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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.
Chapter 9-ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses
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.
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 tree-planting 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 pro-construction 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 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 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 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.
