The push and pull of the city and the countryside

With the relentless expansion of megacities, will the central role of family be marginalised? Shelina Zahra Janmohamed wonders

Dhaka empties every year during Eid, as many residents head out of the city by any means possible.  Mohammad Ponir Hossain / Reuters
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With the relentless expansion of megacities, will the central role of family be marginalised?

When it comes to getting out of town on a holiday weekend, it feels like all of the transport options are worse than the other, whether it’s car, train, plane, boat or even motorbike.

Imagine then the enormity of the traffic trauma if you’re a dweller of a megacity like Jakarta or Dhaka who has been planning for months to join the exodus to the countryside for the Muslim festival of Eid Al Fitr. You will be one of millions exiting the city.

In Indonesia, the trains out of Jakarta around the Eid period were sold out by the end of March.

This week, the state-owned railway operator in the Jakarta area has announced additional “Lebaran” trains, referring to Eid.

In previous years, free tickets were given on public transport to those who avoid driving or taking their motorbikes and as a result block all routes out of the city in dire traffic jams.

The exodus is fascinating, as city dwellers who left the family village to work and settle in the megacities return home for the festival.

It’s the same story in Bangladesh, as people talk of how the city empties almost by half around Eid.

Noted in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2014 list as the second worst city to live in – at that time beaten only by Damascus – residents talk of how the place becomes quite pleasant as around six million people leave.

This strong connectivity between city folks and their village homes is a snapshot of a particular moment in history, where the generational ties between parents and children are immediate.

The draw of the countryside is the draw of childhood, of memories and close family ties.

The children return home to parents and bring with them their own children. They leave the impersonal hectic big city life behind to recapture the warmth and intimacy of extended family life. There may be talk of returning home if only salaries were even half as good.

But, of course, that is the catch – the opportunities and prosperity of life in the megacities is what has created their draw away from the village in the first place.

These family connections will ultimately fade over time. Side by side with this, mega-cities will continue to grow in size, changing the relationship between city and rural areas. There are estimates that some megacities will reach 50 million people.

My prediction is that we will see the family pull diminish, only to be replaced by a nostalgia to reconnect to the countryside. But this relationship with the land will be sanitised.

You can see it in the UK already, with the rise of summer festivals.

There are rock festivals for the cool and hip young folks who revel in sleeping in tents in a field. And there are high-brow literary festivals for the older audiences more accustomed to their city comforts, who may be willing to part with eye watering sums like £4,000 (Dh18,800) for luxury en suite yurts, and who see the countryside as an “experience”.

Take the rise of “forest schools” where children are supervised at outdoor schools to learn about nature.

I even recall when I lived in Bahrain how everyone would leave the city and head to the “desert”, all of 15 minutes south of Manama (in the same space of time I can’t even get out of the London suburb I live in) with full camping gear.

The aim was to return to their desert roots. Of course, if people needed to use the toilet or shower, they would just pop home – and the traffic in and out of the desert was horrific.

The upside, of course, is that those who remain in the city after millions and millions of people have left for Eid, can relax and enjoy traffic-free life for a few days – although they do complain that they don’t know quite how to run things – because all The Help has left to go home to the village too. That seems to be the city’s revenge.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of the books Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World and Love in a Headscarf

On Twitter: @loveinheadscarf