dealt with challenges as they arose in real time. Finally, to gain some vantage ‘from the top,’ we met repeatedly with officials and security officers of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the agency that runs the trains and buses of New York.

The New York subway system has hundreds of stations and thousands of entrances, platforms, corridors and tunnels—too many and too complicated to fully patrol. But this very obvious vulnerability does not cancel out the felt need, and indeed official dictum, that something must be done. This need to do something is a common reaction when facing radical ambiguity, regardless of the complexity of the tasks or the improbability of effectively taking them on. And here’s the critical background fact in the case of the subways: although police have come up with some plots against New York City targets through intelligence and informants—a 2009 Al-Qaeda plot allegedly against the subway system was foiled by a tip received by the FBI—the anti-terror apparatus in the subways has not resulted in a single person being so charged. It is highly unlikely that the multiple programs and procedures aimed at forestalling attacks are the reason why. One piece of evidence for this is that those whose job it is to enact the programs and procedures, the subway workers we dealt with, do not take them seriously. As we learned, they have better things to do.

Perhaps the most famous MTA security initiative since 9/11 is the “See Something” campaign—much imitated and used in facilities of all kinds around the world. Signs say it everywhere and in numbers of different languages: If You See Something, Say Something. The intercoms on platforms and in trains announce it with automated constancy. A problem with the announcements is that they are often so garbled nobody can figure out what is being said. They add to the din of screeching train cars, loud talking and (sometimes) musicians working the system. Not only are the garbles an annoyance, but they could well interfere with announcements pertaining to real danger, including some that might be made by subway workers straining to use their own voices to maintain order.

The “See Something” posters are also visual pollution, interfering among other things with the clarity of signs that actually tell people how to get out and the names of the various exits. The warning words are even on step-risers in staircases. Some “See Something” posters are taped on the glass enclosures of station agents’ booths, interfering with workers’ ability to see what is happening in the entrances and on platforms. Signage experts will tell you that time spent glancing at one sign means less time spent taking in another. Every sign added thus subtracts from the ones, including mighty important ones, already present.

When the signs do ‘succeed’ in generating response, those who say something often create irrelevant contacts with workers and security personnel. This can deter workers from dealing with actual urgent needs. What are those urgent needs? People have heart attacks and strokes in the subways. Children wander off from their guardians. Depressed people attempt suicide (seventy-eight of them, over the last three years, with success). Others fall onto the tracks and meet death that way (a total of 140 people were hit by trains in 2012, fifty-five of them with fatal result). There is, despite substantial declines in the New York crime rate, crime in the subways: robbery, assaults and murder. Fires break out, with smoke conditions following on. Subway workers do come to the rescue, often in ways they invent on the scene and on their own.

We don’t know how many people have called the hotline to report something suspicious—a package left standing alone or a person who, for one reason or another, is doing something out of line. In one of its publicity campaigns, the MTA ran advertisements on the sides of its buses and other places proclaiming, “Last year 1,944 New Yorkers saw something and said something.” I am convinced this number came out of the air. No official at the MTA could trace its source, and the New York Times reporter who similarly tried to pin it down also failed. We can surely conclude that, especially given the nature of New Yorkers to see and say things, there have been many calls. In some cases, callers used the hotline to finger a person against whom they held a grudge, according to one security official with whom we spoke. Other cases involved profiling people who ‘look Arab.’

Fear of Flying
The world’s airports have become, with U.S. authorities certainly in the leadership, the mother of all modern security regimes. They have brought to the act of flying a special choreography and paraphernalia setup. Again the huge background fact: despite all the hullabaloo of metal detectors, surveillance cameras and ʻroutine questions, ’ U.S. airport security—like the subway apparatus in New York―has yielded up no terrorists, nor charges of terrorist intent.  There really have been people who have tried to blow up planes. But when they are caught, it is because fellow passengers or flight attendants detect something wrong and take direct action (again, as our subway workers routinely do in regard to less draconian threats). On American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami, it was the flight attendants who spotted Richard Reid trying to ignite his shoe bomb; with the aid of several passengers they bound him up with seat belt extensions and headphone cords. A physician on board then shot him with a tranquilizer from the plane’s first-aid kit. During the commandeered flight over Pennsylvania on September 11 (United Flight 93), it was the passengers who fought the hijackers and who were able to alter the plane’s trajectory toward the White House or Capitol Building (the exact target is not known).

In the official systems, there are obvious and gaping holes left unaddressed and former top Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials, several of whom I have interviewed, acknowledge them as confounding.  Here is a key instance: the security gates themselves gather up a large crowd—before any inspection. The queue can contain more people than will ever be on a plane. It may be that it is the logistic possibility of creating the security choke point that makes it somehow seem an effective thing to do. Meanwhile, any car driver can mow down innocent people at pedestrian thoroughfares all over America. We avoid facing that problem because it would be so awkward to take on, just like the problem of searching air passengers before they can crowd at the gates. A security apparatus is put in place, this implies, not because it secures but because it is feasible to set up.

Security systems also follow from political expedience. TSA authorities know that planes are full of articles far more lethal than the contraband at the gates. On board, soft drink cans could be stripped into razor-sharp instruments; duty-free liquor bottles are weapons in waiting. Flight crew flashlights (large and heavy) along with all manner of other accessible onboard objects are potential assault weapons. Prisoners have a long history of innovative transformation of even the most mundane products into lethal weapons (like pieces of bed spring). The TSA itself tried to start allowing passengers to carry scissors on board, but flight attendants, passenger groups and some political leaders waged successful counter-campaigns.

Meanwhile, all travelers experience massive inconvenience, anxiety and risk of delay as guards root through their belongings. There are inevitable risks of racial and ethnic profiling (ridiculously misconceived at times) which often alienate people who need to be, whatever the nature of a threat or danger, allies. It is a harsh experience, as one wonders if metal is somewhere on (or in) our bodies; did we forget to pull our cell phone back out of the bin? The yelling of the guards, the fretting of children, and frustration with keys, luggage, shoes and other life elements increase fumbling and nervousness.

The consternation further throws the system out of whack: guards who see a nervous passenger will have to distinguish between somebody made anxious through nefarious intent versus a person just nervous from security itself. Confusing and chaotic conditions work against being able to distinguish the devious plotter (should they exist) from background normality. And woe to those who make jokes about it; they risk being detained, especially if they get near words like ‘bomb,’ ‘gun’ or ‘ridiculous.’ Vociferous complaint, so common for New Yorker subway users, is under fearful constraint. My moments in security give me at least a glimpse of a fascist order. Vulnerable to the guards around me and standing with no shoes and my most valuable possessions in a bin beyond my reach, I bottle up frustration and move on.

But maybe, some wonder as with the absence of attacks at the subways, isn’t all this exertion and, yes, sacrifice, the reason there have been no assaults on air travel? I doubt this one too. We seem to think ‘our’ terrorists specialize in airplanes and that’s it. But, as terrible experience indicates, terrorists do not so limit themselves to one particular venue: they blow up churches, schools, coffee houses, shopping malls and temples. They mow down bystanders with an ordinary passenger vehicle. I don’t believe, again in the American context and at least in the present era, that they are there.

Another possible explanation: maybe the security apparatus finds miscreants but then removes them from our view by, for example, charging them with lesser crimes that then do not gain media coverage. This doesn’t compute because of the very showy announcements that are made when a real live suspect is apprehended including, a very common circumstance, when the threat turns out to be at least questionable. For example, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly held a widely covered press conference to announce the arrest of alleged terrorist Jose Pimentel in 2011—who continues to face trial on bomb-making charges. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) refused to participate in the case, one which turned out to involve charges against a hapless individual who, according to the FBI, lacked the “predisposition or the ability” to carry out the alleged plot. Security is a no-lose issue for public officials; they pile onto a popular bandwagon, perpetuating anxiety and the programs purporting to address it. If there were indeed people being caught, we would know about it.

Freedom Tower
Security now enters the very make-up of buildings in New York and elsewhere too, and nowhere more prominently than in the construction of the new World Trade Center skyscraper nearing completion at ground zero. An office building by function, it is a security apparatus by design. There is no other way to make sense of its architecture or its internal configuration. After the 9/11 attacks, there was a wondrous international competition that drew in the world’s most illustrious design firms, with many thousands of people coming to exhibitions with extensive citizen feedback workshops (an early gigantic enterprise was called “Listening to the City”). A star-studded design jury chose the team THINK—itself an assemblage of world-class architects—as the winner. A prominent element of their scheme was a vast ground-floor crystal lobby open to the rest of the site and downtown Manhattan.

In the end, nobody won. A first ‘compromise’ occurred when the governor of New York overruled the selection of THINK, deciding instead to give the award to Berlin-based Daniel Libeskind. But the then-leaseholder of the site, Larry Silverstein—who actually had the power to decide—hired his own architect, David Childs of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, to do the job. Even the much-watered down design that Childs then provided was to be eroded further still. After preparations were well underway for groundbreaking, security authorities required the building’s location be moved sixty feet from the chosen site. This was to keep it away from potential truck bombs from an adjacent street. And then, at an even later moment and out of the same concern over truck bombs, authorities required the bottom twenty stories to be encased in solid concrete with no windows (eliminating their potential use as offices). This makes it a unique building in the world.

The structure’s top portion was never slated to be rentable space, given the anxieties of its target potential. So the uppermost 408 feet are antenna spire, that’s about thirty floors of a normal office building and twice the height of the spire atop the Empire State Building. Boastfully and patriotically 1,776 feet tall to recall the year of American independence (the building had been initially dubbed “Freedom Tower”), it would be the highest building in the United States. But it is a building with nothing on the bottom and nothing on the top. Rather than a display of American power or authority, it taunts with bluster. The architecture critic of the New Yorker, Paul Goldberger, called it “Fear Tower.”

The bellicosity at ground zero was accompanied by the xenophobia that often comes with threat. So plans to build an Islamic community center, called Cordoba House, a few blocks distant were met with condemnation. The facility was to contain meeting rooms, a theater, fitness center and swimming pool, as well as a prayer space—hence earning the sobriquet “ground zero mosque.” Families of 9/11 victims called it “a gross insult” to the memory of their loved ones, and politicians—Mayor Bloomberg was not among them—voiced energetic opposition as well. Resistance to anything Muslim contrasted with affirmation of anything to do with making the site militarily secure, including intense electronic visual surveillance and gauntlets of guards checking visitors for weapons or incendiaries. One might argue, and as indeed some advocates for the Islamic center have done, that bringing more knowledge of the Muslim world into America might increase understanding in the country and also, no small matter, make the United States more attractive to people who otherwise might be disaffected. In other words, inclusion—relaxed inclusion—can enhance safety.

An amazing thing about 9/11 was the survival of so many people, even as the twin towers flattened like pancakes. About 17,000 individuals who were on site got out. They did so not through fancy technologies or guards hunting for malefactors, but through some very old-fashioned practices. They went down the stairs. They could literally see where to go and understood the route to take—facilitated to be sure by prior drills for workers in the building. They helped themselves and one another, as is also routine practice in the subways and on airplanes.

Mundane Stuff that Works
Such simple elements as stairs and mutual helping are not usually thought of as part of security systems. Instead, security is more typically run as a military operation and with a lot of aggressive hardware. But the stairway-as-hero tips us off to a deeply alternative way of thinking, including what to do, what to build, and how to do it. So in the subways we should create better ventilation. Simple. That would mean more survival no matter what kind of device or noxious substance got loose in the environment. It would improve health and chances for survival no matter the source of danger. Quite crucially, it would provide better air quality as an amenity of everyday life (maybe even air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter!). Likewise, the sound and sign systems: by making information delivery clearer, exiting would be more efficient in case of an emergency but in the meantime—day in and day out—people would have a better chance of knowing where they are going. Ditto lighting: bring it on stronger and fewer people will fall onto the tracks, trip down the stairs or slip in the long hallways.

And there is a list for the airports. Each encounter should be consciously designed to enhance calm and provide help for those in need rather than a way to herd and command. Lines that assemble targets need to be shortened or done away with altogether. Restrictions of what to take on board should be intelligently informed by actual risks and dangers, not make-believe scenarios. People ought even to be able to make jokes—jokes do give information about the jokester, especially if it is correlated with other available cues.

TSA guards (or other airport employees) should be right there to help people hoist their packages onto the conveyer belts and hold prams while parents adjust to their children’s needs. There should be helping hands. Like the jokes, helping informs. Anyone who has helped a child put on a jacket knows that is when you find there may be a pain or injury, a fever, or that the pocket contains a stolen cookie (or heavy instrument!). As it is, TSA employees are for security only with helping (or pleasantness, or wit, or heaven help us beauty) regarded as the opposite of security rather than facilitating it. At budget times, governments treat improvements like ventilation and helpfulness as the opposite of security, or at least irrelevant to it. That is bad thinking.

Instead, interventions for security should always be based on good design and recognition that organizations and people have multiple goals, with getting from one place to another being one of them. At the airport and everywhere else, anything done in the name of security should improve the routines of life, no matter what happens including if nothing happens—which is the far most likely outcome. Given the ambiguity of what to do anyway, why not do something decent?

Threats do exist, of course, and it is reasonable to be alert; vast enterprises of intelligence gathering exist to deal with them and they deserve (and receive) appropriate critique and examination. For everyone, including those in the rich and placid countries, they decrease the sum total of life quality and with little, if anything, positive to show for it.

Harvey Molotch is professor of sociology and metropolitan studies at New York University. He is the author of Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are and Urban Fortunes: Toward a Political Economy of Place (with John Logan). His most recent book is Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger.

In February 2010, during a mid-tour leave, a 22-year-old United States Army private named Bradley Manning walked into a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Rockville, Maryland. The junior military intelligence analyst began uploading hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks, the online publisher. In collaboration with WikiLeaks, the New York Times, Guardian andDer Spiegel later published extensive reports based on the documents.

Manning was initially arrested in May 2010 on suspicion of having disclosed what military prosecutors then believed was a classified video of a July 2007 U.S. air strike in Baghdad. The helicopter attack had injured two children and killed at least twelve civilians, including two Reuters journalists. A month before Manning’s arrest, WikiLeaks had published the video, which it entitled Collateral Murder. Despite a U.S. Central Command classification review later determining that the video was in fact unclassified, military prosecutors nevertheless charged Manning with espionage for its unauthorized disclosure.

Military prosecutors later accused Manning of disclosing four datasets containing 483,562 army field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, 251,287 diplomatic cables, and approximately 765 detainee profiles of the men and children imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Manning was tried by court-martial at Fort Meade, Maryland, on twenty-two charges, including aiding the enemy, espionage, exceeding authorized access, stealing U.S. government property and wanton publication.

Manning spent a year and a half in pretrial confinement, apparently longer than any accused awaiting court-martial in U.S. military law. The presiding military judge, Colonel Denise Lind, nevertheless ruled that the government had not violated the defendant’s right to a speedy trial. The legal proceedings began in December 2011 and continued for the next twenty months, ending in August 2013.

While Lind eventually acquitted Manning of aiding the enemy (the most serious charge, which carried a life sentence), she found Manning guilty of twenty other crimes and handed down a sentence of thirty-five years in prison. Though Lind had ruled that a portion of Manning’s confinement had been excessively harsh and unlawful, she granted Manning only 112 days credit on the long sentence.

The day after sentencing, Manning issued a statement through her defense counsel declaring her gender to be female, and asking that she be called Chelsea and referred to with feminine pronouns.

Significant Activity
“In Iraq death always has its way.” So begins a poem by Manning’s commanding officer, Master Sergeant Paul Adkins. A Secretary of the Army investigation into Manning’s command found that Adkins, a published poet and the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer in the intelligence shop where Manning worked, had been derelict in his duties. He was subsequently demoted to Sergeant First Class. According to the investigation, Adkins failed to inform higher command of an April 2010 email that Manning had sent to him in which she described her gender identity struggles. Manning had attached to the email a photo, which she had taken of herself during her leave in February 2010, dressed in a feminine wig and cosmetics. Adkins testified at Manning’s court-martial that he failed to inform his command of Manning’s email because he was short on intelligence analysts like Manning who specialized in the Shiite militias. Gender dysphoria can be grounds for administrative separation from the U.S. Army.

Before deploying to Iraq, Manning had worked on worldwide intelligence briefs for the commander of the Second Brigade Combat Team at Fort Drum in Upstate New York, home of the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army. The 2nd Brigade formed part of the army’s global response force, on call in case troop surges were needed anywhere in the world. In the garrison’s intelligence shop, Adkins also tasked Manning with rebuilding the “incident tracker.” This required Manning to back up hundreds of thousands of military field reports called Significant Activities, or SIGACTS, from the war in Afghanistan, where the 2nd Brigade was expected to deploy.After Manning’s unit was reassigned to Forward Operating Base Hammer, a few miles east of Baghdad, she followed suit and created another backup of SIGACTS from the war in Iraq. The backups were made on read-writable CDs and stored in the intelligence shop’s shared conference room at FOB Hammer. Analysts could access the backups during periodic interruptions to network connectivity that occurred during deployment.

SIGACTS are normally housed in a U.S. Central Command database called the Combined Information Data Network Exchange (CIDNE), which was accessible on a Department of Defense classified network called SIPRNet. SIPRNet contained information classified up to the level of “secret.” Almost all the information the military presents to the White House and Congress about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan originates in the CIDNE database. Thousands of military personnel, government employees and contractors have access to CIDNE’s various types of reports, including  human intelligence reports, or HUMINT, as well as the SIGACTS.

Manning disclosed 483,562 SIGACTS from the CIDNE-Iraq and the CIDNE-Afghanistan databases. WikiLeaks later published the material as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary. Manning did not, however, disclose the other kinds of reporting from the CIDNE database, like HUMINT, which contained intelligence sources and methods.  The SIGACTS that Manning disclosed, military prosecutors admitted at trial, only represent 24 percent of CIDNE. Manning told Lind that she believed that the classification determination of the SIGACTS (most of which were marked “secret”) was based primarily on their being housed on SIPRNet. While she knew the reports were “sensitive at the time of their creation,” she told the court that she believed that their sensitivity decreased “within forty-eight to seventy-two hours, as the information [was] either publicly released, or the unit involved [was] no longer in the area and not in danger.”

Our Foreign Policy
“Death could not just visit my house anytime it felt like filling its black palms,” reads another line of Adkins’ poem. The SIGACTS that Manning uploaded to WikiLeaks are filled with references to the ubiquity and seeming triviality of death in wartime Iraq. Manning regularly researched and reviewed the ground-level accounts of events in Iraq and Afghanistan during her long shifts at FOB Hammer and became deeply troubled by them. At her trial, Manning said she released the SIGACTS because she believed that a “detailed analysis of the data over a long period of time by different sectors of society might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the affected environment each day.”

She further testified:

In attempting to conduct counter-terrorism or CT and counter-insurgency COIN operations, we became obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and not being suspicious of and avoiding cooperation with our host nation partners, and ignoring the second and third order effects of accomplishing short-term goals and missions.

I believe that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the CIDNE-I [Iraq] and CIDNE-A [Afghanistan] tables this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Manning removed the read-writable CD backups from the conference room. In her containerized housing unit, she transferred the files to an SD card, and transported them home on her mid-tour leave. Prior to uploading the material to WikiLeaks, she called the Washington Post. She spoke with a reporter, who expressed skepticism about Manning’s claims and said that she would check with thePost’s senior editors. Manning then called the telephone number for the public editor at the New York Times and left a voicemail message, but received no response. In all, Manning downloaded documents between February and April in 2010, and uploaded them to WikiLeaks at various times in the same period both during her mid-tour leave and while at FOB Hammer in Iraq.

“Dead Bastards”
Cynicism and a lack of critical thought defined the ethos of the intelligence shop at FOB Hammer where Manning worked. A sign hung over the desks of the targeting analysts there: “The individuals that own this office are in the business of catching shit bags. If you think for one second you can come in here and bug us with sissy shit you might want to rethink your pathetic life.” A Central Intelligence Agency Red Cell memo that Manning disclosed to WikiLeaks in March 2010 was unapologetically entitled, “Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission—Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough.” Manning told Lind that after discovering the CIA memo, she “had difficulty believing what this section was doing.” Manning was also alarmed by the “seemingly delightful bloodlust” of the aerial weapons team that she viewed in the video of the 2007 U.S. airstrike in Baghdad. Manning uploaded the video to WikiLeaks in February 2010, along with information on the rules of engagement in Iraq for the years 2006 and 2007.

Manning said that the helicopter pilots in the video “dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as ‘dead bastards’ and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers.” She compared the pilots’ behavior “to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.” Manning’s co-worker, a targeting analyst named Specialist Jihrleah Showman, had originally found the video within the targeting section’s folder on the brigade’s shared drive. Showman testified that neither she nor her commanding officers ever discussed the rules of engagement while viewing the video in the intelligence shop.

Defense counsel David Coombs said in his closing arguments that Manning realized she could “no longer just ignore the fact that these are real lives being lost and real people dying.” In a letter to theGuardian published on October 9, 2013, Manning described herself as a transparency advocate. “I feel that the public cannot decide what actions and policies are or are not justified if they don’t even know the most rudimentary details about them and their effects,” she wrote.

Iraqi Partners
The 2nd Brigade’s mission in Iraq was to train the Iraqi Federal Police. The partnership included intelligence sharing. The 2nd Brigade also shared intelligence with the Iraqi presidential brigade and the National Iraqi Intelligence Agency. Classified computers in the 2nd Brigade’s intelligence shop were equipped with CD burners to distribute intelligence to their Iraqi partners.

Iraq’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies were divided along sectarian and political lines since the restructuring of the Iraqi state after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. The Bush administration authorized the creation of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) and Congress earmarked $3 billion for its operations between 2003 and 2007. Some of the money wound up supporting paramilitary units that effectively became Shiite-dominated militias and death squads carrying out personal and political vendettas in their search for Sunni insurgents who supported Saddam Hussein. The template for the U.S.-backed counter-insurgency is what journalist Peter Maass has called the “Salvadorization” of Iraq, a reference to the U.S. proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s. U.S. military counter-insurgency experts had reportedly advised the newly formed Iraqi Special Police Commandos. The Guardian reported in March 2013 that the Iraqi Special Police Commandos “conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the U.S. occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war.”

When Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki of the Shiite Islamic Dawa party came to power in 2006, he mistrusted the CIA-funded INIS, which was headed by a Sunni who led a failed CIA-backed coup against Hussein in 1996. A decade later, four INIS agents were suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of an Iranian diplomat suspected of ties to Shiite insurgents. The diplomat later alleged that the CIA had tortured him. Al-Maliki subsequently established his own intelligence agency headed by a Shiite under the Ministry of State for National Security Affairs (MSNS). Fueled by the competing spheres of influence between the U.S. and Iran, Sunni and Shiite factions within both the INIS and the MSNS conducted systematic campaigns to eliminate rivals in an escalating battle for influence and control over the intelligence and security apparatus in Iraq.

“Everything Started Slipping”
Three weeks after her trip to Barnes & Noble, now back in Iraq, Manning was ordered to investigate the arrest of fifteen individuals at a printing press in the Karada district of Baghdad. The detentions had been a joint operation between subordinate commands of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team and the Iraqi Federal Police (IFP). The IFP accused the detainees of publishing “anti-Iraqi” literature; she was told to find out who the “bad guys” were.

Manning established that none of the detainees had any ties to suspected terrorists or militia groups; nor were they carrying out “anti-Iraqi” activities. Pictures from the scene of the arrest included images of the fifteen suspects, pallets of unprinted paper, and high-resolution copies of the printed material they had supposedly sought to publish. When Manning had the “anti-Iraqi” literature translated, it turned out to be a benign treatise on public corruption in Al-Maliki’s government entitled, “Where Did the Money Go?” Upon discovering the discrepancy, Manning informed her command that the detainees were dissidents, not militants. Manning said her superiors “told me to quote ‘drop it’ unquote and to just assist them and the Federal Police in finding out where more of these print shops creating quote ‘anti-Iraqi literature’ unquote were.”

In May 2010, Manning initiated contact with Adrian Lamo, a former computer hacker. Lamo decided to contact U.S. law enforcement and become a government informant when Manning initially asked him: “[I]f you had unprecedented access to classified networks fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for eight plus months, what would you do?” Recounting events around the arrest of the fifteen Iraqis at the printing press, Manning told Lamo that her command told her to “shut up” and explain how to assist the IFP in making more arrests. “Everything started slipping after that,” she told Lamo in the online chat. “I was actively involved in something that I was completely against.”

When Manning spoke about the fifteen detainees to other analysts in the intelligence shop as well as to her non-commissioned officer in charge, “some were sympathetic,” she said in court, “but no one wanted to do anything about it.” Manning’s co-worker, Sergeant David Sadtler, said in a sworn statement for the Secretary of the Army’s investigation that Manning thought, “no one cared about the mission.”

In court, Manning told Lind, “I knew that if I continued to assist the Baghdad Federal Police in identifying the political opponents of Prime Minister Al-Maliki, those people would be arrested and in the custody of the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police and very likely tortured and not seen again for a very long time—if ever.”

Manning also said in court that she decided to give the information to WikiLeaks in hopes of generating media attention preventing further IFP crackdowns on Al-Maliki’s political opponents in the run-up to the Iraqi elections. After uploading the information to WikiLeaks via its secure transfer protocol, Manning said that someone from the WikiLeaks organization requested more information in order to verify the story. WikiLeaks has never published any information about the arrest of the fifteen detainees.

Around the time that Manning was tasked to investigate the detainment of the fifteen Iraqis, brigade commanders began feeling that their soldiers were too “focused on the ground” and “they needed a bigger picture,” according to the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the brigade, Captain Steven Lim. Headquarters directed Lim to send his intelligence analysts a link to the State Department’s Net-Centric Diplomacy database, which housed diplomatic cables from across the world. Most of the cables were unclassified or confidential. Cables housed in the NCD database were intended for wide distribution among at least one million U.S. government employees and federal contractors. Lim emailed the analysts a link to the NCD, no password required, and encouraged them to incorporate the cables into their work product.

The day after the arrest of the fifteen detainees, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad sent a diplomatic cable to the CIA, National Security Council and other U.S. agencies reporting that Al-Maliki had fired 376 officers from the Iraqi security and intelligence services and replaced them “with inexperienced political officers loyal to his Shiite Dawa party.” The embassy said that Al-Maliki was positioning “his own people within the intelligence agencies to eliminate internal opposition in the run-up to the elections.” Iraqi and American observers, said the cable, found the development “troubling.”

After WikiLeaks published the Iraq War Logs, Amnesty International and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture urged President Barack Obama to order an investigation into the complicity of U.S. forces in handing detainees over to the Iraqi security forces, who then tortured them. “U.S. authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished,” the Guardian reported in October 2010.

According to another Guardian report published in January 2012, Iraqi security officers were “systematically arresting people on trumped-up charges, torturing them and extorting bribes from their families for their release.” Likewise in a McClatchy-Tribune report published in June 2012, Al-Maliki’s security services were found to have detained more than a thousand members from opposing political parties, “many of them in secret locations with no access to legal counsel, using ‘brutal torture’ to extract confessions.”

Public’s Right
The lack of transparency in the Manning court-martial raises serious questions about the justice of her conviction. The trial record totals about 45,000 pages, believed to be the longest in U.S. military law. Yet eighteen months into the proceeding, the public was still forbidden access to more than 30,000 pages of court filings and rulings. The failure to allow contemporaneous access to court documents caused irrevocable harm to the public’s right to understand and scrutinize the conduct, case law, arguments, and opinions of both trial and defense counsel and the presiding military judge. The charge of aiding the enemy is one of only two punitive articles under the Uniform Code of Military Justice that applies to “any person” and not solely military personnel. This fact is all the more reason that the public had a right to access the court record.

Obama’s Inquisition
Manning’s conviction and sentencing reflects President Obama’s unprecedented campaign against whistleblowers by employing the Espionage Act, a 1917 statute intended for spies. In January 2011, Obama’s Justice Department brought an espionage case against Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA employee accused of leaking classified information to a reporter at the New York Times. In documents related to the case, Department of Justice prosecutors argued that leaks to the press are a “greater threat to society” than when spies provide classified information to a foreign government because “every foreign adversary stands to benefit” from the leaks.

The defense argued that Manning acted with good intentions to inform the public, and that his disclosures did not lead to actual damage. Colonel Lind, however, ruled that Manning’s motive for the disclosures was not relevant at trial. Such evidence, then, could not be used to mitigate the accusation, drawn from the language in the Espionage Act and in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), charges that Manning had “reason to believe such information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

Crime of Espionage
Manning was convicted on six Espionage Act offenses and one CFAA offense. For the Espionage Act and the CFAA charges, most of the evidence critical at trial remained hidden under black-ink redactions or within at least 229 sealed unreleased court exhibits. The secrecy reached an almost surreal quality, given that the charged documents are publicly available on the Internet. The fact that most of the charged documents were legally classified, despite a defense request to declassify them for trial, prevented Manning’s lawyers from citing them openly in court. It also limited the defense’s ability to call witnesses, since any potential witnesses were required to have security clearances to handle the classified but publicly available material.

Military prosecutors then selectively declassified two sets of documents for use in their case against Manning for “aiding the enemy” and “wanton publication.” One set of declassified documents was material obtained during the May 2011 U.S. raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The documents included a letter from Bin Laden to a member of Al-Qaeda requesting Department of Defense information, and a response to Bin Laden attached to which were the Afghan War Logs and Department of State “information.” Yet, a video exists of Bin Laden recommending a book by author and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. Journalist Glenn Greenwald has asked why Woodward and his high-level sources have not been similarly charged with “aiding the enemy.” “This question is even more compelling,” Greenwald wrote in the Guardian in January 2013, “given that Woodward has repeatedly published some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, including information designated Top Secret—unlike WikiLeaks and Manning, which never did.”

The other documents declassified at trial by military prosecutors for use in their case against Manning for “aiding the enemy” and “wanton publication” was a 2008 U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center (USACIC) memo on WikiLeaks, which was primarily sourced from public information. Manning was eventually convicted under the Espionage Act for disclosing the USACIC memo to WikiLeaks.

Classification Questions
Manning was convicted on the Espionage Act and CFAA offenses for probable, not actual, harm. Military prosecutors were required to prove that the information charged under the Espionage Act was related to national defense and closely held, meaning it was not already lawfully in the public realm prior to Manning’s disclosure. A defense witness testified at trial, for example, that sixty-two of the 102 SIGACTS charged against Manning under the Espionage Act contained content that was also found in public reporting prior to Manning’s disclosure.

Evidence about the lack of actual damage was excluded at trial. Military prosecutors called Original Classification Authority (OCA) witnesses from each of the victimized agencies to testify. The OCA testified that charged information was properly classified at the time of its release and that its disclosure “could” cause damage. The OCA’s classification reviews weighed heavily in Lind’s determination to convict Manning on six Espionage Act offenses.

Coombs argued that the OCA failed to cite specific instances of information within the charged material that could cause damage. Instead, he said, they used generalities and buzzwords. During closing arguments, Coombs cited the classification review for the charged documents concerning the May 2009 U.S. bombing in the Farah Province of Afghanistan, which was widely reported on by the press. The OCA, said Coombs, testified that the classification review “didn’t consider open-source material or unclassified publications like various army regulations or field manuals.”

Much of the information disclosed by Manning was in fact already public, unclassified, improperly classified, or marked at the lowest levels of classification and widely circulated among government and military employees and contractors. The Washington Post reported that “nearly half a million government employees and contractors with security clearances” had access to the diplomatic cables disclosed by Manning. Some 4.2 million government and military personnel and contractors have security clearances for the highest level of charged information classified at the “secret” level.

Damage Assessment
President Obama himself has said the information revealed in the WikiLeaks publication of the Afghan War Diary was already known. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote a letter to the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee explaining that a Department of Defense review of the leaked SIGACTS had “not revealed any sensitive intelligence source and methods.” Professor Derek Shearer of Occidental College, who served as ambassador to Finland during the Clinton administration, has argued that the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks did not contain secrets:

These are not really secrets that are in these cables… Most of the State Department reporting is done by younger junior officials … who were assigned to go to events or to meet people. In some cases the reporting is required by acts of Congress. And, it is not quite “make-work” but it is kind of one of the lower level forms of communications.
At a symposium on Wikileaks held at the University of Southern California in 2011, Shearer cited the Tunisian revolution as a positive outcome from the publication of the diplomatic cables. The revelation of the U.S. government’s negative view of dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali is believed to have fueled anger against the Tunisian regime:

Some of this frank speaking, of not secrets, but just frank description of a country, had a positive outcome…. But, these cables are not the secret level in which the U.S. government operates. We have a whole separate system of much more secret reporting that comes through the intelligence officers in the embassies. And then we have a whole other channel, the defense intelligence operations—defense attaches’ reporting. So, the notion that some vital secrets of America were compromised by WikiLeaks, I think is not the case.

Foreign Advantage
The OCA and other government witnesses also testified that enemies and foreign adversaries could use the large datasets to conduct “pattern analysis.” Yet, technically, Manning was charged under the “reason to believe” language found in the Espionage Act and the CFAA in relation to only 223 of the 735,614 documents contained within the four larger datasets she disclosed to WikiLeaks: specifically 116 diplomatic cables; 102 SIGACTS from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and five Guantanamo Bay Detainee Assessment briefs. Military prosecutors failed to argue how the 223 charged documents could be used in any potential “pattern analysis” conducted by foreign adversaries or enemies. If military prosecutors wanted to use that argument in court, they should have charged Manning under the Espionage Act or the CFAA for more than 223 documents.

A similar problem arises when military prosecutors and their witnesses argued at trial and during the sentencing phase that the information Manning disclosed could potentially be used in future propaganda efforts by the enemies of the U.S. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School has written that the absence of a “limiting principle” to the U.S. government’s expanding justifications for classification and its prosecutions of whistleblowers, who disclosed it, is alarming.“The government’s new justification for secrecy will be strongest when its conduct most clearly violates accepted international norms,” Goitein wrote in a piece published by Al Jazeera America in October 2013.“The reasons why people choose to align themselves against the United States—or any other country—are nearly as numerous and varied as the people themselves.” The Brennan Center has published a study asserting that over-classification itself is a threat to American national security. The argument is that democratic governance ceases to function when terabytes of information hide government waste, fraud, abuse and crimes. “Government secrecy has slipped its traditional moorings and is venturing forth into dangerous waters, where accountability and the rule of law cannot readily follow,” Goitein has said.

Limited Damage
At sentencing, military prosecutors could not link any of Manning’s disclosures to known deaths. Instead, they offered evidence of the government’s mitigation efforts and the expert opinions of lifelong federal employees and contractors. These witnesses testified that the leaks affected diplomatic reporting and relationships with foreign governments. The evidence and testimony concerning damage or the lack thereof was offered in closed session or hidden under redactions in classified stipulations.

Manning’s defense maintained that any impact on bilateral relations was short term and temporary. Reuters reported that government reviews of the release of diplomatic cables caused only “limited damage to U.S. interests abroad despite the Obama administration’s public statements to the contrary.” A congressional aide briefed by the State Department was quoted saying the revelations were “embarrassing but not damaging,” The “Obama administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers,” the aide said.

“Aiding the Enemy”
The last time a U.S. soldier was charged with giving intelligence to the enemy via a media organization was in 1863 during the American Civil War. Private Henry Vanderwater, a Union soldier, was convicted of giving a command roster to a newspaper in Alexandria, Virginia, which later published it. Vanderwater, who willfully intended to provide the information to the Confederate army, was sentenced to several months in the brig. Manning, though acquitted of aiding the enemy, was nonetheless sentenced to more than three decades in confinement.

Manning faced life in prison if convicted of aiding the enemy. Yet while Lind acquitted Manning on that charge, she had rejected two defense motions to dismiss it altogether. That sets a chilling precedent for future whistleblowers and journalists who write about national security issues. When Lind asked the prosecution if it would have acted in the same way had the organization in question been the New York Times rather than WikiLeaks, the reply was “Yes, Ma’am.”

According to defense witness Professor Yochai Benkler of Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, Lind’s failure to dismiss the aiding the enemy charge established a broad precedent. “Leaking classified documents to… newspapers can by itself be legally sufficient to constitute the offense of ‘aiding the enemy,’ if the leaker was sophisticated enough about intelligence and how the enemy uses the Internet,” he explained. In other words, all a prosecutor will have to prove in any future legal case against a national security whistleblower is that the accused knew that an enemy or foreign adversary of the United States used the media organization’s platform to collect intelligence.

Wanton Publication
Philip J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs who resigned over his statements that Manning’s treatment at Quantico was “stupid” and “unproductive,” has described Manning’s leaks as “industrial scale.” In reality, the leaks are proportional to the information age that Manning was born into.

Former Ambassador Shearer said at USC:

When I went out as ambassador it was the end of the kind of old-school style of what an ambassador did. And the idea was that if you had a message for the local government, you got a cable from Washington and it told you to deliver a message, and you would print out the cable. You would make an appointment. You would go over to the foreign ministry. You would give them a message. That was already almost out of date by the Clinton administration, because CNN had already created a twenty-four hour news cycle and many things that were happening that you might want to go tell the local government were already on CNN.… The Internet basically exploded during the Clinton administration. When Clinton came in there was about 400 websites, when he went out there was like 40 million.… But, now today, if you just go on the web and look at any American embassy or other country’s embassy, you are going to see a very vibrant embassy website. The ambassador is going to have a Twitter account. He is going to keep a blog or she will keep a blog. People will write in, locals, on their opinions and things. And, most of the old-time diplomacy has become what is now called in a broader sense public diplomacy. It is not just government-to-government, but public-to-public. And, there aren’t a lot of—there are technical secrets about weapons and some about troop movements, but most everything else is in fact public.

Manning’s conviction for the unprecedented offense of “wanton publication,” which is not tied to any existing punitive article under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or any other federal criminal violation—is intended to interdict the future leak of large datasets capable of being mined or modeled for revelations by digital journalists and organizations like WikiLeaks.

When asked by the military prosecutors if “mass document leaking is somewhat inconsistent with journalism,” Benkler said that large datasets like the Iraq War Logs provide insight that cannot be found in one or two documents containing a “smoking gun.” The Iraq War Logs, added Benkler, provided an alternative, independent count of casualties “based on formal documents that allowed for an analysis that was uncorrelated with the analysis that already came with an understanding of its political consequences.” According to the online organization Iraq Body Count, the Iraq War Logs revealed 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths; the organization’s estimate of total violent deaths increased to 150,000, 80 percent of whom were civilians.

Manning’s leaks highlight the vital role that access to information plays in the deliberative process and oversight functions of the Congress and the press. Her trial illustrates the government’s battle for control over information in the digital age. It is a battle being waged against what Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, calls the Internet’s “culture of disclosure.”

“I am the type of person who likes to know how things work,” Manning said in court. “As an analyst, this means I always want to figure out the truth. Unlike other analysts in my section or other sections within the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, I was not satisfied with just scratching the surface and producing canned or cookie-cutter assessments. I wanted to know why something was the way it was and what we could to correct or mitigate a situation.”

Fort Leavenworth
Manning is confined at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Her case must be reviewed and approved by the Convening Authority, Major General Jeffrey Buchanan. This process is referred to as “taking action” on a case. Buchanan has the power to disapprove any conviction and/or reduce Manning’s sentence. Once Buchanan takes action, the case will automatically be reviewed on appeal by the Army Court of Criminal Appeals (ACCA). Such a review by ACCA could take years. Manning’s defense attorney has filed an application seeking a presidential pardon from President Obama. Coombs says it is unlikely that the request will be granted. Obama has only granted nine pardon requests during his presidency, and he has never granted a pardon for someone that he has previously said “broke the law.” For her part, Manning appears to have appreciated the risks when she decided to release classified information. In her chats with Lamo, she expressed hope that the information would make a difference. She stated that she was willing to pay a heavy price for her decision, telling Lamo: “I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life…”

Alexa O’Brien is an independent journalist who writes for the Guardian, Daily Beast, and other publications. She received a 2013 Freedom of the Press Foundation grant for her coverage of the Chelsea Manning trial. For her “outstanding work for justice for Manning” she was shortlisted for the 2013 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. On Twitter: @carwinb.

The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public  Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East. By Shibley Telhami. Basic Books, New York, 2013. 240 pp.

The Arab uprisings since December 2010 have revolutionized parts of the Arab region, but they have also revolutionized how the world writes about it. The scholarship and serious popular literature on the Arab region in the West have vastly improved in the past few years, for the simple reason that authors have been forced to write about the realities of what ordinary Arab men and women have put on the global agenda. We still see the occasional piece of intellectual exhibitionism by oddballs and ideologues, as well as the occasional indigenous Arab knucklehead, who respond to the current turbulent state of the Arab transformations by decrying the inability of Arabs and Muslims to practice democracy or master the art of politics. The dominant trend, however, is clearly toward much more accurate writing on the Arab world, as millions of ordinary citizens express themselves and struggle to transform their societies, seeking to infuse them with the values of democracy, freedom, dignity and social justice that remain powerful and structural drivers of Arab identity.

Most serious scholars and media analysts at their best seek to answer two core questions. First, what are the meaningful changes in actors and power relations on the ground that are transforming the political-social orders of our region, and which of those changes are temporary or permanent? Second, what are the underlying values that define the peoples of the Arab countries, and how do those values shape the core aspirations, routine political conduct or occasional insurrectionary bursts of millions of Arabs? In other words, have we never had an Arab democracy because something in our values or culture prevents democracy from taking root? Or is the lack of democracy a reflection of the fact that our values are fine but our citizens simply have never had an opportunity to create such governance systems, because Arab countries in the past century have almost always been ruled by non-democratic autocrats or monarchs with the sustained approval of foreign powers from East and West alike?

In the attempt to define the most important changes that have occurred in the Arab region since the uprisings began, I would note two powerful and meaningful things: first, the birth of the Arab citizen as an individual who feels that he or she has rights and also has the ability to change society for the better; second, the birth of a public political sphere in which many established forces (armed forces, Islamists) and new actors (revolutionary youth, independent media) engage openly to shape their governance system, write their constitution and define their national values through participatory means under the rule of law. These two fundamental changes have caused a parallel change in how local and foreign narratives describe what is taking place in our region. The actors in this epic drama of national self-definition and self-determination—ordinary men and women and organized political forces—have also become the scriptwriters of the narratives about their own world.

This means that Arabs and foreigners alike have moved a long way recently toward narrating our Arab people and societies as we really are—and not as extremist ideologues here and abroad would imagine us. I am struck and delighted by the fact that the vast majority of recent media coverage of our region, along with scores of books and studies by Arabs and foreigners alike, delve into our varied realities across the different cultures of the Arab region rather than portray a monolithic and static region defined only by ancient religion or foreign colonial ravages. The important new elements now being studied include ever-evolving social movements, the erratic world of religion and politics, the durability and resurgence of the ‘deep state,’ the weak showing of civil society and secular politics, the imperatives of social justice and dignity, and the centuries-old interventions of regional and foreign powers that seek influence or control in the region. Among the most impressive new developments are websites in the United States, Europe and Arab countries that daily compile a wide range of topical writing that is striking for its accurate narration of realities on the ground.

Shibley Telhami’s The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East is, to my mind, among the most useful and readable of these offerings. I single it out because of its double advantage of analyzing current attitudes and developments across the region while also grounding that analysis in the past ten years of public opinion polling that Telhami has conducted across the Arab world. This combination buttresses Telhami’s current observations with a rich and ever-relevant body of factual historical data that both mirrors and also helps us to better understand the attitudes, values and aspirations of those ordinary men and women who have fought and struggled for nearly three years to take command of their own destiny.

Telhami’s combination of solid substance, readable style and pertinent analytical insights is brought to bear on a series of key dimensions of public opinion and political values and aspirations across the Arab world, including: the centrality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the quest for democracy, religious-secular balances, perceptions of the current uprisings, the interplay between national and pan-Arab identities, the role of media, and attitudes to the United States, Israel, Iran and other major regional actors. One of the great services he provides here, as he does in all his writings and commentaries, is to point out in clear terms the complexities and relationships among the many dimensions of the issues that shape the worldviews of ordinary Arab men and women. So, religion, democracy, Palestine, and American or British foreign policy are all distinct issues in our lives and society, but Arab citizens often perceive them to be interconnected. The many ways in which Arabs simultaneously view the United States both positively and negatively are neatly explained in a chapter that touches on values, democracy, Palestine, Iraq and other issues—all of which feed into the cerebral and emotional processors that determine how an individual in fact views the United States with fear, respect, disdain and envy—without feeling any contradictions. Arab views of Iran are similarly analyzed with the nuance and multi-dimensionalism that actually shape how people view Iran, and how such views evolve in line with events in Iran and elsewhere.

Telhami’s closing chapter on how Arab public opinion will influence the reshaping of the Middle East is an outstanding summary of the likely implications of the current awakening and activation of Arab public opinion because it blends the hard facts of public attitudes with the unpredictable nature of political and social change. The eight points he makes touch on the varied transformations in the Arab countries and their enduring, evolving and pervasive nature, the role of other factors beyond public sentiments, changing regional power configurations, and—apologies to the wild ideologues of the West and our own Arab oddballs, but here it comes again—the continuing and central impact of Arab attitudes to the conduct of Israel and the United States.

Telhami once again shows the bounty of combining the best of American scholarly traditions with the fruits of on-the-ground research and analysis in the Arab world. He links current developments with a longer legacy of popular values and attitudes that will always shape those developments. He reminds us of the importance of mustering the honesty to try to really understand the sentiments and aspirations of millions of ordinary Arabs who are now turning their world—and perhaps the worlds of others—upside down.

Rami G. Khouri is director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut Daily Star. On Twitter: @RamiKhouri.

I was struck a few days ago when I read U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s statement in Riyadh, after talks with the Saudi Arabian leadership, that the United States had neither “the legal authority nor desire” to intervene in Syria. This brief comment seems to have gotten lost amidst the much more dramatic news about Iran, Egypt or Palestine-Israel negotiations, but it is worth asking if this is a new American posture on Syria and other issues in the region that might invite American or other foreign intervention. On the other hand, it could just be another typical example of a global power calling on its capacity for hypocrisy to get out of an awkward situation.

In either case, this is certainly worth examining, because if Kerry is sincere this attitude to the Syrian issue could have important implications for other situations. The most fascinating part of the comment was about the United States not having the “legal authority” to intervene, which raises many questions. Did he mean that the American president required the approval of Congress before intervening militarily, or did he mean that some kind of international mandate was needed to provide legitimacy for any intervention?

I suspect he probably meant the former, meaning that Congress should approve any American intervention, but this is slightly suspect because the United States is already providing Syrian rebels with light weapons, technical aid and training. Maybe he meant that any expansion of American assistance to the anti-Assad forces would need a legal mandate from the Congress; but this is unlikely to happen in view of the great caution that Congress showed when it seemed to oppose Barack Obama’s threat to attack Syria a few months ago in retaliation for the Damascus government’s alleged use of chemical weapons against its own people.

It would be a great step forward for all concerned if the United States were to be adopting the position that a credible international legal mandate were needed for it to get involved militarily in a bigger way in Syria. The sole international body that can confer such a mandate is the UN Security Council; but it is impossible for Washington to get approval there for more military action to bring down the Assad government, given Russia’s veto in the council. So this route for legitimizing any heightened American militarism in Syria also appears closed.

The second part of Kerry’s statement, about the United States not having the desire to intervene militarily in Syria, is equally fascinating, given that the U.S. has intervened militarily in many places in the region and is already involved in providing the anti-Assad rebels with military support of various kinds. What kind of “desire” is this that the United States simultaneously lacks and exercises across the Middle East?

He also said in Riyadh that Washington would continue to support moderate forces in the opposition, but was worried about the growing strength and role of Islamist forces in the opposition. So we are not talking here about the United States totally dropping its support for Syrian rebels, but rather trying to identify “moderate” groups in the opposition that it could support without inadvertently strengthening Islamist groups that would turn around and attack American interests or allies, as happened decades ago in Afghanistan.

The American position on Syria is peculiar, but not unusual. Washington has repeatedly taken contradictory positions on issues in the Middle East that end up leaving it and its allies confused and directionless. On Arab-Israeli negotiations, for example, the United States says it wants to broker a two-state solution but in view of its declared guarantee of the superiority of Israel over any combination of Arab neighbors it seems unable or unwilling to prod the required change in Israeli colonization policies that are needed to achieve the two-state solution. Similarly on the Arab uprisings across the region, Washington declares its support for Arabs fighting for their freedom, rights and dignity, yet also maintains strong support for Arab governments that seem to resist providing those rights to their citizens.

One of the reasons the United States is now in the process of adjusting its policies and relations with key Middle Eastern states—notably Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt—is that the contradictions of the past have simply accumulated to such a large extent that Washington probably finds it difficult to conduct any kind of coherent foreign policy at all. The United States has gotten itself into a situation where all its key allies in the region—Arabs, Iranians, Turks and Israelis—have major problems and disagreements with it, and are not afraid to spell these out in public in some cases.

Is Kerry’s statement this week that Washington lacks both the mandate and the desire to intervene further in Syria a small first sign that the United States may be coming to grips with the self-imposed constraints of its own contradictions of recent decades?

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. On Twitter: @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2013 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

For years, Israel and the United States have been urging Egypt to do more to halt the illegal trade—in guns and rockets, but also in fuel, cement, and consumer goods—under the 14 kilometer-long Sinai-Gaza border. Post-Mubarak Egyptian governments have been more willing than the regime of close ally Hosni Mubarak to go after the tunnels. It is not that Egypt decided to act against the tunnels in an effort to maintain security along the Israeli border alone; rather, changing circumstances made it abundantly clear to Egypt’s generals that the tunnels have become a direct threat to Egypt’s national stability.

Starting with the August 2012 massacre of 16 Egyptian soldiers in Sinai, Egypt’s national security establishment realized that the flow of weapons and fighters can travel in both directions. Since June 2013, in the lead up to President Mohamed Morsi’s ouster in Cairo, the Egyptian military has maintained its most effective operation yet against the tunnel network.

Looking forward, though, it is unclear how long Egypt can sustain the current success in tunnel closures. Furthermore, there is no indication that Cairo is considering policy options to keep the tunnels closed for the long term once the military withdraws from the border.

The smuggling tunnels emerged as a problem in 2005, when Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza; and smuggling expanded significantly following the 2007 takeover of the strip by Hamas and the subsequent Israeli policy of limiting imports and exports. However, the quantity, lethality, and capabilities of smuggled weapons increased following the Arab uprisings: whether this was in the importation of Fajr-5 rockets from Iran or man-portable air-defense systems and other anti-aircraft systems from Libya.

After the August 2012 attack, the Egyptian armed forces initiated efforts to block or destroy tunnels under the Gaza border as part of Operation Eagle, a larger operation begun in 2011 to counter the Salafi-jihadi threat in Sinai. However, the methods used had little effect on smuggling, and underground trade continued normally. Of the almost 250 tunnels Egypt covered or destroyed that year, more than half were back in operation shortly after the military left the site.

In the following months, Egyptian leaders concluded that the tunnels contributed to threats to national security and the continued instability in Sinai. Egyptian military, intelligence, and political leaders may have been willing to turn a blind eye to Palestinian smuggling of food, fuel, and building materials—accepting that occasionally weapons got through as well. Risking Egypt’s own security, however, was another matter. As Essam al-Haddad, a top Morsi advisor and Brotherhood leader, said at the time, “We don’t want to see these tunnels used for illegal ways of smuggling either people or weapons that can really harm Egyptian security.”

With this new realization, Egypt advanced its efforts. According to a January 2013 Israeli report, “U.S. technological measures made available for Egyptian use … and intelligence cooperation” were enabling Egypt to prevent “large-scale smuggling of weapons into Gaza.” In addition to counter-smuggling interdictions, Egyptian operations to destroy the tunnels themselves began in earnest in February 2013. Unlike previous efforts, which could be easily reversed, from February forward the Egyptians actually flooded tunnels, which degraded their structure and stability.

In addition to taking action on its side of the border, Egypt also has used its leverage over Hamas to encourage action inside Gaza. For instance, after the August 2012 attack on Egyptian soldiers—despite Hamas claiming this had nothing to do with Gaza—Egyptian influence saw that Hamas promptly closed the openings on its side of the tunnels. Hamas did so again in the wake of the May 2013 kidnapping of Egyptian security forces: declaring the entire border area a “closed military zone.”

In the month prior to Morsi’s removal, Egyptian forces again stepped up their campaign against the Gaza tunnels. By one measure, the amount of fuel entering Gaza through the tunnels in the last week of June 2013 was around 10 percent of that entering at the beginning of the month. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “These amounts were the lowest recorded since August 2012.” This suggested that Egyptian forces indeed had the capability to effectively shut the tunnels, and it was the will to act that stopped them from doing so previously—when such action was not yet perceived as protecting Egyptian sovereignty and stability.

In the first week of July, when the military removed Morsi from power, OCHA estimated thatfewer than ten tunnels were operational. By the end of August, Raed Fattouh, president of the Palestinian Authority’s coordination committee for the entry of goods to Gaza, said that Gaza’s tunnels were only functioning at 30 percent of their capacity. Even with this slight easing, the tunnels have yet to return to their post-Mubarak traffic.

The post-Morsi counter-tunnel operations have also been the most sustained effort to date. Estimates of the number of operational tunnels in June 2013, before the latest crackdown, range from below 100 to as many as 220 or even around 300. By late September only around ten were open. According to another report, fuel was still being smuggled through the open tunnels—at less than half the rate as during early 2013—but exclusively for the use of Gaza’s power station. In late September, the spokesman of the Egyptian armed forces said Egypt had destroyed the effectiveness of the tunnel network. The Egyptian military also announced that it would establish a “buffer zone” along the Sinai border.

Destroying tunnels, though, requires constant vigilance. Earlier this month, the Egyptian military claimed to have destroyed almost 800 tunnels in 2013. In January 2013, however, Egyptian journalist and Sinai expert Mohannad Sabry estimated there were around 250 operating tunnels, which suggests that Egyptian forces are continuously closing the same tunnels. While highly effective in the short term, consumer and humanitarian demand inside Gaza ensures that tunnel trade will resume the moment Egyptian forces back away. Regular Egyptian activity on the Gaza border is also a worry for Israel, which has long enjoyed Sinai as a buffer between its forces and the Egyptian’s. Egypt and Israel—which approves any Egyptian deployments that would exceed peace treaty limitations—must decide if such operations are a long-term solution or else consider other options for decreasing the extent of the Gaza tunnel network.

Finally, Egypt and Israel seem to agree on the need to clamp down on the Gaza tunnels. Moving forward, the two will need to determine—together—the best way to address this challenge.

This article is reprinted with permission from Sada.  It can be accessed online at: http://carnegieendowment.org/sada/2013/10/22/tunnel-vision/gqxp

Zack Gold is a Washington-based Middle East analyst and author of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center analysis paper “Sinai Security: Opportunities for Unlikely Cooperation Among Egypt, Israel, and Hamas.” 

Protests in Gezi Park continue to be a powerful symbol against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (or AKP). In weekly demonstrations across Turkey activists chant, “Resistance is everywhere!” The most important example of this continuing resistance is weekend park meetings organized by protestors in neighborhood parks across Turkey. These park meetings are popular, animated with the feeling that the Gezi Park movement endures and has propelled hundreds of smaller meetings. Attendees talk about challenging the AKP in the 2014 municipal and 2015 national elections. Beyond party politics, park meeting attendees openly discuss the creation of a new society. However, few outside of Turkey know that the “hooligan” soccer fans of Istanbul were instrumental in the first days of the Gezi Park occupation and protest.

On June 1, triggered by reports of brutal police repression against a small group of environmentalists protecting Gezi Park, people from all walks of life gathered in the pre-dawn hours throughout Istanbul. Beating pots and pans, protestors cried for the end of Erdogan and the AKP.

In many ways the AKP’s own policies created the Gezi Park protest. Mass privatization under Erdogan made Turkey richer than ever before. Yet the new money was not evenly distributed. Unemployment was high and the minimum wage was low. While the economy grew so too did Erdogan’s infrastructure projects, which were bid off to AKP-friendly industries, which cared little about the environment. Erdogan often played the religious card, positioning himself as a good Islamist. He called all abortions murder, said that every Turkish family should have at least three children, and even pushed for male and female segregated pools in resort towns. Leading up to the Gezi Park protest the AKP had given the building rights on Gezi Park to a corporate group intent on destroying the park and building a mall and a mosque in Istanbul’s final downtown green space. It was this combination of anti-environmental privatization and overt Islamism, that got out anti-AKP Turks in the middle of the night.

One group of protestors—over six thousand people—marched toward Gezi Park. Platoons of Turkish swat police met the crowd at the port district of Beşiktaş along the Bosphorus. Behind the officers were police tanks. The swat teams were in full body armor, wearing helmets and gas masks. As the crowd of protestors approached, the police were loading their tear gas and noise bomb guns.

Some people shouted fearfully, “My God, my God! Look at what is across from us!” Then from behind came truck horns. A group of Mack Trucks approached driven by soccer fans of Turkey’s three great soccer teams, Beşiktaş, Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray. The soccer fans were wearing their team jerseys and waving team flags. The protestors cheered that reinforcements had arrived!

The Mack trucks pulled forward and acted as protection from the tear gas, noise bombs and water cannon of the police. With the trucks covering the crowd, soccer fans led the protesters. They built barricades by tearing fences from sidewalks, overturning trash bins, and dragging old cars to the road. Cement blocks were smashed to throwing stones, which hungry hands grabbed and threw at the police. In turn, the police pushed the Mack trucks back and shot tear gas and noise bombs directly into the crowd.

The protestors stood fast, however. The crowd began to chant in Turkish at the security forces:

Shoot, let’s see!
Shoot, let’s see!
Shoot your tear gas, let’s see!
Take off your gas mask!
Leave your bully-club behind!
And then let’s see who the real men are!

As dawn broke police tanks and swat teams pulled off the streets. Hundreds of thousands moved in union across the Bosphorus bridge. A few hours later, with Turkey’s soccer fans in the lead, the people of Istanbul occupied Gezi Park and Taksim Square.

What came next was the expansion of the Gezi Park protest movement. Unprecedented in Turkey or the rest of the Middle East, millions came to openly discuss homosexuality, feminism, minority rights, Islamism, nationalism and capitalism. Gezi Park became a quilt of organizations and people; patch-worked over the green space of downtown Istanbul. One member of the soccer fan group Tek Yumruksaid, “The important thing that I find about Gezi Park is that so many different people who used to be opposed to one another are now talking openly about creating a new Turkey.”

While an important event, the occupation of Gezi only lasted two weeks. On the evening of June 15, Erdogan ordered Turkish police forces back into the park. In the resulting street clashes, thousands were tear gassed, arrested and injured.

In the past few months the AKP has re-landscaped Gezi Park and promised not to destroy it. Hundreds of police patrol the sensitive site and bar any large group from entering. The police and other state controlled institutions have arrested or intimidated many protestors who opposed Erdogan and the AKP at Gezi Park. Recently the AKP hired some six thousand bloggers to monitor Twitter and Facebook in order to get out the party’s side on social media.

For many it is heartbreaking that Erdogan and the AKP have come to this. At one time AKP was the hope of democracy in Turkey and the Middle East. The AKP removed the once oppressive Turkish army from politics. Infrastructure projects, new schools and hospitals now cover the country. Economic growth has sky rocketed; IMF loans have been paid off. In the process, the AKP has become the ruling hegemon by being the biggest privatizers in the country.

The Gezi Park protests show the limitations of Erdogan’s AKP as a model for the rest of the Middle East. Without an equal sharing of the new wealth, class dynamics have become enflamed around the issues of Islamism and environmentalism. Instead of working through these issues with dissidents, the AKP has resorted to oppressive police crackdowns and intimidation. Recent polls show that support for the AKP has dropped by 10 to 15 points.

The best hope for Turkey would be a coalition government led Sirri Sureyya Onder, a progressive Kurdish rights leader and seconded by Numan Kurtulmus, a progressive Islamist. Onder is an independent voice in Turkish politics, supported by many who participated in the Gezi Park protest. Meanwhile, Kurtulmus can bring some AKP supporting Islamists into any future coalition government to heal the social divisions caused by Gezi Park. With these two leaders it is possible to see a Turkey where human rights for all could transform the country and make it into a real international model in the twenty-first century. Yet will this happen given AKP’s dominant and (some say) dictatorial power?

In the short term AKP will continue to solidify its hold on power. However, Erdogan’s government has strayed dangerously into un-democratic practices. Ultimately the desire for a democratic society as exemplified in Gezi Park is more powerful than AKP state sponsored repression.

Sean David Hobbs is a reporter-researcher for the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. He has reported from Istanbul for five years.

Will Egypt’s political scene remain as violent and hollow as it is now—violence on a popular level that portends fighting, the extent of which no one can predict, and hollowness on an elites level that portends the exclusion and discarding of some of the wise, who might otherwise be able to extract the nation from its crisis?

There are two factions attempting to impose a solution on the crisis: one that prefers the Muslim Brotherhood’s survival over the survival of Egypt; another that prefers the vanquishing of the Brotherhood, even if that leads to Egypt’s destruction. Both factions participated, during the month of Ramadan, in political and ethical vice; both ‘fasted’ from prioritizing the interests of a nation. Instead, they moaned from injury. Egyptian elites had all imagined that they were pious enough to be compelled to reconsider the mistakes of their governance and refrain from shocking practices. Elites had also imagined that they were highly committed to the principles of liberalism, be they tolerance of the other, equality of citizens, and the realization of a nation of law—only to abandon these principles at the first juncture. Two fig leaves have fallen, those of religion and liberalism.

At the same time, some of the leadership in political Islam resorted to investing in party discipline. Such Islamists perpetuated a “receive-and-obey” approach, pushing youth to commit acts characterized by a great deal of violence, and exposing them to undue risk out of a martyr-based rhetoric that confusedjihad, or striving against the enemy, with the divergence of opinion among compatriots. The opposing faction’s elites, on the other hand, worked to consolidate hatred between supporters of the two, driving a wedge between the factions, and generalizing blame for the mistakes of the leadership. The cost is that a reconciliation process is even more difficult.

The Brotherhood has no doubt failed miserably in the administration of the state. The Brothers engaged in exclusionary practices, undertook unnecessary battles with numerous strata of Egyptian society, and, for the first time in their history entered into a confrontation with the people—or at least the majority of people—as opposed to being limited strictly to the ruler. Still, there remains a pressing question: Hasn’t the result of this practical experiment been enough? Enough for the Brotherhood, whose irresponsible actions on the Egyptian street increased the hostility directed at them? And enough for the other faction, who, unless motivated by the desire for revenge, had no need to direct more blows to a group that had already proved itself incapable of administering the state?

A number of exceptional personalities have accepted a leadership positions at a time when public offices are a liability.  The practice of intellectual terrorism and blackmail directed at these personalities, simply because they suggested initiatives for resolving the crisis and avoiding bloodshed, is astounding. It would seem to indicate that revenge on the Brotherhood comes before the country’s interests, and before its safety and integrity. It also demonstrates that there is an inability among many to organize their priorities, and that the appetite for revenge supersedes the nobility of justice; that controlling institutions in the short term is preferred to stability in the long run, and lastly, that there is an inclination towards reactionary and reckless action. Brotherhoodization of the state’s apparatuses may not have succeeded. Will the same remain true when it comes to Brotherhoodization of the liberals?

In some circles of elites, the matter has escalated to the ‘moral assassination’ of a number of personalities who have played a patriotic role, reaching its apex when personalities such as Mohamed ElBaradei were accused of treachery by the very same people who fought alongside him in the same ‘trench.’ That some would even accuse him of being part of a Brotherhood sleeper cell is no longer inconceivable. The issue, however, was not limited only to ElBaradei, but included a number of other respected personalities like Amr Hamzawy who was accused by one member of the media—in a futile attempt to characterize him as a remnant of Mubarak’s regime—of being Gamal Mubarak’s friend.

It is a strange thing when the political elite, along with some media outlets, attacks political initiatives, not as a result of their objection to the content of the initiatives but for the sake of refusing them, as though the suggestion of initiatives to resolve a national crisis is itself an act of treason. It becomes even stranger, when an attack such as that against the ‘Third Square’ initiative is launched—an initiative that did not espouse violence, so far as I am aware—without so much as an attempt to understand what this Square was calling for. All this represents a chain of rigidity in prescribing the conditions of a possible resolution, and the refusal of any suggestion, without even knowing what ideas it may contain, that would neutralize, or even appear to neutralize that particular resolution. Everyone is contributing to charting a course of fascist ideology, and Egyptian society is rapidly sliding down it. The only things agreed upon by the two sides is a preference that both sides lose, rather than that they both win.

Instead of searching for a framework within which both sides can emerge as winners (if only relatively), each faction is striving to ensure that the other loses everything, even at the cost of emerging themselves from the battle empty-handed. It may be useful that we not limit ourselves to diagnosing the case, without analyzing the trauma. It may also be useful to delve deeply into understanding these practices, in light of the prevailing values, which are not adequately supported in the raising and upbringing of child (forgiveness, respect for the other, objectiveness, relying on facts as opposed to impressions, and precision in ascertaining verified information).  The disappearance of these values results in deviant practices, which contribute to the inability to reach a consensus, and, in turn leads to a deeply complicated political scene.

In order that my message not appear unfounded, I would ask my readers to allow me to share with them the results derived from a global poll, carried out in Egypt in 2008— that included a question about the values on which Egyptians raise their children. In it, the values of forgiveness, tolerance of the other, imagination and inventiveness came in at a relatively low ranking, while the value of obedience came in relatively highly ranked (in Egyptian society as compared to others). Perhaps we should not look towards the negative phenomena revealed by the political scene, without exploring the cultural and societal reasons underlying it, so that we might change our reality, if only over the long term. This would lead us to a conclusion that, in essence, that we need a cultural revolution to re-establish the human values that govern Egyptian society.  

Magued Osman is the CEO and managing director of the Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research, Baseera. This article originally appeared in Al-Shorouk.

The American peace movement has been celebrating a Pyrrhic victory on Syria. “The U.S. is not bombing Syria, as we certainly would have been if not for a huge mobilization of antiwar pressure on the president and especially on Congress,” writes Phyllis Bennis Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank in Washington. This represents “an extraordinary, unforeseen victory for the global anti-war movement,” she goes on, one that “we should be savoring.”

This turn of events is “something extraordinary—even historic,” writes my friend  Stephen Kinzer, the author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. “Never in modern history have Americans been so doubtful about the wisdom of bombing, invading or occupying another country,” he continues. “This is an exciting moment,” he rhapsodizes, “the start of a new, more realistic approach to foreign policy.”

I completely understand this jubilance. Yet it leaves me feeling uneasy.

Let me be clear: I too was against the Obama administration’s proposed military strike on Syria. How strange that the White House, after two and a half years of doing essentially nothing about the deepening crisis in Syria, decided to act with a sense of urgency. Washington was even unwilling to wait for the United Nations team to complete inspections—as if the world should simply trust American claims about weapons of mass destruction. (Fool me once…)

After two and a half years of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s crimes against humanity, chemical weapons were exactly the wrong issue for the Obama administration to center its policy on. Toparaphrase Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Doha Center, why draw a ‘red line’ at the use of chemical weapons but not at 100,000 dead? The vast majority of civilians have died by means of conventional, not chemical, weapons.

Hinging its case on chemical weapons turned out to be a huge strategic mistake as well. Russia cleverly short-circuited the Obama administration, taking advantage of the thinness of its case. So Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles will be removed from the equation. Yet the Assad killing machine can continue unfettered on its rampage. Chemical weapons issue: solved. Syria’s killing fields: no end in sight.

Given this horrific picture, it’s hard for me to share the peace movement’s triumphalism. Yes, a U.S. military attack was thwarted. But is that where the story ends? For libertarian isolationists like Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky), paleo-con America-firsters like Pat Buchanan, and RealpolitikTories of the sort who long dominated the Republican foreign policy apparatus, the story indeed ends in Washington. People in far-flung lands are not their concern, unless vital strategic or national security interests of the United States are at stake.

But for progressives, especially ones who profess the values of solidarity and internationalism, the story surely cannot end at America’s shores. Struggles around the world for justice and dignity matter to us. We believe that we have a stake in them and their outcomes. We take sides.

In the early weeks of 2011 progressive internationalists emphatically supported popular struggles abroad:the Tunisian revolutionaries who rose up against the dictatorship of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali; the Egyptian protestors in Tahrir Square who demanded the ouster of tyrant Hosni Mubarak; and the Bahrainis who demonstrated against the tyranny of the US- and Saudi-backed monarchy. Our position as progressive internationalists in those cases was not primarily about the U.S. We were against authoritarianism and for human dignity.

The Syrian uprising began very much in the same spirit and as part of the same wave of revolts across the Arab world. But the response of Western progressives to the Syrian case has been quite different. “Where have these people been the past two years?” asks the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in London. “It’s a bit late,” the organization inveighs, “to start marching for ‘no war in Syria.’”

The peace movement is emphatically against U.S. intervention, but where does it stand on the struggle to topple Assad’s murderous dictatorship? “What is emerging in the United States and United Kingdom now is a movement that is antiwar in form but pro-war in essence,” said the Syrian Observatory. That may sound harsh and seem overstated, but it reflects a frustration that many Syrians share. The specter of a U.S. military attack sucked all the oxygen out of the room, imposing a kind of tunnel vision on progressives.

How does it propose the bloodshed be brought to an end? There are no clear-cut answers. But only having a position on what shouldn’t be done, while avoiding the question of what should be done, is a cop out and a betrayal of the tradition of internationalism. The question of what should be done is much thornier. Of course there are many progressives, especially in the peace movement, who are uncomfortable supporting an armed rebellion or advocating the delivery of arms to one. But the point is to place the plight of the Syrian people front and center on the agenda and to think seriously about how to resolve it. More than 100,000 Syrians have been killed and nearly seven million displaced from their homes, with an average of 5,000 fleeing into neighboring countries every day. The humanitarian horror is colossal. It demands serious thinking.

Back in 2000 I chaired a panel on Kosovo  at a conference of the Radical Philosophy Association in Chicago, and the Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Žižek was among the panelists. During question-and-answer period, an audience member began to articulate a widely-held position on the Left: Although Serbian forces had committed horrible atrocities in Kosovo, foreign military intervention would only make things worse and must be opposed. Žižek, having heard this argument before, interrupted his interlocutor just as the word “but” was on its way out.

“And what do you propose should have been done about it?” Žižek thundered. The room went silent. An uneasy moral clarity had been imposed on the discussion. It was a forceful statement, yet it was not a rhetorical question. Žižek demanded an answer to the problem. It’s not enough to stand against; we must also stand for, and think through what that means concretely, on the ground, where lives are at stake.

I want to put Žižek’s question to antiwar activists vis-à-vis Syria.So you opposed a U.S. strike on Syria. I did, too. And that battle has been won. Mission accomplished, the peace movement seems to be saying as it takes its victory lap. But should antiwar activists feel quite so satisfied, as the death toll in Syria continues to mount with no end in sight?

To be fair, some antiwar organizations point in the right direction, at least rhetorically. Peace Action calls for “real alternatives and solutions based on serious multilateral diplomacy, adherence to domestic and international law and massive humanitarian aid…as well as an arms embargo and a cease-fire.” But for the last two and a half years such calls have gone unheeded.

“Dialogue, civil resistance, out-of-the box alternatives that no one expects to succeed—there are always other options,” reads an e-blast from the American Friends Service Committee. To its credit, the AFSC is partnering with the UK-based organization  Responding to Conflict “to support a network of courageous Syrian peacemakers who are working on the local level to build a future in which all Syrians can co-exist safely and peacefully.” This is important work but it is unlikely to stop the carnage.

What if progressives devoted just a fraction of the energy and effort that went into mobilizing against a U.S. military strike to the cause of bringing Syria’s nightmare to an end? It might not make a concrete difference. (In fact all the efforts to resolve the conflict thus far, including those of Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi, have come to naught.) But the effort would at least be an expression of solidarity and internationalism. Factoring the Syrian people, who have been largely absent from the progressive discussion, prominently into the equation would represent a welcome departure from the solipsistic, U.S.-centric tendencies of the American peace movement.

Danny Postel is associate director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He is the author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future and The Syria Dilemma. On Twitter: @dannypostel.