Triumph of The City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (2011)

“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.” 

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. 

“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.”

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. 

“Ideas move from person to person within dense urban spaces, and this exchange occasionally creates miracles of human creativity.” 

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.

“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.” 

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. 

“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.”

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. 

“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.”

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. 

“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.”

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. 

“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.” 

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 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. 

“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.” 

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. 

“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.”

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. 

“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.” 

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.

“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.” 

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.

“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.” 

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.

“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.”

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. 

“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.” 

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. 

“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.”

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.

“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.” 

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. 

“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.”

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.

“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.” 

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.

“Successful cities always have a wealth of human energy that expresses itself in different ways and defines its own idiosyncratic space.” 

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. 

“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.” 

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. 

“We should not force urban growth, but we must eliminate the barriers that artificially constrain the blossoming of city life.”

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. 

“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.” 

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 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 over-development of suburbia.