A third of the world's people are in the midst of the largest population move in human history, as the last of the word's rural populations abandons agriculture and moves to the urban areas of the developing world and of the wealthy West. This shift is at the heart of the most dangerous and violent conflicts today in North America, Europe and Asia. It also has enormous potential to renew the world's economies and bring a final end to mass poverty - if conflict and clashes can be avoided. It is taking place not in the cities we know but in a new type of space, on the margins of our great cities that we rarely notice: the 'arrival city'. These spaces are becoming the power centres of the new era. It is from these, the new home of an enormous floating population of 2 billion people, that most of the world's most serious crises and explosions of violence are emerging.

In Arrival City - both a groundbreaking work of reportage and an exciting, vivid travelogue - award-winning journalist Doug Saunders offers a detailed tour of the key points in the Great Migration, and considers the actions that have turned this enormous population shift into either a success or a violent failure.

A third of the world's people are in the midst of the largest population move in human history, as the last of the word's rural populations abandons agriculture and moves to the urban areas of the developing world and of the wealthy West. This shift is at the heart of the most dangerous and violent conflicts today in North America, Europe and Asia. It also has enormous potential to renew the world's economies and bring a final end to mass poverty - if conflict and clashes can be avoided. It is taking place not in the cities we know but in a new type of space, on the margins of our great cities that we rarely notice: the 'arrival city'. These spaces are becoming the power centres of the new era. It is from these, the new home of an enormous floating population of 2 billion people, that most of the world's most serious crises and explosions of violence are emerging.

In "Arrival City" - both a groundbreaking work of reportage and an exciting, vivid travelogue - award-winning journalist Doug Saunders offers a detailed tour of the key points in the Great Migration, and considers the actions that have turned this enormous population shift into either a success or a violent failure.

Doug Saunders is the European Bureau Chief of the Globe and Mail, Canada's largest and most respected national daily newspaper, and the author of a popular and award-winning weekly column devoted to the intellectual ideas and social developments behind the news. An experienced foreign-affairs writer who has won the Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize on four occasions, he has visited the unknown outskirts and fringes of cities in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and China. He lives in London with his wife, the writer Elizabeth Renzetti, and their two children.