by Dan Ariely
The quintessence of the vibrant city for Glaeser is Wall Street, especially the trading floor, where millionaires forsake large offices to work in an open-plan bath of information. “They value knowledge over space—that’s what the modern city is all about,” he said. Successful cities “increase the returns to being smart” by enabling people to learn from one another. In cities with higher average education, even the uneducated earn higher wages; that’s evidence of “human capital spillover.”
Spillover works best face-to-face. No technology yet invented—not the telephone, the Internet, or videoconferencing—delivers the fertile chance encounters that cities have delivered ever since the Roman Forum was new. Nor do they deliver the nonverbal, contextual cues that help us convey complex ideas—to see from the glassy eyes of our listeners, for instance, that we’re talking too fast.
It’s easy to see why economists would embrace cities, warts and all, as engines of prosperity. It has taken a bit longer for environmentalists, for whom Henry David Thoreau’s cabin in the woods has been a lodestar. By increasing income, cities increase consumption and pollution too. If what you value most is nature, cities look like concentrated piles of damage—until you consider the alternative, which is spreading the damage. From an ecological standpoint, says Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and now a champion of urbanization, a back-to-the-land ethic would be disastrous. (Thoreau, Glaeser points out gleefully, once accidentally burned down three hundred acres of forest.) Cities allow half of humanity to live on around 4 percent of the arable land, leaving more space for open country.
Per capita, city dwellers tread more lightly in other ways as well, as David Owen explains in Green Metropolis. Their roads, sewers, and power lines are shorter and so use fewer resources. Their apartments take less energy to heat, cool, and light than do houses. Most important, people in dense cities drive less. Their destinations are close enough to walk to, and enough people are going to the same places to make public transit practical. In cities like New York, per capita energy use and carbon emissions are much lower than the national average.
John Tomano, NGM Staff. Source: Dan Hoornweg, World Bank
Cities in developing countries are even denser and use far fewer resources. But that’s mostly because poor people don’t consume a lot. Dharavi may be a “model of low emissions,” says David Satterthwaite of London’s International Institute for Environment and Development, but its residents lack safe water, toilets, and garbage collection. So do perhaps a billion other city dwellers in developing countries. And it is such cities, the United Nations projects, that will absorb most of the world’s population increase between now and 2050—more than 2 billion people. How their governments respond will affect us all.
Many are responding the way Britain did to the growth of London in the nineteenth century: by trying to make it stop. A UN survey reports that 72 percent of developing countries have adopted policies designed to stem the tide of migration to their cities. But it’s a mistake to see urbanization itself as evil rather than as an inevitable part of development, says Satterthwaite, who advises governments and associations of slum dwellers around the world. “I don’t get scared by rapid growth,” he says. “I meet African mayors who tell me, ‘There are too many people moving here!’ I tell them, ‘No, the problem is your inability to govern them.’”
There is no single model for how to manage rapid urbanization, but there are hopeful examples. One is Seoul, the capital of South Korea.
Between 1960 and 2000, Seoul’s population zoomed from fewer than 3 million to 10 million, and South Korea went from being one of the world’s poorest countries, with a per capita GDP of less than $100, to being richer than some countries in Europe. The speed of the transformation shows. Driving into Seoul on the highway along the Han River, you pass a distressingly homogeneous sea of concrete apartment blocks, each emblazoned with a large number to distinguish it from its clones. Not so long ago, though, many Koreans lived in shanties. The apartment blocks may be uninspiring on the outside, the urban planner Yeong-Hee Jang told me, but life inside “is so warm and convenient.” She repeated the word “warm” three times.
Every city is a unique mix of the planned and the unplanned, of features that were intentionally designed by government and others that emerged organically, over time, from choices made by the residents. Seoul was planned from the start. The monks who chose the site in 1394 for King Taejo, founder of the Choson dynasty, followed the ancient principles of feng shui. They placed the king’s palace at an auspicious spot, with the Han River in front and a large mountain in back to shield it from the north wind. For five centuries the city stayed mostly inside a ten-mile-long wall that Taejo’s men had built in six months. It was a cloistered, scholarly town of a few hundred thousand. Then the twentieth century cleaned its slate.
World War II and then the Korean War, which ended in 1953, brought more than a million refugees to the bombed-out city. Not much of Seoul was left—but it was filled for the first time with a potent mix of people. They were burning to improve their miserable lot. In their hearts, the ancient Confucian virtues of loyalty and respect for hierarchy fused uneasily with Western longings for democracy and material goods. “The explosive energy of my generation,” says Hong-Bin Kang, a former vice mayor who now runs Seoul’s history museum, dates from this period. So does South Korea’s population explosion, which was triggered, as elsewhere, by rapid improvements in public health and nutrition.
It’s an uncomfortable fact that a dictator helped organize all that energy. When Park Chung-Hee took power in a military coup in 1961, his government funneled foreign capital into Korean companies that made things foreigners would buy—knockoff clothes and wigs at first, later steel, electronics, and cars. Central to the process, which created conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai, were the women and men streaming into Seoul to work in its new factories and educate themselves at its universities. “You can’t understand urbanization in isolation from economic development,” says economist Kyung-Hwan Kim of Sogang University. The growing city enabled the economic boom, which paid for the infrastructure that helped the city absorb the country’s growing population.
A lot was lost in the bulldozing, high-rising rush. If you lived in old Seoul, north of the Han River, in the 1970s and 1980s, you watched an entirely new Seoul rise from verdant paddies on the south bank, in the area called Kangnam. You watched the city’s growing middle and upper classes leave sinuous alleys and traditional houses—lovely wooden hanok, with courtyards and gracefully curved tile roofs—for antiseptic high-rises and a grid of car-friendly boulevards. “Seoul lost its color,” says Choo Chin Woo, an investigative journalist at the newsweekly SisaIN. “Apartment high-rises all over town—it looks stupid.” Worse, the poor often got shunted aside as their makeshift neighborhoods were redeveloped with high-rises they couldn’t afford.
But over the years an increasing share of the population has been able to cash in on the housing boom. Today half the people in Seoul own apartments. Koreans like to heat their homes to 77 degrees, says urban planner Yeong-Hee Jang, and in their well-equipped apartments they can afford to do that. One reason the buildings in Kangnam line up like soldiers on parade, she adds, is that everyone wants an apartment that faces south—for warmth as well as feng shui.
Seoul today is one of the densest cities in the world. It has millions of cars but also an excellent subway system. Even in the newer districts, the streets seem, to a Westerner, anything but colorless. They’re vibrant with commerce and crowded with pedestrians, each of whom has a carbon footprint less than half the size of a New Yorker’s. Life has gotten much better for Koreans as the country has gone from 28 percent urban in 1961 to 83 percent today. Life expectancy has increased from fifty-one years to seventy-nine—a year longer than for Americans. Korean boys now grow six inches taller than they used to.
South Korea’s experience can’t be easily copied, but it does prove that a poor country can urbani
ze successfully and incredibly fast. In the late 1990s Kyung-Hwan Kim worked for the UN in Nairobi, advising African cities on their staggering financial problems. “Every time I visited one of these cities I asked myself, What would a visiting consultant have said to Koreans in 1960?” he says. “Would he have imagined Korea as it was forty years later? The chances are close to zero.”
The fear of urbanization has not been good for cities, or for their countries, or for the planet. South Korea, ironically, has never quite shaken the notion that its great capital is a tumor sucking life from the rest of the country. Right now the government is building a second capital seventy-five miles to the south; starting in 2012, it plans to move half its ministries there and to scatter other public institutions around the country, in the hope of spreading Seoul’s wealth. The nation’s efforts to stop Seoul’s growth go back to Park Chung-Hee, the dictator who jump-started the economy. In 1971, as the city’s population was skyrocketing past 5 million, Park took a page from the book of Ebenezer Howard. He surrounded the city with a wide greenbelt to halt further development, just as London had in 1947.
Both greenbelts preserved open space, but neither stopped the growth of the city; people now commute from suburbs that leapfrogged the restraints. “Greenbelts have had the effect of pushing people farther out, sometimes absurdly far,” says Peter Hall, a planner and historian at University College London. Brasília, the planned capital of Brazil, was designed for 500,000 people; 2 million more now live beyond the lake and park that were supposed to block the city’s expansion. When you try to stop urban growth, it seems, you just amplify sprawl.
Sprawl preoccupies urban planners today, as its antithesis, density, did a century ago. London is no longer decried as a tumor, but Atlanta has been called “a pulsating slime mold” (by James Howard Kunstler, a colorful critic of suburbia) on account of its extreme sprawl. Greenbelts aren’t the cause of sprawl; most cities don’t have them. Other government policies, such as subsidies for highways and home ownership, have coaxed the suburbs outward. So has that other great shaper of the destiny of cities: the choices made by individual residents. Ebenezer Howard was right about that much: a lot of people want nice houses with gardens.
Sprawl is not just a Western phenomenon. By consulting satellite images, old maps, and census data, Shlomo Angel, an urban planning professor at New York University and Princeton, has tracked how 120 cities changed in shape and population density between 1990 and 2000. Even in developing countries, most cities are spreading out faster than people pour into them; on average they’re getting 2 percent less dense each year. By 2030 their built-up area could triple. What’s driving the expansion? Rising incomes and cheap transportation. “When income rises, people have money to buy more space,” Angel explains. With cheap transportation, they can afford to travel longer distances from home to work.
But it matters what kind of homes they live in and what transportation they use. In the twentieth century, American cities were redesigned around cars—wonderful, liberating machines that also make city air unbreathable and carry suburbs beyond the horizon. Car-centered sprawl gobbles farmland, energy, and other resources. These days, planners in the United States want to repopulate downtowns and densify suburbs, by building walkable town centers, for instance, in the parking lots of failed malls. Urban flight, which seemed a good idea a century ago, now seems in the West like a historic wrong turn. Meanwhile, in China and India, where people are still flooding into cities, car sales are booming. “It would be a lot better for the planet,” Edward Glaeser writes, if people in those countries end up “in dense cities built around the elevator, rather than in sprawling areas built around the car.”
Developing cities will inevitably expand, says Angel. Somewhere between the anarchy that prevails in many today and the utopianism that has often characterized urban planning lies a modest kind of planning that could make a big difference. It requires looking decades ahead, Angel says, and reserving land, before the city grows over it, for parks and a dense grid of public-transit corridors. It starts with looking at growing cities in a positive way—not as diseases but as concentrations of human energy to be organized and tapped.
With its quiet commercial streets and Arts and Crafts houses, Letchworth, England, today feels a bit like the garden city that time forgot. Ebenezer Howard’s ideal of a self-sustaining community never happened. The farmers in Letchworth’s greenbelt sell their sugar beets and wheat to a large cereal company. The town’s residents work mostly in London or Cambridge. John Lewis, who runs the foundation that Howard started, which still owns much of the town’s land, worries that Letchworth is “in danger of becoming a dormitory.” Still, it has a key aspect of what many planners today think of as sustainability: it wasn’t designed around cars. Howard ignored the new invention. From anywhere in Letchworth you can walk to the center of town to shop or take the train to London. The truth is, Letchworth looks like a very nice place to live; it’s just not for everyone. No place is.
Thirty-five miles to the south, London remains unsupplanted. Eight million people live there now. All attempts to impose sense on its maze of streets have failed, as anyone who has crossed the city in a taxi can attest. “London wasn’t planned at all!” Peter Hall exclaimed one afternoon as we stepped into the street in front of the British Academy. But the city did two sensible things as it ballooned outward in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hall said. It preserved large, semiwild parks like Hampstead Heath, where citizens can commune with nature. Most important, it expanded along railway and subway lines. “Get the transportation right,” said Hall. “Then let things happen.”
With that he disappeared into the Underground for his ride home, leaving me on the crowded sidewalk with a great gift: a few hours to kill in London. Even Ebenezer Howard would have understood the feeling, at least as a young man. When he returned after a few years in the United States—he’d flopped as a homesteading farmer in Nebraska—he was jazzed by his native city. Just riding an omnibus, he later wrote, gave him a pleasantly visceral jolt: “A strange ecstatic feeling at such times often possessed me . . . The crowded streets—the signs of wealth and prosperity—the bustle—the very confusion and disorder appealed to me, and I was filled with delight.”
PART SIX: Technology
MICHAEL SPECTER
Test-Tube Burgers
FROM The New Yorker
WILLEM VAN EELEN was born in 1923, the son of a doctor and a child of colonial privilege. His father had recently been dispatched to the Dutch East Indies, and van Eelen wanted for nothing. “I was a spoiled boy and gave little thought to the world around me,” he said not long ago, as we sat in the study of his modest apartment, which overlooks the broad waters of the Amstel River, in Amsterdam. His youth of oblivious freedom ended abruptly on May 10, 1940—the day the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Van Eelen was just sixteen, but like many of his contemporaries, he lied about his age, enlisted, and served in Indonesia.
The Dutch fought frantically to prevent Japan from seizing their most valuable colony, but they failed. Van Eelen was captured, and spent most of the war as a prisoner, dragged forcibly from one POW camp to the next. Now, at eighty-seven, dressed in khakis, penny loafers, and a casual gray shirt, he projects the contemplative air of a philosopher. Van Eelen is a genial man who laughs easily. But when asked about the camps, he lowered his voice and slowly closed his eyes.
“These were cruel places,” he said. “We worked from morning to night building airstrips. They beat us like dogs. For food, there was almost nothing. The Japanese were harsh with us, but they treated animals even more brutally, kicking them, shooting them. By the time the Americans liberated the camp, I was so close to death that you could see my spine from the front. The soldiers would ask my name, but I didn’t have enough strength to say the words.”
After the war, van Eelen studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam, but he struggled with the intertwined memories of starvation and animal abuse. He began
to attend scientific lectures, and during one of them, about how to preserve meat, van Eelen was seized by an idea: “I wondered, Why can’t we grow meat outside of the body? Make it in a laboratory, as we make so many other things.” He went on, “I like meat—I never became a vegetarian. But it is hard to justify the way animals are treated on this planet. Growing meat without inflicting pain seemed a natural solution.”
“Meat” is a vague term and can be used to refer to many parts of an animal, including internal organs and skin. For the most part, the meat we eat consists of muscle tissue taken from farm animals, whether it’s a sirloin steak, which is cut from the rear of a cow, or a pork chop, taken from flesh near the spine of a pig. In vitro meat, however, can be made by placing a few cells in a nutrient mixture that helps them proliferate. As the cells begin to grow together, forming muscle tissue, they are attached to a biodegradable scaffold, just as vines wrap around a trellis. There the tissue can be stretched and molded into food, which could, in theory at least, be sold, cooked, and consumed like any processed meat—hamburger, for example, or sausage.
“This became my fixation,” van Eelen continued. “Everything I have done since that day I have done with this goal in mind.” After university, van Eelen went to medical school, where he spoke to biologists, research scientists, and anyone else he thought could help. Most people laughed when they heard about his project—in part, perhaps, because van Eelen is more of a scientific enthusiast than a sophisticate. When he told his professors that he wanted to grow meat in a lab, most acted as if it were a prank. But one teacher took him aside. “He said if I was serious I would need to raise money for research,” van Eelen recalled. He promptly quit his medical studies and went to work. With his wife (an artist, who died many years ago), he ran a series of art galleries and restaurants. The couple funneled whatever money they managed to save into his odd obsession.