NickBlack.com

In Michael Caine’s new film Harry Brown, he plays an elderly ex-marine forced by the violence on his London housing estate to become a vigilante, killing the drug dealers and thugs that have made life impossible. It’s a grim depiction of modern Britain, and will resonate in the rest of Europe and the US. If the Elephant and Castle area of London, where the film is set, were a small state, would it qualify for the Failed State Index published every year by Foreign Policy? When we talk about collapse are we using data at too low a resolution? Suppose we started thinking about collapse at much higher resolution. Instead of measuring nation states, what about failed cities, failing counties and states (in the US sense of states). Would you rather live in one of the shining new developments in Bangalore or in the Toxteth area of Liverpool, recently cited as the most deprived area of Britain? Is Bangalore part of the developed world, and is Liverpool a failing city in the post development world? By only thinking in terms of collapsing nations we are getting a very skewed idea of the real condition of our global civilization. Not that it’s very encouraging even at nation state resolution. The interactive map in the Failed States Index 2009 is chilling.

The Failed States Index measures 12 indicators: Demographic Pressures, Refugees/IDPs, Group Grievance, Human Flight, Uneven Development, Economic Decline, Delegitimization of the State, Public Services, Human Rights, Security Apparatus, Factionalized Elites, and External Intervention. The British Department for Communities and Local Government used generally similar metrics: Crime, Education, Housing, Health, Income etc., and the ones that don’t directly apply, like Delegitimization of the State, would be applicable to the Elephant and Castle if we thought to ask. The US uses much the same metrics in its urban analysis. Does anyone really believe that those gangstas in Harry Brown consider for a moment the existence of legitimate governance in their lives? Maybe we’re measuring much the same things and what we’re seeing is that failure is occurring in a much more nuanced way than we imagine. I don’t have anything like the resources to collect and collate the kind of data sets to make an interactive map at the resolution of cities and counties, but I’m willing to bet it would show us a very different picture of the state of play. My point is that while we look at the Failed States Index it’s tempting to ignore the real condition of the so called rich countries.

If we can imagine a higher resolution world map of socio-economic and ecological conditions what detail might we see? On the one hand we’d see places in the developed world that are slipping out of development. They are becoming feral: once part of the domesticated planet, now slipping back to the wild. Basic infrastructure gone, population declining, local resources used or scattered, education and health of the remaining population retreating, mafia organizations replacing legitimate governance, post industrial pollution leaving some areas too toxic to live in or reclaim.

Although below the public radar, there are plans to manage this decline in many countries now. There is an acceptance that it is impossible to reverse this and it’s better to manage it. Look at the work of Karina Pallagst at UC Berkeley and SCiRN. It’s all about shrinking cities. But what does it say about the era of ‘progress’ we’ve believed for the best part of a century. Unlike previous eras in which cities shrunk and populations declined, the populations of the US and Europe aren’t declining. Rome’s population collapsed from around a million at the peak of its power, to 20,000 in the 14th Century. But a lot of that was centuries of famine topped off by the Black Death. There is (as yet) no Black Death in the US, so where are the new centres of population? What happened to the people from Flint, Michigan, from Detroit, from Baltimore?

They’ve moved to the US southwest – an ecological desert without the water and other resources to support anything like the present population after peak oil. Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in America. The same demographic shift is true in Europe. What were once thriving industrial cities in the north of France and England, for example, are now drifting towards wasteland. Property values have collapsed, people have left, then buildings are abandoned and set on fire. The result is that more and more people gravitate towards the larger cities: London, Paris, Hamburg, Munich etc. All of this internal migration starts to look startlingly like the FSI’s Internally Displaced Persons category. Any number of international agencies are sounding alarm bells about mass international migration, and internal migration in the developing world as a result of conflict and climate. I haven’t seen much in the way of alarm at the collapse in the formerly industrial developed world.

My point is that the pattern of collapse we are seeing in the developing world is increasingly mirrored in the developed world. We are thinking about collapse in a “them over there in those other countries” kind of way. It is partially a function of the way we gather data and partially because the political elite of the developed world has to maintain a media storm of positive spin, which is getting more difficult every day in the face of the facts. What we are actually seeing is an increasingly fragmented world map of wealth and resource distribution, with little reference to national boundaries. What is problematic is that I don’t see any sign in the developed world of alarm at this fragmentation.

Perhaps what we will see as the financial crisis continues is a truly new world order in which the old divisions of developed vs developing world give way to a fragmented map of rich pockets surrounded by vast areas of poverty and decline – like the medieval republics of post Roman Europe as famine and war take their toll and populations decline. Only this would be on an unimaginable global scale. Maybe we’d better start imagining it.