By Doug Saunders
It is the little-noticed force behind the revolutions in the Arab world, the new protests in China and the economic booms in India, Turkey and South America: The largest population shift in human history, currently at its peak, is probably the most significant, and misunderstood, global event of our time.
In Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, hundreds of millions of people are rapidly moving from rural areas, where they practiced peasant agriculture, to cities -- a shift that makes itself felt in the rough-and-tumble transitional neighborhoods where rural migrants first land, both in their own countries and in places like the United States, where they make up the largest group of immigrants.
We need to pay attention to these neighborhoods, and to the huge demographic shift that is shaping them, for they are where either the next great economic opportunity or the next wave of violence and conflict will be born.
For full article: http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_18341048
DOUG SAUNDERS is the European bureau chief of the Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail and the author of "Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World." He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
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