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.
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, 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 good for the whole world, rich and poor alike.
