These studies reinforce the general argument that migrations around the world from rural areas to the big cities are part of a two-stage process. Its political institutions, business relationships, social networks and transactions are all footholds intended to give new village arrivals a purchase, however fragile, on the edge of the large society, and to give them a place to push themselves, and their children, further into the centre, into acceptability, into connectedness. While many still live in slums, they have clearly been receding as a proportion of the urban population over the last two decades.