Triumph of the
City
Edward L. Glaeser
Triumph of the City
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1
Table of Contents
S UM M A RY
3
C H A P TER S UM M A RIES & A N A LYS ES
5
Introduction-Chapter 2
5
Chapters 3-4
11
Chapters 5-6
17
Chapters 7-8
21
Chapter 9-Conclusion
26
K EY FIG URES
31
Edward Glaeser
31
Jane Jacobs
31
Coleman Young
31
William Levitt
31
A. E. Lefcourt
32
Baron Haussmann
32
Henry Ford
32
Frederick Law Olmsted
33
Arthur Erickson
33
34
TH EM ES
The Importance of Cities
34
The Evolution of Big Cities
34
The Pull of the Suburbs
35
IN D EX O F TERM S
37
Agglomeration Economies
37
Curley Effect
37
Externalities
37
Jevon’s Paradox
38
New Urbanism
38
NIMBYism
38
Potemkin Village
38
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Three Simple Rules
39
Vancouverism
39
IM P O RTA N T Q UO TES
40
ES S A Y TO P IC S
49
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Summary
Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser brings new life and controversy to the study of
urban areas with his book Triumph of The City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer,
Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (2011). The 2011 Penguin Books edition is the
subject of this guide.
Glaeser amasses evidence from his own research and elsewhere to prove the critical
importance of cities to the progress of humanity. His thesis is that the many personal
interconnections that take place in dense metropolises generate good ideas that lead to
greater economic productivity, better opportunities for the poor, more creativity in arts and
entertainment, and an environmentally greener way of life than is possible in rural or suburban
areas.
Since ancient Athens, cities have been idea factories. Today, the leading urban centers of
innovation—Bangalore in India, Silicon Valley in California, as well as New York, Boston,
London, Hong Kong, and Singapore—attract educated workforces and lots of small,
innovative businesses where ideas translate into new goods and services. Once-great
manufacturing cities like Detroit became too dependent on a few large industries and were
unable to remake themselves when factories no longer needed masses of laborers. Some, like
New York and Boston, managed comebacks by reconfiguring themselves as centers of
innovation, where person-to-person interactions proved vital to the growth of productivity. Key
to this makeover is education: A well-schooled workforce is more creative and prosperous.
Cities worldwide attract the poor because urban centers offer better opportunities than rural
regions. In a well-functioning city, poverty is a sign of success (the urban poor tend to rise out
of poverty; they’re replaced by newcomers who follow in their footsteps). In urban centers
where the poor become ensnared and unable to move up, the problem usually lies with bad
governance. The best things city leaders can do are provide clean water, sanitation,
functioning transit systems, competent policing, and good schooling. In Western countries,
disease and crime have come down over the past century, and those cities are now safer than
the countryside.
Arts and entertainment thrive in the crowded give-and-take of city life. Enticing arts scenes
and buzzing nightlife are selling points for cities that wish to attract the best-educated
workers. On the other hand, young artists’ access to lively downtowns becomes blocked when
restrictions on urban construction cause living expenses to go up. What should go up instead
are skyscrapers, whose efficient use of limited acreage helps reduce the cost of city life.
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Locals often resist high-rises, fearing overcrowding and a loss of neighborhood character, but
tall buildings designed with plenty of ground-floor shops and entertainment generate a vibrant
street life of their own.
In the US, many policies encourage people to leave cities for suburbia. The mortgage-interest
tax deduction makes home ownership more valuable, while federal support for highway
construction makes it easier to work in town and live in the suburbs. However, large suburban
home sizes and long commutes increase energy costs and pollution. Meanwhile, attempts to
limit construction in greener states shift housing demand to browner areas, which worsens
overall environmental damage. Cities, on the other hand, reduce per-person environmental
impacts with densely built neighborhoods and shorter commutes. Wooded urban parks and
enhanced entertainment options remedy some of the quality-of-life issues that drive residents
to the suburbs.
Every city is unique, and each succeeds in its own way. Some, like Hong Kong and Singapore,
emphasize good governance and free markets; others, like Boston and Minneapolis, feature
excellent universities; still others, like Paris and Dubai, offer urban pleasures. Many
municipalities have become centers of finance and technology; some cities are known for the
physical beauty of their locale.
Even successful cities struggle under misaligned public policies that restrict their growth
while propping up dying areas. Restrictions on trade and immigration also blunt the vibrancy
urban life. Meanwhile, if developing nations copy Western policies that encourage suburban
sprawl, the world will face vastly increased environmental burdens.
Big cities, then, are idea factories that lead to increased productivity, improved opportunities
for the poor, and reduced environmental impact. Cities are vital to the progress of human
civilization; if not supported by public policy, public police should at least not constrain them.
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Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction-Chapter 2
Introduction Summary: “Our Urban Species”
Since the ancient Greeks, cities have been engines of progress, creativity, and prosperity.
Every month, five million people move into the cities of the world, and today more than half of
humanity is urban. Despite improvements in communication that bring the entire world closer
together, dense physical proximity is more important than ever to the productivity of urban
centers.
New York typifies the history and future of cities. Since its founding, the famous metropolis
has been an important commercial hub; by the late 19th century, it was the largest port and
most populous city in the US. During the 20th century, globalization reduced New York’s
shipping advantage but increased its edge in idea production, especially in design and
finance. “Today, 40 percent of Manhattan’s payroll is in the financial services industry” (5),
and Manhattan’s average salary is 170% higher than the US average.
Big US cities have big advantages, their workers earning 30% more and producing 50% more
than those in outlying areas. Cities in the developing world, many of which suffer problems
that once plagued the likes of San Francisco and Singapore, lately are breaking through to the
production of ideas. Bangalore in India, for example, boasts a concentration of talented
workers that can quickly develop commercial concepts and share them efficiently with other
urban centers around the globe. In general, more-urbanized developing nations are also more
prosperous, and the people report greater happiness.
The old Detroit model of giant factories worked for decades, but neglected the small firms
and skilled artisans that help urban centers thrive. Detroit today has less than half its highest
population, and eight of the 10 largest American municipalities of 1950 have lost at least a
fifth of their people because those areas failed to reinvent themselves. Some of these
municipalities launch building projects, hoping to improve their fortunes, but buildings can’t
revive abandoned downtowns: “cities aren’t structures; cities are people” (9).
Big, thriving modern cities tend to attract lots of poor people from outlying areas, which
creates the impression that urban centers are cesspools of poverty. In fact, the poor move to
cities for the opportunities; they have less than their wealthy neighbors but much more than
when they lived in the countryside. That the poor crowd into cities is a badge, not of shame, of
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honor. Still, crime, congestion, and disease have plagued cities for centuries, especially
among the poor. Modern urban centers have come a long way in reducing these problems and
improving the lifestyles of even the neediest of their citizens.
As municipalities become safer and healthier, they attract more investment in museums,
concert halls, entertainment, restaurants, bars, and cafés. These amenities create “urban
theme parks” (11) that attract even more people, including workers with high skills and
creativity. Cities try to retain their charm by restricting new construction, especially high-rises,
but ironically this soon makes housing unaffordable except for the rich.
A city’s character depends on its origins: The oldest, built for walking, have densely packed
centers; those designed around trains and ships are rectilinear, with sidewalks and retail at
street level; the ones built more recently, around the automobile, tend to have no center and
simply spread to the horizon.
The average mass transit commute takes twice as long as the average car commute. This
encourages suburban living, which is attractive but hard on the environment. Governments
encourage this sprawl with incentives for highway-building and home ownership, whereas
city life is much more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. Cities in developing
nations are not yet nearly as car-oriented as in the US, but if they restrict construction, the
resulting nearby development sprawl and its accompanying car traffic could increase
worldwide emission levels by as much as 139%.
Cities, then, should be large, crowded, and bustling; this leads to better ideas, bigger
prosperity, and better environmental outcomes.
Chapter 1 Summary: “What Do They Make in Bangalore?”
India has a lot of poverty, bad roads, an unstable electric grid, and a great deal of bureaucratic
red tape. Manufacturing companies have trouble opening businesses there, “which explains
why the country seems to be leapfrogging straight from agriculture to information
technology” (17-18).
The city as an idea factory got its start in Athens in the 500s BC, when philosophers, artists,
historians, and scholars converged on the metropolis, tutored the wealthy, and met to
exchange ideas. Their work formed the foundations of Western thought and undergirded
Rome's empire, whose greatest strength was its cities, well-connected by roads and
aqueducts.
The fall of the Roman Empire led to the decline of European cities and a loss of knowledge. In
the early 800s, Islamic rulers stitched together their own network of cities between the Iberian
Peninsula and the Middle East, and learning began to travel those roads. The new capital,
Baghdad, installed scholars in a House of Wisdom, where they collected and translated great
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works from all over the world in mathematics, medicine, and philosophy—in the process
preserving many of Europe’s classics—and then developed new technologies and skills, most
famously algebra.
This knowledge slowly found its way back into Europe, which gradually reconnected its cities,
where monasteries and universities sprang up to rediscover the classics of knowledge and
develop yet more. “By the eighteenth century, Western technology and thought had come to
dominate the world” (22). Commerce expanded, and with it came more innovation, which led
to military victories that, in turn, generated yet more technological improvements.
Western colonial domination finally reached Japan in 1853, opening that country wide to
trade. The Japanese took advantage of European ways, rapidly industrialized, and by 1910
made colonial inroads in China and Korea. The secret was Nagasaki, a southern city where,
since 1543, all foreign trade secretly took place. Through that port came a trickle of European
technical knowledge that accumulated continuously until, by the early 1800s, Japan had
become a world leader in medical practice. By the early 20th century, the careful study and
application of Western military techniques enabled Japan to conquer an empire.
Cities like Nagasaki become centers of international communication where widely differing
ideas can meet and intermingle. Such a city's workforce grows as more companies set up
shop there, which, in turn, attracts more workers and more firms in a virtuous cycle. For
example, Bangalore and its neighbor Mysore are famous for their engineering schools,
advanced industrialization, and pro-business beliefs; the founders of the Indian information
technology firm Infosys moved to Bangalore to be near a branch office of one of their first
overseas clients; by 2008, Infosys had nearly 100,000 workers, and the city had grown into an
IT hub.
An effective estimate of the skill level of a city is its percentage of college graduates. “As the
share of the population with college degrees increases by 10 percent, per capita gross
metropolitan product rises by 22 percent” (27), and cities with higher percentages also grow
faster. On average, an extra year of schooling increases a country’s gross domestic product
by 30 percent. In the US in 1970, cities with unionized factory workers had higher overall
incomes than cities with more education, but by 2000 that had reversed. Computerized
technology has replaced unskilled workers but rewarded the better educated.
Santa Clara County, California, informally known as Silicon Valley, is the world’s premier locus
of high technology development: “It attracts brilliant people and then connects them” (32) by
concentrating them in one urban area that inspires intellectual ferment. Early 20th-century
radio and vacuum-tube businesses there gave way in the 1950s and 1960s to a budding
collection of computer-tech companies—Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and
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others—that occupied an industrial park near Stanford University, developed by Stanford’s
engineering dean, Frederick Terman. By the early 2000s, Apple Computer, Yahoo, Google, and
others had joined the group and grown into industry giants.
Today, nearly 80% of Silicon Valley’s adult residents have a college degree. An attractive, if
expensive, place to live, the Valley is basically a one-product town. However, it avoids the
stagnation suffered by earlier single-industry cities such as Detroit by combining markets—for
example, Facebook, which melds IT with social media. Firms also hire experts from other
industries as new boardroom blood, and the same Internet that those companies helped
invent can keep them abreast of the latest developments in every industry.
Why can’t IT companies simply use the Internet to communicate and innovate? Research
shows that in-person work sessions produce more of a sense of personal investment in the
group, leading to better cooperation, than do electronic meetings. In teams and in person,
people pace each other to greater achievement, and they also work longer when they live in
big, competitive cities. Patent citations come from nearby sources twice as often as chance
would dictate, and companies located near the center of their industry are more productive.
Newer workers become more successful when they receive expertise at the workplace from
more-experienced workers.
Jevon’s Paradox states that a technology that becomes more efficient gets more use, not
less. Improved passenger-train steam engines made energy costs cheaper, and train ticket
sales went up; people tend to drive efficient cars more; slashing calories from cookies
inspires people to eat more of them. Likewise, when IT technology becomes more efficient,
people use it more, but this also makes related activities, such as in-person work sessions,
more useful, and those activities also become more frequent.
Advances in technology don’t make cities obsolete. The invention of the printing press in the
1400s created a new industry that burgeoned within urban areas, attracting builders, printers,
writers, and publishers. Books quickly caused religious and social upheavals, along with a
broadening of knowledge that led to increased trade and more demand for centralized
production and shipping. Today, the Internet continues that tradition, opening up more
information channels that, among other things, increase the demand for urban infrastructure
and high-density offices where new ideas create new goods and services.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Why Do Cities Decline?”
Detroit in 1950 was a thriving factory town of nearly two million, its workers churning out
automobiles for the masses. Then foreign competition set in, technological advances reduced
the need for so many employees, and the city began to fade. Other American cities suffered
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the same fate: Eight of the 10 biggest municipalities have lost population since 1950.
As the Industrial Age ended, many metropolitan areas in America and Europe neglected the
main engine of urban growth and prosperity—smaller businesses that employ educated,
creative workers. A few, like New York and Boston, have bounced back with policies that
attract new businesses and reward entrepreneurial spirit. Other industrial cities tried instead
to recover through massive building projects, but large cities that lose population need fewer
buildings, not more.
In 1900, all 20 of the largest US cities were on rivers, because water transport is cheap.
Detroit, on the Detroit River, lay athwart a major transit route that ran from New Orleans up
the Mississippi River to the Illinois and Michigan Canal, then across the Great Lakes to
western New York state, the Erie Canal, and the Hudson River down to New York City’s
Atlantic shipping ports. These cities grew into “agglomeration economies” that benefited
from clustering of resources—transport, raw materials, large working populations—and
generated “returns to scale,” or cheaper per-unit costs, from mass production.
In the early 1900s, Detroit was the center of automotive technology. Henry Ford, Billy Durant,
Ransom Olds, the Dodge Brothers, David Buick, and the Fisher Brothers began manufacturing
cars and car parts. In 1913, Ford introduced the assembly line, which greatly improved carmaking efficiency and required almost no skill from its workers. Detroit quickly transformed
itself into “Motor City,” and the many car makers condensed into just a few, principally Ford
and General Motors, that made vehicles in gigantic factories.
Unions, supported by the government, grew powerful and raised high their members’ wages.
By the mid-1900s, overland transport had become much cheaper, and companies no longer
had to base themselves in large, expensive cities, especially those with high labor costs.
Businesses began to move away. This happened not only in Detroit but in major cities across
America and Europe.
The problem with unskilled assembly-line manufacturing is that, “if people need to know less,
they also have less need for cities that spread knowledge” (48). As manufacturing jobs
declined, workers found themselves without the education, or the innovative companies, to
provide them with new jobs. Tax revenues declined, as well as social services. Many urban
centers with large African American populations, long suffering from institutional bias and
lack of resources and opportunities, began to seethe. In the mid-1960s, riots erupted in
several cities. Detroit in 1967 suffered a riot in which angry citizens destroyed 1,400 buildings,
resulting in thousands arrested and 43 killed.
Some urban centers responded with new construction downtown, but this simply put a pretty,
false face—a “Potemkin Village”—on a failing economy. The businesses and jobs didn’t come.
One bright light was New York City, which lost 300,000 garment industry jobs and nearly lost
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its government to bankruptcy in 1975 but made a comeback, especially in the financial sector
but also with business-friendly policies.
From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, African-American Coleman Young was mayor of
Detroit, a man dedicated to righting the racial wrongs of many decades. However, it is hard “to
right great social wrongs at the city level” (55), and Young’s huge building projects and high
taxes on wealthy white residents caused a flight of capital from the city. Young tore down
1,400 houses and turned the land over to General Motors for a new high-tech factory, but the
plant employs only 1,300 people. Though brash and popular—Young served five consecutive
terms as mayor—his programs failed to solve the problems. The city needed more education
and more new businesses, but a devastated city with cheap housing prices attracts only more
of the working poor.
The “Curley Effect” defines a city leader who alienates a once-dominant ethnic group, causing
them to move out and take with them much of the job-making business sector. Boston’s
James Curley in the early 1900s vigorously defended working-class Irish-Americans against
the established Protestant elite, driving away the wealthier Yankees and leaving the city
poorer than ever. Coleman Young likewise alienated white residents, most of whom left his
city, so that Detroit ended up mainly with under-schooled workers from the old assembly-line
days.
Some cities in America and Europe have had success with innovative ideas. Spain built a
high-speed rail line to ferry workers from outlying cities to Madrid; in the north, Bilbao’s
Guggenheim museum has generated a tourist boom. Leipzig in Germany and Youngstown in
Ohio have torn down thousands of vacant buildings and replaced them with parkland and
open space, making those districts “more attractive, less dangerous, and cheaper to
maintain” (66). Other cities have invested in amenities such as museums and art districts that
they hope will attract better-educated workers and entrepreneurs.
Introduction-Chapter 2 Analysis
The Introduction is an extended essay that outlines the major ideas of Triumph of The City;
the rest of the book fills in the details. Chapters 1 and 2 set forth what makes dense urban
areas so productive, and how today’s cities succeed or fail in coping with the challenges of
modernity.
Glaeser believes cities are hotbeds of innovation because their citizens meet up, not remotely
by phone or email, but in person, where their direct interactions inspire productive ideas in
ways that texting, teleconferences, and technical papers can’t imitate.
Some might argue that Glaeser is merely trying to prop up his love for cities with arguments
against over-reliance on remote communication technologies that might reduce the need for
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urban centers. His point, however, is that workers need direct contact to strengthen their
working relationships; thereafter, remote communications will work effectively.
Glaeser outlines his Jevons Complementarity Corollary, by which any resource that becomes
more efficient will not only find use more but will also increase the demand for related
activities, as when the Internet improves communication efficiency and thereby increases the
value of subsequent in-person work sessions. For example, despite the increasing use of
teleconferencing, more people are traveling on business than ever before.
Innovations also pose problems for modern cities, and some have failed to meet the
challenge. Detroit serves as the main example of a city that rose in prominence as a transport
and manufacturing center, grew into a single-industry factory town, then slowly collapsed as
changes in technology left it behind. The city tried to attract new business by constructing
more buildings, but companies need people first and office space second. New York City in
the 1970s faced many of the same problems as Detroit, but instead of construction it
emphasized business-friendly policies, and by the 2000s it was once again thriving on a base
of smaller, more innovative companies.
In the “Curley Effect,” a minority leader becomes mayor of a big city and thereupon makes life
miserable for the elites who used to run things. It’s a form of revenge irresistible to voters
who have suffered under the previous ethnic regime, and completely understandable.
However, chasing away people with money also chases away the main local sources of
investment in businesses and the jobs they create. Like licking chapped lips, this kind of
revenge feels good at first but causes worse pain later.
Glaeser makes clear the value of education in the growth of thriving cities and the revival of
struggling ones. Money spent on construction of showpiece urban centers should instead go
toward schools and teachers, since an educated workforce, not a bunch of empty showpiece
buildings, is what makes a city adaptive, prosperous, and great.
Chapters 3-4
Chapter 3 Summary: “What’s Good About Slums?”
Cities always contain a large portion of poor residents. This might condemn large
metropolises as aggregators of squalor, but “poverty in cities from Rio to Rotterdam reflects
urban strength, not weakness” (70). Thriving urban areas attract the rural poor, who tend to
improve their fortunes and move up the socio-economic ladder; their good results attract yet
more rural poor, who, in turn, begin their own economic climb.
A city that improves conditions for its poor tends to attract more poor people. This is a sign of
success, not failure. The many businesses in a big city, with their various types of jobs,
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provide opportunities for poor farmers, many of whom have little talent for agriculture but
discover a flare for machinery or pastry-making or sales.
An urban transit system’s stations tend to become surrounded by poor residents because the
stops give them a nearby source of inexpensive transportation, especially to their places of
work. If the poor flock to a particular place, it’s because that place offers them advantages
and a way to move up.
The hills around Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, house shantytowns called favelas. Runaway black
slaves in the 1800 established the first such settlements; in the late 1890s, unpaid soldiers
set up the first of the huts and shanties seen today and lately occupied by arrivals from rural
areas. Though poverty is a watchword there, the average income is higher than that of 70% of
rural Brazilian workers.
Likewise, poor sectors of Lagos, Nigeria have much less extreme poverty and better access to
safe drinking water than their rural counterparts. Kolkata, India similarly has lower poverty,
and one-tenth the rate of food shortages, as the hinterlands. Most urban residents in poorer
nations report greater happiness than nearby residents of the countryside.
Urban slums, for all their problems, offer a path to prosperity unavailable in rural agrarian
regions. Already, Brazil, China, and India are becoming wealthier; this prosperity begins in
their cities. Restricting a city’s growth to prevent poverty is tantamount to telling poor rural
residents that they can’t ever escape their condition. Limiting cities to the well-off is not only
unfair, it creates stagnation and dead-end cultures.
Government attempts to improve conditions in low-income urban areas will tend, ironically, to
increase the number of poor residents. “If a government provides health care and education
in the city but not in the countryside, then those services will attract more poor to urban
areas” (76).
America is a land of immigrants. Today, one-third of New York City is foreign-born, and nearly
half speak a language other than English at home. Newcomers to the US tend to end up in
cities. Their numbers include Patrick Kennedy, who arrived penniless in Boston and whose
great-grandson became a US president; Andrew Carnegie, who came from Scotland poor and
grew rich building up American industry; or President Barack Obama, whose father was a
Kenyan immigrant.
African Americans in the Deep South moved to northern cities for better job opportunities—
some tripled their old income just by working at the Ford factory—and to escape racially
restrictive Jim Crow laws. Blacks like Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington helped launch the
Harlem Renaissance in jazz that spread across the country. A few, like Richard Wright, found
success after working a series of jobs until they found their niche—in Wright’s case, penning
short stories and books that won him prizes, a Guggenheim fellowship, and fame.
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It was hard to escape racism, though, and northern blacks soon found themselves locked out
of white neighborhoods, instead having to pay as much per square foot for housing as the
wealthy. Decades of court fights removed most of these restrictions, and the Civil Rights Act
of 1968 finally outlawed housing discrimination.
Unfortunately, some of the first to leave the ghettos were the better-educated African
Americans, who had “provided role models and leadership for the entire community” (84).
Without them, “those communities became rudderless” (84) and worse off than before.
In some cities with limited transit options, the rich prefer to live downtown to save time
commuting. Poor people tend also to live downtown in older, dilapidated buildings, and they
take the bus. In New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, the center of town houses the rich,
surrounded by poor residents who, in turn, have more wealthy people surrounding them.
These wealthy people commute by car and, in turn, have poor residents who use public transit
surrounding them. Finally, the outlying suburbs house middle-class car commuters.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development gave vouchers to get poor single
mothers into low-poverty neighborhoods, with mixed results: The moms were happier but
made no more money; their daughters did better in school, but their sons got into more
trouble. The Harlem Children’s Zone is a private effort with a school, the Promise Academy,
that admits students by lottery, demands high academic standards, has closed the math gap
between black and white children, and has become a standard for other local initiatives
around the nation.
Many state and federal efforts have tried to alleviate conditions in poor areas, only to
encourage more poor people to move there. Attempts to integrate schools, meanwhile, result
in white flight. Local school districts run as monopolies have little incentive to improve,
especially in poorer areas. If inner-city schools had full funding and staff, much of the
schooling problem might find alleviation—public monies spent productively on educating
those who need it instead of wasted on more stadiums and fancy people movers.
Chapter 4 Summary: “How Were the Tenements Tamed?”
In one neighborhood of Mumbai, India, nearly a million people live in less than one square
mile. Residents work hard at small, simple jobs, and they look after each other so that crime is
low; however, pollution, sewage spills, and inadequate toilet facilities take their toll in disease.
Life expectancy in Mumbai is seven years lower than in the rest of India.
Cities all over the world must deal with these types of problems. Strong leadership, unfettered
by too many checks and balances, can respond quickly to problems of disease and crime that
arise in downtowns everywhere. When urban public sectors become dysfunctional, crime and
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disease can run rampant, driving away productive workers. “This failure prevents the city
from fulfilling its core purpose, lifting the country by connecting talented people” (96).
In central Africa, Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, has struggled off and on since its founding
with corrupt and brutal dictators. On top of rampant corruption, crime, high infant mortality,
malnutrition, lack of potable water, and periodic warfare, Kinshasa's 10 million residents
suffer from malaria, typhoid fever, and AIDS. CNN considers Kinshasa to be one of the 10
most dangerous cities in the world. Its saving grace is that the country's interior is even more
dangerous; its greatest hope is that other great cities, like New York and London, faced many
of the same problems in the past and overcame them.
Throughout history, successful cities became crowded, which generated unwanted side
effects, or externalities, including disease outbreaks. Sometimes the most effective solution
involved new public services. In the late 1700s, Philadelphia and New York responded to
epidemics by launching projects to replace cesspool-contaminated drinking water. New
York’s private water systems failed to reduce sanitation problems until the city stepped in and
built an effective public system. By the late 1800s, “municipalities were spending as much on
water as the federal government spent on everything except the military and the postal
service” (100).
Between 1850 and 1925, construction of clean water systems in Chicago reduced the city’s
death rate by 30 to 50 percent. London in 1854 suffered a cholera epidemic; a doctor mapped
the disease’s path and zeroed in on a single water pump contaminated by a nearby cesspit.
When the city closed the pump, the epidemic stopped. Paris built a sewage system still in use
today; Paris also introduced asphalt as a better way to pave streets and keep roads cleaner.
By the 1890s, New York had similarly repaved its roads, and a street-cleaning campaign
further reduced sanitation problems.
The early 20th century brought increased medical knowledge, better hospitals, and improved
sanitation systems, reducing infant mortality and increasing human lifespan in New York and
elsewhere. Citizens also became better educated, and the New Deal safety net of the 1930s
raised living standards, all of which helped cleanse cities of corrupt political machines.
Another externality caused by civic success is traffic jams. Each additional car benefits its
driver but worsens congestion, and roadway improvements invite more traffic, so the
situation doesn’t get better. People pay directly for water and sewage services, but most
roads are free, causing overuse. Charging tolls for road use, with higher fees during rush
hours, transfers costs to the drivers and reduces congestion. London and Singapore impose
central-city congestion pricing, which reduces traffic snarls. Sprawling cities in developing
countries typically lack subways and sidewalks; traffic problems there are worse and harder
to solve.
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Fear of crime keeps people off the streets, reducing productive interactions. Crowds
concentrate a large assortment of potential victims in front of criminals, and big cities suffer
more crime per person than small cities. Most crime is poor-against-poor.
Crime rates vary greatly between big cities, sometimes for no obvious reason. In New York
City, murder rates varied, over the centuries, between three and five murders per year, but
between 1960 and 1975 the rate jumped to 22 murders per year; thereafter, it dropped back to
about six per year. Rio’s favelas today have high rates, while more-crowded Mumbai has
much lower rates, largely due to strong social connections and people looking out for each
other.
Attempts to reduce crime by reducing poverty generally fail, while better arrest and conviction
rates, along with harsher penalties, reduce crime somewhat. Low conviction rates are part of
the problem in Rio and in Bogota, Colombia. In the US, between 1980 and 2000, prison
populations rose from less than two million to more than six million, and crime dropped
because career criminals were off the streets. Imprisonment does little to reduce recidivism
rates, though, and harsher penalties can ruin the lives of people who made only one youthful
mistake.
Improved use of mapping and data collection have helped police in New York and elsewhere
to better allocate police resources, focusing in on areas of high crime, spotting trends, and
making more timely arrests. Increased efforts at community outreach—where beat cops
develop good relationships with people in the neighborhood and, in return, receive better leads
on crimes and criminals—have made inroads in crime rates, especially in Boston, but overall
these practices make only a modest difference.
The World Trade Center attacks increased fears that cities had become too dense and
attractive a target to be safe anymore, but studies show that popular terrorist targets like
London and Jerusalem still grow and thrive, and skyscraper construction continues unabated.
In America, densely populated areas tend to have lower death rates than more rural regions.
Youthful accidents and suicides are higher in the countryside, where there are more cars and
guns per person, but death rates among middle-aged and older people also are lower in big
cities. Possible reasons also include citywide public health measures, fast information flow,
lots of hospitals, and smoking restrictions.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Chapters 3 and 4 take a close look at poverty in cities, how successful urban centers attract
the poor, and how attempts to reduce poverty often exacerbate it.
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Telling someone in a poor urban shantytown that they should move back to their old country
village is like telling someone with an old car that they should trade it in for a horse. Horses
are wonderful creatures, but the least worthy automobile can do far more than its equestrian
ancestor.
Glaeser points out that modern agricultural technology requires fewer farm hands. In fact, the
US, which began as a nation largely of farmers, today has less than three percent of its
population involved in agriculture. Much the same process of technological advance has
cored out industrial work as well: In 1950, nearly 40 percent of American employees worked in
mining, manufacturing, and construction, but by 2015, less than 10 percent did so. By
contrast, services, which required only 30 percent of workers in 1910, now employ over 80
percent of them.
In short, Americans, and Western societies in general, have shifted in the past 100 years from
farming to manufacturing to service work. Some US politicians, believing other countries have
lately stolen America’s manufacturing jobs, campaign for a revival of Rust Belt factories, but
it’s largely not foreigners who have taken those jobs; it’s technology.
Poverty tugs at the heart strings of the more fortunate, who try to help. Many anti-poverty
programs, however, attract the homeless and others who arrive poor and then stagnate, and
further attempts to alleviate their suffering often worsen the problem. It can be hard to tell
the difference between the rising poor and enmeshed poverty, making the issue one of the
most ticklish and controversial to resolve.
Glaeser would like to see a bit less democracy in cities, especially in India, and a bit more
authority vested in urban leaders who can then respond decisively to problems of crime and
disease. His argument is that, as in war, leaders sometimes need a free hand to solve difficult
urban problems. The counter-argument is that such leaders can, and often do, succumb to
the temptations of power and become overbearing, corrupt, and arbitrary.
A big problem with crime-reduction efforts is that each method will alienate a voting bloc.
Increased policing, along with harsher penalties, fall hardest on minority neighborhoods; antipoverty efforts, which historically have low success rates, frustrate wealthier areas that must
pay for such programs.
The upshot is that thriving metropolises will attract the poor, and sometimes the best policy is
to regulate the resulting problems with a light hand. Beneath all the controversies, cities
quietly work their magic, transforming generations of the rural poor into working-class, and
later middle-class, citizens of the urban age.
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Chapters 5-6
Chapter 5 Summary: “Is London a Luxury Resort?”
Cities concentrate luxuries and entertainments. High-end goods, engaging plays, and creative
cuisines are for sale, produced by interesting people who, in turn, attract more interesting
people. Companies move to large, appealing urban centers partly to draw from the pool of
talented workers who flock to those places.
The sheer size of cities makes possible many of these arts. London in the late 1500s had
grown large enough to support permanent theaters with their sets, actors, and directors. The
many productions brought into one area a number of brilliant playwrights, including
Shakespeare and Marlowe, who picked up ideas from each other’s plays and developed them
into their own works. To this day, London’s West End theatrical performances are the envy of
the English-speaking world.
Major entertainment tends to evolve in live venues of big cities, where, as in Renaissance
London, creative artists learn from each other. In the 1970s, DJ Kool Herc used turntables like
instruments at night clubs, Grandmaster Flash and MC Melle Mel added vocals, and soon Def
Jam Records was recording Rap albums and changing the world of music.
Restaurants in big cities take advantage of the large pool of specialized talent available there
to create exotic, innovate dishes served in beautifully designed dining rooms. The first
restaurants, in 18th-century Paris, catered to more than just the nobility, spreading their costs
among a much larger urban clientele and making interesting foods widely available. The
resulting spread of culinary knowledge benefited other restaurants, improved home cooking,
and enabled renters of small flats to meet up with other people while enjoying good food in
larger spaces meant for the purpose.
Cities attract immigrants who blend cuisine from their home countries with local culinary
traditions to create tasty new dishes that people likely wouldn’t create anywhere but in a
metropolis. Large clienteles, both wealthy and modest, appreciate, and will pay for,
experimental cooking.
City dwellers also spend more on clothing and shoes than do their rural counterparts,
including more on high fashion, which thrives in cities. Unique clothing helps people stand out
in a crowd and signal who they are. This is important for single people, because cities house a
higher proportion of singles than elsewhere, and profusions of night spots make socializing
with others easy. “Cities attract more single people than other areas, in part, because urban
density increases the odds of meeting a prospective partner” (127).
In small towns, bad behavior can lead to shunning, but big cities forgive social rule-breakers
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by providing lots of venues where people can start over. This tends to loosen urban moral
standards. For people with plenty of money and low thresholds of boredom, cities offer nearly
endless new sensations in the form of art openings, new restaurants, concerts, and events.
Wages tend to reflect a city’s quality of life: Higher pay corrects for bad weather, crime
problems, or other negative attributes, while lower wages imply a desirable and popular local
lifestyle. In recent decades, as more cities improved their amenities, more people have
chosen those places to live in.
Chapter 6 Summary: “What’s So Great About Skyscrapers?”
Between 1853 and 1870, Paris reformed under the direction of Baron Georges-Eugène
Haussmann, whose long streets lined with five-story buildings make up the Paris we think of
today. To preserve that beauty, Paris restricts construction, causing housing prices to
skyrocket, so that the City of Light has become “a boutique city that can today be enjoyed
only by the wealthy” (136).
High-rise buildings are an attempt to make maximum use of crowded space by building
upward; they’re also a way to show off. In the West, by tradition, no building would overtop the
local church. Then a community erected a commercial belfry in the wool-market port city of
Bruges in Belgium, whose spire for a time reached 354 feet in height. By the late 19th century,
both Paris and New York had structures higher than the local church spires—the Eiffel Tower
and the New York World building, respectively—and skyscrapers have grown taller ever since.
Construction methods and people’s tolerance for climbing stairs were a deterrent for building
heights. Elevators and load-bearing steel skeletons, however, made increasingly tall buildings
possible; in the early 20th century, American skyscrapers quickly outdid each other, growing
from 300 to nearly 800 feet in height.
A. E. Lefcourt rose from obscurity to great wealth by buying and enlarging a Manhattan
garment factory, then expanding into real estate, erecting many of the 20th century’s early
skyscrapers and, alongside other builders, modernizing the New York skyline with efficient,
tall structures that added vertical workspace to a crowded city. One of Lefcourt’s projects, the
Brill Building, in the 1950s and 1960s became a center of music production, a tall city building
filled with creative minds that produced a string of pop hits. “Cities are ultimately about the
connections among people, but structures—like those built by A. E. Lefcourt—make those
connections easier” (142).
Beginning in 1913, a movement began to save old New York architecture, especially Fifth
Avenue mansions, from the wrecking ball; adherents claimed high-rise construction would
harm property values, add congestion, and ruin the city. Height restrictions and zoning laws
tried, and largely failed, to limit the skyscraper craze; only the Depression slowed it down for a
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time. After 1960, however, growth began to slow again from further restraints, so that average
heights of new construction dropped below 20 stories. “The increasing wave of regulations
was, until the Bloomberg administration, making New York shorter” (151).
Jane Jacobs, a self-made journalist and architecture critic, in the 1950s began to take issue
with the city’s urban renewal effort, especially how it tore down diverse neighborhoods and
replaced them with blocks of soaring, isolated, single-use buildings. By the 1970s, Jacobs
was arguing that dense cities were environmentally greener than suburbs, but that
neighborhoods with more than 200 families per acre, as with high-rise apartment buildings,
overdo density and create sterility.
A simple solution is to have plenty of shopping and nightlife built into the ground floors of
skyscrapers. Hong Kong, for example, which embraces change and construction, has a lively
street culture beneath soaring towers.
Jacobs also believed smaller buildings would provide affordable housing for creative types;
she worried that high-rise construction would increase rental costs. The opposite is true,
however: Shorter buildings can’t absorb increased housing demand in a growing city. Large
buildings may charge more, but they ease demand pressure on the rest of the city’s building
stock.
With the razing of the iconic and beloved Penn Station railroad terminal building in 1961, a
preservationist movement gathered steam to protect old buildings from modernization’s
wrecking ball. The city established a Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965 with
oversight of about 700 buildings. By 2010, the commission’s purview had increased to more
than 25,000 buildings and 100 historical districts. Those buildings and districts have much
higher rents than elsewhere. New York in the early 1960s permitted an average of 11,000 new
living units per year; by 1999, that average had dropped to 3,120, and rental prices, in
constant dollars, had increased nearly fourfold.
Paris has, in recent decades, faced similar issues. Largely unchanged since Baron
Haussmann’s renovations of the 1850s and 1860s, the city finally got its first skyscraper in
1969, but the unpopular monolith inspired renewed height restrictions, and the city banished
high-rise construction to just beyond the city limits. Lacking new construction, Paris retains
its beauty and popularity but is very expensive to live in.
Mumbai tried to limit the growth of its population of 12 million by severely restricting building
heights, but poor people kept pouring in, causing the city to become cramped and congested.
Incompetent local governance has led to water and sewer problems, traffic snarls, and people
using the streets as toilets. Meanwhile, Singapore and Hong Kong are densely populated and
packed with high-rises, yet they are wealthy and pedestrian-friendly, their close-together
buildings requiring many fewer cars.
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Glaeser proposes three simple rules for urban planners and regulators: (1) replace arcane
permitting processes with a list of fees that offset neighborhood problems caused by
construction; (2) limit historic preservation to cherished buildings rather than entire districts;
(3) give locals more say in the character and appearance of their neighborhoods.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Chapter 5 looks at how crowded cities act as incubators of artistic creativity; Chapter 6
explains how crowding leads to the development of vertical construction, an innovation that
solves many problems but generates strong neighborhood resistance.
Triumph of The City contains many asides—they’re akin to sidebars—with background on
topics related to the book’s thesis. Examples include a short history of the Boston politicos
who predated the Kennedys; a brief biography of the man who spearheaded the cleanup of
New York City’s streets; the urban rise of author Richard Wright; an overview of the factors
that went into Boston’s decision to improve community policing; and a digression on
Theodore Dreiser’s novels of city life. These mini-stories add color to what might otherwise
become an overly statistical recitation of the advantages of big cities.
Glaeser builds Chapter 5 largely out of these asides: The creation of the restaurant industry;
who the first great London playwrights were and how they stole plots from each other; the
urban links in the creative chain that led to Rap music albums. These asides add color to the
chapter’s main argument, that cities are stimulating and entertaining places in ways
unavailable in the countryside. Three cities figure prominently in the chapter: London, with
over nine million residents, and New York, with eight million, are major trade, financial, and
entertainment centers that attract immigrants, entrepreneurs, and creative energy, while
Paris’s history runs centuries deep with culinary and artistic fervent.
Much of Chapter 6 serves as an editorial against restrictions on new urban construction. The
main point is that adding new housing keeps rents low. Preservationists argue against large
construction projects, claiming they ruin older, historic neighborhoods. Glaeser responds that
restricting development in a given area raises prices there, passes the entire problem onto
nearby districts, and prevents lower-income people from moving there.
People who dislike skyscrapers often argue, with good evidence, that high-rises tend to
isolate people from the street life of a city. Many skyscrapers resemble fortresses, with huge,
blank walls facing the sidewalk. Glaeser suggests, instead, that the ground floors of highrises should contain shops and entertainment. In areas where tall buildings meet the street
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with bistros, shops, and night clubs, a local culture quickly evolves, and the streets become
vibrant. Thus, a spirited urban experience can thrive as easily in a steel canyon 400 feet tall as
on a quaint street 40 feet high.
Preservationists may be trying nobly to preserve a city’s history and charm, but they may also
be trying, less generously, to “keep out the riffraff” (150). In that respect, Glaeser suggests,
preservation movements have the whiff of racism about them.
Glaeser loves cities, thinks they offer a better life than the countryside, and wants them
affordable to more people. Skyscrapers help keep costs down by making efficient use of
limited acreage, but the tug of war between builders and preservationists may always make
cities somewhat more expensive than suburban and rural areas. Still, the many work
opportunities available in cities will continue to attract newcomers.
Chapters 7-8
Chapter 7 Summary: “Why Has Sprawl Spread?”
With each advance in transportation technology, cities have spread out. Horses increased the
useful distances in towns; horse-drawn buses of the early 1800s widened that distance.
Electric trolleys enlarged cities further, and commuter steam trains enabled the growth of
suburbs. Elevators allowed cities to expand upward.
New forms of transport tended, at the outset, to be somewhat expensive, so it was the
wealthy who first used them, often to get to new homes farther from downtown’s noise and
crowds. As the automobile became a main mode of transport, highway systems formed that
connected the country but also made it easy to commute to work from well outside the city.
New towns cropped up around driving, and older cities began losing population. The result
was urban centers surrounded by wide suburban sprawls.
Following the Second World War, the US established mortgage loan guarantees and tax
deductions to help servicemen afford a house. William Levitt, a returning Navy Seabee
construction officer, bought up 20 square miles of land on Long Island, and, inspired by Henry
Ford’s assembly-line system, mass-produced and sold thousands of small, inexpensive, goodquality homes complete with appliances. Levitt cut costs by avoiding both unions and
middlemen; his houses, ridiculed by architecture critics, proved wildly popular. The
development became the first of many “Levittowns” across America and launched the massproduced tract housing industry.
Federal support for highways and mortgage-interest tax deductions has greatly encouraged
suburbanization. “When public policy promotes home ownership, it also pushes people to
leave cities” (176). Businesses and jobs also have followed homeowners to the suburbs. The
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US isn’t alone: Since the 1950s, despite high gasoline taxes, 90 percent of new construction in
major European cities has been in suburban areas. Cars reduce pedestrian traffic, take up
more space while in use, and require expensive parking facilities; on the other hand,
commutes by car take roughly half as long as commutes by public transit.
Thirty miles north of Houston, Texas lies The Woodlands, an award-winning housing
development with a business park, excellent schools, shopping mall, pedestrian-friendly town
center, golf courses, 3,000-square-foot houses selling for less than $300,000, and forests on
20 percent of the land. The Woodlands is emblematic of the attractive and affordable middleclass lifestyle in the Houston metro area that drew a million new residents during the 2000s.
The average home in New York in 2006 was worth $496,000; in Los Angeles, it was $614,000.
Houston’s average house in 2007 cost $120,000. “You get much more house in Houston, and
you pay a lot less for it” (185). Adding up housing, transit, and food costs, and with no state or
local income tax, it’s much cheaper to live in Houston. New York and Los Angeles offer
features unavailable in Texas, but Houston responded by building more than 200,000 homes
between 2001 and 2008, keeping housing costs low.
In Texas, construction isn't tightly restricted, as in other major American urban areas, so
rising populations lead quickly to more housing. Texas escaped the nationwide real estate
price bubble and crash during the 2000s because construction increased during the boom
years and dropped during the Recession, tracking demand and keeping prices within a range
of a few percent.
In general, restrictions on construction cause home prices to rise, which stymies efforts to
offer affordable housing to the poor. Inner cities also have more trouble providing good
schools; concerned parents who can afford it move to the suburbs, where schooling is
generally better. Suburbs aren’t bad in themselves, but government policies encourage their
growth at the expense of urban centers, a somewhat arbitrary condition that hobbles cities in
the competition for residents. As the suburbs fill up and traffic there gets more clogged,
downtown living may become more appealing, if only for its much shorter commutes.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Is There Anything Greener Than Blacktop?”
Single-family suburban homes need much more energy to heat and cool than city residences,
and the wide-open spaces of suburbia require much more travel time and fuel costs.
Downtowns are simply more environmentally friendly.
Despite the hopes of many environmentalists, populations in the Third World continue to
move out of rural areas, and many of those people wish to enjoy the suburban lifestyle
available in Western nations. This would inject large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere,
worsening the risks of global warming. Cities, with their greater efficiencies, can help reduce
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these problems, including in the West.
In the early 19th century, as cities industrialized, their smoke, crime, ugliness, and disease
made the countryside seem much more attractive. Thoreau at Walden Pond, and Wordsworth
in England’s Lake District, became icons of a blissful life in nature. Urban planners responded
by designing towns encircled by greenbelts, and, for large cities, built parks downtown.
Still, large suburban lots offer a chance to grow some trees and have a mini-park surrounding
one’s house that doesn’t have to be communal. Streetcars and, later, automobiles enabled
suburbanites to commute to the city for work and then come home to tree-lined
neighborhoods. Frederick Law Olmsted—who designed New York’s Central Park and many
other urban oases around the US in the mid-to-late 1800s—created Riverside, outside Chicago,
in 1869 as the first planned suburban community, with winding streets, big lots, and an
abundance of trees.
Living closer to nature has its costs. Suburban residents drive farther, and not just on their
commutes: “In a city, you often walk to a restaurant. In a low-density area, eating out might
entail a twenty-five-minute drive each way” (207). Cars emit 10 times as much CO2 per trip
than does a ride on mass transit. In the US, older northern cities use more fuel to heat their
homes, but fast-growing, low-density Sunbelt cities require much more air conditioning.
Overall, denser urban areas use less electricity per person than more sprawling cities.
Greener states like California severely limit new construction, hoping to protect their
environments and limit crowding. This pushes home-building to places like Las Vegas and
Houston, where sprawl and hot summers require much higher energy use, causing a net
increase nationally in environmental stressors. This makes California environmental policies
less green and browner than they appear.
The New Urbanism movement wants a return to more traditional small-town living, though
representative boroughs—including anti-modernist Prince Charles’s Poundbury village,
Disney’s town of Celebration in Florida, and several other planned communities in the US and
England—consist mainly of larger, energy-guzzling single-family homes and their cars.
An environmentalist with views opposite to those of Prince Charles is Ken Livingstone, who,
as London’s mayor from 2000 to 2008, strongly supported high-rise construction to improve
density and bring in wealthy taxpayers to support the city’s social programs. Livingstone also
charged fees to drive in central London, which reduced congestion and increased use of mass
transit.
Charles’s vision of a return to medieval-style towns depends on residents using as little
energy as a 15th-century peasant. Livingstone’s view, given modern energy usage patterns, is
that skyscrapers, mass transit, and “common public spaces, like restaurants, bars, and
museums” (217) make cities relatively efficient.
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China and India are urbanizing rapidly; if they achieve the same per-capita energy spending as
in the US, worldwide carbon emissions will more than double. France emits one-third as much
carbon per person as the US; if China and India manage their growth so that energy use
resembles that of the French, total carbon emissions worldwide will rise only 30 percent.
So far, emissions per person in most Chinese cities are one-twentieth of those in the
Washington, DC area, but those emissions will rise as China makes greater use of air
conditioning and automobiles: “we can hardly expect an increasingly prosperous Chinese
population to forgo the luxuries that Americans take for granted” (219). Meanwhile, India now
manufactures a car costing only $2,500, which likely will worsen that country’s future
pollution problems. The West may want to subsidize fuel-efficient technologies in developing
nations and encourage denser cities at home and abroad: “there is nothing greener than
blacktop” (222).
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
Chapters 7 and 8 argue in favor of dense cities as ecological antidotes to the more energyintensive and polluting lifestyle of suburbia.
Humans evolved in small communities widely spaced, so that the relative openness and
quietude in the suburbs may more closely fit human instincts than the rush and tumble and
verticality of modern metropolises. The countryside exerts a tidal pull on people’s psyches, a
feeling not easily countered by economic calculations.
Suburbia expanded greatly in the decades following World War II, but not without growing
pains. Some people criticized the Levittowns of mid-century America for including restrictive
covenants in homes sales contracts that forbid ownership by Jews and blacks, as if William
Levitt invented such clauses. In fact, these restrictions were common practice at the time; by
the late 1940s, however, the Supreme Court overturned these restrictions and removed them
from Levitt’s contracts.
The main problem with suburbia is that it has become too successful. Glaeser repeatedly
hammers home the point that, between homeowner incentives—mortgage interest tax
deductions, funding for highway construction, moderate fuel taxes—and big-city restrictions
on new construction, governments effectively have steered Americans toward the suburbs.
It’s a nice lifestyle but hard on the environment.
Since the publication of Triumph, new forms of inexpensive taxi service—Uber and Lyft, for
example—have begun to replace some of the use of private cars. This eases the demand for
parking in shopping areas and reduces the number of cars on the road. The advent of
driverless electric vehicles will further reduce costs: Estimates place wholesale expenses for
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such cars at about 30 cents per mile; even at retail prices of 60 cents per mile, such
transportation would be cheaper than driving one’s own car. Whether these trends reshape
transit for the better is still in question.
Glaeser’s fears about the growth of China’s automobile fleet “by 2020” have partially come to
pass: In 2019 there were 250 million cars there, making China the world’s largest car market.
On the other hand, China’s leadership is very gung-ho about urban rail transit, spending over
$200 billion per year on it in the late 2010s.
Glaeser doesn’t explain why inner-city schools are generally worse off than suburban schools,
aside from asserting that “the American public school system essentially puts a public quasimonopoly in charge of central-city schools” (195). Mandated monopolies face almost no
competition and needn’t strive for competence, and angry complaints at school board
meetings will barely budge the problem.
Suburbs contain higher-income residents who can afford private education, which inspires
competition between schools, both public and private. To their credit, inner-city school boards
have, in recent decades, set up magnet schools to help improve educational opportunities
there.
Suburbs have another competitive advantage: their more wide-open spaces often contain
wooded areas that are, quite simply, good for the soul. Studies show that a simple hike in the
woods generates significant psychological benefits, and some therapists now recommend
such walks, calling them “forest bathing.” Trees are generally hard to find in the centers of
cities; possible solutions include forested urban parks (with the wooded areas of New York’s
Central Park as prime examples), transit systems with spurs that stop at the edge of town to
accommodate hikers, and high-density suburban residential areas located next to woodlands.
The author gently mocks Thoreau's anti-city views, pointing out that a life in the countryside
is more costly to the very environment Thoreau praised. Thoreau preached simplicity, a virtue
that, ironically, exists within the tighter confines of city life more than in suburbia, where
bigger houses and plenty of storage spaces permit an absurdly large accumulation of stuff.
Cities in Thoreau’s time were messy and dangerous, but today’s modern metropolises are a
far cry from their predecessors. Would Thoreau have approved of today’s massive cities or
shrunk away in horror? It’s anyone’s guess.
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Chapter 9-Conclusion
Chapter 9 Summary: “How Do Cities Succeed?”
Cities fail similarly—boarded-up businesses, empty houses and streets—but they succeed
differently. Each metropolis has its own style and appearance: some crowded and messy,
others tidy; some multicultural, others ethnically unified; each boasts unique cuisine, art, and
cultural sensibilities. All successful urban centers, however, have in common talented
workforces and opportunities that form a path up from poverty.
The best cities attract talent in different ways. Hong Kong and Singapore have a competent
governance and a free marketplace; Boston, Minneapolis, and Atlanta offer quality
universities; Paris and Dubai offer myriad pleasures; Chicago and Houston encourage
construction and, with it, competitive housing costs.
Tokyo, capital of a highly centralized government and economy—“Washington and New York
rolled into one” (226)—attracts corporations that want access to power. The city draws from
Japan’s highly educated and skilled workforce to make it an economic showpiece. Downtown
is dense and tall, and the city has excellent mass transit.
Hong Kong and Singapore grew up as independent trading ports. In 1965, Singapore became
an independent nation under the strict, rule-of-law leader Lee Kuan Yew, who, over the next 40
years, coaxed a tiny, resource-poor, crowded country into one of the wealthiest cities on the
planet. Singapore boasts low corruption, a world-class educational system, a highly trained
workforce, and excellent infrastructure, including desalination plants and an award-winning
sewerage and water recycling system. Despite a high number of skyscrapers, Singapore’s
streets remain unclogged, clean, and safe.
A similar storyline applies to Gaborone, founded in 1966 as the capital of newly independent
Botswana in Africa. The nation's leaders used national resources, including diamond mines,
to finance education; they established strong property rights and insisted on relatively
uncorrupt governance, in stark contrast to the incompetent and venal regimes common to
developing nations. From shanties and an under-educated population, Gaborone quickly
prospered, its growth rate near the top of world rankings for 35 years. Today it is one of the
most successful and best educated countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
In the US, post-war Minneapolis lost its riverside transport advantage to railroads and
trucking, but its workforce, nearly half of them college educated, moved easily into technical
fields. The University of Minnesota delivered many skilled entrepreneurs who founded a
number of national companies, including medical-device manufacturer Medtronic and stylish
budget retailer Target.
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Milan, Italy benefited as well from an educated citizenry, especially when its manufacturing
base suffered Detroit-like symptoms after 1970. Tire maker Pirelli survived and thrived, and
Milan’s highly productive workforce, many of whom studied at the University of Milan and the
city’s Polytechnic Institute, filled positions in the burgeoning fields of finance and fashion,
notably Prada and Versace.
Western Canada is rich in scenic beauty, and the port city of Vancouver benefits from that
and a temperate climate, plus a highly educated population, 40 percent foreign-born and
mainly talented Asians. An urban philosophy of “Vancouverism” stresses open areas,
excellent mass transit, and a tall, well-spaced skyline with housing and offices that feature
stunning views. The father of Vancouverism, Arthur Erickson, taught at the University of
British Columbia and designed the campus of Simon Fraser University, the famous MacMillan
Bloedel “concrete waffle” office tower, and Robson Square civic center. Erickson’s student,
James Cheng, designed 20 of the city’s high-rises, featuring green glass and mixed-use
design.
Chicago, which lost nearly a fifth of its residents between 1970 and 1990, has remade itself
into a center for financial services and high technology, the city once again is growing, due to
its affordable, construction-friendly verticality, improved schools, new parks, and a major treeplanting campaign.
More affordable even than Chicago is the burgeoning Sunbelt city of Atlanta. Between 2000
and 2008, Atlanta added over one million residents, second in growth only to Dallas, its proconstruction policies keeping down real estate costs. Atlanta’s residents are more educated
than even those in Boston, the traditional standard bearer.
A more extreme example of growth unfolds in Arabia, where the port city of Dubai attracts
business from nearby countries because of its business-friendly government, rapid growth,
and amenities that include the world’s tallest building, one of the world’s largest malls, a
Disneyland-like park, and many other entertainment options in a city largely free of religious
restrictions. The ruling sheikh, however, overbuilt with public money, causing a default in
2009. “City builders must be visionaries, but also realists” (246).
Conclusion Summary: “Flat World, Tall City”
The world needs the vibrancy and interconnections possible in big cities. The Internet Age
has brought many benefits, but it hasn’t changed the basic human need for in-person
communication.
Governments, meanwhile, shouldn’t take steps that hobble the growth of cities—which, after
all, are the main engines of a society’s prosperity and tax revenues—but should instead, as far
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as possible, get out of the way and let cities thrive. Taking sides and favoring one urban area
over another merely gums up the works.
Restrictions on trade and immigration transform vibrant urban centers into insular has-beens.
Tariffs during the Great Depression worsened conditions in many countries, helping to turn
many European countries from democracy to dictatorship and, finally, World War II. Even in
good times, trade limits make everything more expensive: “We’re far better off allowing our
consumers to take advantage of inexpensive foreign products and forcing our producers to
adapt than we would be hiding behind tariff walls” (252).
More open immigration, especially to attract skilled foreigners, helps cities and their countries
thrive and prosper. Closing the borders restricts growth and reduces the beneficial
interchange between cultures.
Education produces remarkable benefits in urban areas. College grads are much more
productive than high-school grads and earn nearly twice as much. Better-educated citizens
also tend to insist on better-quality, less corrupt government. However, upgrading public
schools is a daunting task; the best improvements have come from magnet schools, but
parochial and other private schooling also help, and an increase in school choice would spur
useful innovations and improve learning.
Teacher unions often resist such competition or the rewarding of good instructors with higher
pay. “Any union that fights to protect poorly performing teachers is putting its membership
ahead of our children” (255). Better schools not only improve student performance and
upgrade their later productivity in the marketplace, but such schools attract more educated
parents, who enhance a city’s productivity right away.
Government investment in dying urban areas is a waste of resources and cripples the growth
of more dynamic cities elsewhere. It doesn’t help the poor, for example, to rebuild a downtown
that remains empty and won’t hire them. It does no good to prop up cities that are now
obsolete from new technologies and changing economic realities, like New Orleans, whose
port is no longer central to the South’s prosperity. It’s far better to let those areas’ residents
migrate to places where jobs are plentiful, or at least allow such cities—Detroit and Buffalo,
for example—to try to innovate themselves back into relevance.
Wealthier residents often move just outside a city’s boundary to avoid paying urban taxes
that support anti-poverty programs. This divides communities and hurts cities. Instead, such
funding should take place at the national level, so the well-off no longer have that incentive to
leave the city.
“NIMBYism”—“not in my backyard” politics (260)—resists development to keep
neighborhoods from growing and changing. NIMBYism takes the form of preservationist
campaigns to protect, not individual buildings or blocks, but entire districts. This increases
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housing costs and office rents, dictates how owners may use their property, reduces
economic opportunities, and diminishes a city’s potential. Instead, preservation should focus
on protecting specific high-value older buildings and otherwise permit taller, denser growth on
the remaining land—which, ironically, reduces the overall pressure to tear down historic
structures.
In Congress, where the smallest states have the same number of senators as the largest, the
least dense areas get favored treatment and receive twice as much transportation funding as
the densest regions. “We’re using our infrastructure money more to make rural America
accessible than to speed the flows of people within dense urban areas” (266). Even at city
council meetings, transit projects face additional difficulties, including high cost and
neighborhood opposition.
Meanwhile, gas taxes meant to discourage too much driving often funnel back into highway
construction, which makes the problem worse. Overall, drivers aren’t paying enough to offset
external costs of driving—pollution, congestion, accidents—which add up to an average of
$2.30 per gallon. A simple carbon tax would help level the playing field, both in Western
nations and the developing world.
Despite recessions, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and policies that hobble them, cities
continue to thrive, their density contributing to creative innovation and prosperity. If the
developing world, especially China and India, adopt a policy of eco-friendly high-rise urban
design, the craze for suburbia may, to future generations, appear “more like an aberration than
a trend” (269), and the city will have triumphed.
Chapter 9-Conclusion Analysis
Chapter 9 examines the various ways cities achieve vibrant growth; the Conclusion argues for
public policies that, at the very least, don’t hinder that growth.
For Glaeser, the biggest single factor in the success of a city, aside from an educated
populace, is construction that matches demand. This keeps real estate moderately priced,
which encourages an influx of businesses and people, from skilled workers who contribute to
urban dynamism to the rural poor who arrive to participate in the work of the city and thereby
climb up from abject poverty.
Many cities in America and Europe are known for tight restrictions on new construction;
they’re also famous for high rents. Glaeser’s plea to cities—to open up new construction, bring
in new blood, and add to the creative vitality of urban areas—gets pushback from current
residents who would rather pay high living costs than feel swamped by outsiders who alter
the city’s character. Glaeser calls this “NIMBYism,” the attitude of people who want to keep a
neighborhood to themselves. NIMBYists often portray their concerns as preservationism or
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environmentalism, but sometimes this simply disguises racism.
Glaeser mentions tax incentives that discourage urbanization. One of these is the graduated
income tax, by which higher-income workers pay disproportionately higher taxes. Cities
generate more income per capita than suburbs, which incentivizes people to move out of
town, where they’ll likely make less money but pay much less in taxes. Taxpayers don’t
actually lose money when their tax bracket goes up—the higher rate applies only to the
additional income—but it does “make it less attractive to earn more” (267), which adds a
small additional pressure against urbanization.
Throughout Triumph of The City, Glaeser describes cities that thrived in manufacturing during
the early 20th century, suffered when factory jobs declined, then reinvented themselves as
centers of professional services. As the Industrial Age of the 1900s gave way to the
Information Age of the 2000s, jobs shifted from factories to offices and from manufacturing
to services. Most American cities that came back from the dead—New York, Boston, and
Minneapolis, among others—did so by shifting resources into services, especially finance and
high tech.
Manufacturing in the US didn’t go away—the nation is a powerhouse of industrial production
—but the work became mechanized and automated, requiring fewer laborers. Something
similar happened in agriculture, which employed 40 percent of the US labor force in 1900 and
less than three percent in 2000. In short, technology took over farming, and workers moved
into factories, then technology took over factories, and workers moved into services.
As computers, robots, and artificial intelligence begin, in turn, to take over service jobs,
workers may migrate to the creative arts or small-batch artisanal production, or perhaps the
digital revolution will make goods and services so cheap that the 40-hour work week will fade
away, and the leisure society will finally come to be. In either scenario, big cities will remain
the principal engines of prosperity and change.
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Key Figures
Edward Glaeser
Triumph of The City author Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics professor, Manhattan
Institute senior fellow, and contributing editor to public policy magazine City Journal, has
made a career of studying urban areas and how they grow, thrive, and contribute to
civilization and human prosperity. Glaeser believes “ideas spread easily in dense
environments” (272), and that cities are the ideal place for such creative innovation.
Jane Jacobs
Architecture critic Jane Jacobs took issue with New York’s policy of replacing old, multi-use
neighborhoods with sterile single-use skyscraper districts. Her book The Death and Life of
Great American Cities argues that sidewalks and street life are the essence of the urban
experience. Jacobs theorized that dense cities are more environmentally friendly than spreadout suburbs, but that high-rise neighborhoods with more than 200 households per acre—
greater than about six stories in height—create lonely sterility. Glaeser counters that high-rise
areas can solve the sterility problem with plenty of ground-floor shopping, restaurants, and
night life, and that a mix of taller and shorter residential structures adds variety and choice to
a city.
Coleman Young
From 1974 to 1994, Coleman Young served five consecutive terms as mayor of Detroit; he
tried to address the problems of poverty and loss of manufacturing jobs by increasing taxes
on wealthier residents and building new construction and transit systems in the downtown
area. Brash and tough-minded, Young alienated white citizens, who left the city in droves,
taking their tax dollars with them in a form of white flight known as the “Curley Effect.”
Though his policies had mixed results, Young remained popular, especially among black
constituents.
William Levitt
In the 1930s, young Bill Levitt, along with his brother Alfred, built and sold homes to the rich,
then switched to cheaply made shacks in Virginia, which sold poorly. After a stint as a
lieutenant in the Navy Seabee construction corps during World War II, Levitt bought 20 square
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miles of Long Island real estate and, this time, constructed thousands of well-built, affordable
small homes in a planned community, using an inexpensive assembly-line method that
avoided both unions and middlemen. Federal mortgage loan guarantees and tax deductions
helped make the homes wildly popular, and Levitt went on to build thousands of tract houses
in “Levittowns” across the US and overseas. This kick-started the mass production of postwar suburban communities.
A. E. Lefcourt
Lefcourt started out as a New York newsboy and bootblack; by age 25, he had bought his
boss’s garment business; in his 30s, he was doing $40 million of sales per year (in 2010
dollars), and in 1910 he helped settle peacefully the Great Revolt garment strike. Branching
into real estate, Lefcourt erected many of New York’s buildings, including high-rises and his
own garment company, which he located between the city’s two great railroad stations
instead of near the outmoded wharves. By 1928 he was, in today’s dollars, a billionaire. The
stock market crash and Great Depression ruined him; he died nearly broke in 1932. Lefcourt
made his mark as one of the many builders who helped transform Manhattan into a city of
skyscrapers that could grow while keeping rents affordable.
Baron Haussmann
Georges-Eugène Haussmann was, from 1853 to 1870, Prefect of the Seine under France’s
Emperor Napoleon III, at whose command he rebuilt Paris, demolishing many of its ancient,
run-down neighborhoods, displacing thousands of poor people, and replacing the old areas
with wide boulevards, well-built five-story buildings, and water and sewer systems. Widely
criticized at the time as a travesty of cruel urban disruption and aesthetic sterility,
Haussmann’s work made central Paris what it is today, the world-famous “City of Light”
known for its beauty.
Henry Ford
Ford, who apprenticed at both the Edison and Westinghouse companies, formed a Detroit car
manufacturing company (which later became Cadillac), then left to start a new firm that grew
into the Ford Motor Company. Ford’s innovations—cheap cars for the masses built on
assembly lines—changed auto manufacturing and helped make Detroit America’s “Motor
City.” Ford also accelerated the growth of factory towns, where unskilled labor got good pay
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for simple, repetitive work. This approach was so successful that Detroit and many other
cities settled into a kind of creative stagnation, and when manufacturing work declined
across America in the 1970s, those cities found themselves adrift and underemployed.
Frederick Law Olmsted
America’s first landscape architect, Olmsted in the mid-to-late 1800s designed many urban
parks, most notably Central Park in New York, and developed the first planned suburban
community at Riverside, near Chicago. Olmsted’s designs brought areas of woodland into the
heart of cities; as an early conservationist, he also fought to preserve American wildlands.
Arthur Erickson
Erickson studied at Canada’s noted McGill University, became an admirer of architect Frank
Lloyd Wright, taught at the University of British Columbia, and had a big hand in designing the
look and feel of downtown Vancouver. His Vancouverism philosophy took the town by storm
with its emphasis on wide-open areas and vistas—as in his open-spaced, tree-lined Robson
Square civic center—and carefully distributed office and residential towers that look out on
ocean and mountain views. His design of the Simon Fraser University campus is worldrenowned. Canadians revere Erickson as “the greatest architect we ever produced” (240).
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Themes
The Importance of Cities
When large numbers of people live and work together in cities, they generate positive effects
that small towns or the countryside can’t replicate. The sheer size of cities enables
businesses to mass-produce goods and services at low cost. This makes dense urban areas
more productive, which attracts more workers and residents, and so on in a virtuous cycle.
Poor people from the countryside move to cities, where opportunities are much greater and
they can move up the economic ladder. Their success inspires other rural residents to enter
into urban life and improve their own fortunes. Poverty in lively, thriving cities is a dynamic
function, with poor neighborhoods acting as economic incubators for new generations of
urbanites. Without cities, humanity would remain mired in poverty. With them, the poor can
begin to move up and out of squalor.
The most vital factor in the productivity of cities is the rapid spread of new ideas within
crowded urban centers. In-person contacts are many and varied, which stimulates creative
thinking. Work groups interact intensively, day after day, their members becoming much more
invested in the work than by working alone and communicating from home. People in various
careers meet up at conferences, restaurants, bars, and entertainment centers, where their
various perspectives and ideas nourish each other’s thinking. Cities become, in effect, “idea
factories” that help improve human life.
The density of cities also creates environmental efficiencies. Transit times are shorter and
efficient mass transit makes travel simple; this reduces energy and pollution costs. High-rise
office and residential towers make efficient use of land, and compact living and working
spaces are less demanding of resources. As the developing world becomes urbanized, dense
cities will help reduce the environmental impact of that growth.
The Evolution of Big Cities
With every advance in technology, cities have evolved. In ancient metropolises, walking gave
way to bullock carts, and city streets grew wider and longer. In more recent centuries, horse
travel and trolleys permitted cities to expand into the countryside; trains and cars spread the
growth of suburban towns.
As the Industrial Age burgeoned in the 1900s, cities adapted by centering around huge
factories that produced single products—cars in Detroit, for example, or steel in Pittsburgh—
and offered plenty of well-paying, low-skill jobs. Technology kept advancing, however, and,
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beginning in mid-century, manufacturing became increasingly automated, throwing millions
out of work and coring out urban centers. Many cities responded by constructing more
buildings and transit, hoping to attract business, but workers need jobs first, and none were
forthcoming.
What cities needed were more service jobs that leveraged the new possibilities made
available by rapidly advancing technology. Some American cities, such as New York, Boston,
and Minneapolis, responded by reinventing themselves as centers of technology, finance, and
education. They encouraged not monolithic factories, but small, entrepreneurial businesses
that attracted a diverse population of better-educated workers. Leaders improved city
management and public services, developed open spaces and parks, and supported lively arts
and entertainment. Many cities today have thus morphed from backwaters to world-class
centers of commerce and culture.
Critical to this progress are a well-educated workforce, laws that favor efficient high-rise
construction, a lightly regulated commercial district, and policies that preserve culturally and
historically significant buildings and city blocks but not entire neighborhoods.
The Pull of the Suburbs
Especially in the US, public policies have tilted development away from cities and toward
suburbs. Tight limits on construction in urban areas contribute to a higher cost of living,
street crime causes fear, and inner-city schools suffer from problems not encountered in
suburban communities. Meanwhile, earmarks for new highways out of town, large lot sizes,
and a mortgage-interest tax deduction for single-family homes combine to induce people to
move away from downtowns and toward the countryside.
The lures of tree-lined streets, good schools, lower crime, and cheaper housing can be
compelling, but the suburban lifestyle also is energy-intensive and more environmentally
damaging. Large houses require more resources to heat and cool, and the car culture and
longer commutes contribute more pollution than life in the city. Downtowns, meanwhile, have
made great strides in recent decades by reducing crime, adding woodsy parks, and improving
urban night life.
Cities don’t need unfair legal advances to thrive, but they should at least be free from policies
that tilt people toward the suburbs. Many Western nations, especially the US, have extensive
suburban areas, and developing nations see this and want that lifestyle for themselves. If the
Third World suburbanizes, the impact on the environment will be heavy, but the West can
hardly justify telling developing nations not to suburbanize if wealthy countries can’t control
their own sprawl. Policies that allow cities to grow and absorb large populations are thus
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Index of Terms
Agglomeration Economies
Agglomeration economies are “the benefits that come from clustering in cities” (46), where
the concentration of industry and transport systems makes shipping easier and cheaper, and
where large urban populations gather to further shrink the distance between manufacturer
and consumer. These factors improve “returns to scale” (46), so that larger production runs
become cheaper per unit manufactured. In the US and Europe, major cities grew on land next
to rivers and oceans to take advantage of inexpensive water transport; railroads later fanned
out from these transportation centers into the hinterlands, bringing the advantages of scaledup production to people living well inland. Agglomeration economies constitute a large
portion of the advantage that cities have over rural areas.
Curley Effect
Hard-charging, outspoken Boston mayor James Curley’s angry defense of the city’s poor Irish
Americans so alienated well-off local Anglo-Saxon Protestants that they moved away, leaving
Boston with a population largely of poor people and little investment money to create jobs for
them. Glaeser calls this type of ethnic politics “The Curley Effect,” and he uses it to
characterize Detroit Mayor Coleman Young’s alienation of that city’s white population,
especially its wealthy elite, most of whom moved out, leaving behind a town with few financial
resources and a population that could no longer find enough jobs.
Externalities
Externalities are unintended side effects of activities, often borne by people other than those
who benefit from the activity. Cars offer convenient transportation but generate pollution that
everyone must breathe; clear-cutting of forests provides cheap and useful wood but also
causes soil erosion and ecological destruction; popular destinations cause traffic jams.
Sometimes laws pass to control externalities; at other times, technical solutions resolve these
problems—pollution control devices on cars, plantation-style forest management, and
improved parking and traffic control systems, for example.
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Jevon’s Paradox
Jevon’s Paradox states that, when a resource finds more efficient use, people will use it more
often. More fuel-efficient transportation vehicles, for example, will find use more often,
negating the resource savings. Jevon’s Complementarity Corollary states that, when greater
efficiency leads to greater use of a resource, related activities also will increase. Thus, if
trains get more efficient, hotel bookings will go up, and if workplace electronic
communications—email, texting, teleconferences—get more efficient, in-person work sessions
also will become more valuable and therefore engaged in more often.
New Urbanism
Somewhere between the density of a big city and the sprawl of suburbia lies the New
Urbanism, a design movement that values small-town neighborliness, diversity, a mix of
homes and businesses, greater use of walking, biking, and public transit, and respect for the
environment. Several planned communities, including Poundbury in England and Celebration
in Florida, attempt to meld suburban and urban values. Glaeser believes, though, that these
experiments largely fail because residents still make heavy use of cars, and because the
houses tend to be large and energy-intensive.
NIMBYism
NIMBYism, or “Not In My Back Yard” politics (260), is a form of political resistance to new
urban development. NIMBYism takes many forms, including zoning laws, preservationism,
environmentalism, and restrictions on new construction. Though NIMBYism helps protect a
city’s historical treasures and can put a lid on unbridled construction, it causes a rise in real
estate costs and reduces access to a neighborhood by minorities and the poor. It thus can be
a form of elitism and racism masquerading as civic virtue.
Potemkin Village
Russia’s empress Catherine the Great, traveling with foreign dignitaries on a tour of her newly
acquired province in the south of the country, pointed out prosperous-looking villages lining
the route. These hamlets were fake, mere facades assembled to impress the dignitaries.
Since then, Potemkin Village refers to anything erected to convince outsiders that things are
better than they seem—new construction in an economically struggling city, for example, or
an expensive transit system that almost no one uses.
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Three Simple Rules
For regulators who struggle with dense urban areas, Glaeser suggests three simple rules. The
first is to replace construction-permit labyrinths with a system of fees that offset any damage
caused by construction—for example, to compensate neighbors for noise, obstructed views,
blocked sunlight, increased traffic, and the like. The second is to limit the number of
preserved buildings to the most emblematic or cherished examples rather than to entire
neighborhoods, or to set aside nearby areas for dense development. The third rule is to give
neighborhoods more say in the character of their areas—architectural styles, or number and
type of entertainment establishments, for example—as long as they don’t close off new
construction.
Vancouverism
Vancouver, in Canada’s province of British Columbia, lies in a beautiful and temperate
oceanside setting surrounded by picturesque mountains. The city takes full advantage of the
scenery with a philosophy of Vancouverism, which stresses open spaces, including widely
dispersed high-rises that afford stunning views, a love for fine architecture, and excellent
transit systems that make living there convenient. Vancouverism’s founder, Arthur Erickson,
designed many of the central city’s buildings and much of its overall look and feel. Erickson’s
student, James Cheng, filled out this vision with nearly two dozen skyscrapers that feature
iconic green glass, beautiful views, and mixed-use designs that make downtown efficient and
lively.
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Important Quotes
1. “There is a near-perfect correlation between urbanization and prosperity across nations. On
average, as the share of a country’s population that is urban rises by 10 percent, the country’s
per capita output increases by 30 percent. Per capita incomes are almost four times higher in
those countries where a majority of people live in cities than in those countries where a
majority of people live in rural areas.”
(Introduction, Page 7)
Cities concentrate talent; people working closely together become more efficient and
productive. Countries with primarily rural populations report less happiness; the more
urbanized a nation gets, the better are its prosperity and happiness. Far from being mere
swarms of stultifying poverty, cities around the world are evolving into high-energy centers of
creativity and productivity.
2. “With very few exceptions, no public policy can stem the tidal forces of urban change. We
mustn’t ignore the needs of the poor people who live in the Rust Belt, but public policy should
help poor people, not poor places.”
(Introduction, Page 9)
Mid-20th-century American cities grew around huge factories that produced masses of
products from a few large companies. Today’s cities rely on smaller, more innovative firms
whose productive diversity thrives from the back-and-forth inventiveness of talented people
working in close proximity. Policies that prop up failed industrial centers do nothing to relieve
unemployment and poverty.
3. “India’s poor roads and weak electricity grid make life difficult for big manufacturing firms,
which explains why the country seems to be leapfrogging straight from agriculture to
information technology.”
(Chapter 1, Pages 17 - 18)
The developing world, as it tools up toward prosperity, isn’t simply repeating the history of the
West, whose workers went from farms to factories to services. Many Third World countries
are simply skipping the Industrial Age and moving straight to the Information Age by grabbing
onto the latest technology and building from there.
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4. “Ideas move from person to person within dense urban spaces, and this exchange
occasionally creates miracles of human creativity.”
(Chapter 1, Page 19)
Great ideas that affect civilization have room to grow in cities, where ideas get shared,
bounced around, improved, and finally made useful. Most of the great inventions of
civilization, including writing, printing, machine power, materials science, electricity, and
computers, developed in cities.
5. “One hundred years ago, the telephone was supposed to make cities unnecessary. That
didn’t happen. More recently, faxes, e-mail, and videoconferencing were all supposed to
eliminate the need for face-to-face meetings, yet business travel has soared over the last
twenty years. To defeat the human need for face-to-face contact, our technological marvels
would need to defeat millions of years of human evolution that has made us into machines
for learning from the people next to us.”
(Chapter 1, Pages 36 - 37)
Workers are more effective when on the job next to their fellow employees, and younger
workers become more successful by learning directly from older ones. Person-to-person
interactions create more cooperation, more generosity, and a larger sense of investment in
the work done together. These facts point to the continued importance of cities in the
advancement of human productivity.
6. “The age of the industrial city is over, at least in the West, and it will never return. Some
erstwhile manufacturing towns have managed to evolve from making goods to making ideas,
but most continue their slow, inexorable declines.”
(Chapter 2, Page 42)
American cities like Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, along with European urban
centers like Rotterdam, Liverpool, and Bremen, have declined in size since the 1960s because
the demand for unskilled factory labor has diminished. Industrial centers, long used to factory
ways, forgot to encourage other, smaller businesses to grow and thrive. When the Industrial
Age ended, those areas began to fade, unable to imagine that imagination itself was the most
important new skill, a quality that has since proven itself in more adaptive cities like New York
and Bangalore.
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7. “The irony and ultimately the tragedy of Detroit is that its small, dynamic firms and
independent suppliers gave rise to gigantic, wholly integrated car companies, which then
became synonymous with stagnation.”
(Chapter 2, Page 49)
Ford and others developed the auto assembly line, which effectively turned workers into cogs
in a giant machine. The workers’ jobs were discreet and simple, requiring little thought, but all
of them together built complex products like cars on a massive scale. Huge companies
sprang up in the early 20th century to produce the products, encouraging single-industry
cities to rise up around them, filled with people trained to be repetitive, not inventive. When
the factories much later replaced people with automated machinery and robots, the newly
unemployed had no other sources of work nearby, not even small-scale businesses, to keep
them occupied. The cities stagnated, people left, and the great industrial regions became
Rust Belts.
8. “The direct effect of [Coleman] Young’s income tax was to take money from the rich to fund
services that helped the poor. The indirect effect of a local income tax is to encourage richer
citizens and businesses to leave.”
(Chapter 2, Page 59)
In Detroit, as in other big American cities, entrenched racism stripped opportunities from
blacks, but attempts in the 1960s to right those wrongs with a tax on the wealthy had the
unintended effect of chasing away the rich and their investment money. Tax revenues
remained largely unchanged, but business and job growth stalled or retreated.
9. “Cities aren’t full of poor people because cities make people poor, but because cities attract
poor people with the prospect of improving their lot in life.”
(Chapter 3, Page 70)
When people from the hinterlands move to the city and raise their living standard, this
attracts more of the rural poor, who migrate into town in the hope of improving their own
conditions. Thus, as older migrants move up the economic ladder, poor newcomers eager to
try for the same outcome, replace them. The result is a city always teeming with urban poor,
not because the city is a failure but because it acts as an incubator that transforms the rural
poor into the urban working class and finally into the country’s middle class. This process is
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by no means universally effective, and many new arrivals from the countryside get stuck in
urban poverty. But the general principle holds, and vastly more people escape poverty by
moving to a city than become trapped in squalor.
10. “Poor rural villages can seem like a window into the distant past, where little has changed
for millennia. Cities are dynamic whirlwinds, constantly changing, bringing fortunes to some
and suffering to others. A city might bring a bullet, but it also offers a chance of a richer,
healthier, brighter life that can come from connecting with the planet. Life in a rural village
might be safer than life in a favela, but it is the safety of unending poverty for generations.”
(Chapter 3, Page 75)
Poor city areas create an easily seen concentration of poverty; rural areas tend to contain
lovely trees and farmland, with the poverty hidden away indoors. In fact, the poor urban
districts are much better off. Crime can be the biggest problem in those neighborhoods, but
income, access to water and power, amenities, and lifespan itself are usually much better in
the city than in the country.
11. “Urban governments in developing countries must do what the cities of the West did in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: provide clean water while safely removing human
waste. They must make ghettos safe. They must even do what too many American cities
have failed to do: break the isolation that can rob poor children of the advantages that most
people get from living in a big city.”
(Chapter 4, Page 94)
Water, sewers, paved streets, and cops on the beat don’t make for great photo ops, but if a
city provides these services, along with education, its poor can move up and out. This will
make room for a new set of indigent immigrants to take their place. Keeping a city’s poor
residents healthy, safe, and educated are the most powerful steps governments can take to
transform the well-being and productivity of their citizens.
12. “The market works, more or less, and when a city has really high housing prices relative to
incomes, you can bet that there is something nice about the place. If an extremely attractive
area had high wages and low prices, it would attract thousands of new residents who would
quickly bid up the cost of living.”
(Chapter 5, Page 130)
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Cities provide work, things to buy, and a certain quality of life. High wages sometimes make
up for harsh weather or similar downsides to living there; expensive housing or low wages
suggest an attractive setting, good weather, and/or popular amenities. Each city thus is
unique in its mix of wages, lifestyle, and expenses.
13. “Perhaps a new forty-story building won’t itself house any quirky, less profitable firms, but
by providing new space, the building will ease pressure on the rest of the city’s real estate.
Price increases in gentrifying older areas will be muted because of new construction. Growth,
not height restrictions and a fixed building stock, keeps space affordable and ensures that
poorer people and less profitable firms can stay, which helps thriving cities remain successful
and diverse.”
(Chapter 6, Page 148)
It seems intuitively obvious that, if you replace older, shorter buildings full of interesting,
diverse people with new, tall buildings that charge much more for rent, high-rise construction
causes housing costs to go up. In fact, the opposite is true: Although the immediate
construction disrupts the lives of the displaced tenants, rents citywide will tend to go down
slightly because of the added housing units. Pricey high-rise apartments attract wealthier
tenants who might otherwise compete with lower-income residents who live in charming
nearby districts.
14. “People are forced into so little space in Mumbai because real estate is more expensive
there than in far richer places, like Singapore. Singapore is cheaper than Mumbai not because
demand for that prosperous place is low, but because Singapore allows builders to put more
floor space on the same amount of land.”
(Chapter 6, Page 160)
Mumbai’s severe building restrictions make the city expensive, causing overcrowding, traffic
chaos, and failures of city services such as water and sewage. Limiting construction doesn’t
prevent poverty but instead makes the lives of poor residents worse and more expensive.
15. “Cities can’t force change with new buildings; the experience of the Rust Belt refutes that
view. But if change is happening, the right kind of new building can help that process.”
(Chapter 6, Page 162)
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New construction doesn’t attract new business, but new business requires new construction.
Development should reflect, and not try to generate, increased demand for office and
residential space. Likewise, efforts to limit the size of new construction worsens
overcrowding, congestion, and the cost of living. High-rises, properly located and with plenty
of street-level shops and entertainment, keeps a city vibrant and affordable.
16. “Ranting about the philistinism of people who choose car-based living in Houston may be
emotionally satisfying to some, but it does nothing to help older cities attract more people.
For millions, the appeal of suburban, Sunbelt places is real, but better policies, both at the
national and local level, could enable older cities to compete more effectively.”
(Chapter 7, Page 167)
Already struggling with a lost manufacturing base, many cities must watch helplessly as
residents abandon them for the suburbs, attracted by mortgage tax breaks, efficient
highways, and better schools. If planners want more people to move to cities—where fewer
cars and the efficiencies of greater density reduce human impacts on the environment—they
should replace regulations that encourage suburban sprawl, especially easing up on
construction restrictions. More housing means lower home prices and rents, which helps
everyone in the city, including the poor.
17. “When people move to places that are more productive, the country as a whole becomes
more economically vibrant. When people move to pleasant places, they enjoy life more, and
when they move to more temperate climates, they use less energy.”
(Chapter 7, Page 193)
Sunbelt cities in Georgia, Texas, and Arizona are popular because local governments are less
restrictive in their housing policies, making homes more affordable. Successful urban areas
begin to fear that their pleasant lifestyle will suffer from a huge influx of outsiders, so they
increase building controls, which makes those areas more expensive, so that only the
wealthier can afford them.
18. “Residing in a forest might seem to be a good way of showing one’s love of nature, but
living in a concrete jungle is actually far more ecologically friendly. We humans are a
destructive species, even when, like Thoreau, we’re not trying to be. We burn forests and oil
and inevitably hurt the landscape that surrounds us. If you love nature, stay away from it.”
(Chapter 8, Page 201)
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Like Thoreau, who accidentally set fire to 300 acres in New Hampshire and refused
responsibility, suburban residents burn far more resources in driving to and from, and heating
and cooling, their single-family dwellings, ignoring the complaints of environmentalists.
19. “The fact that cities must compete in a globalized world can turn even the most
antibusiness politician into an advocate of glossy high-rises, because those high-rises house
the people whose taxes will pay for social programs.”
(Chapter 8, Page 216)
Though the poor and their political leaders tend to look askance at the rich and their
corporations, they also find them highly useful as tax supporters of social programs. The
growth of world trade offers more such benefits to cities that invite major international
corporations to move there.
20. “The only way the West can earn any moral authority on global warming is to first get its
own house in order. As long as America leads the developed world in per capita carbon
emissions, we’ll never be able to convince China and India and the rest of the developing
world to do anything other than emulate our own energy-intensive lifestyles.”
(Chapter 8, Page 220)
The developing world wants material advantages like those available in the West. Such
benefits, however, come at a large cost to the environment. Until the US and other Western
nations manage their lifestyle in an ecologically green way, they will have no principled
position on which to stand when warning advancing countries of the dangers of unbridled
energy use.
21. “Successful cities always have a wealth of human energy that expresses itself in different
ways and defines its own idiosyncratic space.”
(Chapter 9, Page 223)
The gloom of urban failure—empty houses, boarded-up businesses, bits of trash skittering
across unused streets—is similar in every city that suffers from it, but successful, thriving
metropolises each express achievement in different ways, from dense Hong Kong’s
pedestrian skyway kiosks to the uncrowded avenues of Singapore to the massive skyline of
New York. What they have in common are skilled workers and an entrepreneurial spirit.
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22. “Connecting in cyberspace will never be the same as sharing a meal or a smile or a kiss.
Our species learns primarily from the aural, visual, and olfactory clues given off by our fellow
humans. The Internet is a wonderful tool, but it works best when combined with knowledge
gained face-to-face […] The most important communications still take place in person, and
electronic access is no substitute for being at the geographic center of an intellectual
movement.”
(Conclusion, Page 248)
Humans evolved as social animals, and in-person contact is how they best get to know each
other. Digital collaboration improves when the participants have met directly, giving them an
emotional stake in each other. If people were robots, this might not matter, but human minds
need the creative and collaborative stimulation of direct meetings to kick-start their thinking
and ability to contribute. Cities are where these meetings most easily take place, and the
many incidental and accidental encounters in a crowded downtown add even more inputs to
that creative process.
23. “We should not force urban growth, but we must eliminate the barriers that artificially
constrain the blossoming of city life.”
(Conclusion, Page 249)
It’s not that suburban life is a bad thing, but dense urban cores are more efficient, greener,
and more productive. Decades of pro-suburban policies can change course, not by compelling
people to live in giant urban centers—many simply don’t like the crowds—but by simply
dismantling the artificial inducements to sprawl.
24. “The central theme of this book is that cities magnify humanity’s strengths. Our social
species’ greatest talent is the ability to learn from each other, and we learn more deeply and
thoroughly when we’re face-to-face. […] The ideas that emerge in cities eventually spread
beyond their borders and enrich the rest of the world. Massachusetts rises or falls with
Boston just as Maharashtra rises or falls with Mumbai. Too many countries have stacked the
deck against urban areas, despite the fact that those areas are a—if not the—source of
national strength. Cities don’t need handouts, but they need a level playing field.”
(Conclusion, Pages 249 - 250)
National support for highways out of town, tax exemptions for home buyers, and restrictions
on downtown construction each play a part in pushing people toward exurban living. This is
unfair to cities, which, after all, are the main engines of prosperity and creativity, and they
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deserve a fairer shake. A certain amount of suburban development will arise on its own
without inducements, offering a lifestyle that competes with city amenities—which helps keep
metropolises on their toes—but there’s no need to tilt the playing field toward overdevelopment of suburbia.
25. “Competition among local governments for people and firms is healthy. Competition
drives cities to deliver better services and keep down costs. The national government does no
good by favoring particular places, just as it does no good by propping up particular firms or
industries. It’s far better for companies to compete, and it’s also far better for cities to find
their own competitive advantages.”
(Conclusion, Page 250)
If an umpire were consistently to favor one team over the other, the fans would cry foul. The
same outcry should rise up whenever national or regional governments favor one city over
another. If a metro area outcompetes other areas, the others will “up their game” and improve
governance and services to pull back more residents, business, and prosperity. Governments
may step in if an area teeters on the brink of elimination, but bragging rights between top
cities shouldn’t be fore-ordained.
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Essay Topics
1. List three government policies that make suburban towns more attractive than cities, and
explain how each does so.
2. Why are poor neighborhoods in thriving cities a sign of economic health? How do such
neighborhoods help the poor move up the economic ladder?
3. New York City faced bankruptcy in the 1970s. Explain how New York turned itself around
and returned to vibrancy.
4. List two complaints lodged against skyscrapers, and describe how the buildings’ designers
might address each problem.
5. What is “NIMBYism,” and how does it stymie the growth of cities?
6. Detroit mayor Coleman Young tried a number of incentives to bring economic vibrancy
back to Detroit. Name two of these actions and describe how they helped or hurt the city.
7. In what ways are suburban areas more stressful on the environment than cities? Describe
briefly how cities reduce these stresses.
8. What is the chief benefit of urban density? How does density make that benefit possible?
How can cities encourage more of this productive density?
9. Many things make cities attractive places to live. Select three of those things and explain
why each is a plus to a city’s residents.
10. Name a city in the American South mentioned in the book for its low housing costs, and
explain the ways that this city keeps those costs manageable.
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