50 pages • 1 hour read
Edward L. GlaeserTriumph of The City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (2011)
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
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, good-quality 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 mass-produced 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 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 middle-class 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 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.
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 energy-intensive 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 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 quasi-monopoly 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.
