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The sudden stardom of the third world city.

Article Excerpt
Why is the third world metropolis suddenly taking over Western culture?

Tsotsi (2005), a film about Johannesburg gangs recently released in the U.K., took the 2006 Oscar for best foreign-language film. Another Oscar went to The Constant Gardener (2005), an account of the dark forces at work in Nairobi, whose director, Fernando Meirelles, shot to international fame in 2002 with his portrait of a Rio favela, City of God. Last October's Raindance Film Festival climaxed with a screening of Secuestro Express (2005), a film about abduction gangs in Caracas. And at the end of 2004, two best-selling books explored the fiercely competitive under- and over-worlds of Mumbai: Suketu Mehta's Maximum City and Gregory David Roberts's Shantaram, which will be released next year as a major Hollywood motion picture directed by Peter Weir.

My feeling is that these are early symptoms of a huge shift in the West's picture of the world: the third world metropolis is becoming the symbol of the "new." This is all the more thrilling for its utter improbability: surely those suffocating piles of slums and desperation are too exhausted, too moribund, to bring forth futures? But it seems to me this is exactly what is happening. If, for the better part of the twentieth century, New York and its glistening imitations symbolised the future, it is now the stacked-up, sprawling, impromptu city-countries of the third world. The idea of the total, centralized, maximally efficient city plan has long since lost its futuristic appeal: its confidence and ambition have turned to...

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