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

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 spread-out 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. 

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. 

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 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 post-war suburban communities.

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. 

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. 

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 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. 

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.