JAN NIJMAN TAKES ON THE WORLD, ONE CITY AT A TIME
 

An Urban Legend

dventure, excitement, and perhaps danger—the globe-trotting endeavors of Jan Nijman are what most people only fantasize about. Nijman, professor of geography and regional studies at the University of Miami School of International Studies, has traveled down the Amazon, trekked through a rainforest in Nepal, and seen the majestic basilica of Yamoussoukro on Africa’s Ivory Coast. He even has been searched by armed soldiers looking for anti-Soviet contrabands at the Leningrad border during the height of the Cold War, back when he was a student at the University of Amsterdam.

But more than collecting stamps in his passport and great stories to tell, Nijman’s journeys have forged his unique view of the world.

“I look at a map, and instead of seeing countries, I see a collection of 40 or 50 big cities that are the main parts of a global system,” he says. “These are the places where major decisions are made.”

Nijman has a fascination about cities, for their role in the international system as well as their ability to be studied up close and personal. To him, countries are “an abstraction.” His innovative philosophies won him the Nystrom Award in 1991 for best doctoral dissertation in geography in the United States. He is the author of The Geopolitics of Power and Conflict and The Global Movement in Urban Evolution, and he is coeditor of The Global Crisis of Foreign Aid. Recently appointed to the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration, he travels several times a year to Washington, D.C., to vote on grant proposals for scientific research and exploration.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, Nijman is currently surveying the economic and social effects of globalization on Bombay, the second-largest city in the world after Tokyo.

“This is a city that had the highest real estate prices in the world a couple of years ago—higher than Tokyo, New York, London—and then it has the biggest slums on earth right next to it.” Factoring in the beautiful Indian culture and the city buzz makes it “a terrible place, but a great city.”

Miami on the other hand, offers great landscapes but lacks the urban buzz of many other great cities, says Nijman. He notes that the city’s recent rise as an economic hub has been overshadowed by focus on its notorious transience and ethnicity. Part-time residents “enrich Miami with their money, but not their citizenship.” Exile communities and other international cultures “function like islands unto themselves.”

Miami’s transience is perhaps why Nijman likes it here so much, not to mention year-round sailing on Biscayne Bay. “Miami feels like a big airport,” he says. “It’s such a mobile city, such a transient city, that I don’t feel stuck here.”

But it’s hard to believe he would be stuck anywhere. “I find it hard to go a year without traveling. I just need to spread my wings.”